chubbs

The Chester County deep-dive has shown that a county station average is a terrible way to evaluate NOAA. The available stations aren't designed to produce county averages by simple averaging and the stations change with time. The average shelf life of a coop station isn't very long. Even stations with long-term records have station moves and equipment changes. The NOAA method is well proven for getting the right answer from a constantly changing station network. If the stations didn't change then simpler methods would also work; but, as we have seen in Chester County the simpler methods breakdown when there are large changes in the station network with time.

An interesting study that helps explain other recent findings. Plain Language Summary Analysis of satellite observations shows that in the past 24 years the Earth's storm cloud zones in the tropics and the middle latitudes have been contracting at a rate of 1.5%–3% per decade. This cloud contraction, along with cloud cover decreases at low latitudes, allows more solar radiation to reach the Earth's surface. When the contribution of all cloud changes is calculated, the storm cloud contraction is found to be the main contributor to the observed increase of the Earth's solar absorption during the 21st century. The paper also discusses the causes. An important contributing factor is a shift of clouds polewards in part due to Hadley Cell expansion. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025GL114882

Another paper in the high climate sensitivity camp. This paper says that low-climate sensitivity models can't match CERES satellite radiation measurements, i.e. climate models are underestimating warming on average. "The CERES satellite measures Earth's energy imbalance—specifically, how much solar radiation is absorbed compared to how much heat (longwave) radiation is emitted back into space. The data show a significant increase in absorbed solar radiation, partly due to reduced snow and ice cover, but also because of changes to clouds. At the same time, Earth is emitting more heat, driven by rising surface temperatures. The satellite measurements have been compared with results from 37 climate models. The study shows a clear connection between climate sensitivity in the models and the ratio between increased absorbed solar radiation and increased heat radiation from Earth. Climate models with low climate sensitivity show small changes in the energy imbalance in the individual contributions from absorbed solar radiation and increased terrestrial radiation from Earth, and are less able to reproduce what is measured from satellite data." https://phys.org/news/2025-06-climate-sensitivity-greenhouse-gases-align.html https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt0647

New paper analyzing the flowering date of Kyoto Cherries. Warming began to impact cherry flowering around 1890. Per the paper, urbanization and changes in cultivation are unlikely to have had much impact at that time. https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.70268

Solar by the numbers. The solar age is here. https://aukehoekstra.substack.com/p/the-coming-solar-era-in-numbers

No I haven't changed my views. Here's an estimate of volcanic forcing through the end of 2024. Sulfur from HT has decreased faster than H2O, so the current impact of HT has changed from neutral to warming, but the effect is small, and partially balanced by a small volcano last year. Note that there has been a slight increase in volcanic activity in the past 5 years. So volcanoes would be producing a slight cooling without the HT water vapor.

Blog article by Tamino on paper using statistics to determine if warming has accelerated. The paper is being revised in response to peer review comments. The updated statistics estimate that the warming rate has roughly doubled in the past decade. We are have received 2 decades of warming in the past decade. Tamino notes that some slowing off this spike should be expected. https://tamino.wordpress.com/2025/06/08/picking-up-speed/#more-12598

You have Chester County as warm as Philadelphia in 1942. That's your UHI problem. Other local data warms in line with Philadelphia. including Coatesville after its 1946+47 station moves. Chester County only had 3 stations in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Two of them, Coatesville in 1946+47 and West Chester in 1970, had station moves from town---> rural that produced roughly 2F cooling. Since you aren't correcting for station moves and network changes you are baking a reverse heat island effect into your calculations. Surprised a heat island expert like yourself, can't understand that.

Nope, I was just matching the years when you claimed the Philadelphia Airport was having a big heat island effect. I am happy to go further back. I extended my chart back to 1941, the origin of temperature data collection at the Philadelphia airport. The Philadelphia airport matches Coatesville fairly well until the big Coatesville station moves in 1946 and 1947, whose effect is clearly seen. Before the station moves, the Coatesville station was located in a built up section of the City of Coatesville. Roughly as warm as the Philadelphia Airport. Not representative of Chester County. The big heat island effect on this chart is in Chester County not Philadelphia. The reverse heat island due to the Coatesville station move to a more rural location. The West Chester station experienced a similar move to a cooler, less built-up, location in 1970. The 1970s are cool in your chart because of faulty analysis. If you correct for the station moves and other network siting changes over the years, like NOAA does, the 1970s don't stand out as a cool decade. Funny that you complain about heat island effects in Philadelphia but ignore them in Chester County.

Melting picked-up in May allowing 2025 to close the gap with the lowest year, 2017. Melt was focused in the peripheral areas and the Atlantic front under an AO+ regime. Need the favorable AO+ regime to persist to avoid a low year.

Your in denial mode. These two charts fit together well. The station moves at Coatesville and West Chester produce spurious cooling if they are left in the raw data. That's why NOAA matches raw data without station moves and you (COOP station avg) don't. You have Chester County as warm as the Philadelphia airport before the station moves. How silly is that.

Coatesville 2W has more 90F days than kmqs. That's the reason for the Chesco decrease. Easy to see when you separate the stations. Looks like the Philadelphia heat island extends all the way to rural Chester County.

I missed the Atlantic focus. One factor in cooling the tropical Atlantic are higher surface wind speeds this year vs last.

Agree that 100+ days are not increasing locally, but average summer temperatures are. Below are monthly temperature trends for the Philadelphia airport (PHL) and for Coatesville, Chester County in the far N+W burbs from 1970 to 2024. As you say the winters are warming the fastest, but all months are warming. Added a chart for philadelphia airport average summer high temperature. Summer highs are increasing, although nights are warming the fastest as expected with GHG.

What I would expect coming out of a nino. The ocean is cooling overall and the warm anomalies are migrating away from the tropics.