This google map display is just one of 230 GHCN stations that is located in the water. After finding  instances of this phenomena over and over, it seemed an easy thing to find and analyze all such cases in GHCN. The issue matters for a two reasons:

1. In my temperature analysis program I use a land/water mask to isolate land temperatures from sea temperatures and to weight the temperatures by the land area. An area that would be zero in the ocean, of course.
2. Hansen2010 uses nightlights based on station location and in most cases the lights at a coastal location are brighter than those off shore. Although I have seen “blooming” even in radiance calibrated lights such that “water pixels” do on occasion have lights on them.

The process of finding “wet stations” is trivial in the “raster” package of R. All that is needed is high resolution land/sea mask. In my previous work, I used a ¼ degree base map. ¼ degree is roughly 25km at the equator.  I was able to find a 1km land mask used by satellites. That data is read in one line of code, and then it is simple matter to determine which stations are “wet”. Since NCDC is updating the GHCN V3 inventory I have alerted them to the problem and will, of course provide the code. I have yet to write NASA GISS. Since H2010 is already in the publishing process, I’m unsure of the correct path forward.

Looking through the 230 cases is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming.  We can identify several types of case: Atolls, Islands, and coastal locations. It’s also possible to put the correct locations in for some stations by referencing either WMO publications or other inventories which have better accuracy than either GHCN or GISS. We can also note that in some cases the “mislocation” may not matter to nightlights.  These are cases where you see no lights whatsover withing the  1/2 degree grid that I show. In the google maps presented below, I’ll show a sampling of all 230. The blue cross shows the GHCN station location and the contour lines show the contour of the nightlights raster. Pitch black locations have no contour.

I will also update this with a newer version of Nighlights. A google tour is available for folks who want it. The code is trivial and I can cover that if folks find it interesting. with the exception of the graphing it is as simple as this:

Ghcn<-readV2Inv() # read in the inventory

lonLat <- data.frame(Ghcn$Lon,Ghcn$Lat)

Nlight <- raster(hiResNightlights)

extent(Nlight)<-c(-180,180,-90,90) # fix the metadata error in nightlights

Ghcn<-cbind(Ghcn,Lights=extract(Nlight,lonLat)) # extract the lights using “points”

distCoast <-raster(coastDistanceFile,varname=”dst”) # get the special land mask

Ghcn <- cbind(Ghcn,CoastDistance=extract(distCoast,lonLat))

# for this mask, Water pixels are coded by their distance from land. All land pixels are 0

# make an inventory of just those land stations that appear in the water.

wetBulb <- Ghcn[which(Ghcn$CoastDistance>0),]

writeKml(wetBulb,outfile=”wetBulb”,tourname=”Wetstations”)

Some shots from the gallery. The 1km land/water mask is very accurate. You might notice one or two stations actually on land. Nightlights is less accurate, something H2010 does not recognize. Its pixels can be over 1km off true position. The small sample below should show the various cases. No attempt is made to ascertain if this causes an issue for identification of rural/urban categories. As it stands the inaccuracies in Nightlights and station locations suggests more work before that effort is taken up.