Any site influenced by UHI is a useless indicator of climate – they should be discarded.

If, on the other hand, you are wanting to measure the effect of man-made heat sinks, they are indispensable.

When I look at isolated rural towns I see little or no evidence for warming in Australia. Big cities are a different story – strong warming. This write-up shows a small number of examples but I have found many more similar cases:-
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/mcclintock-country.pdf

Global warming during the 20th Century was 0.6C, with a margin of error of +/-0.2C. The Southern Hemisphere warming was less than half that level. But New Zealand warming, according to NIWA, was almost twice the global average – and with no error margins mentioned.

Referring to the NIWA web page, one finds that this major warming trend is the product of a single study involving only 7 temperature stations – out of the 238 stations which currently report to NIWA. In response to a request under the Official information Act, NIWA has disclosed that this study was undertaken as part of a student’s thesis some 30 years ago.

NIWA has no record of how the NSS came to be in their computers. The only reasonable inference is that the student himself, one Jim Salinger, must have added it when he became NIWA’s Principal Scientist many years later.

Now I’ve found Richard’s article at this august site:

http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2010/04/niwa-disowns-salinger-thesis/

Thesis available, but only in Wellington
ACT MP John Boscawen asked a question in the Parliament of the Minister of Research, Science and Technology, Dr Wayne Mapp:

Can the minister confirm that Dr Salinger’s PhD thesis is still “publicly available”? If so, where, and how may it be obtained?

A simple question, you might think, and so it is. Listen to the answer from Dr Mapp.
I am advised that Dr Salinger’s PhD thesis is publicly available through the Victoria University Library. This thesis is in the Closed Reserve Collection at VUW Library. It can be accessed by the public.

(Note that VUW means Victoria University of Wellington.) Though I don’t like the sound of the “Closed Reserve Collection”, it’s good news that he says the thesis is available to the general public. But listen to the conditions:

To view the thesis, members of the public can visit the Closed Reserve Desk between 8am and 5pm Monday to Friday. On production of an ID, they can be issued a temporary visitors card and can check out the thesis for up to six hours. The thesis must be kept within the library.

So you have to go to Wellington, you have to read and absorb hundreds of technical pages in only six hours and you can only copy a little bit of it. Presumably you get another six hours each day you stay in Wellington. It could cost a lot of money unless you have relatives in Wellington.

and note Richard’s comment to that article (quoting in part) NIWA’s response to the NZCSC

You asked about adjustments made to the seven station data series. Information regarding those adjustments is available from the following publicly available sources.” You will note he does not say “the adjustments are contained within” the sources. Then he cites

· Salinger, M.J., 1981. New Zealand Climate: The instrumental record. Thesis
submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Victoria University of
Wellington, January 1981;
· Rhoades, D.A., and Salinger, M.J., 1993: Adjustment of temperature and rainfall
measurements for site changes. International Journal of Climatology, 13, 899 –
913;

I recommend this article for background material which is probably all in a thread somewhere on this site which I just haven’t found yet