Snow job in Antarctica – digging out the data source

I’ve had difficulties getting to CA’s page today, does that mean the site’s getting as much attention as it can handle?
I’ve been learning that the Arctic and the Antarctic are two very, very different environments. Antarctic snow just keeps piling on, up up up, burying everything pretty fast. A “polar opposite” to the Arctic, where the sea ice forms, melts, forms, melts – and I wonder if it gets melted from underneath too, as it gets heavier and starts to sink deeper into the warmer ocean (only the highest ocean is freezing, after all, since freezing water rises).

REPLY: CA was overwhelmed, but some adjustments to the server were recently made, and it should be OK now. – Anthony

OUTSTANDING work. Congrats all around to you, SteveM and everyone else who toiled away. I just KNEW the scientists hadn’t been “doing the calcualtions in there head” or “on back of envelopes”. In reality, they had been ignoring obviously corrupted data, just like a real scientist is supposed to do.
Again, marvelous work gentlemen….

So was snow burial more of an issue in the 1950s or ias it more of an issue now? Let’s accept that getting data from the Antarctic is a tough call. Why the concern about this now, following Steig’s paper which found a warming trend, when there was no concern expressed about it before, when the general meme was that the Antarctic was cooling? Why do you energetically challenge findings that suggest supposed warming whilst uncritically accepting any evidence of supposed cooling?

Ron de Haan (16:25:53) :
This article effectively destroys all claims of rising Antarctic temperatures.
And does it also destroy all claims of falling Antarctic temperatures?

REPLY: Interesting question. The key would be to demonstrate how these issues could result in a cooling bias. A station buried under snow will of course be warmer than the surface air not only for the insulation from that surface air it provides, but also from any heat from the electronics package slowly radiated through the snow to the temperature sensors. Without wind to carry away such waste heat from the electronics, IMHO the only place for that waste heat to go is outward and upwards and eventually to be detected by the sensors.
Show how snow burial of an AWS could result in a cooling bias. Maybe I’ve missed something. – Anthony

What a place; I need to go there.
Before the stampeding herd arrives, and since we are talking Antarctica; I notice that the thread on Antarctica warming per Eric Steig et al seems to have sublimed.
I have a bone to pick with someone whose name sadly I forgot and since I can’t find the thread, I can’t call him out by name.
But somewhere in that thread, I had made the statement that in parts of Antarctic such as South pole, or Vostok Station, the atmosphere was likely to be essentially devoid of water (very low vapor pressure) and possibly of CO2 as well, since at Vostok the temp can get as low as about -90C.
So whoever it was, that commented on that; he was unequivocal in his opinion that “that was total nonsense”, and by inference I was a total idiot; and he advised me to look at the CO2 phase diagram; which he kindly pointed to, such as :-http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/CO2/CO2_phase_diagram.gif
So I did that and then meekly submitted that he was correct, and that was nonsense; but I did not admit to being a total idiot; which I am not.
But I did launch massive research project into the matter; which finally ended a few minutes ago in discussions with my immediate boss; and since he is a PhD physicist,a nd an HP Fellow; who am I to argue with him.
So here is the situation; The CO2 phase diagram which Mr_X referred me to shows that CO2 sublimes at -78.5Deg C and one atmosphere pressure, and the soli/solid+gas phase boundary goes from about -135 deg C and 0.001 atmospheres to-56.6 deg C at 5.11 atmospheres which is the triple point.
Whence Mr_X declared that CO2 at 385 ppmv could not possibly precipitate out and form CO2 snow, even though I talked with a chap who claimed he walked on CO2 snow at the south pole, while making solar insolation readings.
Well here is what Mr_X failed to realize. That one atmosphere pressure at
-78.5 C sublimation point is the TOTAL ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE; it is NOT the partial vapor pressure of CO2.
Considered at the atomic level at the solid/gas interface, all that the dry ice surface molecules know, is that they keep getting clobbered from above by some energetic projectiles, of unknown species exchanging energy and momentum between the species.
So what determines the escape rate of CO2 molecules from the surface is the kinetic energy exchange going on with the gas molecules, and it matters not what species that is; only the net exchange rate of energy/momentum matters.
So the equilibrium diagram definitely is a total pressure condition.
The ice under an ice skate blade, cares not whether the applied pressure comes from air or steel.
Therefore we can say with a fair likelihood of being correct, that the sublimation point of CO2 is at -78.5 deg C at 1.0 atmospheres of total pressure from all sources; which by dalton’s law would be the sum of all the partial pressures of all the atmospheric components, including the 385 ppm of CO2 gas.
So at -90 deg C, where Vostok can reach at times, the equilibrium pressure is about 0.3-0.4 atmospheres TOTAL PRESSURE.
Therefore at around -90 C at Vostok, and one atmosphere total air pressure, solid CO2 is quite stable, so precipitation of CO2 snow is quite possible, and in fact it is possible any time the air temperature drops below -78.5 deg C.
Therefore I hereby declare, I am not an idiot, and my assertion was not total nonsense.
So when Mr_X arrives here, I would appreciate an apology.
George
And thanks for the phase diagram Mr_X; there’s no such thing as too much information.
Reply: That would have been Phil. And this was the post.. Moderators have much better search tools available. For better or worse ~ charles the moderator.

It looks to me like solar panels are lower than the temp sensors. This would seem to indicate that the stations would quite broadcasting before the temperature sensors go below the snow (looks like 6″ to 12″ above the solar panel). Of course the height of the sensors above the snow will decrease from 6′ or so as the snow “buries” the station.

Can’t quite reconcile “Last Two Days of Observations” link to “Text Data” with seemingly multiple data with no rhyme or reason, out of order and conflicting, for example:
ID Date Time Temp
8911 2009035 134740 -30.1
8911 2009035 134740 -14.1
It seems also that maybe half of the entry dates should have been one day off, instead of them all being “2009035” apparently the 35th day of 2009.

G Alston (16:47:18) :
Simon Evans — Why the concern about this now, following Steig’s paper which found a warming trend, when there was no concern expressed about it before, when the general meme was that the Antarctic was cooling?
It’ll take “The data for years says one thing and Steig says another, so why is that?” for a thousand, Alex.
Maybe it’s just me, but I have the distinct impression that if Gavin were to cough, your head would compress.
Cut out the ad homs and stick to the discussion – you do your argument no credit by choosing to resort to personal sneers.
Reply: Moderators agree with Simon. Missed that one. I’m leaving in for continuity, Anthony may think otherwise. ~ charles the moderator

Now if Anthony will do a “site bias” examination of the manned Antarctic stations.
I can’t imagine that at 50 below temps the heating of the buildings, runways, etc. at the manned sites don’t influence the readings. Are the temp sensors on top of the buildings to avoid cover by the snow?
Just a thought . . .
H

George E. Smith (16:58:42) :
We should also not forget the example of the so-called “lost squadron” f P-38s and B-17s that got abandoned on Greenland in 1942,

I watched the Holy, er History Channel (or Discovery, don’t remember which, might have even been Mil Channel) on that. Very interesting.

They need a barbecue to keep the snow away. Works everywhere else. Right?

Gary A. (16:45:09) :
“It looks to me like solar panels are lower than the temp sensors. This would seem to indicate that the stations would quite broadcasting before the temperature sensors go below the snow (looks like 6″ to 12″ above the solar panel). Of course the height of the sensors above the snow will decrease from 6′ or so as the snow “buries” the station.”
Maybe not. There must be battery packs for the electrical system, I think that there are a lot of cloudy days down there. They may hold enough charge to operate for weeks, maybe months. I doubt these batteries are much of a source of heat, though, with regards to whether buried sensors would be getting heat from them. Heat reflecting off snow when the sensor is above snow level would likely be a bigger issue, and more the closer the sensor is to the snow level.

The next question I have is, will Stieg correct this error?
Will Nature make a retraction?

Horace (17:00:45) :
‘Now if Anthony will do a “site bias” examination of the manned Antarctic stations.
I can’t imagine that at 50 below temps the heating of the buildings, runways, etc. at the manned sites don’t influence the readings. Are the temp sensors on top of the buildings to avoid cover by the snow?
Just a thought . . .
H
Horace,
Take a look at the pictures, read the article and you have the answer to your question.

The Amundsen-Scot station chart from GISS might be of interest to WUWT readers. There appears to be a discernable human influence on temperature.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890090008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
This shows a zig-zag pattern from 1957 to about 1977 with a temperature range of about 1 degree. From 1977(?) onwards the amplitude of temperature range dramatically increases up to about 3 degrees C.
Could this reflect human influence from 1977 onwards as station size increased?
Perhaps. According to Wiki the original South Pole station was abandoned in 1975 and moved and replaced with the dome. Additional building was undertaken in the late 1990s. The current station includes three power generators running on JP-8 jet fuel and a green house.
I couldn’t find where the actual weather station is located but I hope its not next to the green house or under a BBQ.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmundsenScott_South_Pole_Station)

Anthony & moderators & various article contributors and learned commenters, thank you for such an interesting blog.
Since in the north country of the USA the response to deep snowfall is to raise your satellite dish up a bit, why don’t they use taller towers for the stations in Antarctica? Or, do measurements need to be taken at a specific number of feet above the snow pack, which would mean they are only accurate when conditions comply?
Mr. George E. Smith, you are a gem. If you do end up going to visit Harry, Theresa, et al, email me and I will spin and knit a pair of cashmere (or qiviut if I can get some) mitten liners for you to wear.

Simon,
You asked:
So was snow burial more of an issue in the 1950s or ias it more of an issue now?
I’m puzzling over whether you are a) being argumentative for its own sake or b) if you really envision some process whereby the 1950s era procedures for measuring temperature were subject to the same burial effects as the modern AWS temperature stations are.
In trying to capture the spirit of your argument, I’m envisioning some poor 1950s era chap who plows through the snow on a twice-daily basis to read the thermometer. And I’m trying to see how a thermomter that is read twice daily (one hopes) would get buried in snow over the course of a couple years. I’m just not seeing it happening.
Perhaps there is some documentation from then of folks digging out the monitoring station, while at the same time having taken daily readings. I dunno, seems rather preposterous. Maybe, just maybe, this is associated with unmanned stations that are visited once every couple of years? How long has that been going on, I wonder. One might find that it coincides with the AWS deployment.

Good job guys. The pictures are great. It’s easy to see how bad conditions are and how tough it is to try and get it right.

Re: P38 rescued from glacier in Greenland:
http://p38assn.org/glacier-girl.htm
And there is NO such thing as a cooling bias. All bias is going to be toward warm, which should be self-evident if you consider how temperature sensors work. Those solar panels create a bias too.

Having dug in snow to retrieve pipelines, I know firsthand how much warmer it is to stand in a trench in 4 feet of snow than it is to stand on the frigid surface.
Nice. Now we know how good the data has been. How then do the stations in Western Antarctica rate as opposed to the previously colder East?
When they remodeled the data recently, it seems someone forgot to add the minus sign to the modification.
The warming models are getting buried in investigation.
Very good work.

Richard, you beat me to it. I was just going to say that buried temperature sensors HAS to be the fault of school teachers. HAS to be!

Simon Evans (16:50:03) :
I’m sure you can see my point. The impression is that the obvious limitations in Antarctic data are only challenged if it suits the agenda. If I had posted here before the Steig paper saying that the Antarctic station data was unreliable and that, therefore, the ‘cooling’ was meaningless I fully expect that I would have been howled down. It’s fair enough if people are expressly pursuing one side of the argument, so to speak, but any suggestion of scientific disinterest is hard to swallow.
I’ll take a stab at a fair answer to your comment.
We all, including you, understand how burial in snow would insulate the instrumentation and lead to false-high readings. If you had asserted the cooling data was meaningless with no explanation, yes, we would have howled you down. On the other hand, if you had shown pictures of the instrumentation and provided an explanation of how the setup was biasing the data toward false-low, you’d probably have been congratulated.

Simon Evans (17:06:33) :
“I simply don’t know, but I certainly don’t see why the snow issue necessarily implies a warming bias over time.”
Elementary – snow is an insulator. When caught in a blizzard, dig a snow cave to survive.
Also from Simon:
“What I would like to know is whether the issue with ‘Harry’, or any other of these issues, are specific to the Steig paper. If they are, then fair criticism. ”
Since the Harry data is basic to the Steig paper – and the Harry data is corrupted, then the Steig paper is automatically corrupted. If the paper is reqworked with the correct data then it becomes rehabilitated (sorta). But until then, the results are scientifically and logically void.
Also from Simon:
“If, however, they are raw issues with all the records for the Antarctic, thern that is another matter. It might be that Steig et al are being challenged for trying to make the best of a bad job.”
Evidently there is a continuing issue with Antarctic records. If nothing else, interpolation of satellite data between stations is a questionable technique. But there’s also the question of data continuity and quality. Bad data, “correct results” = Bad Science.

Ric Werme.
I understand your frustration but as I understand it, Steve McIntire tried to get co-operation & failed. That is in my belief unfortunate as it creates ‘sides’.
Just releasing data & methods would either substantiate or deny the claims. Hiding of both makes suspicion.
How, (effectively,) public employees can claim intellectual property rights, I have yet to ascertain.
DaveE.

Forgot to mention.
Remember the 2-3ºC “uncertainty”!
That’s not an offset but an error band in the satellite surface readings.
They’ve not got the surface readings sorted yet, so how do you get a precision of 0.1ºC?
DaveE.

“Pamela Gray (17:14:43) :
They need a barbecue to keep the snow away. Works everywhere else. Right?”
Ok. That was funny.
Thanks for the chuckle!
JimB

that’s the best place to never work

Ok…how is the idea of a warming trend in antarctica where instruments have become buried in snow NOT funny?
JimB

I’d volunteer to go to Antarctica and do a site audit for A’s project, but funding is hard to come by . . .
Or i could drive to Mesa, AZ and help out.
Tough decision . . .
H

See the update imagery at the top, looks like the Stevenson Screen is fairly close to the only heat sources around. – Anthony
But how does burial affect the temperature trend? I would think that the automated stations have had the burial issues since they where initially set up. So that wouldn’t bias the temperature trend unless the time they spend buried has changed through time- and that could be either a warming or cooling bias.

Robert Wood (17:08:36) :
Great post Anthony.
‘I hereby give to humanity, patent free, an idea for automatic Antartic weather stations that will not get buried by snow’.
Robert,
Can you send me a sketch or a drawing.
I will build a prototype for testing.

Ric Werme (19:18:17) :
Bingo, now how does he claim openness?
My first guess is that his paper is correct. Lack of information makes me wonder why not? I mean come on, if the Antarctic is warming let’s see, I want to know. We already know the rest of the world warmed so no loss there.
He obviously has the code all together on an easily accessible file set. His coauthor Mann actually did a pretty good job of disclosure in his 08 paper.

Does it worry anyone else that satellites are now going to be recording the temperatures and CO2 output? There will come a day when only a select few will have official, government approved access to weather and carbon dioxide data. In the not too distant future, I believe that weather stations will be considered obsolete and land based data will be publicly scoffed at by the likes of James Hansen and Al Gore. These are dangerous times.

Richard, I am a teacher with three degrees and published research. I don’t just work with what I’m given. You seem to have a low opinion of a teacher’s ability to think and reason. What “system” are you talking about if not the teachers?

RC has a posted a new defense of Steig’s paper
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/antarctic-warming-is-robust/

April, that thought occurred to me too as I was trying to find the December AIRS CO2 data. The website has changed to reflect a more “environmentalist” attitude and agenda as opposed to reporting simple data to the public. It’s quite a change from just 6 months ago. hmmmmm

OT but very interesting. Snake size is related to the mean temperature, so the bigger the snake the warmer the temp. The new discovery suggests that the mean temp was 10 degrees warmer than today. Video included in article.
—————
Largest prehistoric snake on record discovered in Colombia
Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake’s vertebrae suggest it weighed 1140 kg (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 metres (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip. A report describing the find appears in this week’s Nature….
“At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips. The size is pretty amazing. But our team went a step further and asked, how warm would the Earth have to be to support a body of this size?”
Assuming the Earth today is not particularly unusual, Head and Dr Jonathan Bloch, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, estimated a snake of Titanoboa’s size would have required an average annual temperature of 30 to 34°C (86 to 93 F) to survive. By comparison, the average yearly temperature of today’s Cartagena, a Colombian coastal city, is about 28°C.

MattN (16:34:05) :
09 “Simon: “Why do you energetically challenge findings that suggest supposed warming whilst uncritically accepting any evidence of supposed cooling?””
Because cooling is almost never artificial.
I read about wind chill above, in one of the descriptions of digging out a station.
I know that if my cheap sensor stuck on my windshield gets wet, the temperature drops; also that these sensors are below freezing . What about though water evaporating from the ice ( sublimation)? Does it not drop the temperature? Is there no ice around the sensor, the metal parts of? Of the container/protector?
I am completely ignorant on this.
I am

GISS includes the Antartica Siple location in its dataset 75.9S 84.2W .
See the link at:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700892840009&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
It looks like an (incomplete) 22 year solar cycle! No warming there.

Chris V
Do you really think that a weather station’s temperature sensors when buried by snow would measure colder than the surface air? Most people here think that due to the snow’s insulating effects the temperature sensor is more likely to read warmer than the surface air. Do you have a mechanism to explain your contention?
Simon
Your argument about digging the stations out of the snow in the 1950’s is rather dubious, as the automated weather stations did not come into play until much more recently, and the manned stations that need to be read every day would be regularly kept free of any accumulating snow, otherwise the staff down there couldn’t read the temps!

Chris V. asked:
“But how does burial affect the temperature trend?”
1. when these stations are installed, they are well above the snow. this may last for a few years until they get buried for the first time. so the warming bias is shifted away from the beginning and resulting in a positve trend, especially for stations with short life span.
2. the aws project started collecting data in 1980. the measurements before did not include snow buried stations. adding the aws data set after 1980 to the data pool should result in a snow cover warming bias after 1980.

Re: In the pictures of before and after digging out at the beginning of the article.
If it was up to its head in snow… where was all the snow in the after picture? It was down to its ankles all around for miles… Surely they did not dig out the whole area!

Anthony and all,
On a related subject, Artic Ice and its thickness, it may be a good idea to keep an eye on http://www.benhadow.com and http://www.catlinarticsurvey.com.
Ben Hadow and team are walking to the North pole over the next three months and regularly, and frequently, manually drilling to find ice thickness; then relating it to satellite data to try to determine long term trends.
Only problem, they seem to have a mindset which says “Artic ice thinning. We will find out when it will disappear”.
This should help to answer the question, “Is Artic Ice widening in extent but thinning by being melted from below?” And only three months away unless the results are “adjusted”.

A Bit OT but still the same region.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2009) — Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a new study suggests. This change might take a toll on public health.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090204131625.htm

Chris V. (18:27:00) :
“And it is certainly possible for snow burial to introduce a cooling bias. Most snow falls during Antarctica’s winter. ”
Contrariwise, most snow in Antarctica falls during the summer. Winter is very cold and clear.

Simon Evans (16:50:03) :
I’m sure you can see my point. The impression is that the obvious limitations in Antarctic data are only challenged if it suits the agenda.
Correct. and this is precisely what Steig et al set out to do. They challenged and spliced the data to suit their warming agenda.
Simon, may I make a suggestion. Please, lose the anger within your posts, all it does is frustrate others. Instead, talk to us like adults, I’m sure you’ll get a better response from people.

E M Smith that’s another brilliant post. You’ve done so many brilliant posts here, you need to think about publishing IMHO… with pictures to keep the “kitchen science” feel and to be accessible.
I reckoned school science hit problems the moment “Health and Safety” interfered and made people wear masks, distancing themselves from that important moment of participation with the bangs, the smells, the flashes. Short-time no doubt some safety was improved; but in the real School of Life, it’s far more dangerous NOT to learn to cope with the hard edges – where one might realize, beforehand, inherent biases in AWS.
EricH, typo, it’s http://www.penhadow.com – p not b. Pen’s story is fascinating – in line with the above – but then Pen has more experience than most of the Arctic sea ice, and he has watched with dismay the changes taking place there over the past two decades – open water where there was none, seals and bears in places where they never used to be, changes in the thickness and colour of the ice itself. The result is that Pen has now become a leading exponent on the need for change – oh dear, seems like he hasn’t heard of Nansen’s voyages or the MWP.
For a laugh, and for IMHO damning evidence, look at Warming Antarctica by Paintwork

anna v: “I read about wind chill above, in one of the descriptions of digging out a station.”
wind chill is not tempearture…

Robert Wood (17:08:36)
Robert, your idea has a basis but needs a modification. You left a factor out of your calculations, wind speed in the Antarctic averages 44mph with high speeds of 190mph+ this is why if you study the photo’s you will see that the towers are tide down, this would make for prohibitive expense and mechanical failure, for a piston to lift or lower the instruments, perhaps extending the height of the tower a meter or two would achieve the results you are proposing.
George E. Smith (16:41:08)
Re Charles the moderator.
Charles, any chance of getting a copy of the key to your toolbox?

Amazing. Simon Evans writes: “Why the concern about this now, following Steig’s paper which found a warming trend, when there was no concern expressed about it before, when the general meme was that the Antarctic was cooling? Why do you energetically challenge findings that suggest supposed warming whilst uncritically accepting any evidence of supposed cooling?”
This is clearly an an effort to call into question the motives and intellectual honesty of people who post and comment on this site. And yet, when a different commenter makes a snarky comment about Simon Evans, he gets all huffy about “ad homs”.
Simon, you can’t have it both ways. Anthony gets kudos for responding to you as if your question were somehow a legitimate one based on science. It wasn’t. Because your question contained a false assumption — one which was disparaging of Anthony and others.
You have been treated better than you deserve. If you don’t want people to personalize a dispute, perhaps you shouldn’t have been personally disparaging in your initial comment.

Ice in the Desert
Consider that frost can form on the ground on a clear and still night even if the air temperature is above freezing. On a ‘clear’ night, the ground is radiating heat out to space with limited return radiation which allows for the surface to be colder than the air above it. Ric identified the air and surface relation in his excellent post earlier Ric Werme (18:50:20) : “Dew only forms when the ground temp is cold enough so that air is being chilled to less than the dewpoint.” The cooled air would only need to be a thin layer above the surface, and could be significantly different from the measured air temperature.
How much different might the surface be from the measured air temp?
There is the ‘Ice in the Desert’ phenomenon. I first ran into this as an engineering thermodynamic question, posed something like: How warm can the night time desert air be above a thin pool of water and still have the water freeze? In the desert, with limited moisture in the air column above, there is limited re-radiation back to the surface, so more heat is lost to space. As I recall, the book answer was that the air temperature could be in the mid-40s F, so something like +10F (or +6C) above freezing and still form ice in the pool. I have since seen estimates that the air temperature could be as high as 60 F (about +15C above freezing) to 90F (+30 C) depending on the starting configuration, allowance for evaporation, and use of an apparatus to make the ice. Apparently both the Romans and Egyptians were able to make over-night ice using equipment as simple as a clay tray or a pit technique.
Remember that this only happens on a still night. If the wind is blowing, the relatively warmer air mixes down to the surface and convective heat transfer becomes significant. The energy lost to space is ‘shared’ between the surface and the air above, so the surface does not cool as much, if at all, relative to the air temperature.
So a couple of thoughts – Ric is probably right about the solid CO2. It would be quite a stretch to get extra cooling from -90C to -135C even with the surface radiation heat loss. On the other hand, per E.M.Smith (22:43:49) : “the CO2 / water clathrate phase has a temperature at 1 bar of about -55 C as I read it.”. That would suggest that it doesn’t need to be -90C to get a CO2 solid. With extra radiative surface cooling of say 5 deg C, the clathrate might form in areas where the measured air temp was ‘only’ -50C.

Wouldn’t locating a dark solar panel just a foot or so below the temperature sensor, be a potential source of warming bias?

Eight-year-old Child- But, Mr. Gore you ARE an older person, aren’t you?

Re EM Smith (01:43:46)
To EM Smith, Charles the Moderator, and Lucy Skywalker,
I think some of this brilliant detective work of Mr. Smith’s is absolutely essential to WUWT. Not only is the readership is larger, but it is more diverse. Climate Audit, with its own excellence, draws mainly the highly-educated and trained professional readership. Someone like myself, only a “scientist” in values and method, can read CA regularly, but understanding the material…..?
EM Smith is helping to show millions+ (per month now) what fools we be if we believe ANY of the Global Warming Apocalyptics. And I remain a sceptic of both warming and cooling “theories”. Show me the goods. Give me the evidence. Provide that experiment. Write that code properly.
Please, EM Smith, with an invitation, also post on Climate Audit and publish elsewhere. The official-government hand is in the till and the propaganda is orchestrated — beginning with a 13 million-strong email list.

On co-variance matrices and the data reconstructed by Steig:
papertiger (01:18:08) :
Did you get that? In English –
It’s an unnecessarily complex mathematical expression …
It may be complex, but I don’t think it’s unnecessary or inappropriate. However,
… created to mask the prejudices of the author from reveiw.
…
Here’s the nut of the thing.
Prof X can’t say “We didn’t use Harry” and ” the AWS data are used only for calculating the co-variance matrices used in the different reconstructions.”
These two statements are contradictory.
If they did, in fact, use flawed data, trending high, to generate the covariance matrix, they built in a bias to force all data reconstructed by the matrix to be inaccurately high.
The technique is mathematically sound. Their use of it is completely inappropriate and unjustifiable. I don’t have any way to know whether their behavior is fraud, sloppy thinking, an honest error made because they took the class decades ago, or whatever. But I will assert that they need, at the least, a refresher course in math. And they need to regenerate the matrix, WITHOUT flawed data, reconstruct their data set, and rerun the analysis.

Tim L (20:04:17) :
OT but good
The snake’s enormous dimensions are a sign that temperatures along the equator where the remains were found were once much balmier. (hotter)
“A newly named species from Barbados could be the world’s smallest kind of snake.
Adults of the new threadsnake average only 100 millimeters long (not quite 4 inches), says evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/34803/description/Smallest_known_snake

Anthony,
You ask “Show how snow burial of an AWS could result in a cooling bias”. The answer is fairly straightforward. Lets assume for a moment that AWS stations are checked at least every few years, and cleared of snow as needed when they are checked. The effect of burying the station in snow would have a pronounced effect on the trend over those few years that the station remains buried, but would have less effect on the long-term trend (as it would show a quasi-periodic cycle caused by the burying and unburying). Now suppose, as is probably reasonable, that the AWS network was less rigorously maintained in its early years (say, the 1950s-1970s). This would be due to the lack of technologies to prevent burying, less frequent checkups, etc. In this case, during any given year during the 1950s-1970s the station in question would be more likely to be buried than in a given year from the 1970s to present, and a spurious cooling trend would be introduced. My point is that we cannot realistically tell the effect of snow burying on the trend unless we know how the frequency at which the station was unburied changes over time.
As for the arguement that the location of sensors close to buildings at arctic bases introduces a warming bias, well, prove it. Again, there is only a bias IF it affects the trend, not the temperature reading. So unless bases have grown over time, or introduced new practices that change the albedo or create a new major waste heat source in the vicinity of the monitor, there would be no “Antarctic Heat Island” effect.

Wow, I’ve spent half an hour reading this and Climate Aud, most of the good stuff seems to happen in the comments. Once again I find myself in need of a meta-blog that distills the situation to something I can digest. I see that automated stations frequently get buried which seems like it would have an obvious effect on readings. But are the automated stations used for climate modeling? Did the Steig paper use AWS or only manned stations, and what really was the effect of the Gill-Harry splice? Sign me “Still confused.”

anna v (04:47:40) :
I always thought wind chill factor was only a means devised to show effects on exposed skin and, unlike heat index, has no effect once skin is covered.

“Why do you energetically challenge findings that suggest supposed warming whilst uncritically accepting any evidence of supposed cooling?”
Good point. We really shouldn’t accept much of anything the AGW Climate Scientists put forth, as the current Steig/Mann Antartic Warming fiasco also seems to indicate. They simply aren’t proceeding scientifically.
But also, it’s the AGW’ers who are ginning up GW into a “we’re all gonna die” scenario, that is, if we don’t return to the Stone Age post haste – which comprises an agenda.
So it’s up to them to at least prove to begin with that the “Globe” is warming, not anyone else – which they just took another swipe at concerning the Antartic, an area which Steig himself claimed everyone had ~ “not paid much attention to”, thus starting another suspect “narrative” in order to suddenly bolster the GW claim.
This is simply the way things are developing. If the ipcc and its Climate Scientists had set out to do an actual scientific analysis of Global temperatures to begin with, all of this helter-skelterism wouldn’t be occurring, with the rest of us trying/needing to play “catch up” 24/7 so as to check and counter an unscientific AGW agenda.
Instead, Science would be proceeding as it should, with the chips falling where they may.

@ march 20:41:
I posted a simple question on RealClimate’s website about that re-analysis of Antarctic temperature. I asked how I should understand the fact that Antarctic sea ice extent is at a (at least) 30 year maximum when the place is warming up. Not exactly what you would expect, methinks.
Guess what, they censored it.
Speaks volumes about their objectivity, don’t you think?

John Philip (02:49:27) said:
“RealClimate (Gavin) respond here. Turns out the conclusions of the study are not dependendent on the automated weather station readings”
As long as the data and code are not available, this is a black box for anyone else except a few people.
you may discover errors in databases, warming biases, inconsistencies, poor justifications , dubious screening, starting date issues,
or come to the same or the other conclusion by your own calculation, but further on this is all about
trust and confidence into the authors’ skills.
and not science.
after all, i do neither trust or have confidence in the authors’ skills.

By the way, interpreted anew, the overall finding here may be ominous vis a vis a leading indicator of continental ice expansion globally.

Does it matter? From other references i’ve seen it appears the entire study is based on a cherry picked starting date
Well you have to start somewhere! And any start date is open to accusations of cherry picking. Steig’s paper [incidentally Lucy S, on your website you say the study was published as a ‘Letter’ in Nature and thus escaped peer-review, Letters to Nature most certainly are peer-reviewed We are not talking Letters to the Daily Telegraph here] starts in the International Geophysical Year when many manned research bases and meteorological stations were established and hence the bulk of the data available dates from that year. If you have a better choice I am sure the authors would be all ears. They have made it clear that …
Our paper — by itself — does not address whether Antarctica’s recent warming is part of a longer term trend. There is separate evidence from ice cores that Antarctica has been warming for most of the 20th century, but this is complicated by the strong influence of El Niño events in West Antarctica. In our own published work to date (Schneider and Steig, PNAS), we find that the 1940s [edit for clarity: the 1935-1945 decade] were the warmest decade of the 20th century in West Antarctica, due to an exceptionally large warming of the tropical Pacific at that time. (RealClimate)
So I am not sure what the thrust of the point is? The study addresses a defined period and finds a statistically significant warming trend over that period, with shorter and more regional cooling trends contained within that overall finding. I don’t really see how that could be made more clear.
Manfred – You can find the article in any library, the data from the study is here, all the code is here so I am afraid the thrust of your point escapes me also.

JP: Eric’s measurements have been rerun with AWS stations removed. There is a post about it up on RC today, and it doesn’t really change much.
Frank K.: I’m completely aware of heat transfer and the potential effect of warm buildings. However, what it being analyzed here is not the temperature at the station. Its the trend in temperature at the station. Co-location with a station will have absolutely no effect on trend over time if the station itself does not significantly change.
I do need to correct my initial post, however, in light of the fact that the AWS stations “only started to be deployed recently” according to Gavin. My point about the effect of burying on the trend holds true only if the station has been unburied more than once over the temperature record (which if probably still the case, since most of the AWS stations seem to be at least 15 to 20 years old).

Manfred:
The data and code is available:
http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~tapio/imputation
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/READER
Knock yourself out.

… I have speculated that too many of the Global Warmmongers started off as just woefully inept fifth-rate physicists, and only slowly became dishonest, I didn’t mean to imply that they stopped being woefully inept too.

Unfortunately, this is not true. Several years ago I wanted to verify AGW supporters list. Therefore I contacted one Nobel Physics Laureate (the real Nobel Prize, not the “peace” one). The reply I got back was quite upsetting, in line with AGW cult: “those evil oil industry, and so on and so forth..”

This February the Dutch Prince Willem-Alexander (1st heir to the Dutch throne) and his Argentinian wife Maxima will visit the South Pole region, together with the Dutch minister of Science und Culture, Ronald Plasterk. They will convince themselves on the effects of (A)GW in this area.
Also Prince Albert of Monaco is currently visiting Antartica.
Last year the Scandinavian heirs to the throne, Victoria of Sweden, Haakon of Norway and Fredrik of Denmark visited antartica to convince themselves about the problems of GW in this area.
All these people do have more than a quite decent life, materially speaking. In practice, they are quite pityfull and can’t, because of their position as head of state for lifetime (and hence being a uniter), say what they think, feel or experienced, just to avoid any schisms in their countries.
Last year I went to Rome with my family on a cheap bargain trip. We had a fabulous time and told all our relatives and friends about this.
This year my friends and relatives are going to visit Rome, all on cheap bargain trips.
I’m now looking for bargains to the South Pole!

Anthony,
Since you build these AWS stations, I’m curious for your expertise, how much heat is generated by their electronics package?

In answer to a statement that Global Warmmongers began as fifth-rate physicists and only slowly became dishonest, Tegiri Nenashi wrote:
Several years ago I wanted to verify AGW supporters list. Therefore I contacted one Nobel Physics Laureate (the real Nobel Prize, not the “peace” one). The reply I got back was quite upsetting, in line with AGW cult: “those evil oil industry, and so on and so forth..” (10:14:17)
Yes, this only one prize-winning physicist. However, I think a very important question to ask regarding the “real Nobel Prize” is: Would the Nobel committee, given their record lately, have awarded any prize to a scientist who is not either left-leaning or not in lock-step with the global warming agenda?

What still gets me in all this is the fact that only in 2004 Gavin Schmidt and Drew Shindell (co-author with Steig) were referring to Antarctica cooling not warming. I just don’t believe that so many scientists at that time were that wrong. I believe, rather, that people have short memories.
What I see in the 2004 NASA article, alongside the legit-looking 2004 temperature anomalies map, is a wretched Climate Model picture that shows Antarctica right in the middle of a frenzy of warming. I am sure they have now looked for what they believe in, consciously or unconsciously – I don’t need to assume intentional bias.

How do these stations operate during the Antarctic winter? No sun for several months.

Tim L (20:04:17) :
As an object gets bigger, surface area goes up more slowly than does volume.
A snake could probably be approximated by a rod of constant diameter.
The surface of the rod is Pi * r * l. It’s volume is Pi * (r**2) * l.
All biological activity generates heat. As a result of this, the bigger an animal is, the more easily it can heat itself with internally generated heat. Even cold blooded animals.
If I remember right, the time when this snake lived, both O2 and CO2 were higher than today. Enhanced CO2 meant more plants. Which meant more animals to eat those plants. Lots of food for the snake.
More O2 is good for animals.
Most authors that I have read attribute the large animals found during that period to enhanced CO2 and O2. Not to the temperature.

MarkW
Batteries

jarhead, enough batteries to last all the way through the winter?
1) In the period before and after winter, there is very little sunlight.
2) Even in the summer, there isn’t that much sunlight. Yes it’s light for 24 hours, but much of that time, the sun is not in front of the solar panel. It’s to the side or behind.
3) The output of batteries is affected by cold. The colder it gets, the less output from the batter. (It’s darn cold down there in the winter.)

Zeke Hausfather (08:14:45) :
Zeke, that’s not how science works. If you want to use a data set, it’s up to you to prove that the data set is valid. You can’t just assume that it is good until someone else shows a problem with it.

pyromancer76 (11:22:37) :
In answer to a statement that Global Warmmongers began as fifth-rate physicists and only slowly became dishonest, Tegiri Nenashi wrote:
Several years ago I wanted to verify AGW supporters list. Therefore I contacted one Nobel Physics Laureate (the real Nobel Prize, not the “peace” one). The reply I got back was quite upsetting, in line with AGW cult: “those evil oil industry, and so on and so forth..” (10:14:17)
Yes, this only one prize-winning physicist. However, I think a very important question to ask regarding the “real Nobel Prize” is: Would the Nobel committee, given their record lately, have awarded any prize to a scientist who is not either left-leaning or not in lock-step with the global warming agenda?

Let’s not confuse the Nobel Peace Prize with the Nobel prizes awarded for science or medicine. I don’t know how many peace prizes have been awarded, but there’s never been much peace in my lifetime. But in science or medicine, those prizes are awarded for something demonstrable. Those awards are awarded years, perhaps decades, after a discovery or a breakthrough. You don’t have to actually accomplish anything to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

I am not quite clear on the reason for supposing that a warming trend will occur when a temperature sensor is buried by snow. If it is buried by snow of the same temperature as the air, and the sensor itself is not a heat source (or connected to one), I suppose it would continue to register the same temperature (assuming the temperature measurement is not affected by the wind).
Obviously if I sheltered in a snow hole, I would stay warmer, but that is because I would be losing less heat as I was initially warmer than my surroundings, but the sensor is at the same temperature as the surroundings. I guess the question is, does the sensor pick up more heat from its own batteries etc when buried that when it is exposed? If not, the readings should just be a highly damped measure of the temperature changes on the surface (as jarhead said a few posts back). I’d hope there are some measurements of this effect (has anyone compared a buried and unburied sensor at the same location?).

John Philip (10:01:03) wrote:
“From other references i’ve seen it appears the entire study is based on a cherry picked starting date.
Well you have to start somewhere! … Steig’s paper … starts in the International Geophysical Year when many manned research bases and meteorological stations were established and hence the bulk of the data available dates from that year.”
This is practical but not scientific reasoning.
if the results are actually strongly dependent on the starting date, a sensitivity analysis is required.
if this analysis leads to the conclusion that the decision “waming or cooling antarctica” is depending on the starting date, it should be admitted, that the data is simply unsufficient to draw a conclusion.

MarkW (12:21:43) :
“jarhead, enough batteries to last all the way through the winter?”
“The AWS unit is powered by six to twelve 40 ampere-hour 12 volt gel-cell batteries charged by one or two 10 Watt solar panels. At the South Pole, 12 batteries and two solar panels are sufficient to operate the AWS unit through the year, while six batteries and one solar panel are adequate on the Ross Ice Shelf. Several of the AWS units have operated on the same batteries and solar panel for 6 to 10 years.”
http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu/aboutaws.html

E.M.Smith, and others on the Antarctic heat island effect (I’m assuming that is what HIE represents)
First, Mr. Smith, as an old Fortran programmer myself, kudos for the yeoman work you are undertaking on GISStemp. I’m getting a kick out of reading your comments…brings back not-so-fond memories of reading and splicing ancient Fortran code written by refinery engineers (not computer scientists) who had little time nor inclination to do things right. Lordy, what a mess sometimes!
My take of the HIE in Antarctica: probably negligible due to wind-induced convection. And, the Island is very very small, not at all like the big cities. Therefore, the cold air whistling around the measurement station will overwhelm the small (but still existing) effects from radiating heat from an artificial surface. If the wind ever dies down, it is a different story, but probably still very small.
Another factor is that radiative heat transfer does depend on the fourth power of the difference between absolute temperatures. This means that the colder it gets, the less radiative heat is transferred even when the temperature difference remains constant. (i.e. body A at -80 F and B at -10 F will have less radiative heat transferred from B to A, compared to body A at -50 F and B at +20 F, even though the temperature difference is the same at 70 F. )
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California

The Net Radiation Loss Rate
“If an hot object is radiating energy to its cooler surroundings the net radiation heat loss rate can be expressed as
q = ε σ (Th^4 – Tc^4) Ac (3)
where
Th = hot body absolute temperature (K)
Tc = cold surroundings absolute temperature (K)
Ac = area of the object (m2)”
source: Link

Ruth (12:47:37) :
“I am not quite clear on the reason for supposing that a warming trend will occur when a temperature sensor is buried by snow.”
Temperatures in the Antarctic snow can range from 0C down to somewhere around -24C. Whenever air temperatures are higher or lower than the snow temperature and the instrument is measuring partial or whole snow temperatures, you have an opportunity for incorrect measurement of the air temperatures.

E.M.Smith (11:59:59) :
Frankly, I wouldn’t trust GISS nor anyone trained in their methods to balance my checkbook or even tell me the weather with a window in front of them. I would eject them from any drug trial statistical analysis so fast they wouldn’t hit the ground for a mile. And don’t even think about using their ‘pasturized processed data food product’ for anything more critical than a coffee table yarn.
If they tried any of this on a drug trial they wind up in jail – the Office of Research Integrity would see to it. As to the rest …
But maybe I’m biased… I’m working with a friend on doing stock market prediction code. He wrote the real time control software for part of the flight controls of a fast not-so-detectable bomber that we are still using… I did some code for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle program and wrote accounting software that had to be accurate to the penny at all times. Period. Maybe my standards are just too high. I expect things to be provably correct and good enough to literally bet your life on.
You and I have some common work experience. I used to be a tool builder: debug, maintain, develop and apply (high fidelity) simulations for system analysis and system engineering. Now I’m a tool user. I’d fire any of my team who came back to me with work that shoddy.
Heh. I’d be willing to bet that they think the Earth is a sphere, and that gravitational potential is the same everywhere around it.

OT, so please move to a more appropriate place idc, but the UN Sec Gen made the following comments in Delhi:
“Deserts are spreading. Water scarcity is increasing. Tropical forests are shrinking. Our once prolific fisheries are in danger of collapse,” said Mr Ban at the start of the conference in Delhi.
The BBC then move to the quote:
“Failure to combat climate change will increase poverty and hardship. It will destabilise economies, breed insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for sustainable development.”
All the points in the first para are pertinent and true, but none necessarily follow from the second. Another case of Auntie Beeb splicing quotes (viz Obama’s inauguration speech) or just more proof that the UN is hawking the AGW voodoo for all it’s worth?

Fer the luv of ….. when will the fear mongering reach a level that scientists are laughed at for their asinine predictions?
Click Here for Antarctic ice melt story
This one says the earths tilt will be affected. Undoubtedly true, but do they say the process will take thousands of years, if and only if, the planet ever starts warming up again?

With more computer programers and “green” jobs being created there will be no future need to read weather stations as their projections of a warmer Anartica will then be the “offcial” records. I’m sure James Hansen of NASA would love to monitor and make needed corrections of the programed data.

Some great detective work here and at CA as usual.
I’m a little confused though. Surely the issue is not whether burying by snow causes a trend (I don’t see how it could) it is that an artifical trend was introduced to the “New Harry” station because it was a splice of 2 stations where the newer station had a higher baseline?
I think the question on the impact of snow burial is a red herring. The fact is the new station had a higher baseline (when the old station was reading x, the newer station read x+y, splice the 2 datasets together and hey-presto a trend!). Now the reason for the higher baseline (snow burial, station positioning, calibration, alien interference or otherwise) while an interesting line of debate is surely irrelevant to the fact that an apparent trend is in fact a statistical artifact (seems to be a lot of them when Mann gets involved) .
Now it seems that Steig et al. are claiming that this discovery (again climate scientists with no wish to do minimal due diligence themselves before publishing) would have no impact on their results – is that claim true?

E.M Smith,
“Just send me your $100,000 down payment for each unit to reserve your spot on the waiting list ;-)”
Just build a prototype and test it so we know it will work, then an order and check will be in the mail. Signed NASA, deep pockets with half a bil on the way for klimayt resarch.

Stan: “Because your question contained a false assumption — one which was disparaging of Anthony and others.”
I’m not sure what assumption you have in mind, but I think Simon has a valid point, which is that scepticism should be ‘blind’.
Previously, the generally accepted AGW sceptic position on the Antarctic was that it was cooling, implying little, if any, doubt about the data. Now sceptics are casting doubt on the measuring equipment and resulting data.
The event that bridges this abrupt change of view was the release of a report claiming Antarctic warming. One can reasonably conclude that the newly discovered scepticism over the measurement of Antarctic temperatures is a response to the report and its findings.

realitycheck: your
To me snow burial should reduce the variance in the recorded temperature, not the mean?
No, it reduces the mean. Think igloos, which need no heat except the human body. The temperature is quite close to 0 deg C, inside an igloo, regardless of the outside temperature.
There is a reference over at RC, on temperatures of sensors buried in snow. The deeper it is, the less the response. At about 10 meters, it gives the same reading year round. As the instrument is a source of heat, the temperature would be considerably higher than ambient.

Les Johnson (15:37:10) :
“There is a reference over at RC, on temperatures of sensors buried in snow. The deeper it is, the less the response. At about 10 meters, it gives the same reading year round.”
The reference at RC is incorrect. Sub-surface snow temperatures do experience diurnal and seasonal changes. See figures 5 and 9 in particular in:
Town et al. Temperatures, heating rates, and vapour pressures in the near-surface snow at the South Pole. Revision 2 for J. Glaciology, January 2008.
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~vonw/pubs/TownEtAl_JGlac_2008.pdf
Also see the measured temperatures surveyed in transects across Antarctica:
THERMAP: Ice Temperature Measurements of the Antarctic Ice Sheet
http://nsidc.org/data/thermap/antarctic_10m_temps/dates.html