By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

This NOAA USHCN climate station of record #415018 in Lampasas, TX was found to be tucked between a building, and two parking lots, one with nearby vehicles. According to the surveyor, it is right next to the ACE Hardware store on the main street of town.

While likely representative of the temperature for downtown Lampasas, one wonders how well it measures the climate of the region. In her survey, volunteer surveyor Julie K. Stacy noted the proximity to the building and parking, which will certainly affect Tmin at night due to IR radiance. Daytime Tmax is likely affected by the large amount of asphalt and concrete in the area around the sensor. The main street of the town (28 ft from US 183) and the ACE Hardware parking. According to MMS, station has been at this location since 10-01-2000. Previous location was an observer residence, which appears to have been a park-like location according to MMS location map. The sensor was apparently converted to the MMTS style seen in the photo in 1986, so the move did not include an equipment change. See the complete survey album here.

Since there has been some discussion about how well “adjustments” take care of such problems, I thought I’d show you just how well the GISS homogeneity adjustment works with this station.

Here is the GISS raw data plot (blue) with the GISS homogeneity plot overlaid on it (red):

See full size image here.

The effect is quite clear. The recent “spurious” measurement remains unchanged, and the past gets colder. The result? An artificial warming trend that is created by GISS adjustments. See full post here.