Shannon Airport synoptic weather station siting

Rebelbrowser

My tuppence would be that watching Shannon in the 2013 and 2018 warm spells (in particular) it does "hang on" to heat in the evening differently from other stations. Equally maybe that's just the micro climate in east Clare? Certainly there appear to be issues for met.ie to consider though.

Anyone able to show sites of Dublin and Cork airport stations just for comparison?

JCX BXC

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

The 30 degrees is from 050 to 080 degrees. The spike occured around the 080 time.

Nope, that's a very strange thing to say. The shift of 30° occured over an hour, from 1500Z to 1600Z, the shift was only of 10° between 1530Z to 1600Z, and a shift of 10° as reported on metars could Infact only be a shift of 2/3°.

Gaoth Laidir

JCX BXC wrote: »

Nope, that's a very strange thing to say. The shift of 30° occured over an hour, from 1500Z to 1600Z, the shift was only of 10° between 1530Z to 1600Z, and a shift of 10° as reported on metars could Infact only be a shift of 2/3°.

The anemometer is around 1 mile away from the screen, so it may not accurately reflect the exact wind at the screen area. What's fairly obvious is marked spikes and dips in temperature throughout the day, despite the fact that skies were clear throughout. This doesn't happen without some cause, such as subtle windshifts on and off the carpark.

Akrasia

Gaoth Laidir wrote: »

The anemometer is around 1 mile away from the screen, so it may not accurately reflect the exact wind at the screen area. What's fairly obvious is marked spikes and dips in temperature throughout the day, despite the fact that skies were clear throughout. This doesn't happen without some cause, such as subtle windshifts on and off the carpark.

Can you show me a graph from a better sited Irish weather station without those spikes in them?

rebs23

Rebelbrowser wrote: »

My tuppence would be that watching Shannon in the 2013 and 2018 warm spells (in particular) it does "hang on" to heat in the evening differently from other stations. Equally maybe that's just the micro climate in east Clare? Certainly there appear to be issues for met.ie to consider though.

Anyone able to show sites of Dublin and Cork airport stations just for comparison?

The one in Cork is up a steep hill which is always 1-2c cooler than at sea level. Not sure about it's actual location in the Airport.

Gaoth Laidir

Akrasia wrote: »

Can you show me a graph from a better sited Irish weather station without those spikes in them?

I don't have access to these graphs. I took this one from Twitter. You would expect similar spikes at any station on partly cloudy days as the sun comes in and out, but the day in question was wall-to-wall sunshine. Note, however, how smooth the graph is during the night, right up to sunrise, but how the variability starts from mid morning onwards.

Gaoth Laidir

rebs23 wrote: »

The one in Cork is up a steep hill which is always 1-2c cooler than at sea level. Not sure about it's actual location in the Airport.

It's beside the road, just at the entrance to the airport. All the stations can be seen in this thread that I started.

Oneiric 3

I would imagine that little 'heat spikes' are not all that uncommon on warm days. Very often, we see the final maxes at stations being higher than any of the hourly reports would suggest. A similar trait seems to occur with low maxes as well, especially in winter.

Gaoth Laidir

So, I was in Eason in Liffey Valley today, flicking through a book of old aerial images of Ireland, when I opened the page below. Shannon Airport in 1951, showing the weather station in its original location, to the west of the airport. That area is fully built up and concreted by now, and the current station is probably off the right edge of the photo.



Here's the station outlined in a photo that was posted earlier in this thread.

Gaoth Laidir

Two more asphalt carparks have been built right beside the station at Shannon Airport. That now makes it 40 hectares (5 Wembley pitches) of asphalt area within 250 metres of the station enclosure. That's 40 times more asphalt area than the grass area of the station.

https://twitter.com/BadWxStations/status/1936866355917050269

ClimateObserver

Shannon Airport AWS needs to be re-located within the Airport grounds.

Dublin Airport AWS was moved several times in the past, so - there is precedent, and quite frankly it should be a priority now for Met Eireann.

Thunder87

I pointed this out in another thread last week, crazy!

I'm in no way a 'denier' but you'd wonder how many high temperature records being broken these days are a result of increased urbanisation rather than spikes in actual ambient temperature of the airmass

M.T. Cranium

I never noticed this discussion in 2018, possibly because I was away for about the same duration, but one thing worth noting that I didn't read in any comments is that the METARS also indicated (on the hot day being discussed) a regime of shifting breezes within a range, that's what the comments like V040120 mean (winds recorded during past interval from directions between 040 and 120 degrees). I think I saw speeds like 6 knots, so basically this is what a golfer might experience as "swirling breezes" — in some more established wind fields the direction is more constant especially at a well-exposed site (think we can all agree Shannon is well exposed, to what being the discussion).

Ironically the New York weather enthusiasts are all complaining that Central Park is poorly sited in the other direction, being too shaded and in an urban park which is cooler than 90% or more of the surrounding area. They claim this has reduced temperatures recorded there in heat waves by 2 or 3 C deg since major heat waves of the past (more accurately they claim the site accurately records temperatures that would have been that much higher if the trees were smaller or absent).

I would imagine a lot of airport weather stations are prone to local heat contamination. When they moved the instruments at Toronto (Pearson) airport in 1962, to a more remote portion of the airfield, it appeared to create a drop in mean temperatures when records were compared to nearby undisturbed data, that amounted to over 1 C deg, and I personally did an analysis of the data for a technical paper showing that the differentials were almost all much larger variations in overnight lows further from buildings at the airport central hub. So it was a case of about one-quarter of all recorded daily minima being 3-4 C lower and the rest of the data (in cloudy and/or breezy conditions) being essentially unaltered.

sryanbruen

The Met has responded about the additional car parks in Shannon that they're working with SAA to identify more suitable locations for the station.

https://twitter.com/METclimate/status/1939694357491204472