Temperature Monitoring Station--With 22 Air Conditioners Within 100 Feet

That troublemaker over at Watts Up With That? keeps running around to the weather stations that provide the U.S. data about global warming history. I've mentioned this troublemaker before. The latest is another marvel:

There's been some recent discussion about how only rural stations have been used in the NASA GISS analysis, and those rural stations are qualified by looking at night time DOD satellite photos, and doing a count of visible streetlights within a radius to quantify UHI potential or lack thereof. The "best" stations are labeled "lights=0"

One of those stations is Happy Camp, California, population 2182, an old gold mining and logging town located in the rugged NW corner of the state, and about 100+ miles from any major city. NOAA MMS metadata website reports data back to 1931 with 3 small distance station moves, and no changes to equipment. NASA GISS reports data back to 1914.

It looked like a good candidate to look at for a lights=0 survey. The weather station is located at the Ranger Station:

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But what you can get from satellite images and databases can't really prepare you for what you may find. I "expected" to find an old classic Stevenson Screen, probably near the Ranger Station office. Check on that. But what I didn't expect to find was a "rural" station swimming in a sea of exhaust from 22 air conditioning units within 100 feet of the Stevenson Screen. Ridiculous, you are making this up you say? Well that would be my first reaction too.

But here they are, count them, I've labeled the A/C units for your convenience:

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If each A/C unit was 2000 BTU, that would be 22x2000=44,000 BTU of waste heat dumped within 100 feet of the Stevenson Screen where the thermometer is located.

Additionally. for other biases, positive and negative there's the buildings, the windows, the shade trees, the wind sheltering, and the lawn sprinkler. There's also the big parking lot to the southwest, and the Stevenson Screen is at the top of a slope and there's a parking lot downslope.

When I mentioned to the site curator about the A/C units she said "hmm, I never thought about that" but then added, "But I can tell you that when we water the lawn, my high temps are lower". I asked the curator what the prevailing wind direction was, and she said from the "south to southwest usually".

Here's another gem, where he shows you the graph--and it doesn't take much smarts to figure out what year the A/C compressor was installed right next to the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climate Network) weather station.