It’s more than a sentimental favorite, it’s the centerpiece of the whole “World’s Worst Weather” claim. They will defend both the record and the slogan mightily. I don’t really criticize them for that stand either. Once you take all the context in, it’s a pretty impressive record. They will defend the record fairly. Well, they will likely insist that the post calibration be done, and in one case, the anemometer in a challenging report blew away. The conclusion of the review board was that its high reading came after a guy wire broke and the tower began whipping back and forth before another guy wire broke. Fair enough….

The record is 231 mph (see http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/recordwind.php) so it would be safe from the Grandfather Mtn report of 200 mph. The Mt Washington anemometer was well calibrated before (and after!) the record, so the confidence in its performance is very high.

Even so, a meteorologist there told me that the observatory’s current building has the effect to reduce wind readings somewhat, so placement issues affect even that station!

Station moves should be in proportion to changing land use. In that case there would be no reason to adjust data other than to eliminate outliers. And if temperatures should be measured automatically there should be few if any gaps in the data, and few if any outliers.

Why, oh, why is the new CRN to use wired MMTS without automatic data transmission? It makes no sense to me whatever.

Can’t we start a movement to exclude city weather stations from GISS data? :)

REPLY: It is doubtful GISS will do that, as they are entrenched. But a separate analysis can be done once the best stations are identified.

Bill

“the weather service has no information about the anemometer — or wind gauge — on Grandfather.
”

Sounds like they have no idea what anemometer is up there, how it’s calibrated, or even if its ever calibrated. In addition to it being in a bad place. No info what-so-ever is how I read that.

Rabbet: I thought Rabbet was outed as Josh Halpern? Where did I read that?

In any event, you’d think the NWS would offer to help Grandfather Mountain with their wind guage, both placement and certification. But Grandfather Mountain is actually privately owned and maybe the owners are not interested….

Looking at the past, and betting the
stats, The smart money would bet that 2008 will have an ANNUAL anomaly
at below .12C.”

Well, first off, that +0.12C anomaly is arbitrarily defined versus the mid 20th century average not the period of record. So, before anybody starts declaring global warming over based on one month, perhaps we should look at the longer term trends.

REPLY: There was no mention whatsoever of “global warming over”, (other than your comment) only that the anomaly was large.

I read through the CRN document (again) and searched it for the word “maximum”. It only appears once and only to note that T-Max is an observation time. Nowhere does it say the CRN siting errors are maximums. It would seem contradictory. They would be saying a CRN4 error “>= 2C” would be “equal to or greater than OR less tha 2C”, a somewhat meaningless phrase.

Besides, if the error turned out to be a delta of a mere sixth of that, it is highly significant to the overall record–that would be fully half of the 20-Century recorded warming.

What I say about is to ignore Tamino, Rabett and their bunch of merry maids and lets all get the USHCN survey done. With John Goetz recent analysis on CA, it is even more important.

I’m have no intention of taking the only siting spec in existence, signed and approved by Dr. Karl himself, (see the front pages of the CRN manual) and modifying it to suit complaints of a few. To do so would open the project up to even greater criticism.

They are such hypocrites. First it was “photos prove nothing”, then it was “you are cherrypicking sites”, then it was “USA is only 6% of the world landmass” then it was “JohnV proved that GISS did a perfect job (on only a few CRN12 sites)” now it is “The CRN system developed by NOAA is flawed as applied to the surfacestations project”. Next it will be something else, probably that the results aren’t statistically valid for some obscure reason. The fact that they are arguing the current CRN issue shows they’ve acquiesced to the previous “issues” and are now arguing methods rather than merit.

Let me say this for the record: Tamino and Rabett are intellectual cowards. They claim superior knowledge, talk and write the big talk, but don’t have the professional ethics to put their own name up to stand behind their words. Any scientist that doesn’t stand behind his/her own words by name is worthless. Science has never been advanced by somebody named “anonymous”. Journals don’t accept research papers done by “anonymous”.

As Internet phantoms with no-name opinions, they are less than worthless. They keep harping about “peer reviewed” so what? Not one thing they’ve published as a criticism of this project is peer reviewed either.

Pay them no heed.

What they mean by this is that >=2C doesn’t mean:

“>=2C”.

It actually means:

“UP TO >=2C maximum but usually 0C, you ignorant person, you; go read a book.” (Followed by a bunch of citations for UHI, none more recent than 2003. “Lights=0″, my dear boy, hadn’t you heard?)

But the CRN handboook doesn’t say anything about “potential” for their estimated violation effects. They just say “>=2C”. I searched the entire document for “potential” and they never apply that word anywhere near violation effects.

And besides, when is a heat sink supposed to have its greatest effect? At T-Max and (especially) T-Min, right? THAT’S when the bias would apply–and that’s exactly what they use to measure the temperatures, right?

So what am I missing that the folks at tamino are not? They seem VERY averse to the notion of actually plugging in the CRN violations and seeing how they average out for the observed sites. (Shock! Horror! What an ignorant notion!) Yet it would seem that even if they were correct, this would seem a vital first step in the larger equation (which they do not specify).

You’ve done some work on this, Mosh. What do you have to say about it?

Now why would they deliberately exclude record winds for this reason, but include temperatures from a similarly problematic station in their records? Hmmm…somethings fishy!

Of course we are talking here about the NWS and not NASA GISS, or NOAA Also the wind speed would not have much relation to (it sure is getting hot) AGW propensity.

It is a real shocker that they would through our some data because the weather station was not installed to standards. I haven’t seen where this has made a lot of difference before. I wonder if the temps for that date were disqualified for lack of standards .

Bill

REPLY: Bill did you see the message I posted for you about surveying in your area?

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

Giss JAN 2008 hits the tape at .12C anomaly!!!

Looking at the past, and betting the
stats, The smart money would bet that 2008 will have an ANNUAL anomaly
at below .12C.