Yeah, no doubt that the strong UHI that characterizes Athens makes some difference with these conditions. Larissa has an airport station, the city is not huge, its UHI can reach the airport only with given wind directions; while Filadelfia is sourrounded by the city and it will be involved by UHI under most wind directions. It would be very interesting to see a comparison between Larissa and Nea Filaldefia without the UHI-boost of Athens, a thing that is impossible with contemporary data and will not be possible very soon. Santamouris & collegues are proposing lots of countermeasures to face UHI but it takes time to apply them.
Somewhere I have a WMO stations database with 1961-1990 means for a lot of stations (over 900 stations), and Larissa is one of them. But I fear there is not Nea Filadelfia. In 1961-1990 perhaps the UHI of Athens il less intense than now; it seems that it exploded and became tremendous as it is now only in the second half of 80s.
If you are still in Athens, could you do a couple of photoreportage please?
We are quite interested in the pictures of Thiseio and the new Nea Filadelfia sites.
About Thiseio, I have already seen pictures and there is nothing to hide. It is better than most of old Italian Hydrographic stations like those in the database I sent you last year. It has about 8-11 meters range of lawn around, so it is reasonable. About Nea Filadelfia, the interest is in the trees sourrounding it. If they cut some and created a large surface of only grass, this would impact the sky view factor of the station (decreasing tmins) but also it would reduce shadowing, increasing tmax. The meteogr reportage suggest that in late 2009 the station was shadowed by trees.
Instead I believe it is not safe to try to take pictures of Elefsina: the probability of suffering a gunshot is high