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’ve modified some routines so that we are always grabbing a roughly equal area regardless of the latitude. Basically, you do this: getLonScaleFactor

Those who follow the discussions about UHI understand that “nightlights” plays a large role in defining whether or not a station is considered Rural or Urban. In the work of GISS nightlights are determined by looking at the DSMP product. The product is available in 30 arcsecond format. That’s .00833 degrees. ...

Just a short update on ICOADS. I started out an ICOADS project with grand plan to reprocess the observation files into a “raster” format. That ends up being a really big job. Along the way I had to learn a new package Rcurl and relearn some old Unix skills for ...

Update: google earth files in the box: Personally I like to look at things backwards. Why are cool sites cool? So download the kml or kmz file and you can tour 62 sites: All with 90 years of data or more. All with a cooling trend. And all “supposedly” urban. what do ...

Now, that  the whole analysis has been moved to raster, I took some time to play around with a question that has interested  a couple of people. Cool stations. A while back when I was looking at ways of bounding uncertainties in the record I went on a hunt for ...

A couple hours work and we now have animations of the global anomalies: Created with the animation package in R.  The code examples were a bit terse about some of the details but after fiddling about I was able to get  the program to output an Html animation complete with ...

Code will be in the drop box in a bit, once I shower:  [DONE] This is a wholesale replacement of previous versions, completely rewritten in raster. It will be the base going forward. All of the analysis routines will be rewritten using raster.  For time series functionality I will continue ...

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working at getting Moshtemp to work entirely in the raster package. I’ve been aided greatly by the author of that package, Robert, who has been turning out improvements to the package with regularity. For a while I was a bit stymied ...