Alabama combined temperatures

There are fifteen USHCN stations in Alabama that start at Brewton and end at Valley Head. It has two GISS stations on the list, and they are at Mobile and Montgomery.

USHCN stations in Alabama (CDIAC )

The station in Montgomery is yet another where GISS is using a station that does not start its record until 1947. It is interesting to see how many times GISS is using these shorter truncated records when there are a significant number of other stations that have a full record back into the 1880’s. If one were cynical one might think that this was to hide the higher temperatures in the 1930’s.

Average annual temperatures for Montgomery AL, GISS station data

However there wasn’t such a temperature high in the ‘30’s, for Mobile, whose temperatures have remained relatively stable, so we’ll have to see if there was one for the state as a whole.

Average annual temperatures for Mobile AL, GISS station data

When looking at the difference between the average GISS and the average of the homogenized data for the USHCN sites for this state, the GISS sites are, on average 3 deg F warmer, but there is no trend in the data for Alabama.

Difference in average temperature, per year, between the GISS stations and the homogenized values for the USHCN stations in Alabama.

In terms of the temperature trend for the state, as a whole, even the homogenized data from the USHCN sites shows that the state has cooled over the last century.

Average temperature for the state of Alabama with time, using the homogenized temperature data from the USHCN.

When this is compared with the Time of Observation adjusted raw data (TOBS), that also shows a decline. It is interesting that in both there is a drop in the average temperature in 1958, which then seems to re-stabilize around a lower temperature

Average temperature for the state of Alabama with time, using the Time of Observation corrected raw temperature data from the USHCN.

Looking at the populations surrounding the different stations, using the citi-data sites for the communities, This does not work for Gainsville, which has a population of 192 according to HomeTownLocator. Saint Bernard is a little more of a challenge – so I go to Google Earth, and while close in it looks very rural (being in a Benedictine monastery/school) when one zooms out a little it is in the community of Cullman, AL).

Location of the station at Saint Bernard AL, Cullman is over the hill to the left.

Alabama is some 330 miles long and 190 miles wide, stretching from just under 85 deg N to just under 88.5 deg N, and from 30.21 deg W to 35 deg W. The mean latitude is at 32.84 deg N, that of the USHCN stations is 32.8 deg N, and that of the GISS stations is at 31.5 deg N. The elevation ranges from sea-level to 733 m, with a mean elevation of 152.4 m. The mean elevation of the USHCN network is at 122 m, while that of the GISS stations is 40.5 m. The two GISS stations have an average population of 197,648, while that of the USHCN is 14,866. (With a temperature change of 0.024 deg per m, the change in elevation gives a 1.6 degree difference because of elevation changes, and using a temp change that varies with 0.6 x log (pop) would explain another 0.7 degrees of the average 3.04 deg between the two mean temperatures).

Looking at the effects of state geography on temperature change, beginning with Latitude.

Average Alabama temperature as a function of latitude

Alabama is another state where there is a fall in elevation moving West, and so there is a temperature increase with longitude:

Average Alabama temperature as a function of Longitude

While the R^2 value for latitude falls, from 0.86 to 0.71, when the data is homogenized, the value for the longitude correlation increases from 0.14 to 0.28. This again helps explain my concern with the process used to fill out the data.

Looking at the elevation itself,

Change in average Alabama temperature as a function of the elevation of the observing station.

The final correlation is with population, and there is not a really broad distribution of population around the stations., so that when this is included with the other variations, gives a poor correlation in the state with a 5-year average for temperature. (The correlation is, oddly, in this state better over longer periods).

Correlation of Alabama temperatures with the population of the community surrounding the station.

And that leaves the final check, between the raw data and that which has been modified to give the official USHCN numbers. The plot is the official temperature minus the raw temperature averages.


Let me throw in one final fact, just glancing at Chiefio’s site, he has a post up on relative humidity in which he quotes as follows:

As an average, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) defines an international standard atmosphere (ISA) with a temperature lapse rate of 6.49 K(°C)/1,000 m (3.56 °F or 1.98 K(°C)/1,000 Ft) from sea level to 11 km (36,090 ft). From 11 km (36,090 ft or 6.8 mi) up to 20 km (65,620 ft or 12.4 mi), the constant temperature is −56.5 °C (−69.7 °F), which is the lowest assumed temperature in the ISA.

Since I am using meters for measuring elevation but degrees Fahrenheit for temperature, the gradient is thus officially 11.68 deg/1,000 m or 0.0117 deg/m. The rate that the data fits, as shown above, is 0.024 deg, or about twice the official rate. It will be interesting to test the actual data for the different states against this standard.

E.M. Smith (who writes as Chiefio) has some interesting points to make about the effects of humidity, which I haven’t even thought of looking at, but which might be an interesting place to go. Water vapor is, after all, as he notes, supposed to be a stronger GreenHouse Gas (GHG) than carbon dioxide, and yet more humid places may be cooler than those which are drier. (It just may not feel that way). Read the post, it is interesting!

Saturday Pick Points

Running a little late today (because of the time change.)

Well it’s time to meander around the Climate Change sites again, for another week, and catch up on the gossip. Since their comment on George Will over a week ago, Real Climate has not been posting. I notice that Joe Romm has a “who am I” piece up, at Climate Progress, after being called

Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.

by Tom Friedman, whose book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, has been sitting unread by this laptop for over a week now. (From my pre-Kindle days). Anyway if you really want the ”doomerish” side of the Climate Change debate, I guess this site is it. By the way, apropos the post earlier Saturday, he can’t read those graphs either. I note that he worked for John Podesta, who headed up the Transition Team for President Obama, so no doubt his influence at present could be quite pervasive.

At Climate Audit Steve McIntyre is off to Thailand for a couple of weeks, and only had a couple of posts over the week, on upper tropospheric humidity and on the number of Principal Components to use in an analysis. The former post explains why the measurement of humidity in the troposphere is important to global temperature, since it controls the feedback that water vapor has on the process. The problem that is arising is that there is now a possibility that the feedback is negative rather than positive, and

And if the pattern were to continue into the future, one would expect water vapour feedback in the climate system to halve rather than double the temperature rise due to increasing CO2.

Oddly (well not really) it has been quite difficult to find a journal that would print the information (since it goes against prevailing political correctness), but it has now been published.

The earlier post on PC’s contrasts the arguments of Steig (who we have been discussing recently because of his Antarctic paper) with those of Mann, who had used some of the same approach in his “hockey stick” work. It also points out that some of this has “no statistical integrity.”

Anthony Watt quotes the Boston Globe, who asks, in regard to 2008 being the coldest year since 1998, the interesting question

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

. But before you think much has changed, the last paragraph of the article should be thought about, since I fear that sadly it is all too true.

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.

Anthony also had a guest post from Roger Pielke Snr’s Climate Science site which, in turn, quotes a paper from Urban and Keller (pdf). One of the debating points in the climate debate has related to heat storage in the oceans and its possible contribution to future warming. The paper says it won’t happen. There are also a couple of graphs in an earlier post that help explain the humidity issue that was discussed at CA.

And over at Climate Skeptic there is a post on the relevance of feedbacks, and how they work.

Gristmill is outraged that the Governor of New York is easing the restrictions on coal plant emissions. Basically he is increasing the amount of carbon dioxide the plants are allowed to produce. Gristmill also however give warning that the climate and energy bills of this year will likely be combined, which they don’t think is a good idea).