after you do all of that, see if you can find pictures of the stations, the little structure the old ones were in are called "CRS" which stands for Cotton Region Shelter. these were the old liquid-in-glass style thermometers. The new ones have multi-plate radiation shields to house the thermistor and protect it from direct sunlight while allowing airflow. i guess some people say they look like a beehive, but they're a cylinder.
so the CRS ones could be put anywhere. the new MMTS sensors had a pre-cut length of cable for installation, as the base unit was to be situated indoors.
So CRS could be out in the middle of a field, where the MMTS are generally within 30' of a building.
Maybe we should throw out all the MMTS data?
Now, though, someone finally realized, and they're installing wireless MMTS - minimum-maximum temperature sensor, tells the min and max over the last 24 hours, and you record those numbers once per day, at a specific Time-of-Observation. Changing the time-of-observation requires de-biasing the data, too!
i agree that the apparatus varies tremendously over the decades. Real science is hard work and I applaud environmental scientists for their efforts. We need to be careful about qualifying "raw data" since software engineers usually stop at a textfile and forget about the origins.
so the CRS ones could be put anywhere. the new MMTS sensors had a pre-cut length of cable for installation, as the base unit was to be situated indoors.
So CRS could be out in the middle of a field, where the MMTS are generally within 30' of a building.
Maybe we should throw out all the MMTS data?
Now, though, someone finally realized, and they're installing wireless MMTS - minimum-maximum temperature sensor, tells the min and max over the last 24 hours, and you record those numbers once per day, at a specific Time-of-Observation. Changing the time-of-observation requires de-biasing the data, too!