Abstract
Analysis of hourly underground temperature measurements at a medium-size (by population) US city as a function of depth and extending over 5+ years revealed a positive trend exceeding the rate of regional and global warming by an order of magnitude. Measurements at depths greater than ~2 m are unaffected by daily fluctuations and sense only seasonal variability. A comparable trend also emerged from the surface temperature record of the largest US city (New York). Power spectral analysis of deep and shallow subsurface temperature records showed respectively two kinds of power-law behavior: 1) a quasi-continuum of power amplitudes indicative of Brownian noise, superposed (in the shallow record) by 2) a discrete spectrum of diurnal harmonics attributable to the unequal heat flux between daylight and darkness. Spectral amplitudes of the deepest temperature time series (2.4 m) conformed to a log-hyperbolic distribution. Upon removal of seasonal variability from the temperature record, the resulting spectral amplitudes followed a log-exponential distribution. Dynamical analysis showed that relative amplitudes and phases of temperature records at different depths were in excellent accord with a 1-dimensional heat diffusion model.
Highlights
Despite a long period of contentious debate, there is little dissention among scientists who study globalHow to cite this paper: Silverman, M.P. (2014) Statistical Analysis of Subsurface Diffusion of Solar Energy with Implications for Urban Heat Stress
Evidence for increasing mean global temperature has come from four major sources: 1) the US NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), 2) the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 3) the UK Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and most recently 4) the US Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group (BEST) whose acronym reflects what the group believe to be the largest sampling and smallest uncertainties of the major investigations to date [3]
This paper reports on subterranean temperature measurements made over a 5+ year period as a function of time and depth in a medium-size US city (Hartford, Connecticut: 41.76 N, 72.67 W ) and compares the results with surface temperature measurements made in New York City (NYC: 40.67 N, 73.94 W ), which is currently the largest US city by population
Summary
Despite a long period of contentious debate, there is little dissention among scientists who study global. Evidence for increasing mean global temperature has come from four major sources: 1) the US NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), 2) the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 3) the UK Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and most recently 4) the US Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group (BEST) whose acronym reflects what the group believe to be the largest sampling and smallest uncertainties of the major investigations to date [3] Reports in both the scientific literature and popular news media have focused nearly exclusively on global aspects of global warming [4]—i.e. on planet-wide catastrophes such as melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, disruption of the thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic, increased frequency and intensity of extreme storm events, and regional perturbations of ecosystems leading to large-scale extinctions. Power spectral analysis of the time series as a function of depth revealed two different power-law variations, which shed further light on underlying stochastic processes
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