State Police Blow up Global Warming - Updated

Well almost.

Climate Audit brings us the following from Salem Virginia:

The suspicious device blown up by a State Police Bomb Squad Thursday evening turned out to be a weather station.
It happened outside the Medical Office Building on the east side of Lewis Gale Medical Center. We were told a visitor contacted authorities after seeing a suspicious object hanging from a tree. Authorities brought out a robot to check it. The device was blown up around 7:00 p.m. At no time was the hospital or any other buildings at Lewis Gale evacuated.
Friday afternoon, Salem Police said the package was actually a remote weather station. A hospital employee had attached it to the tree and used putty to weather-proof it. Police say no criminal charges will be filed.

I would like to know how long the weather station was there before someone noticed.

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The Global Warming theory assumes that the world temperature data is of consistent quality over time. To verify that Climate Audit is building a data base of all the official USHCN weather stations to evaluate their data.

While some stations are excellent examples of a well located and maintained station following USHCN standards, this is all to common. There is a change in the external environment of the station which effects the results, usually raising the reported temperatures. The stations are unmanned and not visited very often.




In 1999 the air conditioners were removed from the roof of the adjacent building and placed a few feet from the weather station. The station has reported an average temperature four degrees higher since the move.


Garbage In -- Garbage Out

HT: David Duff
David says the real Hat Tip goes to Anthony Watts

UPDATE August 11, 2007


Anthony Watts provides more information. It seems there is more at play than the air conditioners, which if not entirely innocent should have their offense down graded from felony to infraction.

Regular readers may remember that I posted about a climate station in Detroit Lakes MN last week, surveyed by volunteer Don Kostuch, and cross posted it to the website Climate Audit that had two air conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an obvious cause and effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined that the a/c units were moved off the roof of the radio station where this station resides and moved them to the ground where the temperature sensor is close by.

However, some folks on the blogosphere just went, well, a little ballistic over that assertion. It was a good thing too, because their very loud and somewhat uncivil complaints led to an examination of this idea: if its not the a/c units, what then did cause the temperature jump at that time?


Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the "corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..
Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error."

Read the whole post: It gets even more amazing



NOTE:

He also reports

Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit is down due to excessive traffic that may have been caused by either or a combination of these things:
1- Rush Limbaugh mentioning the website in Thursday's Show
2- Denial of Service (DOS) attacks
3- Being Slashdotted the next day
4- All of the above

surfacestations.org has been off line for unrelated reasons, someone accidentally cut a cable.