Oregon Combined TemperaturesBIT TOOTH ENERGY

Oregon Combined Temperatures

Having previously looked at California and Washington, examining the temperature behavior in Oregon will complete the West Coast sweep (outside of Alaska and Hawaii). This is another state with a lot of stations, in this case, the USHCN lists 40, so the first thing is to get that data into a spreadsheet. And looking at the USHCN site, it dawns on me that I could enlarge the map to show where the stations are. So this is the map.

Location of the USHCN stations in Oregon.

Chiefio’s List gives two GISS stations are at Medford and Pendleton, though when I click on the Oregon segment of the GISS station selector map it takes me to Mexico – ah, well. Type in the names- well first shot gets no Medford. Try Pendleton, and egads, a full set of data for once. And the high temperature was in 1934.

GISS data for Pendleton

So let’s download that data first, and then go look for Medford. Turns out it is near Klamath Falls, so I type that in, and GISS finds it, and then I look for adjacent stations, and lo, there is Medford. Only data since 1947, but still . . .

GISS record for Medford.

Looking at the state geography, Oregon runs from 116.75W to 124.5W, and from 42N to 46.25N. It is 360 miles long and 261 miles wide. The average elevation is 3,300 ft (1,005 m) with Mt Hood being the high point at 3,425 m. (The average station elevation is 550 m)

So what does the data tell us for the temperatures of the state. Interestingly the GISS data is a consistent 4 deg higher than the USHCN over the entire recorded period.

As far as the temperature has changed over the years (using TOBS data) there has been a slight increase, at the rate of 0.6 deg/century (the homogenized data shows an increase of 1.3 deg/century).

Turning to the geographical effects, these are for latitude:

Interestingly this is showing an increase in temperature, albeit not significant, with latitude, which is contrary to just about every other state.

On the other hand the change with longitude is explicable in that the higher elevations are to the East and thus as the land goes west it lowers, and thus gets warmer.