Western Standard - August 14, 2025


Meteorologist says airport temperatures are inaccurate

Topics
airport temperatures
Mentioned
Chris Martinson Stevenson Warmer
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

174.29

Word count

798

Sentence count

46


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to meteorologist Chris Mart about how accurate are airport temperature thermometers? And why they might not be as accurate as we think they are. We also talk about the impact of climate change on airports and the impact it could have on our well-being.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Another day, another dollar here at headquarters. Or, as a meteorologist might say, another day, another temperature. But how accurate are temperatures? How accurate are airport temperatures? Well, we talked to Chris Mart, a meteorologist, who said they might not guarantee an accurate temperature measurement.
00:00:21.100 Yeah, so that comparison you're talking about was at Phoenix, Arizona's Sky Harbor International Airport. And so the first picture that I show was from 1959. And then the second was a satellite image from the same exact angle taken last year in 2024. And obviously, you can see all the urbanization, building infrastructure, all of it around the airport. The airport itself has gotten a lot bigger. They've added more runways over the last several decades.
00:00:50.180 And so all of that is going to have increased heat retention. And so when you thermometers, when you place a thermometer, now it's standard operating procedure by NOAA to, and this is the World Meteorological Organization standard. This is NOAA standard in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to measure temperature two meters above the ground in an enclosed shelter called a Stevenson screen.
00:01:17.520 It's painted white. It's painted white, so it reflects sunlight like snow. And so it prevents all the sunlight from getting absorbed and heating it further, like asphalt and blacktop, you know, black surfaces or dark surfaces in general.
00:01:30.600 And it has louvered sides like shutters on that side of the house. So it allows airflow through the shelter. Prior to the 1930s and 40s, a lot of these stations were located on farms or in town that at a park, Central Park in New York City, for example, has a consistent record there going back to 1869.
00:01:50.720 And so a lot of these stations in the 1930s and so a lot of these stations in the 1930s and 40s were moved to airports because we started, we had flight, travel, especially the 1930s, 40s, 50s.
00:02:02.720 We started seeing a lot of that because pilots and air traffic controllers needed real time weather information so they could have proper takeoff and landing.
00:02:11.720 And these thermometer networks were never intended to serve as a basis for climate monitoring for a national, regional or even global network.
00:02:24.720 network. They were just intended to provide real time weather information.
00:02:28.720 And a lot of these stations have now been integrated into what's called the global historical climatology network.
00:02:33.720 And that's part of NOAA's data. NASA uses it.
00:02:37.720 And so they all those temperature plots of the global average surface temperature that you see use this data.
00:02:42.720 And they have some correction factors that they add in there to try to eliminate urbanization and they tried to eliminate fixed where stations when they move.
00:02:51.720 The last thing I want to point out about this is that so obviously urbanization surfaces like brick and asphalt concrete.
00:03:00.720 They readily absorb the sun's radiation during the day and then at night they release it.
00:03:05.720 And so when you have thermometers that are near the runway of an airport, the blacktop there, it's going to radiate off of that.
00:03:12.720 Or if it is next to a highway, it's going to be affected by wind.
00:03:16.720 And also at night in the countryside where I live, for example, a lot of times the boundary layer, the lower part of the troposphere, the lowest layer of atmosphere, it cools radiatively to space effectively.
00:03:28.720 And I get this a lot from people.
00:03:31.720 A lot of skeptics and a lot of people I respect will say that there's no such thing as a global average temperature.
00:03:37.720 I disagree with that because what I will agree with them is that it's not measurable.
00:03:42.720 You cannot measure a global average temperature.
00:03:44.720 You can calculate it and estimate it through because you can only measure temperature at one location.
00:03:49.720 Like I can measure the temperature in the sunroom I'm sitting in and I can measure the temperature in the living room, but I can't measure the average house temperature.
00:03:56.720 I can calculate it based on different measurements that I take.
00:03:59.720 So it's not in terms of the relevance to human welfare, for example, the idea that though it's a warmer climate is going to hurt us or it's going to be better for us.
00:04:10.720 I don't really think it's either.
00:04:12.720 Warmer could be slightly better for us, but we really have the technological capabilities to adapt to whatever climate that we have, whether it's a couple of degrees warmer or a couple of degrees cooler, especially with modern technologies.
00:04:25.720 So whether it gets a couple of degrees warmer or cooler is not going to really have on a global average basis is not going to really affect our well-being all that much one way or the other.