I found an interesting piece on Climateaudit.org, which is run by climate data analyst Steve McIntyre. In Steve's Feb. 15th blog, Anthony Watts shows us an example of how poor temperature data from a climate station has found its way into the NASA GISS temperature analysis.

Watts takes us to Lampasas, Texas, which is a fairly rural community. The climate station was moved to a new location back in 2000. Looking at the new location, you can see many obvious problems that would have a large warming effect on the temperature. There is way too much asphalt surrounding the site, while there is also a large building with brick right behind the sensor, which would obviously radiate heat back toward the instrument.

Check out the first graph shown on Climateaudit.org (blue one) and you can see the dramatic rise in annual temperature since 2000. Now I cannot prove it, but I would have to say at least half of that warming has got to be due to the change in location.

Unfortunately in this particular case, the usual GISS homogeneity adjustment made no downward adjustment (post 2000) like it did for much of the 20th century, and actually left the plot as is, which just further enhances the warming trend after 2000.

Now, I do not know how widespread this particular problem is across the country, and even the world, but surfacestations.org is doing a good job trying to find that answer in the U.S. I think the government will say that the problem is too isolated to have much impact on the overall temperature trends when you average it all out for the country and that there is just not enough money available in the budget to fix these sites, but obvious things like this need attention ASAP. What do you think?

Just for fun, here is the GISS temperature plot for Llano, Texas, a similar rural area just 36 miles away from Lampasas. It does indeed show a rise in temperature post 2000, but nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, I could not find a picture of the observing site.

Again, here is the plot for the contaminated Lampasas, TX station below....

You can find out more about the quality of many climate station sites across the U.S. at surfacestations.org.