They are useful for communicating warming to the public. The 2 meter temp in urbanized areas is what the majority of people experience. Obviously scientists have to be careful to make the distinction of local vs. global climate change and sometimes they are not as careful as they should be. My personal weather station tracks closely with Sea-Tac airport so I think it is fine enough as a representative site for Seattle.
What bothers me more is that like all surface obs these ASOS stations are prone to sensor drift and bias but they don’t seem to have good QC measures in place to catch that early and it’s often the general public alerting the NWS to an issue.
The fact these urbanizing UHI stations are relied on so heavily in surface climate datasets is a joke.
It’s obvious sfc datasets are corrupted because the vast majority of “observed” warming has occurred at night, even in areas where cloud cover has declined. Also, satellites are in near perfect alignment w/ sfc datasets over the oceans, but on land sfc datasets are warming up to 2X faster than satellite data in some areas.
Yes, GHG-induced warming will also skew slightly higher at night (for a multitude of reasons that require lots of jargon to explain), however it’s a minuscule difference when you actually calculate it, even if you are extra generous w/ how you construct the “fractal” of diurnal/nocturnal fluxes.
FWIW, one of the leading Apr-Jun EOFs during p8-1-2 transitions in waning niños is troughing at the coasts and a ridge in the middle of the country. There are other possible outcomes (subseasonal responses are always state dependent), but I could definitely see that pattern verifying.
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