Impacts of Moving a NCEI/NWS Coop Site on the Climate Record

The move of a NWS/NCEI coop site produces a variety of discontinuities into the climate record. This is due to reasons ranging from a difference in topography, land use, level of nearby urbanization, and the time of the day that the observations are taken. The observations, while accurate, may not be representative of the region as a whole. If the records are used to evaluate climate change, the records will have to be examined over time to remove the noise introduced by the move to a new site to discern the signal of a changing climate. Likewise, if the data was utilized to inform urban planning or agricultural interests, the representativeness of the data would need to be examined to determine how well it would apply to a topic of interest. I will present some of my experiences with a NWS/NCEI coop station that I operated for 38 years, and take a look at what has happened since it moved to a much different setting at the Texas A&M International University on January 1.