WUWT reader “Ari” tips us to this interesting puzzle on the Central England Temperature series and the Met Office temperature series in the UK doing some wonky diversion.
Reposted from: TheWeatherOutlook » TWO Community Discussion » Weather »
A problem with Temperature
I don’t think people will be able to enlighten me on this one, but probably should be aware of it. It’s a bit technical.
If you work out the CET annual temperature anomalies and then the METO England annual temperature anomalies and deduct one from the other, you should just get a line bouncing around the zero line (unless the climate of one is moving out of phase with the other). If you take 1961-90 as your base period and deduct CET anomaly from England anomaly for all 101 years during which the England series has existed, you get this:
Where the line is above the zero line, that’s a year when the England anomaly is warmer than the CET anomaly and vice-versa. For the 101 years of the METO England series, you get the bouncing around zero that you would expect, then for the last 4 to 8 years, the CET has been growing notably colder than the England anomaly.
So, it seems that one of the series is going astray a bit. I think Essan might chip in here and say the revised CET stations are too cold, but even if you would use the Eden series, you would get something similar (about 0.1c less). Note that this doesn’t mean that it hasn’t got cooler in the last few years. But, according to the METO regional series, it hasn’t cooled by as much.
Here’s the same graph with the red line showing the same thing for the Eden anomaly. The same problem is evident:
I have looked at your explanation and compared the CET anomaly with just the METO series anomaly for the Midlands. You still get the same effect:
BUT, curiouser and curiouser, if we do the same thing with the CET vis-a-vis the METO series for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we don’t get this problem! Instead, we just get the bouncing around zero that we would expect. Of course, the bounces are of greater magnitude as would be expected as places further away from CET have greater deviations from it on an individual year basis. Here, for example, is the graph for Wales anomaly minus CET anomaly:
So, we now seem to have reached a position where the CET is remaining in relative phase with the METO series for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but has become colder than the METO series for England (I have also tried the METO series for England North and England South and you get the same thing). Or, rather, the METO series for England (and English regions) is moving out of phase with everything else.
Why this is happening remains the mystery.
=====================================================================
You can read the rest of the thread here, ideas and comments welcome. To me, it looks like a case of UHI pollution in one series and not another.
Was Hansen able to make some ‘ adjustments’ on this data . . . ?
There is more visibility of the CET data with several unbiased observers. It keeps it honest. Compare that to the secrecy of the Met Office and what ‘adjustments’ they fiddle with to torture the data. Of course to the naive AGWer that makes me a conspiracist, even though the MetO’S fiddling is plain to see. None so blind, and all that.
PS knowing the moderation policy of TheWeatherOutlook only too well i suggest whoever originally posted this over there get ready to be banned.
Does that anomaly get added to the overall anomaly of Northern Ireland, Scotland or wales in such a way as to suggest warmer temperatures for those areas individually?
Joy!! Another hockey stick
CET temperatures are compiled by Hadley. ’nuff said.
The so-called ‘anomaly’ is in fact simply the measure of the political desperation of the AGW movement.
Hmm. Something awfully familiar about the shape of that graph. Can’t place it…it’ll come to me…
Hockey Stick? But is it man made?
There, I said it.
Seen this before?
http://www.geoffstuff.com/spaghetti%20Darwin.jpg
I continue to be amazed by the effort invested in torturing data that are essentially impossible to extract from major noise.
eco-geek, I thought that the hockey stick was Mann made.
The CET uses rural stations to attempt to filter out Urban Heat Island effects, I would say that the Met Office series is contaminated because it uses more urban series and is not correcting sufficiently. Either that or some of the colder stations (e.g. Redhill) have been removed from the Met Office stations that are used in their series.
Hmm. Hide the decline?
(That’s what people will think, once this is publicized. Another arrow in the elephant.)
Well it has been bloody cold in England for a few years, perhaps its just that.
Gary Hladik says:
September 5, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Hmm. Something awfully familiar about the shape of that graph. Can’t place it…it’ll come to me…
Maybe it reminds you of part of a certain Harry_read_me.txt file?
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
According to the UK Met. Office it has been getting warmer over the past 10 years due to AGW. Unfortunately where I live this has not happened and a cooling is in progress.
Gotta love these hockey stick designs. This one has a curve that starts quite late – in 1990. I have now seen these hockey sticks with curves as early as 1870 and every point in between. Question is, who gives a puck?
Another scandal in the making, I would say.
Manipulation of the METO data, to make it warmer, obviously.
Mind you, the CET series is not exactly perfect. One of the temperature stations is sitting in the middle of Manchester International Airport, next to the engine test stands. You can imagine what a ten-minute jet engine test will do to the temperature there.
.
Here is the Extended Hadley record to 1772
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
It clearly shows the cooling in recent years which observationally I would confirm by an inability to ripen tomatoes in my garden in recent years and a greater level of frosts.
tonyb
Runaway water vapor feedback in England; now empirically proven! Can’t take long now and the London cabbies will become Gondolieres.
I am sure that the UK “Team” are applying the same rigorous “Quality” Adjustments to the METO record as the NIWA made to the New Zealand record. With exactly the same results.
Perhaps we should bring this to the attention of Booker or Delingpole.
climatereason says:
September 6, 2011 at 5:23 am
It clearly shows the cooling in recent years which observationally I would confirm by an inability to ripen tomatoes in my garden in recent years and a greater level of frosts.
Tony, take a tip, I have many beautiful vines of big juicy ripe plum tomatos this year, after trouble like you’ve had. How did I do it when the Earth’s enhanced greenhouse effect seems to have been oversold to us?
I built my own greenhouse. If you want a job doing properly…
“Ralph says:
September 6, 2011 at 2:41 am
Mind you, the CET series is not exactly perfect. One of the temperature stations is sitting in the middle of Manchester International Airport, next to the engine test stands. You can imagine what a ten-minute jet engine test will do to the temperature there.”
Absolutely – and still the MetO shows warmer than CET! Where are the MetO stations placed to get a result like this?
Man-made climate change again.. or Mann-made..
Even more curious is… why do the two series parallel so nicely up till 30 yrs ago?
It has been a few years since we have had a good summer in Southern England, Indeed, I can only thjink of a handfull of good summers these past 20 years. This year, the BBQ has not been used once (although there have been a hndful of days when it could have been used) and the summer has essentially been a complete wash out. The rain has certainly made up for the dry Spring. .
The end of the historic London fogs?
Compare them to the specific geographic satellite data of interest.
“But that’s Apples-to-Oranges! You can’t directly compare!”
Yes. Duh. So -cross-calibrate- the data with the satellite data over a portion of the period, and -then- compare. Not versus the ‘Global Mean Surface Temperature according to satellites’, but the specific estimate of temperature at the identical lat/long.
The satellite data should be completely immune to -micro-site- issues. It may, or may not, really pick up the true UHI issues.
Coming up with a solid, documented plan for comparing satellite data to point source ground data would be mighty useful on an ongoing basis.
Ralph, Rob,
The weather station at Manchester Ringway was moved to Stonyhurst in Nov 2004.
Stonyhurst College is a Catholic Boarding School in a very rural setting, the weather
station is situated next to the Observatory some distance from the School.
The nearest village Hurst Green (about 30/40 houses and two rather decent pubs) is
about two mile away, nothing else exept a few scattered farms in the distance.
So quite remote and rural.
Ken Sharples
Why would it be UHI effect? Why not a “warmist political adjustment”, aWPA effect?
ben says: September 6, 2011 at 1:53 am
Another scandal in the making, I would say.
This is surely black Tuesday for global warmers.
First they proved how simple it is for warmists to get things published when it is provably difficult for any evidence against them to get out.
Then the University of East Anglia have the gall to complain to the warmist Guardian because it stated they broke FOI law (when it is very clear they did break the law, it was just that it was past the time limit for prosecution). … The phrase “how to win friends and influence people comes to mind”.
Now the Met Office are going to have to explain themselves with a massive discrepancy.
“I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.”
– James Lovelock, March 2010
(I wonder what the MSM would have done if a tobacco scientist had said something similar about some nicotine studies done by the tobacco industry…)
Hm, the same pattern is shown globally, coincident with the Great Dying of the Thermometers.
1990 was about when the big push to globally fudge temperature records kicked in. IOW, CET is accurate, the rest of the English and global averages are inflated.
Aaaaargh! More wriggly lines! They’re taking over the world, I tell you!
We’re doomed.
@Brian H September 6, 2011 at 2:44 pm:
“Hm, the same pattern is shown globally, coincident with the Great Dying of the Thermometers.”
Yes, when the curve was seen to all of a sudden start on a steep slope real scientists would first of all ask, “Wait a minute, is there anything we might have changed that might be distorting the data?”
Candidate #1: The Great Dying of the Thermometers
Candidate #2: [H/T Jantar Sept 6th at 1:04 am for not forgetting it…]
This is especially odd when the METO themselves report;
“Mean temperatures ranged from about 0.3 °C below the 1971-2000 average over eastern England and the Midlands to about 0.8 °C below over Northern Ireland, much of Scotland and parts of western England and Wales. It was the coolest August since 1993…
(Although 2010 wasn’t much warmer in England)
The hockey stick looking first graph is due to calculating anomalies across data break points. The AMO turned strongly positive in 1987-1988-1989. The way to do the math is to use temperatures rather than anomalies then use logical time periods which stop and restart with visible break points, to calculate trends. The trends from the two areas can then subtracted from each and plotted. The resulting differential trends will not make a hockey stick.
You can see the AMO break points in the De Bilt temperature dataset as well.
JFD
Having been a non-scientific caveman living in the Midlands for all my 37 years, there is no way in hell it has been warmer here in the past five years. As far as UHI playing a part, I needed some groceries cooking dinner one evening last summer so hopped on the bike to Sainsbury to buy some noodles (I know totally off topic) and the temperature in the nice big parking lot must have been at least 2C higher than it was just three miles west where I started from plus a much higher humidity level.
Again it all boils down to where the data is taken from. Of the three surface stations in the town I live, one has a cold bias (wunderground), another with a warm bias (wunderground) and another somewhere in the middle (Accuweather). I’m not sure where the Accuweather one is sited but I have an idea it’s sited at a school with a playing field, the two used by wunderground are both in residential locations but both appear poorly sited looking at Google Earth. Just to mess with my head, the cool biased is actually showing 1.7C warmer than one with the warm bias and yet they are roughly a mile apart. Maybe they had a BBQ last night?!
Unsuprisingly, the Met Office use data from an airport seven miles away for data collection.
As I understand it, air temperature without considering humidity content is more or less meaningless. Early this summer, we were enjoying nice weather where I live, when the weather forecaster said that in a few days, a mass of dry air was going to descend on us. The effect of this dry air was going to be hotter weather for ten days or so.
The AGM crowd keeps telling us that CO2 is making the world hotter. While CO2 has risen greatly in the last 10 years, temperatures have fallen. They tell us that water vapor is a greenhouse gas and increased humidity will exacerbate the warming from CO2 by as much as 300 – 500%. When the air gets dry here in the summer, the temperature goes up.
I used to live in souther Louisiana, where it’s very humid. The temperature there rarely ever goes over mid 90s. I’ve traveled to Arizona and New Mexico (dry country) where the temperature regularly hits 110 – 115.
Everything the warmists are telling us seems backwards.
It would be very blatantly crass of the Met Office to try and adjust the METO series upward, however the changes in station location and perhaps inaccurate phasing hwev lead to this divergence. We shall never know but we shall be watching with interest, well done to chaps who discovered this.
Steve Garcia says:
September 6, 2011 at 6:00 pm
“Yes, when the curve was seen to all of a sudden start on a steep slope real scientists would first of all ask, “Wait a minute, is there anything we might have changed that might be distorting the data?””
Post normal climate scientists ask themselves: “The stakes are high and the uncertainty big – is there anything we can do to distort the data some more?”
Somehow this reminds me of the way the renewable energy and electric car proponents constantly fiddle the numbers to try to convince people of the viability of their schemes. It’s really a mindset, a whole population that seems to think they can change reality by fudging numbers; the Keynesians included. A subspecies – Homo Desideriens. Remember that the inventor of post normal science doesn’t believe in objective reality.