NOAA: FUBAR high temp/climate records from faulty sensor to remain in place at Honolulu

17 06 2009
Honolulu ASOS looking south - click for larger image

Honolulu airport ASOS looking south - photo from NOAA, annotations added

WUWT readers will probably remember yesterdays’ story about the malfunctioning temperature sensor at the ASOS station at Honolulu airport next to an asphalt access road. Well guess what? Even though NOAA admits the sensor is in error by as much as 2 degrees, they are going to keep the data and the string of new high temperature records. “BUT” they fixed the recent record rainfall data from the same station. See below. How’s that for science? Fix one broken record due to faulty equipment but leave others?

FROM KITV-TV (hat tip to Becka)

HONOLULU — Honolulu’s run of record heat came to an end Wednesday, but it may not have been any cooler.The weather has been warm most of the month, with highs in the 90s the past nine days.However, between 11 a.m. and noon, the city’s temperature dropped from Wednesday’s high of 89 degrees to 86 degrees, the same hour a new thermometer was installed at Honolulu International Airport.

The old one had been showing a warm bias of a degree or two, officials said. The National Weather Service said that is not significant enough to throw out the data and recent records.

Here is the string of temperature records that have been set from this faulty ASOS station: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 127 Comments »

Categories : climate data, ridiculae, weather

Solar Cycle 24 lack of sunspots caused by “sluggish solar jet stream” – returning soon?

17 06 2009

I got a tip by email from JohnA who runs solarscience.auditblogs.com about this NASA press release. John’s skeptical about it. He makes some good points in this post here.

What I most agree with JohnA’s post is about sunspots. While we’ve seen some small rumblings that the solar dynamo might be on the upswing, such as watching Leif’s plot of the 10.7 CM solar radio flux, there just doesn’t appear to be much change in character of the sunspots during the last year. And the magnetic field strength just doesn’t seem to be ramping up much.

He writes:

“Let’s check out the window”

The spotless disk of the Sun

The spotless disk of the Sun

On Solarcycle24.com they’ve got yet another sun speck recorded yesterday, that by today had disappeared. Exactly the same behaviour we’ve been having for 12 months with no end in sight.

I agree with JohnA, it’s still a bit slow out there. Leif is at the conference in Boulder where NASA made this announcement below, so perhaps he’ll fill us in on the details.

Here is the NASA story:

Mystery of the Missing Sunspots, Solved?

June 17, 2009: The sun is in the pits of a century-class solar minimum, and sunspots have been puzzlingly scarce for more than two years. Now, for the first time, solar physicists might understand why.

At an American Astronomical Society press conference today in Boulder, Colorado, researchers announced that a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star’s interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots.

Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, used a technique called helioseismology to detect and track the jet stream down to depths of 7,000 km below the surface of the sun. The sun generates new jet streams near its poles every 11 years, they explained to a room full of reporters and fellow scientists. The streams migrate slowly from the poles to the equator and when a jet stream reaches the critical latitude of 22 degrees, new-cycle sunspots begin to appear. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 312 Comments »

Categories : Science, solar

Just where are those grid killing tornadoes anyway?

17 06 2009

http://bsnotebook.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/kerry_tornado_swiftboat.jpg

John Kerry and Tornadoes – not a good mix

Warren Meyer over at climate-skeptic.com is a bit fired up over the NCDC sponsored, Los Angeles PR firm processed, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. He’s running a series. This is #4. Full report available here: GCCI Government Report

GCCI #4: I Am Calling Bullsh*t on this Chart

June 17, 2009, 11:36 am

For this next post, I skip kind of deep into the report because Kevin Drum was particularly taken with the power of this chart from page 58.

electrical-outage

I know that skepticism is a lost art in journalism, so I will forgive Mr. Drum.  But in running a business, people put all kinds of BS analyses in front of me trying to get me to spend my money one way or another.  And so for those of us for whom data analysis actually has financial consequences, it is a useful skill to be able to recognize a steaming pile of BS when one sees it. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 64 Comments »

Categories : energy, weather

The climate science elephant footprint in the room

17 06 2009

Even though written from a biased perspective, with comments such as “raving from a fringe minority”, this article speaks clearly to things like the absurdity of the Catlin Artic Ice Survey. It used tremendous amounts of fuel (and left fuel depots on the ice yet to be retrieved) compared the the simple flyover in a DC-3 by German researchers at the Wegener Institute to measure ice thickness.

Then there’s the new “Deep Black” supercomputer being installed by the UK Met Office that will use 1.2 megawatts of power to run climate models.

That’s enough to power a small city

Yet there’s “no shame” in any of this as long as its being done to “save the earth”. Even though Mr. Brook is on the other side of the argument from me, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that wonders about these “do as I say, not as I do” things. – Anthony

Ignoring the Elephant in the Room:
The Carbon Footprint of Climate Change Research

by Ryan K. Brook from ARCTIC VOL. 62, NO. 1 (JUNE 2009) P. 253–255

http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic62-2-253.pdf
Despite some ongoing raving from a fringe minority of attention seekers and professional refuters funded by the oil companies, most scientists now accept that climate change is a reality and that human activity is the root cause (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007; Jacques et al., 2008). Many scientists have worked tirelessly to ensure the science is solid, and each new study contributes to understanding the big picture. In all of this, scientists should be immensely proud. Global efforts to convince the general public that climate change is a reality and that our collective actions need to change have been much less successful. Perhaps this failure stems from the misguided notion that climate change is really only an environmental issue, not a social problem. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 100 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, climate_change, energy

Bob Tisdale on NCDC’s USCGRP report

17 06 2009

The USGCRP Report “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” Fails To Acknowledge the Multiyear Effects of ENSO on Global Temperature

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

The USGCRP report “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” was released today. Link to report:
http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/climate-impacts-report.pdf

As noted in the title, it fails to address the multiyear effects of El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on global temperature.

Other than explosive volcanic eruptions, El Nino-Southern Oscillation events have the greatest impacts on global climate on annual and multiyear bases. The year-to-year global temperature impacts of ENSO events are clearly visible in a comparative time-series graph, Figure 1. Also visible are the overriding effects of the 1982 El Chichon and 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruptions.
http://i44.tinypic.com/144ag5f.jpg
Figure 1 Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 186 Comments »

Categories : ENSO, climate_change