Santa Rosa USHCN – click for a much larger image
Or maybe with the lack of grass, “goat” might be more appropriate.
Every once in awhile (like once a week) I happen upon a NOAA USHCN weather station that leaves me wondering – what were they thinking?
From this NOAA USHCN COOP weather station #298107, which was located here on 6-14-2007 , we get climate data. Unfortunately there appears to be a lack of attention to details. For example, ignoring the obvious other things, look at the green garden hose at the base of the MMTS mounting pole. That garden hose was apparently used to bury the cable in underground to the residence. Only one problem. If the end of the hose is not sealed, water will wick right down the cable during rain and eventually fill the buried hose. Eventually the water will seep into the cable it was supposed to protect, causing some reduced resistance, perhaps a short later. With thermistor systems like this, the sensor often has resistance into the kilohms…and moisture induced resistance changes are easily masked and often go unnoticed in data.
But all that and Dr. Seuss aside, here is what the data looks like before and after NASA GISS adjusts it. These are the USHCN “raw” and “homogenized” data plots from the GISTEMP website. The before and after is quite something to behold.
Click for original source graph from GISS
And here is the data after it has been “homogenized” using the GISTEMP algorithm, I changed the color hues to help differentiate them visually:
Click for original source graph from GISS
Note that other than my applying labels and doing a hue shift, these are the exact graphs presented on the NASA GISTEMP website.
They also present the data used to plot these graphs on each of the above linked pages. You can download it yourself by clicking on the “Download monthly data as text” links at the bottom of the pages linked by the graphs above. I can’t provide direct links here due to the links being dynamically generated and as temporary files at GISTEMP.
I downloaded and plotted both of these datasets myself, plus did polynomial fit trend lines. Note that missing data from 1920 has not been plotted on this graph, but simply skipped.
The visual result of the before and after adjustments by NASA GISS speaks for itself:
Click for larger image
What was down, is now up. Note the hinge point in the near present. The GISTEMP data stops at 2006, it will be interesting to see what this new location does for the data in 2007 and 2008.
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Thanks for the snow 🙂
Snow? So I have just wasted a pile of dollars at the opticians! I am from Brisbane Australia and have never seen snow. Could one be warned next time?
1. GISS never ceases to amaze.
2. It’s tough typing around the snowflakes.
And it looks like they have the requisite barbecue less than … what? fifteen, twenty feet away?
I think this is a better comparison of raw and homogenized data than the animations of before, and quite damning.
The snow and the Seuss verse are both timely around here.
Amazing. Looks like about 1992 is the tipping point.
Where is the proof that temperatures were 1 to 1 1/2 degrees cooler in the 1910’s to 30’s at this site? I think the adjustment falls into the category labeled
“arbitrary” or “pulled it out of my …”
Snow pretty; also back yard is a mess. This is probably my all time favorite Anthony, it reminds me to get out fishing now that th striper season is under way.
Is that the Weber eqipment I see up against the house there?
Somebody should write an Opera about this subjec; maybe Carl Maria von Weber already did !
looks like an incinerator barrel too!
At any rate it will probably be possible to determine the launching and beaching dates of that metal boat from the GHCN data. A first for climate science!
You could not make this up!
I suspect that they only fire up the trash burning barrel on days when the smoke blows into the house to ensure that it doesn’t heat the sensors.
Not only a grill against the house but also a burning barrel?? in the middle of the yard
It looks the temperature adjustments are not too different from what we saw in the Siberia data. Not just a constant offset to take into account altitude etc. but it is changing over time such as to introduce an artificial heating trend.
Your plotted graph is a perfect example of how global cooling causes global warming.
If you cool the past records the present records will appear to be warmer.
There is a resty 55 gallon barrel in the picture. Was that barrel used to burn garbage?
What a scam, this keeps getting better. I had another post rejected by Lord Schmidt at Real Climate. I don’t see how he can look at this data and believe in it with a straight face unless someone paid him to…. Oh, wait that’s exactly what they do.
I need to find the archived versions of GISS data if they exist.
After seeing how the data gathered I am going to come up with my own data for global temp. Who needs equipment, I’ll just make it up with a radom data generator. If it’s too cold, I’ll adjust a number here and there to get the number where I think it needs to be. Anyone want to send me some Grant money for my project? LOL
Looks like a trash burning barrel to the right towards the barbeque grill. Dig the snow (but its piling up on top of my computer).
Not only is the pre-requisite BBQ up against the house, but it appears to me that there’s a much more special addition here…
Is that a “burn-barrel” located approx. 1/2 way between the BBQ and the sensor?
We used them in Maine when I was a kid. Burned all the cardboard/paper/anthingthatwouldburn stuff in it.
I used to get the sides of the barrel cherry red.
Anyone know the heat radiation properties of a steel barrel?
JimB
In my field of work, this would be considered fraud. The result would probably be fines, possibly jail time, and definitely an opportunity to explore alternate career paths.
How do these people get away with this?
With all the site problems and fudging of the data conspiring to make things look warmer more recently and cooler in the past, I’m almost ready to bet that we’ve actually been in an overall cooling trend for about at least 80 years.
Anthony, can we ask NOAA to explain the reason for the “adjustment” near 1992? I’d love the hear what they have to say. And if they don’t respond, that’s a response, too.
Better than the weber grill, check out the brown barrel. Does everybody know what that probably is?
Another example of “Homer Simpson” quality control at NOAA.
And to top it off we have GIS turning cooling into warming. Now that is change we can “believe in”.