In the debate over the accuracy of the global temperature nothing is more evident than errors in the location data for stations in the GHCN inventory. That inventory is the primary source for all the temperature series. One question is “do these mistakes make a difference?” If one believes as ...

In our last installment we looked at stations which were pitch black. The case I examined, Middlesboro Kentucky illustrated 1. The station location data used by Hansen2010 has inaccuracies. 2. While the purported station location was pitch dark, nearby within a couple 1/100ths of a degree there were urban lights. What this ...

In his august draft of Hansen2010, Dr. Hansen makes the following claim: “We present evidence here that the urban warming has little effect on our standard global temperature analysis.  However, in the Appendix we carry out an even more rigorous test. We show there that there are a sufficient number ...

Dr. Paul, R graphics guru, blessed us with his rendition of transparent contour maps drawn on a google earth image: Cool stuff. I’ll be taking his code and turning it into a function and sharing it back: here is the picture his code creates: That is just plain slick.  ...

UPDATE: holy open source to the rescue. I posted a question yesterday on a idea peter had. Transaprency for overlaying light maps onto google maps. reminds me of the old Quake days. Well, I know John Carmack, John is an old friend of mine, but I’m no John Carmack. ...

In part 1 and part 2 we went over the background of nightlights and the fundamental problem: Station inventory data had errors in it: In Hansen 2010, Hansen writes: “ Station location in the meteorological data records is provided with a resolution of 0.01 degrees of latitude and longitude, corresponding to a distance of about 1 [...]

In part 1 we discussed UHI in a general way and introduced NASA’s use of nightlights to identify Rural, periurban and Urban stations. Very simply, the latitude and longitude data in the station inventory is used to look up at radiance value in the nightlights file. If that value is  10 ...

With the publication of Hansen2010 forthcoming it is critical to examine the subject afresh. The global temperature index product from NASA is known as GISSTEMP .GISSTEMP, like the temperature index from Hadley/CRU and NCDC attempts to estimate the average temperature of the globe using historical data archived in the ...

  Kuwait International airport. Giss has it as nightlights =0, so do I. By looking at comparisons of nightlights with the station centered and a static google map with the station centered, there are mismatches between GISS and Me and between Nightlights and the  world. Subtle shift here and there. Annoying. Also, ...

I am continuing the investigation of nightlights using some additional packages from Cran. Here we add Rgooglemaps to the mix. Rgooglemaps is a neat tool that gives you a simple ( needs better docs) interface to the static map server. Perhaps, I’ll modify the code to my likeing, so For ...

I like to use animated plots in my talks on functional time series, partly because it is the only way to really see what is going on with changes in the shapes of curves over time, and also because audiences love them! Here is how it is done. For LaTeX, ...