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Anthony Watts
NationalityAmerican
WebsiteWatts Up With That?
SurfaceStations.org

Anthony Watts is an American broadcast weather presenter (AMS seal holder retired), editor of the blog, Watts Up With That? (WUWT), owner of the weather graphics company ItWorks, and founder of the SurfaceStations.org project that documents the siting of weather stations across the United States.

Career

Watts became a television weather presenter in 1987 when he joined WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana, and KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California. After working at KHSL for 17 years, he left in 2004 to become the radio weather presenter for KPAY-AM, a Fox News affiliate also based in Chico, California. Watts also operates several companies that make weather graphics systems for use on television broadcasts.

In 2006, Watts was briefly a candidate for county supervisor, to represent Chico on the Butte County Board of Supervisors, but he withdrew his candidacy due to family and workload concerns.

View of climate change

Watts has a skeptical view of CO2-driven global warming. He has said that in 1990 he had "been fully engaged in the belief that CO2 was indeed the root cause of the global warming problem," but that he later changed his thinking after learning more about the science. He established the blog, Watts Up With That, which mainly posts about the global warming controversy. In 2008, his blog won the internet voting-based "Best Science Blog" Weblog Award.

SurfaceStations.org

In 2007 Watts launched the "SurfaceStations.org" project, whose mission is to create a publicly available database of photographs of weather stations, along with their metadata, in response to what he described as "a massive failure of bureaucracy to perform something so simple as taking some photographs and making some measurements and notes of a few to a few dozen weather stations in each state". The project relies on volunteers to gather the data. The method used is to attract volunteers of varying levels of expertise who undertake to estimate the siting, usage and other conditions of weather stations in NOAA's Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and grade them for their compliance with the standards published in the organization's Climate Reference Network Site Handbook.

Soon after launching the project, when 40 or so of the 1221 USHCN climatological surface temperature monitoring stations had been surveyed, Watts stated that his preliminary findings raised doubts about NOAA's temperature reporting. "I believe," he said, "we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment." By 2009, the project had documented over 860 stations using over 650 volunteers. In a report entitled Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?, published by the Heartland Institute, Watts concludes that "the errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature...during the twentieth century."

Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has said that he was aware of Watts' work and invites anyone with expertise to contribute to the scientific process. Elsewhere, he has stated that the evidence for human-driven warming remains robust, however.

On July 6, 2009 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a preliminary report that charted data from 70 stations that SurfaceStations.org identified as 'good' or 'best' against the rest of the dataset surveyed at that time, and concluded, "clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends." Watts issued a rebuttal in which he asserted that the preliminary analysis excluded new data on quality of surface stations, and criticized the use of homogenized data from the stations, which in his view accounts for the creation of two nearly identical graphs. Since then NOAA has released a detailed peer reviewed study confirming both reliability of the surface stations reviewed. The results show that poor stations produce a slight cooling bias, in stark contrast to Watts claim, but also that after corrections both poor and highly rated stations align very well.

See also

References

  1. "List of AMS Television Seal Holders". American Meteorological Society. Retrieved 2010-05-13.
  2. Watts Up With That? blog
  3. Watts, Anthony (2009). "Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?" (PDF). Heartland Institute. Retrieved 2009-11-24.
  4. Watts, Anthony. "About Watts Up With That?". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2009-02-09.
  5. Indar, Josh (2006-03-16). "One out, one in, one on". Sacramento News & Review. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
  6. Watts, Anthony (March 27, 2008). "Gore to throw insults on 60 minutes". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2009-02-06.
  7. "2008 Weblog Awards". Weblogawards.org. 2008.
  8. Watts, Anthony. "About SurfaceStations.org". SurfaceStations.org. Retrieved 2009-03-06. Given such a massive failure of bureaucracy to perform something so simple as taking some photographs and making some measurements and notes of a few to a few dozen weather stations in each state, it seemed that a grass roots network of volunteers could easily accomplish this task.
  9. Climate Reference Network (CRN) — Site Handbook (PDF). CRN Series. NOAA/NESDIS. 2002. NOAA-CRN/OSD-2002-0002R0UD0. Retrieved 2009-09-30. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  10. Steigerwald, Bill (2007-06-17). "Helping along global warming". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
  11. ^ Watts, Anthony (2009). Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? (PDF). Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute. ISBN 1-934791-26-6. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)
  12. Olsen, Ryan (August 30, 2007). "Scientists warm up to Watts' work". Chico Enterprise Record. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007. Retrieved 2009-02-05. I think any effort to better understand the observation system that's used to collect data and analyze it is helpful.
  13. Revkin, Andrew C. (August 26, 2007). "Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-02.
  14. "Talking Points related to concerns about whether the U.S. temperature record is reliable" (PDF). NOAA Climate Services. July 6, 2009. Retrieved 2009-07-02.
  15. Watts, Anthony (2009-06-29). "NCDC writes ghost "talking points" rebuttal to surfacestations project". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2009-07-09.
  16. Watts, Anthony (July 31, 2009). "On Climate, Comedy, Copyrights, and Cinematography". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2009-07-31.
  17. Menne, Matthew J. (to appear). Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres. American Geophysical Union http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2010.pdf. Retrieved 2010-02-05. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  18. Cook, John (27 January 2010). "Climate sceptics distract us from the scientific realities of global warming". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 February 2010.

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