A comment on temperature measurement at automatic weather stations in Australia

Abstract

Two versions of 1-min air-temperature data recorded at Bureau Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) were compared in three case studies. The aim was to evaluate the difference between 1-min data represented by a measurement at the last second of each minute, compared with an average of four or five 1-s measurements made during the minute. Frequency distributions of the difference between these two values were produced for 44 000 min in three monthly data sets, January and July 2016 and September 2017. Diurnal and seasonal changes in standard deviation of the temperature differences showed that minute-to-minute fluctuations were driven by solar irradiance as the source of turbulent kinetic energy in the planetary boundary layer. Fluctuations in the difference between the two versions of 1-min data were so small overnight in all months that minimum temperature (T_min) was the same using both methods. In midsummer, any difference between the two values for maximum temperature (T_max) was greatest at midday. T_max could be up by 0.1 K higher in the 1-s data compared with T_max averaged from four measurements in the minute, but less often than 1 min in five. A follow-up test for September 2017 at Mildura when a new T_max record was set found the difference immaterial, with T_max the same for the averaged or 1-s values. Thus while the two versions of 1-min air-temperature data showed fluctuating small differences, largest at midday in summer, for the 3 months studied at both sites, fluctuations were too small to cause bias in climatological air-temperature records. This accorded with a numerical experiment confirming the Bureau’s advice that thermal inertia in the AWS measurement systems ensured that its 1-s data represented averages over the prior 40–80 s, providing a 1-min average of air temperature in accord with World Meteorological Organization requirements.