I'm not sure i know the exact locations, but NASA and NOAA do, and people who have seen the data and locations (and therefore know what is rural or not) say things like this about realclimate.org's handwave of UHI:
> "Because urban areas still only represent 3-4% of the global land surface, this should not substantially influence global temperatures.
> However, most of the weather stations used for calculating the land component of global temperatures are located in urban or semi-urban areas. This is especially so for the stations with the longest temperature records. One reason why is because it is harder to staff and maintain a weather station in an isolated, rural location for a century or longer."
further from a paper critiquing the GHCN model's homogenization algorithm:
> "When they were compiling the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset, the National Climatic Data Center included some basic station metadata, i.e., data describing the station and its environment. For each station, they provided the station name, country, latitude, longitude and elevation. They also provided a number of classifications to describe the environment of the station - whether it was an airport station or not; if it was on an island, near the coast or near a lake; and what the average ecosystem of the stations’ surroundings was, e.g., desert, ice, forest, etc"
oh and an interesting note, if you are wondering "well, how many fully rural stations do we have data for at least 95% of the 'last 100 years?"
> "Because urban areas still only represent 3-4% of the global land surface, this should not substantially influence global temperatures.
> However, most of the weather stations used for calculating the land component of global temperatures are located in urban or semi-urban areas. This is especially so for the stations with the longest temperature records. One reason why is because it is harder to staff and maintain a weather station in an isolated, rural location for a century or longer."
further from a paper critiquing the GHCN model's homogenization algorithm:
> "When they were compiling the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset, the National Climatic Data Center included some basic station metadata, i.e., data describing the station and its environment. For each station, they provided the station name, country, latitude, longitude and elevation. They also provided a number of classifications to describe the environment of the station - whether it was an airport station or not; if it was on an island, near the coast or near a lake; and what the average ecosystem of the stations’ surroundings was, e.g., desert, ice, forest, etc"
oh and an interesting note, if you are wondering "well, how many fully rural stations do we have data for at least 95% of the 'last 100 years?"
eight.
globally.