Saturday, January 16, 2010

Airports & "Global Warming"

In the USA, at the least, many (Most?) of the official weather stations are at air-ports. In the past these places were typically at the edges of cities or even in rural or semi-rural areas, with short paved runways, with few flights, with air craft having (By today's standards) low powered and internal combustion engines and minimum numbers of autos and trucks coming and departing. Today, these places are surrounded by suburbs and shipping company facilities with attendant concrete roads, use air craft which have huge and powerful jet engines which produce equally huge heat signatures, extensive runways and other concrete surfaces which retain, reflect and even produce (When laid down) like heat and other sources of increased temperature and localized "carbon foot prints".

I suspect that the same tale is evident where most, civilian, air ports are located. Yet, I can recall only one note as to the taking of air temperatures at such places as a potential source of bias in scientific studies of climate change.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow, never even thought of that! Totally correct, I lived on a Canadian army base in northern Ontario for awhile and the weather station for the entire area was there. Needless to say the jet engines and other multi-engine aircraft left an enormous heat signature, especially evident when we would watch them through our thermal goggles at night. They would light our goggles right up.