Phoenix’s Record Summer Warmth Not Reflected In Surrounding Weather Station Data
A man named Luke Howard was the first to document the urban heat island (UHI) effect, 190 years ago (The Climate of London).
Cities have expanded substantially since 1833, replacing the native landscape with high heat capacity surfaces like buildings, pavement, and sources of waste heat. This leads to UHI warmth today of +10F or more, mostly at night.
The UHI effect, along with “record warm” temperatures it delivers, would exist even if humans didn’t emit a single pound of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Yet, we are routinely told through media reports that anomalous city warmth shows ‘the fingerprints of climate change’ and wouldn’t have occurred if we humans had never burnt any coal.
As caterwauled by the Miami Herald, the summer of 2023 experienced some record heat in cities across the South:
Conflating the urban heat island with ‘global boiling’ is an easy win for the MSM, and it is demanded that they do so.
As the Herald’s report dutifully adds: “Prominent scientific institutions around the globe including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agree that the warming is caused mainly by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, NASA said.“
“See how that works?,” writes former NASA scientist Dr Roy Spencer. “A city has record warmth, so it must be due to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.”
The southern U.S. had an unusually hot summer, particularly in August — nobody is arguing that.
According to Dr Spencer’s analysis –which used urbanization-adjusted average summer temperatures (based upon NOAA homogenized GHCN surface air temperatures) across all available stations in the Lower 48 states– the summer of 2023 was the 13th warmest on record (since 1895):
The media cherry-picks urban reporting stations, or at least airports serving major urban areas, and for good reason — this is where the heat is. Staying in Phoenix, the city’s “record hot summer” doesn’t show up at the surrounding weather stations.
As part of Dr Roy Spencer’s research project –where his team at the University of Huntsville are quantifying the average urban heat island effect and its growth over time as a function of population density– he looked at the official NOAA GHCN monthly surface temperature data at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (red curve in the below graph) versus at all rural stations (0 to 100 persons per sq. km) within 10 to 100 km of Phoenix (blue curve below). Spencer also applied a small urbanization adjustment correction at the rural (or nearly-rural) stations based upon their individual histories of population growth.
The result? The summer of 2023 was only the city’s 11th warmest summer on record.
“We see that the urban heat island effect was the dominant cause of the summer of 2023 being a record warm year in Phoenix,” writes Dr Spencer. Clear as day, the surrounding rural and nearly-rural stations held far cooler.
Alarmists will likely point to the blue line and protest that even the rural stations still show a strong warming trend.
“Well,” continues Spencer, “that is partly because I have used only ‘homogenized’ temperature data, which NOAA has already adjusted to some extent leading to all nearby station temperature trends being more or less equal to one another.”
Dr Spencer says he is still trying to determine if he can use the ‘raw’ data to make such comparisons, since there are other data adjustments made in NOAA’s homogenization of the data that I’m not privy to.
One final point: The legacy media routinely parrots NOAA’s claim that these new high temperature records are based upon data extending back to 1895. In general, this is not true, notes Dr Spencer. Most of these station records don’t go back nearly that far. For the Phoenix Sky Harbor location, for example, the data starts in 1933. A few of 2023’s other “record hot cities” start dates are Miami, FL (1948), Houston, TX (1931), and Mobile, AL (1948).
Cities are hotter than their rural surroundings, and increasingly so — this is an undisputed yet rug-swept fact.
Spurious correlations and unsupportable conclusions, however, continue to be front and center of MSM rounds.
Why you dont Talk about usa midwest pretty above average temperatures? and the same we are living in nearly all Europe.
You just have to look at the snow amount in the pyrenees early and mid XX century compared to the low amount in the present day winters. How do You explain that?
And im not in the AGW party but the way, just and observer.
Here in KY/Tenn. we had a cooler than normal Summer which was also wetter than normal. Each area will get different climes due to the Wavy Jet Stream caused by the Sun cooling down (less output). Look ate the WHOLE picture don’t cherry pick certain areas and say…SEE? Global Warming!
Don’t worry, the snow is coming back as the Grand Solar Minimum bites.
You are picking a very small part of the world in a very narrow timeframe.
No one denies we had colder, snowier winters decades ago and these past 30yrs have been slightly warmer. That is Climate Change. The world has always had it.
Climate Change works in cycles, even cycles within cycles. Effects of magnetism & the Sun- which until recently (2018?) nasa and the ipcc disputed their effect.
What is now happening is a slow cooling as showed by noaa of 0.2°C. And with the Sun going into a cooling phase, Sun weakening magnetic field and our own weakening magnetic field, we are in for a couple of very cold decades…
No doubt, Global Cooling due to mankind!!!
Why you dont Talk about the above average temperatures that we are suffering in Europe a long time ago? If there is no warming what is your explanation? Because the famous wavy jet Stream that You Talk about only seems to be on the warm side since we are not having colder winters by any means. I mean You just have to look at the pyrenees for example, the amount off snow they are receiving nowadays is ridicoulous almost every year compared to the early and mid XX century.
And im not in the AGW party im just a critical thinker
No one denies that there’s been some warming over the last100-150 years.
Do you have a temperature data set for Europe that only uses rural stations? How much warming does it show?
The satellite data, which takes measurements across the whole of the Earth’s surface, 95% of which is non urban, shows less than half the warming predicted by the IPCC models. How do you explain this? Don’t just quote the very high anomalies over the last 3 months unless you can show that the Hunga Tonga eruption in no way contributed to this warming spike.
Are you brave enough to check how people respond to your comments or are you only interested in trolling?
Trolling for what! Im just talking straight facts. And by the way the creator of this site predicts every year brutal cold conditions that not only rarely happen, plus he totally ignores the fact that we are undeniably experiencing hotter conditions almost every year saddly.
you sound very vaxxed
you ARE the carbon the WEF wants to reduce
How old are you Son? When you can prove you are 1K yrs old than talk okay?
It’s a good thing they have a way to make the earth warmer. If the velocity of the earth stays the same and we continually absorb space debris. Our mass is on the increase. If the sun constantly spewing material into space grows smaller and cooler, with less gravity our orbit should extend further into space. Smaller sun. Lower solar output. Greater distance. Our future is cooling.
What kind of crackpot nonsense is that? “If the velocity of the earth stays the same [as] we continually absorb space debris”? Like cosmic dust and meteoroids amount to anything significant?
The planet weighs 5.972 x 10^24 kgs. On average the planet gains 400,000 kgs of space dust and debris (40,000 tons) but loses 950,000 kgs (95,000 tons) of hydrogen from the atmosphere for a net LOSS of 55,000 tons per year. It’s like saying a speck of dust landed on an elephant and somehow that’s going to change the elephant’s speed or course of direction.
And the sun, while losing 1.5 x 10²⁷ kg of mass in the form of energy over a year, has another few billion years before it begins to turn into a red giant, so there’s no impact from that either, other than complete incineration of the interior planets as its size expands by a few tens of millions of kilometers.
You make no sense, and we are all dumber for having had to read your ridiculous comment. I award you no points, and hope you step on a floor full of Legos at night when getting out of bed.
400,000 kg = 400 t NOT 40,000 t
950,000 kg =950 t NOT 95,000 t
Did you ever went to scool??
Just so people don’t get confused. The mass of the earth is irrelevant. The sun losing mass and Total Solar Irradiance does assuming the velocity of the earth remains unchanged. All these conditions met the orbit of the earth will drift higher. Since its creation the temperature of the earth has been trending cooler. If earthlings can alter that it might be necessary at some future
time.
It’s not just the tarmac, concrete and buildings that contribute to the Urban Heat Island effect.
Drive your car for 20 minutes. Now, get out, open the hood and touch the engine – it’ll burn your hand! Give it 3 hours and its back to the ambient temperature. Where’d all that heat go? Cities have thousands or millions of cars, trucks, busses, motorbikes and trains.
Step inside a mall or office on a hot day, and the aircon’s nice and cool. For every cubic meter of air inside cooled by one degree, there’s about three or more cubic meters of air heated by one degree outside. Multiply that by all the airconditioned homes, factories, offices, hospitals, schools and malls, and that’s a heapen helpin of heat!
And on the hot days, we generate far more heat outside keeping the inside of our buildings even cooler, ie a bigger difference to the ambient temperature.
In the 1930’s, people didn’t have aircon, they opened the windows to catch a breeze.
Then there’s all the lighting, gadgets, cooking etc that we find essential for our urban way of life, almost every Watt of which is dissipated as heat.
One only needs to think about these sorts of things for a minute – its just basic applied physics.
Everything you are saying is true but if the city populations moved into the sticks clearing land, cutting down trees and building homes the environmental impact could be much greater. Let’s keep the cities even though lot’s of people couldn’t stand living in them.
I’m not suggesting urban populations relocate. Just stating there’s reasons other than buildings and roads that explain the differences in temperature between cities and adjacent rural areas.
Frankly, most urban dwellers wouldn’t be capable of cutting down trees, clearing land, growing crops or erecting a humpy to live in.
I live in a large metropolitan city in Texas. It is going vertical. Even a few years ago when I visited a relative a half-hour outside of the city and in a rural area, the thermostat in my car would show more than a few degrees of difference in temperatures, the higher always being in the city.
We drove from Glasgow KY to our home in Metcalfe County KY the other day. It went from 84°F down to 71°F. That last temp was in the shade by a creek and it was COOL!