The phrase
"rural stations" refers to small or remote locations in the countryside where people can catch a train or a bus.
Full definition
As we discussed in Section 2, the problem is that there just aren't that many
rural stations with long, reasonably complete records.
In other words, it is one of our
only rural station records that we can use for studying long - term temperature trends.
But, the limited
rural station data that is available suggests that the 1940s - 1970s global cooling and 1980s - 2000s global warming are not at all unusual.
For example,
many rural stations were shut down in 1980 and in 1990, as well as the other years.
Even rural stations have suffered from land use temperature increases over 150 years and 0.5 degrees of increase would not be recognizable from white noise over that long of a period.
It might also be possible to find longer and more complete records for some of the
other rural stations.
Quixeramobin is the
nearest rural station with more or less reliable data over a longer time span, and shows very different trends than Salvador.
This was done by using satellite - based night - light detection of urban areas, and more thorough homogenisation of the time series (with corrections, for example, for the tendency of
surrounding rural stations to be slightly higher, and thus cooler, than urban areas).
I am sure that the UHI problem is largely resolved in developed countries, as there are a lot of
rural stations which can be used to compensate for the UHI of large towns (there are some residual individual and regional problems, like irrigation in valleys, but that doesn't influence the general trend that much).
There does seem to be
enough rural stations with long records to be reasonably confident about the U.S. temperature trends for the 20th century, but not for the rest of the world.
Figure 4:
Rural station Amtsberg (blue curve) near Chemnitz is similar to the trend observed across Germany (red curve).