March 1, 2008

Urban Heat Islands

Wonderful science fair project over at Climate Skeptic:
Measuring the Phoenix Urban Heat Island
This is a project my son did for Science Fair to measure the urban heat island effect in Phoenix. The project could also be called "Disproving the IPCC is so easy, a child could do it." The IPCC claims that the urban heat island effect has a negligible impact, even on surface temperature stations located within urban areas. After seeing our data, this claim will be very hard to believe.

In doing the test, we tried to follow as closely as possible the process used in the Nyuk Hien Wong and Chen Yu study of Singapore as published in Habitat International, Volume 29, Issue 3 , September 2005, Pages 547-558. We used a LogTag temperature data logger. My son used a map and a watch to mark our times, after synchronizing clocks with the data logger, so he could match times to get temperature at each location. I called out intersections as we passed them and he wrote down the times. At the same time, I actually had a GPS data logger where I gathered GPS data for location vs. time, but I did not share this with him because he wanted to track locations himself on the map. My data below uses the GPS data, which was matched with the temperature data in an Excel spreadsheet using simple Vlookup calls.
An excellent idea for a project and the results are very evident.
urban_heat_island_phoenix_az.jpg
In the interest if server space and transfer speeds, I have converted the GIF file into a JPG and shrunk it from 500px wide to 300px. The X axis is the Miles from City Center with zero being at the left and thirty at the right. The Y axis is the temperature with 45 at the bottom and 54 at the top. The two sets of dots are from each trip, out of town and back in. How much longer do we have to suffer this foolishness - AGW is bad science and even worse politics. Posted by DaveH at March 1, 2008 8:27 PM