Anthony Watts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the North Queensland Cowboys rugby league player, see Anthony Watts (rugby league).

Anthony Watts is Chief Meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio. ^[1] In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a website devoted to photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations. ^[2]

1 Career
2 SurfaceStations.org
3 View on Global Warming
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Career

Watts became a television weatherman in 1987 when he joined KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California. After 17 years working at KHSL, he was replaced by Kris Kuyper ^[3] in 2004. He took his career forward by becoming the radio weatherman for KPAY-AM, a Fox News affiliate also based in Chico, California. At KPAY he re-examined the science of global warming and, in his words, "changed my thinking when I learned more about the science involved and found it to be lacking" ^[4]. He established the blog "Watts Up With That?" ^[5] to popularise his views on global warming. Watts also operates a company called ItWorks which makes weather graphics systems for on air use.

[edit] SurfaceStations.org

Watts leads an all volunteer effort to document the quality of weather stations. The SurfaceStations.org website contains all of the instructions one would need to gather enough information to determine if a weather station meets the requirements of NOAA. The data is collected and displayed on the website for others to study. According to the participation rules, weather station maintainers are given the opportunity to correct any errors in survey forms, diagrams, or photos in a form of independent review.^{[citation needed]}

The project has received moral support (Watts takes no outside funding for the site)^{[citation needed]} from Roger A. Pielke and Stephen McIntyre. Pielke described the effort as filling "a very important need for the climate science community".^[6] Watts is a regular contributor to McIntyre's website, ClimateAudit.org, where he posts some pictures of particularly poorly sited stations.

In August 2007, due to collaborative work between Watts and McIntyre, NASA's GISS issued a correction on U.S. temperature anomalies due to a faulty unpublished algorithm. The error mainly affected the years 2000-2006. ^[7]

After developing a database of documents and photographs on hundreds of stations, Watts presented his research at a scientific workshop in Boulder, CO. Of the stations surveyed so far, more than half appear to fall short of the guidelines set up by the NOAA. Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center said "I think any effort to better understand the observation system that's used to collect data and analyze it is helpful." ^[8]

[edit] View on Global Warming

Watts expects that the result of the SurfaceStations.org effort will be "to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment"^[9] and has said "you have to wonder if the whole house of cards isn't about to start falling down". ^[10]

Linking the SurfaceStations.org project to global warming has been criticised by Gavin Schmidt, who commented in August 2007 "They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset".^[11]

Watts writes: "The data will speak louder than any opinion I could ever utter. In the end, whether I’m right or wrong, the data will show the path and nature will be the final arbiter." ^[12]