I recently made a trip into Oregon to survey several USHCN stations there, including Klamath Falls, Crater Lake, Bly, and Lakeview. I also made a stop at another remote USHCN station in Cedarville, California.
Klamath Falls was one of those places where you have to wonder “what were they thinking?” when they placed a climate monitoring station. Imagine measuring the temperature in the middle of acres of asphalt combined with huge amounts of waste heat from electric power conversion. That’s’ Klamath Falls USHCN official climate station of record.
Below is an aerial view of the electric power substation facility operated by Pacific Power and Light:
And here is a wide view of the location where the Stevenson Screen was:
And a close up view:
As is typically found, the station location was chosen for the convenience of the observer, who had an office in the old administration building, shown on the right side of the photo. Only a few short steps were needed to get the reading. The station closed in May 2002, when the observer at the power company retired, and nobody wanted to assume the job. All that remains is the walkway to the screen, and an old Heathkit rain gauge on a post.
Can you imagine the heat from the transformers being transported by wind, or the heat from the massive asphalt in the service staging facility yard being pushed toward the sensor by the wind? Being almost exactly in the middle of the complex, it’s hard to imagine any bias free day there, wind or not. It’s a likely scenario, and one well suited for a study this coming summer where I may ask permission to place a sensor at the old measurement location, and position some temperature loggers around the facility to quantify the difference.
Another thing this location may have been doing in the long term is measuring waste heat generated by the transformers as a function of power usage demands. Historically, power use has not declined, so its safe to assume that this facility, its transformers, and capacity has been upgraded over the years to handle increased demand.
Yet we measure temperature there. Here’s the temperature trend graph from NASA GISS:
The photo gallery and site survey are available on my surfacestations.org database.