2005-11-26

The Parker Paper

The Parker UHI paper (see [[Urban Heat Island]]) from Nature 2004 (and the Peterson 2003) strengthens the TAR contention that the UHI isn't important; and perhaps negligible. Now RP Sr has taken a shot at it. Unfortunately his paper is... difficult. You can take his word for what it says if you like, but I'd rather not. Happily, RP is so confident of his position that he has followed up with a whinge about Nature rejecting him, which includes the reviewers responses: Pielke has failed to adequately assess whether there are any trends in windiness in the Parker data set. Parker stratified by wind conditions, both at rural and urban sites, so any trends in windiness (even if this were possible in a stratified data set) would occur both at rural and urban sites. To suggest that there would be different turbulent mixing at rural and urban sites would then require differences in trends in temperature to be found, which is exactly what Parker found not to be the case. The logic presented in Pielke’s comment is circular and incorrect is the briefest.

One day I may actually read it, or meet someone who has. Until then I don't have a good way to assess it.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

William- I am sorry that you do not want to read the paper which is readily available from http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-302.pdf.

Others who do read it will find that the Nature referee that you cite misrepresented the focus of the paper. I look forward to constructive scientific critiques of our paper:
Pielke Sr., R.A., and T. Matsui, 2005: Should light wind and windy nights have the same temperature trends at individual levels even if the boundary layer averaged heat content change is the same? Geophys. Res. Letts., 32, No. 21, L21813, 10.1029/2005GL024407.

James Annan said...

I think RP has argued the theoretical case clearly enough. What he has singularly failed to do is to provide any evidence as to the likely magnitude of the effect, and in the absence of any evidence that it materially affects the overall picture, I find it hard to get too excited about a rejection based on no fewer than three negative reviews.

Luboš Motl said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
William M. Connolley said...

Roger - on the contrary, I *do* want to read it, and look forward to doing so, but it will take me a while.

Anonymous said...

Willam and James- Thanks for your quick reply to my comment. I look forward to further constructive comments on the paper. As to how significant the basis is, note the magnitude of the differences in degrees in Figure 3 of my paper due to just a one watt per meter squared reduction in the boundary layer cooling.

This significant effect could explain the greater multi-decadal minumum temperature increases that have been diagnosed at night. This warm bias certainly will be important in high latitude, land areas during the winter.

Now that we have identified this issue, the burden is on the climate surface temperature data community to quantitatively assess the magnitude of the bias. This will a difficult task, however, unless we can find locations with long term measurements at multiple heights.

EliRabett said...

Come, come, we have irrefutable shown that the volume of hot air emitted from, well Colorado Springs, will melt the Greenland ice sheet. It is now up to you to show that it won't.

Sorry Roger, that hunt won't dog.