A significant editorial on weather stations and data quality

5 06 2009

I was surprised to learn today, that one of the most prominent newspapers in the USA, the Orange County Register in the Los Angeles area, carried an editorial of which my work was the subject. It is quite a turnaround from the brush off I got last year by their Science Dude blogger who wrote a story on the warming of Santa Ana, CA.

By the way here is what the official NOAA weather station for Santa Ana looks like, note the a/c heat exchanger exhausts:


Santa Ana Station looking North.  Click for a larger image

The editorial about my work was published in the OC Register on Monday, June 1st. I’ve reposted it below.

OCRegister.com

Editorial: Cooling down with global-warming data

U.S. and world temperature records are compromised by monitoring station errors.

An Orange County Register editorial

If fighting global warming may cost the economy $9.6 trillion and more than 1 million lost jobs by 2035, as the Heritage Foundation forecasts, it’d be a good idea to be sure there’s a sound basis before making such a massive sacrifice.

We’ve noted before that climate change is occurring as it always has, but the claim that man-made greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic temperature increases is based on questionable science and projections. Man’s contribution to greenhouse gases is minuscule. There are some theories but no convincing proof that increased emissions cause increased temperature.

Now another serious doubt has been raised concerning how much of the 1-degree centigrade increase over the past century allegedly caused by escalating emissions has even occurred.

“We can’t know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the data,” said Anthony Watts, veteran broadcast meteorologist, who for three years organized an extensive review of official ground temperature monitoring stations, in conjunction with Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and professor emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric Science at the University of Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »





RSS Global Temperature Anomaly also down in May, halving the April value

5 06 2009

RSS May 2009-520

Click for a larger image

The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for March 2009 was published yesterday and has dropped after peaking in January.   The change from April with a value of 0.202°C to May’s 0.09°C is a (∆T) of  -0.112°C.

Recent RSS anomalies

2008 10 0.181
2008 11 0.216
2008 12 0.174
2009 01 0.322
2009 02
0.230
2009 03
0.172
2009 04 0.202
2009 05 0.090


RSS (Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa)
The RSS data is here (RSS Data Version 3.2)

Oddly, a divergence developed in the Feb 09 data between RSS and UAH, and opposite in direction to boot. UAH was 0.347 and RSS was 0.230

 I spoke with Dr. Roy Spencer at the ICCC09 conference (3/10) and asked him about the data divergence. Read the rest of this entry »





UAH global temperature anomaly for May – down again, near zero

5 06 2009

UAH_May09-520

Graph by Anthony (click for larger image) text by Dr. Roy Spencer from his blog here

May 2009 Global Temperature Update +0.04 deg. C

June 4th, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

YR MON GLOBE   NH   SH   TROPICS
2009   1   0.304   0.443   0.165   -0.036
2009   2   0.347   0.678   0.016   0.051
2009   3   0.206   0.310   0.103   -0.149
2009   4   0.090   0.124   0.056   -0.014
2009   5   0.043   0.043   0.043   -0.168

May 2009 saw another drop in the global average temperature anomaly, from +0.09 deg. C in April to +0.04 deg. C in May, originating mostly from the Northern Hemisphere and the tropics. Read the rest of this entry »