I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog showing how badly maintained and situated the stations in the USHCN network are. And rightly so, the majority of them have issues. But, finding the good ones is actually more important, because they are the ones that hold the true unpolluted temperature signal. Unfortunately, the “good ones” are few and far between.

But when one comes along that is a real gem, it deserves to be highlighted. I present the USHCN climate station of record for Tucumcari New Mexico, COOP ID # 299156, located at the Agricultural Experiment station about 3 miles outside of the edge of town.

I “had” (he just moved to St. Louis) a nephew who lived in Tucumcari, and he just happened to be friends with the director of the experiment farm. Before my nephew left they both helped me get this survey done.

Click picture for additional images

Surfacestations.org image gallery link

This station has several advantages:

• Length of continuous record - going back to at least 1946 at this location, possibly to 1905 but NCDC MMS metadata stops at 1946.
• Length of continuous instrumentation - using mercury max/min thermometers
• Length of continuous data record - there doesn’t appear to be any missing years
• Lack of encroachment - 3 miles from the northeast edge of town, little development, little UHI. Tucumcari is well off the beaten path of development. Population actually declined 12% in recent years.
• Good siting - the station rates a CRN2 due to distant trees and sun angle, and one small asphalt road 70 meters away.

See the station survey report here (PDF) You can also make out the station on Google Earth using this link. After opening Google Earth, zoom in and the fenced outline and screen will be visible.

Eyeballing, you can see that the temperature data trend for Tucumcari is slightly positive over the last century, about 0.5°C, but there is a “bump” in 2000, which brings it to about 0.9°C. This same bump appears in neighboring stations such as in San Jon (33km away) and in Boys Ranch (135km away). There is nothing in the metadata location or equipment record to suggest a reason for the bump. So, either the bump is naturally occurring, or we have another data set splicing error like the GISS Y2K debacle from last year.   Read rest…

Write comment
Name:
Email:
Subject:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."