The GISS Temperature Record Divergence Problem
Guest post by Tilo Reber
“Areas covered occasionally by sea ice are masked using a time-independent mask.”
So if there is sea ice coverage for any part of the year, GISS will not use SST values to cover those cells for the entire year. Those cells must be covered by extrapolations from land for that year. This means that when the area is cover with ice or with water or with part ice part water, it will have it’s anomaly extrapolated from land, regardless. HadCRUT, on the other hand, does not extrapolate their coverage. But they will use SST values for a cell when SST values are available for part of the year. If the area is covered with ice for the entire year, HadCRUT will not assign it a value. Therefore we get polar areas that are covered by extrapolation by GISS and not covered at all by HadCRUT.
When we look at the HadSST2 record, we see that the cool cells that show up above Svalbard in 2005 are consistent with the numbers in that record. And these then go into creating the sea surface portion of the HadCRUT3 temperature record. So, obviously, how cells are filled with data can have a profound effect on the anomaly value that those cells have. This leads one to wonder if extrapolations at the pole are legitimate. I decided to look at some of the northern Russian stations, at the GISS site, that show up as being so hot in the 2005 version of the GISS chart when compared with the 1998 version of the chart. I found that those big changes are in fact represented in the individual records – especially for the coastal stations. Here are three of them.
1998 Annual Mean – -3.39
2005 Annual Mean – 0.60 1998 – 2005 delta 3.99 C
1998 Annual Mean – -14.99
2005 Annual Mean – -10.79 1998 – 2005 delta 4.2 C
Gmo Im.E.K F: 77.7 N, 104.3 E.
1998 Annual Mean – -15.96
2005 Annual Mean – -12.67 1998 – 2005 delta 3.29 C
For comparison, let’s look across the Arctic ocean and see what was happening in Canada and Alaska at the same time.
Eureka, N.W.T.: 80.0 N, 85.9 W.
1998 Annual Mean – -17.38
2005 Annual Mean – -17.34 1998 – 2005 delta 0.04 C
1998 Annual Mean – -8.80
2005 Annual Mean – -10.44 1998 – 2005 delta -1.64 C
So it seems that the North American side of the Arctic changed little, or even got cooler between 98 and 05, the Russian side warmed considerably. Why is that? I think that this ice cover map gives us the answer. As is immediately apparent, the coastal ice cleared out far earlier in 2005 in northern Russia than it did in 1998. This is even though the rest of the globe was slightly warmer in 1998 than in 2005. When dealing with coastal stations, removing the ice and exposing the water is like taking the hatch off a heating source for the coastal thermometers. For stations that are in areas where the temperature is well below zero, exposing the immediate area of that thermometer to a surface that is above zero, changes everything. Looking at Ostrov Vize, we see that it is a small island, and therefore even more subject to changes in coastal sea ice. And when we compare 1998 months on this island with 2005 months we can see that there are differences in some of the monthly means that are larger than 10C. Even a partial ice cover as opposed to a complete ice cover will supply the stations with more heat.
So I think that we can safely say that the huge change in the anomalies of Russian coastal stations is mostly due to coastal sea ice changes. In fact, if we look at stations further inland in Russia, the coastal effect begins to decline. With this in mind, we need to ask if the GISS extrapolations of land based stations, particularly coastal stations, to the poles is appropriate.
The answer would seem to be that it is not, and the Svalbard case makes this perfectly clear. There we had a case where the SST anomaly was actually cool, and yet the land based extrapolation actually turned those sea based cells more than 3C hotter. Reaching across the Arctic Ocean with temperatures that are the result of a coastal sea ice effect cannot give valid answers for what the temperature anomalies away from those coastal stations should be. In fact, taking the variation that is represented by those coastal stations and extrapolating into the interior of Russia is also not appropriate, because the interior areas did not undergo the magnitude of temperature change of the coastal stations.
Looking at the SST temperature anomalies that NOAA uses for 1998 and 2005 it again looks like nothing exceptional was happening in the Arctic (Note, the chart will not retain the months that I selected; so use your own sample months and they will plot). It seems, from this analysis, that GISS polar extrapolations and interpolations are likely to simulate large variations away from the Arctic coasts that are really only present as changes at the Arctic coasts. And the GISS divergence from HadCRUT, as well as from UAH and RSS are likely to be errors instead of enhancements.
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I find the errors that are increasingly being highlighted deeply depressing. It is clear that some organisation need to go back to square one on the global temperature record starting with raw data froma much larger sample than is used today.
Lots of not very exciting number crunching but vital if we are going to get a decent global record
[snip] What is the mystery?
Mike Ramsey
The butchers still have their thumbs on the scales….
Fortunately, scales of a different sort are falling from
the eyes of the misled.
The systematic efforts to manipulate data to get it warmer is so obvious!
Mr Hansen is NOT a scientist. He is an activist acting as scientist. Embarrassing for NASA and the whole American state. [snip -OTT]
Is there any list anywhere were I/we can protest against this [snip]
Good work Anthony!
REPLY: Thank Tilo Reber, he wrote this piece, not I. -A
“Colin Aldridge (10:43:35) :
I find the errors that are increasingly being highlighted deeply depressing”
I find it highly entertaining to see explanations like those from E.M.Smith or Tilo. Maybe because i’m a programmer and often have to reverse engineer other peoples mistakes. Dismantle it all! I wanna see how the deception worked! (past tense because it won’t ever work again.)
And again, I am forced to wonder why “climate science” can’t restrict itself to using raw data. In my field, Medical Physics, where inaccurate data/results can kill people, if I used anything other than raw pristine data I would be laughed out of the room.
If temperature stations are providing data you can’t trust… its not appropriate to guess at how to “correct” them. If you do… you’re just guessing. Use good data, throw out bad data. If you need data in a certain area to complete your picture of global temperatures, then improve the way in which you gather that data so that its reliable. Don’t try to fix data that isnt reliable.
Sheesh… this isn’t that complicated. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.
-Anton
Very interesting. Has this been addressed anywhere in the literature?
If extrapolating coastal stations which sea the greatest temperature change causes bias, then if sea ice stabilizes or perhaps increases the next decade we should expect the divergence between GISS and HadCrut to remain the same or shrink. Some good reason to think sea ice will stabilize or increase given the -PDO which seems to correlate with a colder arctic and with sea ice if you use a lag time.
Now to explain the bigger divergence between land and satellite, is that just due to the greater coverage of HadCrut and GISS over the poles?
It looks like it will be tough for GISS to make any reliable statement
about Northern Hemispheric temperatures this winter due to their
non-function equipment way up north. They’ve lost the temperature, pressure, and winds data:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np_weatherdata.html
At this same site you’ll see NOAA’s little notice that “The ice
mass balance buoy has stopped transmitting (Aug. 17, 2009)”
According to Environment Canada, the Polar and sub-polar ice coverage is extensive despite the “unprecedented” warm air temperatures allowed in by the Arctic Oscillation in December
and early January:
http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/data/analysis/350_50.gif
North Pole Weather Data from 2009 Deployment
Tuesday January 26, 2010
Weather data plot
Ice-temperature plot
Map of station drift
Weather plot: This plot presents air temperature, air pressure, and winds measured by the meteorological station. No radiometer was deployed this year. The weather station sensors are working intermittently (Nov. 20, 2009).
Well, since inspecting and verifying the integrity of the actual thermometer stations from which their data comes is low on the priority list, I guess I’m not surprised that looking around at the local conditions around the world when they massage data isn’t too high on the list, either.
I’d like to see a similar comparison for 2009. As a layman, I’ve been wondering how the Northern Hemisphere could have had a mild summer and a frigid winter, and yet the planet as a whole would have near record-setting average temperatures. One would have assumed that the people down south of the Equator would have noticed the presumably high temperatures there before last week’s NASA news release.
Perhaps the reason it is not warming as predicted, is because the entire premise of warming from 1975 to 2000 is flawed. A few cold winters (but not abnormally cold) from 1975 to 1985 produced a temperature trend that appeared to be global warming. This is based on hadCRU data; I have not yet done the analysis using GISS data.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/cold-winters-created-global-warming.html
Why all the manipulation at the heart of global ‘temperature’ taking? Is there something wrong with the raw data??? 😀
Just think; If, say 15-20 years ago, rather than burying their heads in computer code and “adjustments” the likes of Dr. Hansen and those that ended up at CRU had said “The surface station network needs massivly improving!” they could have surely gathered a bit of political muscle to fund a good quality global network of surface stations.
As it is they are working backwards – they take a set of stations that are haphazardly distributed and maintained to varying degrees of quality and try to massage a credible temperature record out of it. Perhaps due to successful scaremongering getting them plaudits and ears of politicians they decided the setting up of a decent network was not neccessary. That they could get all they need to from computers.
Are there any recent (post 1950) examples of GISS or CRU or NOAA adjusting the data downward? I’ve been reading about a lot of adjustments and they all appear to be upward. It seems to me that there should statistically be both upward and downward adjustments.
I guess the choice now is to ascribe this to either intentional manipulation to support a predetermined position or incompetence. I wonder which Dr Hansen would like to embrace?
This filling of gaps in temperature records has major problems. I now have all of Ontario and decided to look at what is happenning in Southern Ontario. I’m findind that stations close by, within an hours’ drive of each other, have very different temperatures for the same day, more than 5C difference in some cases! The differences seem to be more pronounced in the winter than in the summer. See Appendix I in my new report: http://www.scribd.com/doc/25995131/Ontario-Surface-Temperature-Trends-no-Warming-happening
I’m finding for all of Ontario the same thing as the Belleville example. No warming at all but a narrowing of the variation with summers actually cooler now than in the 1920’s.
I have more to add to this report later today.
Next report will be British Columbia.
Erik in Cairo (11:04:23) :
One would have assumed that the people down south of the Equator would have noticed the presumably high temperatures there before last week’s NASA news release.
Well it’s been pretty cool here in N.Z. this ‘summer’. Can’t speak for anywhere else in the S.H. but my guess is that the massaged data will show a heatwave for NZ and the entire SH
Climatology is an Art, it is not Science.
This is one of the reasons why I oppose extrapolating data from one area to another. Basically it’s just a guess. Let me illustrate an extreme example. Suppose we wanted to use only one thermometer to monitor earth’s temperature so we picked one that was very centrally located, i.e. at the geometric center of the earth. We would find that the earth’s temperature today is a balmy 7000 degrees C. (Or according to Al Gore it would be millions of degrees.)
Good job – more fiddles as we suspected all along.
A bit off topic, but here in the UK – this is in the Daily Telegraph today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7101004/Water-vapour-is-a-major-cause-of-global-warming-and-cooling-find-scientists.html
I don’t suppose that any of us suspected that Water Vapour was a greenhouse gas!!!!!!!!!! after all it isn’t even listed in the IPCC list of GHGases.
Just in case you are tempted to misunderstand – the last paragraph was an attempt at humour.
You have to give Hansen some credit for the ingenious ways he finds to “refresh the parts others can’t reach”.
-reference to an old Heineken advert.
I was a convinced and concerned warmist until I saw a copy of the Vostok ice core data (temp and CO2) back in 2005 and started to question the “science”.
With the climategate e-mails, I took quite a hail of abuse from posters (where I post habitually) when I broached the subject but with each revelation, the objections got fewer and less strident.
Anthony and the rest of the “Realists” are to be commended and thanked for their diligence and forth-rightness in this area. We have been spared an economic and psychological nightmare.
In future references, your efforts will be well appreciated by our children.
Since this article is looking at 1998 with 2005, I’d like to point out that in Southern Ontario 1998 was the “hottest” year of the average of the yearly mean temperatures. But when I looked at the daily temps and compared 1998 to other years I found that this was caused by not so cold winters in Dec and Feb, warmer spring and Oct temps, but NO CHANGE in summer temps. 1998 wasn’t the “hottest” year on record at all, it just happened to be a warmer spring and some not so cold days in the winter, nothing more.
Send a copy to Osama too…..
Why don’t these people simply provide temperature records for the areas where they have thermometers, and leave the unmeasured areas blank?
It doesn’t add any value at all to our understanding of climate to make up readings, regardless of whether someone is following reasonable rules, just to make a map appear filled in.
Why would scientists waste their time doing this?
Butcher with his finger on the scales is probably the most accurate description I’ve seen. It’s why they can never, ever allow the raw data to be seen. It’s why they have to throw out stations that do NOT have UHI effects.
This isn’t science, it’s dogma.
It’s the climate version of Reefer Madness.