Urban heat islands in Florida, USA

Florida 5 degree Grid Cell

The 1985 / 91 data of CRU / Jones drew on only three temperature records, Miami, Tampa and St. Leo. Populations are given by GHCN as 1.814Million, 1.995 Million and less than 9000 (rural) respectively. St Leo is a minor center in central Florida and CRU / Jones only use data from 1932 to 1970 which looks similar to Tampa.

The Jones 1994 global update added the station FL West Palm Beach which is an airport with data only from 1948 and is listed by the GHCN with a population of 818,000, although it is probably more on the fringe of the Miami UHI than Jones Miami record. The West Palm Beach trend does not warm as much as Miami and Tampa ( see bottom graph ) but unless commercial activity there dies out (which seems unlikely), then this record can be relied upon to continue to contribute artificial warming trends to the IPCC global data in years to come.

As usual Jones 1994 completely ignores rural data from Everglades and Arcadia ( in that area of the map between Miami and Tampa) which run contrary to IPCC warming trends.

The first graph shows Miami warming relative to Arcadia and Everglades (data from the V2 GHCN) and the UHI warming in Miami is obvious despite the data gaps in the rurals.

The second graph shows the Tampa UHI warming relative to the two rural stations. Why are the "great and the good" tolerating obvious spurious warming data such as from Miami and Tampa to back up the IPCC case to ratify Kyoto ?

Finally we look at the West Palm Beach trend, the Jones 1994 addition and find much weaker warming than Miami and Tampa.

Why would not Jones "get the message" from this that Miami and Tampa may not be the best measures of Florida climate trends ?

The Miami page accessed through the Cities link has a NASA GOES satellite image of Florida urban heat islands which drives home the point that the Jones data is from UHI affected areas.

The NASA earthlights image for SE USA provides further re-inforcement of the bias in Jones data.

Posted 16, July, 2001
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