A couple of days ago, I located the “long lost” Honolulu Observatory GISS weather station on the Island of Oahu with just a couple of hours of digging. That one apparently got “lost” because the station name changed, and the inter-agency communications seemed to be the cause, and nobody at GISS bothered to look to see if there was still current data coming from the station.
Today I found one in under 5 minutes. I wasn’t even planning on looking for one, it happened by accident. I was watching the Discovery Channel TV show this afternoon “Deadliest Catch” where crab fishermen brave the worst imaginable weather to keep crab shacks running nationwide. They are based out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
While watching a scene where they were coming into the docks, I saw an ever so brief flash of what looked like a Stevenson Screen off in the distance near the docks. I hadn’t expected to see one and I wasn’t 100% sure, but I thought I’d check NCDC’s metadatabase (MMS) for Dutch Harbor, AK. Sure enough, they have a COOP station there with a Stevenson Screen there that is “current”.
When NCDC says “MAX-MIN THERMOMETERS”. that means mercury thermometers in a Stevenson Screen.
The MMS Location description tab had this:
Topographic Details: TOPO- STN NEAR WATERFRONT, ACROSS HARBOR FROM DUTCH HARBOR ARPT IN VILLAGE OF UNALASKA. MNTOUS ISLAND. STN EXPOSED TO STRONG TURBULENT WINDS AND TEMPS INFLUENCED BY SURROUNDING WAT
I assume the last word was to be “WATER” and they ran out of characters in the database field. The MMS database also mentions it to be located at REEVES TERMINAL, which I assume is the ship terminal/dock.
Here is where the lat/lon given by NCDC places it, I seem to recall my brief glimpse was closer to the docks visible near the top of the image, but the lat/lon given by NCDC is not always accurate:
So I was curious to see what the temperature record looked like in this very remote part of Alaska. I figured if it was an active weather station, GISS would have a plot of it. They did indeed but it was not what I expected to find:
Here is the link to the GISTEMP graph above.
Huh. Big data hole. But NCDC said it is current? WUWT?
So I decided to look at the COOP section of NCDC, and sure enough it WAS current to April 2009. I found the most current B91 form and downloaded it.
Here’s the PDF of the form: Dutch_Harbor_April2009
Seeing the big hole in the GISS data, I decided to look for the data forms backwards, and sure enough, it is current all the way back to 1985 where it picks up in January and appears to have every month through April 2009.
So why does GISS not have this data? Remembering the name change which happened in Oahu, names again come to mind. I can’t be sure, but it might have something to do with the station name spelling.
- I spell the station name this way: Dutch Harbor
- NCDC MMS spells it this way: Dutch Harbor
- NCDC B91 selector spells it this way: Dutch Harbor
- The station COOP observer spells it on the B91: Dutch Harbor
NASA GISS spells it on the graph header and web page station selector:
Harbour? WUWT? It’s an American port!
I checked this guide for differences in British, Canadian, and American spelling, and sure enough:
Note to Gavin: change the spelling in the GISTEMP database and the station data might automatically kick in on the next data pass.
Glad to help! Got any more lost stations and station data you need found? We’ll look for the last 20+ years of Dutch Harbor data to show up in GISTEMP real soon.
UPDATE:
In comments “timetochooseagain” writes-
I’m reminded of this from John Christy:
“the use of a few popular stations for which the data are easy to find, leads to too much warming when the averages are constructed. I have published research for North Alabama, Central California and in a few months East Africa, in which I went back to the original sources of data to augment the number of stations by roughly a factor of ten – indeed, ten times more stations. This effort requires significant time in searching for and manually digitizing the records for scientific purposes. In each case, I’ve found that the data sets based on a few popular stations overstate the warming by up to a factor of three.”
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy/ChristyJR_WM_Written_090225.pdf
Update2: I’ve removed a sentence related to Gavin Schmidt and British spelling of the station name, since he’s not at fault, GHCN managed by NCDC is the source of error -Anthony
“I thought you checked through the source data?”…..
Deadly catch, Anthony, …… ;^]
Another embarassment for our government data collectors. Sad that with all those multi-billion dollar budgets, staff out the yazoo, and stimulus cash to boot they can’t even get the basics. Pathetic.
So sad. So, so sad. If you’re gonna live in the USA it might be a good idea to learn the language…
Not only do the best people not work for government (ref: R. Reagan) but the ones that do apparently have prissy Euro affectations. Right! I don’t care what colour your harbour is, put down that rubber, take your torch and go read the thermometer.
Personally, I don’t have anything against prissy British spellings, provided that they are consistent throughout the database. However, to paraphrase Bogie as Rick Blaine, there are some parts of New York where I suggest you don’t use “harbour”.
Our neighbor is a former Royal Marine. He and his fellow English ex-pats in town all concede that ANY british accent (even the lower echelon ones) is worth 30 points on their “perceived IQ” when working in the US. Apparently, “perceived IQ” doesn’t help with written work.
I’m reminded of this from John Christy:
“the use of a few popular stations for which the data are easy to find, leads
to too much warming when the averages are constructed. I have published
research for North Alabama, Central California and in a few months East Africa, in which I went back to the original sources of data to augment the number of stations by roughly a factor of ten – indeed, ten times more stations. This effort requires significant time in searching for and manually digitizing the records for scientific purposes. In each case, I’ve found that the data sets based on a few popular stations overstate the warming by up to a factor of three.”
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy/ChristyJR_WM_Written_090225.pdf
REPLY: Good find, I’m going to add it to the main article. Dutch Harbor is already digitized by NCDC so there’s no excuse for GISS not being able to use it. – Anthony
Potato, pa-ta-to, tomato, ta-ma-to, harbor, harbour.
Nice spotting.
When I first looked at the Steig station data, I expressed annoyance about their failure to provide identification numbers, because manual concordance is complicated by precisely the sort of spelling variation that you caught here. So you can’t match directly by name and manual handling is required. I objected in passing to this in connection with Steig here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4914
In a bizarre over-the-top outburst at CA http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4945#comment-322363, Eric Steig mentioned this complaint in passing, expressing disdain for people who worried about data availability and spelling consistency:
As events proved, Steig’s data was not all available. He didn’t provide satellite data until the end of March and the pre-cloudmasked data remains unavailable.
IT wasn’t that I was complaining about how it was spelled – but about the lack of identification numbers which increased the possibility of identification failure of the type that you’ve demonstrated here – one that has eluded NOAA and NASA for 20 years, leading, it seems, to the loss of a potentially valuable continuous record.
BTW I’ll bet that GISS just uses the GHCN spelling and that GHCN spells it Harbour (which is my natural way of spelling it BTW).
Remember how quickly Gavin Schmidt moved to try to get the faulty Harry station record deleted from the British Antarctic Survey (which would have made it that much more difficult to decode Steig et al.) If Gavin is as concerned about the integrity of station histories as he then professed, presumably he will be right on top of this situation and send a notice to the relevant agencies before the weekend is over.
REPLY: I sent him an email tonight to be sure. I wouldn’t want him to miss this one just in case he doesn’t read WUWT regularly, especially on weekends – Anthony
Been there once,Dutch Harbor even in June is anything but warm….
Yep,Fish on! Anthony!…
Maybe that’s a Stevensoun screen by the harbour, with mercury thermometeurs.
Steve McIntyre: I’m sure that as soon as Father’s Day starts, Gavin will be right on it.
I’m sure that Gavin is e-mailing and calling even as we discuss this latest lapse.
OT, Dutch Harbor is the next stop for some dudes planning on making it thru the Northwest Passage,
http://www.aroundtheamericas.org/
I gotta say, more and more of this type of thing keeps popping up, making Hansen, Schmidt et al, look pretty bad. I am am finding myself becoming increasingly critical of Gavin Schmidt in particular, as I come to the overwhelming conclusion that he is a complete hack.
Just came across this on Google Books, in a book from 1892 written by an old Scotsman about the climate in Dundee in the 1820s:
IS OUR CLIMATE CHANGING?
In a climate like ours the weather is a never- ending topic. I have often heard old people speak of the weather changes that had taken place since their young days, as they expressed it. The summers, they said, were then much warmer, and, as an instance, they said that barley would be above the ground in forty-eight hours after sowing. It was then, they admitted, the last grain that was sown. The summers were then so hot that the cows could only be put out to pasture in the early morning and evening, as they were driven mad by the glegs” or horse flies biting them. Then the winters were almost arctic in their severity and length. The seasons also were more sharply divided, approaching those of Russia and North America in their rapid seasonal transitions. I know that many about my own age have the same ideas of what has taken place in their time. A very hot or a very cold season or two may, as we get older, come to assume the general character of that far-off time, still I cannot but think that for a good many years past there has been more of a mixing of summer and winter than was the case fifty years ago, winter now being often found in the lap of spring, and summer-like weather about the New Year. On a New Year’s day—I can’t remember the date—I gathered blossom from our gooseberry bushes to show to a friend. It must be sixty years since a funny occurrence took place in the next garden
to ours. A decent old man, Johnnie C , who was
a wabster in winter and delved people’s “yairds” in summer, was one day so overcome by the heat that he threw off his “duds” until nothing was left but his blue bonnet and his “sark” and “shoon.” The sark he required for decency’s sake, and the shoon to drive in the spade.
link: http://books.google.com/books?id=QmULAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA19&dq=changing+climate&as_brr=1&client=firefox-a
I can just see all the major newspaper headlines for Monday…..?
“Surface Temperature Record In Doubt!”…….. “Mistakes Made”…. Read all about it.
Yep….I know, I know. My cynicism blinds me to the rigours of our modern journalistic excellence;-)
Even MS-Word’s spelling checker won’t give a pass to harbour. Maybe MS Corp. can provide them with a copy.
This “find” makes me wonder how many more of these sorts of things have occurred and been corrected (or not). Say such a thing happened and three years on someone figured it out and made the appropriate spelling change. Would they have also re-inserted the 3 years of missing data?
What a bloody (Brit.) mess.
Anthony: Can you tell me how you did that? I mean with the starting url and some steps?
There are some gaps in our weather records here, and I’d love to get them filled up.
At least I could try.
REPLY: I’ll write something up and turn it loose. GISS desperately needs our help. – Anthony
GISS data chart page has an ID of 425704820010.
The MMS page has a COOP id’s of 509575 & 502587, and NCDC id of 20021772.
Maybe that’s confusing them.
.
I’m webmastering a Canadian S.F convention web site (from Texas) and I run into the spelling differences quite a bit. Because of that, I notice the skeptic/sceptic variations here at WUWT coming from our Brits and Australians, and a tendency to use ‘s’ where Americans put a ‘z’, as in paralyse. Canadians use the British (really French per AD 1066) ‘re’ instead of ‘er’, as in centre. Another toughie for me is that Canadians don’t stick with purely British spelling, so I’ll put something up thinking British, then get an email about it. Double ll’s are a chancy game, too.
It’s a bilingual site, but others take care of the French translations. Even that isn’t trouble-free, because txt and doc and rtf and other formats treat the accented characters in different ways. And I can’t begin to say what a mess it makes when somebody posts a new page with French characters in the URL.
I’m guessing that Reeves terminal is the old Reeve Aleutian airlines terminal. They used to fly 727’s into Dutch until they went out of business. Alaska Air flies in there now. If you check the runway starts pretty much at the beach.
Hey Anthony, we Canadians are so polite, we spell words both ways, American English and UK English! It all depends on which spellchecker you use these days!
Anthony, there is a very valid reason for not using this station. The readings do not agree with the conclusion they have jumped to, …..
REPLY: we don’t know that, nor has anyone plotted the missing data since 1985 to show what it might portray. -Anthony
Taking odds on what it will likely show?
To clarify, just a betting analogy, since it is unlikely you are a gambling man.
REPLY: Well I was just going to go plot it and settle the issue, but the price NCDC charges for the 288 monthly mean datapoints since 1985 is a bit absurd. See this:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/files/2009/06/ncdc_shop.png
What kills me is that the American Taxpayer has already paid for this data! NCDC runs a racket it seems. – Anthony