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Anthony Watts is an American broadcast meteorologist, editor of the blog, Watts Up With That?, owner of the weather graphics company ItWorks, and founder of the SurfaceStations.org project that documents the quality of weather stations across the United States. He is currently meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio.

Career

Watts became a television meteorologist in 1987 when he joined KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California. After working at KHSL for 17 years, he left in 2004 to became the radio meteorologist 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.

He was briefly a candidate for a supervisor to represent Chico on the Butte County Board of Supervisors, but family pressures and a heavy workload at the school board left him unable to mount an effective campaign and he withdrew in favor of Steve Bertagna.

In 2006, Lorraine Ann Blanton was arrested and accused of trying to extort money from Watts by threatening letter. Blanton allegedly threatened to tell the news media about an intimate relationship the two had had in the mid-1990s. Watts dated Blanton in 1996 and 1997.

View of climate change

Watts has a skeptical view of climate change theories. He has said that he had once "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 won the 2008 Best Science Blog Award.

SurfaceStations.org

In 2007 Watts launched the 'Surface Stations' project, whose mission is to create a publicly available database of photographs of weather stations, along with their metadata, in response to what he describes 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. 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. He also said that in any case the evidence for human-driven warming remains robust. After only a small percentage of stations had been surveyed Watts predicted that the result of the SurfaceStations.org effort would ultimately be "to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO₂ but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment." 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.

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 said that the preliminary analysis excluded new data on quality of surface stations, which he said he would have forwarded on request, and criticized the use of homogenized data from the stations, which he claims accounts for the creation of two nearly identical graphs.

References

1. Watts, Anthony. "About Watts Up With That?". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2009-02-09.
2. Indar, Josh (16th March, 2006). "One out, one in, one on". News Review. Retrieved 2009-10-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
3. Aylworth, Roger H. (28th March, 2006). "Anthony Watts target of accused extortionist". Chico Enterprise Record. Retrieved 2009-10-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
4. ^ Anthony Watts (27 March 2008). "Gore to throw insults on 60 minutes". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 06 February 2009. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
5. Template:Cite web url=http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-science-blog/
6. 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.
7. Olsen, Ryan (30th August, 2007). "Scientists warm up to Watts' work". Chico Enterprise Record. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 06 February 2009. I think any effort to better understand the observation system that's used to collect data and analyze it is helpful. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
8. Revkin, Andrew A. (26th August, 2007). "Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-04-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
9. Steigerwald, Bill (2007-06-17). "Helping along global warming". Pittsburg Tribune-Review.
10. NOAA (10th December, 2002). "Climate Reference Network Site Handbook" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-09-30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
11. NOAA (6th July, 2009). "Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-07-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
12. Watts, Anthony (2009-06-29). "NCDC writes ghost "talking points" rebuttal to surfacestations project". Retrieved 2009-07-09.
13. Watts, Anthony (31st July, 2009). "On Climate, Comedy, Copyrights, and Cinematography". Retrieved 2009-07-31. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

• Watts being interviewed on Hannity's America
• Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?, Anthony Watts, Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2009.

• Living people
• Meteorologists