NASA Puts Thermometer Station In Super Hot Spot In Death Valley That Gives Dishonest Readings

Comparing temperatures of the past and present is hazardous due to moving gages around and the growth of cities which are hotter than countryside.  Generally speaking, moving a temperature gage that is used for official purposes usually is done to remove these from ‘heat islands’ which form around them.  But recently, the reverse is happening.  In their anxiety to create a global warming data set, NASA has set up a dishonest thermometer in a specific hotter place rather than the reverse.  And I want to illustrate the worst example of them all: Death Valley’s new Badwater station.

 

This is the hottest place in America due to being an elevation far below sea level.  In the past, it has been and remains to this day, the holder of the hottest day, ever and it was not in recent times, it was 100 years ago nearly exactly:  Death Valley Record High And Low Both Came In 1913

 

Record Temperatures
The hottest air temperature ever recorded in Death Valley (Furnace Creek) was 134°F (57°C) on July 10, 1913. During the heat wave that peaked with that record, five consecutive days reached 129° F (54°C) or above. Death Valley holds the record for the hottest place on earth.
Oddly enough, 1913 was also the year that saw Death Valley’s coldest temperature. On January 8 the temperature dropped to 15°F (-10°C) at Furnace Creek.

 

Longest summers
The greatest number of consecutive days with a maximum temperature of 100° F or above was 154 days in the summer of 2001. The summer of 1996 had 40 days over 120° F, and 105 days over 110° F. The summer of 1917 had 43 consecutive days with a high temperature of 120° F or above.

 

Highest ground temperatures
The highest ground temperature recorded was 201° F at Furnace Creek on July 15, 1972. The maximum air temperature for that day was 128° F.

 

The Dead Sea is 1300 feet below sea level and Death Valley is only 282 below.  Due to other climatic conditions, the Dead Sea doesn’t hold the world record, that is in Africa.  One of the problems with data about Death Valley such as the above data about the summer of 2001 having the most hot days of the last 100 years is, the data is screwed up due to ADDING a new thermometer and placing it deliberately in the hottest place of all due to the ‘heat island effect’.

 

The new meter which was installed in the early 1990s is in Badwater: Lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level, Badwater Basin is a surreal landscape of vast salt flats. A temporary lake may form here after heavy rainstorms. Do not walk on the salt flats in hot weather.

Badwater

 

In climatology, record-breaking is of little significance climatically speaking. An all-time hot record in one place can be easily matched by an all-time cold record somewhere else. This year in the U.S. and in Australia, both hot and cold records have been broken at various times and places. They make interesting fare for the Guinness Book of Records, but little else.

 

However, record-breaking does have one purpose for the greenhouse industry, namely that of heightening public fears about global warming. For this reason, the industry likes to see hot records being broken as often as possible, present a lot of media hype about them, and then go into quick denial and spin-making when cold records are broken, sometimes even blaming the cold record on global warming!

 

The industry also dislikes a hot record being very old, such as the all-time hot daytime record for Australia of 53.1°C. set at Cloncurry, Queensland in 1889. Valuable research money and academic effort was spent in a futile effort to discredit that one record (Trewin, B., Aust. Met. Mag. 46 (1997) 251-256).

 

There is one all-time hot record that is the ultimate global prize: 58°C (136°F) set at Al Aziziya, Libya, in 1922. This was the hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere in the world and has stood for 80 years in spite of real or imagined `global warming”. It is even noted in the Guinness Book of Records. But 1922 is a long time ago and the longer it stands, the less convincing are the claims about global warming in the eyes of the public.

 

To topple this record, the industry has not bothered with the Cloncurry approach – that of seeking to discredit the record itself – as that appeared to be, and was, merely sour grapes and spin.

 

Instead, the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC), has set up their own temperature instrument in Death Valley, even though there is already a long-standing instrument at Furnace Creek right in the open central part of the valley.
The new instrument is located 20 miles south of Furnace Creek at Badwater (Fig.1).

 

The photo shows the Badwater area with a large salt pan stretching into the far distance, caused by evaporation of salty water welling up from a spring just metres this side of the sign shown in the photo. The new instrument at Badwater was installed in the late 1990s, but it must be stressed that the record left is for Furnace Creek, not Badwater. Yet the public plaque on the instrument at Badwater implies otherwise.The plaque claims Death Valley recorded the hottest air temperature anywhere in the world on 17th July 1998 – implying it was an all-time world record. It was not. It was referring to 1998 only. Actually, the hottest temperature ever recorded at Death Valley was way back in 1913 on 10th July – a whopping 134°F (57°C).Unlike the Furnace Creek instrument which is located in the open centre of the big valley, the new instrument has been mounted next to the eastern side of the valley at Badwater. The local topography is such that the instrument sits in a curved hollow (topographical map – Fig.5) so that it is well sheltered from all but westerly winds, and fully exposed to the afternoon summer sun. In fact, the whole area around the instrument is a perfect afternoon sun trap.
On the east side of the instrument is a high west-facing cliff over 500 feet tall, a cliff which will heat up magnificently in the afternoon sun on a hot summer’s day. 280 feet up on that cliff is a large sign which says `mean sea level’ (Badwater is 285 feet below sea level).

The above photo shows the Furnace Creek community.  It is not in a reflective, super hot oven so we get a more realistic reading.  Any place that is next to a reflective cliff facing west which magnifies the afternoon hot sun, it inappropriate.  I remember Death Valley really well because I had a lot of experience with the place when I was a child.  When I was outside in the afternoon, I was careful to cast my shadow over my feet so my toes would not fry in my sneakers.  Ouch!

 

Also, the desert floor would be so hot, the soles of the sneakers would become very hot, too.  My favorite joke back then was to discuss ‘fried baboon toes’ in reference to the heat.

 

The other major problem the the NASA thermometer is that it is only about four to five feet off the ground!  The closer to the ground, the hotter it is due to reflection, not air temperature.  Generally speaking, the official thermometers I remember from the past were at least 10 to 12 feet off the ground due to this factor.  Hell’s bells!  If you lay the thermometer on the ground, it would register 200 degrees!

 

We certainly did cook things on the ground.  One thing I loved doing was taking my father’s paraffin wax and mixing it with crayons by melting both on the ground in a metal pan and then making candles out of these.  We  melted paraffin wax on lots of things there to make them faster like slides, for example.

 

The other thing is, the desert is COLD at night and if it isn’t in high summer, it feels cool due to the winds that blow when the sun sets.  And mornings are cool indeed and this is when we did all the sweaty, hard stuff like digging in the caliche soil which is hard as rock.  By the way, I am furious that NASA is stooping to this sort of stupidity.  Shame on them all.  Shame.  My dad who is the person who brought back the Nazi rocket scientists during WWII, is turning in his grave.

 

 

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