Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Melbourne, beautiful city - terrible data

As shown on Whatts Up With That? they have taken a good look at the primary Melbourne based weather station. Being a Melbourne person myself, I have passed this weather station many times. It's basically in the middle of Melbourne, whilst the Carlton gardens are on the opposite side of the very wide Victoria Street, this intersection comes to an almost standstill in peak our and it is a major access to the central hub of the city from the north.



But it wont stop there, at night, Victoria street and La Trobe street is lit up by street lights. Not country style street lights, but city street lights, so there is not a single section of the area under shade.

View the map here.

So how have the records gone for this station? You guessed it, increases in maximum temperature and minimum temperature, even increases before bitumen was invented. So surprises really, in fact temperatures at Midnight, 3am, 6am, 9a, Noon, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm have all seen increases.






No surprises really. With cars and concrete buzzing past during the night, and under constant heat lights at night, well, the conclusion answers itself.

And as for rainfall? well there's a reasonable chance that the surrounding sky scrapers eliminate some of this, and the last 10 years has seen decreases despite no significant difference. Ohh,and don't even bother getting meaningful readings about Sunshine duration or wind.

7 comments:

Luke said...

Which is why BoM don't use these in climate change analysis - the END!

Anonymous said...

Or for any other purpose----one would hope.

But the fact that it still exists as an operating station at all, begs the question about all the others in the portfolio

Anonymous said...

With people like luke it's hard to tell if they are just fools and time wasters or deliberate liars.

So I went to the bother of checking the stations the BoM uses for it's high quality climate data network.

Melbourne is there with a lat/long of -37.81 144.97

Surprise, surprise. This is the corner of Victoria and Latrobe streets.

ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon
/home/ncc/www/change
/HQdailyT/HQdailyT_info.pdf

Link broken into 3 cos of blogger.

skeptic said...

Hi Luke, i too had a look at HIGH-QUALITY AUSTRALIAN DAILY TEMPERATURE DATASET and it does include this station, are you saying the "climate change analysis" uses a different data set?

atticus said...

do you think the rainfall gauge is actually sitting out there in the middle of the road? if you're so big on real scientific research data why don't you get on top of a building and look for it there?

Jonathan Lowe said...

Hi atticus,
I never said the gauge is in the middle of the road. I think that is Google Earth suggesting where it is based on the co-ordinates from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

The rain gauge is about a 20 minute walk from where I live, so I see it regularly. Its on the small piece of park between Victoria St. and Latrobe St., right next to all the cars/trams/street lights.

College Term Papers said...

I guess sometimes truth is stranger than fiction!