The Original Temperatures Project

K got them all disregard post above thx.

The gymnastics required to get original data seem to be as important as the data itself.
Nice presentation which strongly confirms that air temperature is not a realistic measure of any climatically important variable. Air temperature is a weather variable, if anything.
Putting the thermocouple inside of a multikilogram sphere of aluminum inside the sensor shelter might give a more useful measure, since it could be used to estimate the change in energy in the area.

Amazing, I was thinking of just such a project this week, and you put it in motion.
I just powered up my computer to have another look at HISTALP and I find this. Brilliant.
there are certainly sampling issues etc with most data sets but the problem comes when the “corrections” are as large as the remaining long term signal.
Further more, most of the adjustment are very speculative at best. Making speculative adjustments increases the uncertainty, not reduces it. However, we usually find after “correction” the published uncertainty is less.

Just to add to my above comment, what if on the “basic results” map you colored points within say 0.25K or 0.5K green? What would the map look like? Would there be a considerable amount of blue or red?

Thanks Frank. Very good article.
Yes, most political-scientific meteorological institutions seem to be hiding the small decline in temperatures. They are trying to avoid reaching a tipping point for CAGW, I think.
Also, very good website at http://hidethedecline.eu also. You have links from oarval.org.

IIRC, the BEST publication was done with someone who pretended to be a skeptic but was quite an environmentalist as seen in prior work.
This article illustrates some cases of a true temperature history more like a double peak than a hockey stick over the past century. Looking at publications made in the 1970s is an easy way to see the large first peak in temperature history, as the very most reliable sources are not electronic but paper copies impossible to invisibly rewrite later. (Back then, the CAGW movement hadn’t developed yet; mankind was being blamed for global cooling; and enviro-activists didn’t universally know which way to fudge the data yet).
The double peak is the history which an unfudged Northern Hemisphere or global temperature index would display, as well as the pattern in solar activity meanwhile (and that in the AMO but with the AMO being another temperature index itself by definition rather than an independent climate driver).
Such can be seen along with much else in http://img250.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=45311_expanded_overview2_122_15lo.jpg

Frank, have you managed to get HISTALP “ORI” files. They say they are available but I have not found them. Have they been removed recently? Their site seems to state quite clearly they are there 😕

Bohm et al 2009 covers how they “corrected” the flat temp records by adding two adjustments of 0.5 deg C each.
http://pluslucis.univie.ac.at/FBW0/FBW2010/Material/2009-09-04-Boehm-etal-CLIMCHANGE.pdf
Data from most of the long alpine stations (good long records from observatories) are pretty much flat until 1970 until “corrected”.
Maybe the proves AGW !?
Interesting to project to dig out all the data before adjustments and see what the story is .
Also see my look at Hadley ‘corrections’ to SST:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2

Also, this posting shows us once again that what is lacking from so many of these climate studies is good, old-fashioned scientific rigor. Using data which has not been rigorously screened is bad enough, but some use suspect data that they have good reason to question. Climate science is the very pits of science.

Steve Mosher says: “In short, we aim at taking all the that is publically available. No sign in, no registration, no request to people who could deny your request. That way people can check the work.”
In some ways that is a great approach. Sadly, it falls in practice because it is the publically available data that has been manipulated and the originals (if they have not be “lost”) are only given to people who can be trusted to “say the right thing” or “help the cause”.
regards

RichardLH says:
I have for Germany mad a long row of examples orignal versus BEST, check out the Germany writing.
I have TONNES of German meteorologic yearbooks and are not cheap nor easy to find, so i hope you guys can use it 😉
About making data online. I think this will be a goal at some point.
However, i have to feel confident about the rights and so on. I believe it shold be within the law to pass data on since the meteorological institutes already themselves have published data many years ago, but I have to be sure. I dont want to give this new project problems with lawsuits. In sure there are people who would love that. But you can always mail me!! Im very busy with MANY children, work etcetc so forgive me for slow response times…

So do I understand that ‘BEST’ was really just the same old ‘adjusted/lets ignore’ data that we all complained about in the first place? Who would have thunk it. But apparently its ok as so long as you use what the others use – you get the ‘BEST’ temp record!! Rather than look at the possibility that it actually maybe gigo. Are people really happy with themselves doing that kind of thing? When you know what you are producing has a huge question mark hanging over it. Not even curious? Wow…….! Well I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again. My gut tells me there is no 10yr/12yr/13yr/17yr pause in global warming. The ‘rise’ that is documented in the records of the main dataset crunchers was purely a statistical artefact of various adjustments, ignoring of uhi, ignoring the fallout from station shutdown, ignoring land use change etc. And now that all those adjustments have been done we have…er…nada. Its just the same as in business, sure you can tweak the figures to make a couple of years look good, but it will just bite you in the ass later. Climate science seems to be at that crossroads, hoist by their own petard methinks. And I don’t think it was even deliberate, just the madness of crowds.

Someone else with a lot of data sets at hand: What Catastrophe?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-catastrophe_773268.html

Excellent start to uncovering the adjustments (i.e. lies). Historical data should NEVER be changed. Even when there is a disconnect due to a new technology. The data from the new technology must be calibrated to agree with historical data for any comparisons. To do otherwise, which is what we see the AGW crowd doing, is dishonest, misleading and unscientific. NASA/NOA “time of day” adjustment is simply a fudge factor to get the desired final result. Hansen should have been professionally reprimanded and crucified for the “adjustments” he introduced after 1999. That should have led to his immediate dismissal for cause and without pension. We are fighting a well intrenched & well funded political enemy and we must not give up.
Bill

Antony This is probably is one of the most important and scientifically significant posts concerning global average temperatures ever put on this site. I am amazed how little attention has been given it. It should be a top top sticky post for a week at least!!! The amount of work and meticulous detail gone into this publication is mind boggling. It completele wrecks poor ol Mosher and the BEST project LOL.

Adjusting data is not a problem , provided its justified , the changes made are well documented and the pre-adjusted data is still available. But what we often seen in climate ‘science’ is all of these or some of these missing. And when ‘mistakes ‘ are made and admitted to by lucky chance there always made to the benefit of ‘the cause ‘
Given this pattern you can see why trust is not high when it comes to such adjustments.
Once again its worth remember that a student handing an essay would be required to meet all three of this requirements , therefore we can ask once again why the professional working in this area cannot match this standard ?

Wow, amazing job digging up, compiling, and analyzing all this data.
“None the less, the BEST team adds around 0.7 K of warming to the Pecs data. BEST use a so called “Regional Expectation” for all countries i have analysed, and change original data so they approach these expectations. Best also claim that Hungary as a nation has experienced this warming trend.”
BEST uses the same method to mutilate our local region as well. All stations in the region show the double hump, with the 30’s warmer than ca. 2000. BEST then adjusts them to match the “Regional Expectation”- creating a hockey stick.
The peak of the recent warming was about 2002, since when we have seen a considerable drop.
Your OAA/OAS thesis is further corroborated by a recently published paper on the snow pack here. Snow plots and stream flows broke into 2 categories, the divisor being 8500ft altitude on the western side of the Sierra Nevada crest. The lower maritime set showed decreasing snowpacks with earlier stream flows…the continental side showing increasing, later peaking snowpacks and later, higher streamflows.
An interesting exception is Yosemite Park Headquarters, which shows a temperature record matching the Eastern Sierra/Great Basin although it is located on the western side in Yosemite Valley.

Re: Lansner 9:56 am: We may have such an issue with some of the Dutch stations and therefore i have used averages of 8,14,19 hour reading all the way, exactly to avoid this rare TOBS issue.
There you go, Thrasher. A prime dataset to evaluate just how much difference a theoretical TOBS adjustment will make to daily min-max records. Personally, I think it is lost in the noise.
Lansner (main post): Are we facing homogenization of temperature data? Or is it “pasteurization” (= warm treatment) of temperature data?
Excellent turn of phrase. Worth remembering in any open debate or peer review.

” Sadly, it falls in practice because it is the publically available data that has been manipulated and the originals (if they have not be “lost”) are only given to people who can be trusted to “say the right thing” or “help the cause”. ”
Exactly, already manipulated.
I can not applaud this approach enough Frank! It is what has been needed for so long, lurking in the background.
As for the TOB “adjustments” (the time that max/min diurnal readings are observed), just try to get the code that all publically available records are first put through the ringer, good luck, I had little of it. If anyone does have the code (any language) for the TOB adjustments, I would appreciate a link to it. I think TOB at best is a strawman argument along with the WWII SST bucket adjustments but those are great cubbyholes to hide untraceable adjustments.

Excellent post, Frank. Diligent, thorough, outstanding.
My understanding is that the TOBS corrections were accomplished with model algorithms, resulting in corrections where in some cases none were needed.

Eric Simpson says:
January 6, 2014 at 10:12 am
“And the summary?”
Basic summary.
Many places refuse to turn over climate data,
BEST adjusted and cherry picked much of the data they used,
Coastal areas appear to be heavily effected by coastal winds that are likely very very poorly documented,
Non-coastal wind effected areas seem to have little to no warming,
“Free”/online unadjusted data appears to be mostly at or near satellite data start thus provides little extra info about the past,
Looking for help from anyone who has Europe based original data outside of the “taxpayer funded yet refuse to turn over data to the public/taxpayer groups”.

You know what, even if the Arctic and Antarctic were melting away to nothing to much less, it wouldn’t prove anything, other than that we have had some (probably natural) warming and / or cyclical phenomena. But that’s not happening. This year we have record levels of Arctic ice growth, and record Antarctic sea ice. And it just doesn’t feel any hotter, any different, than it did decades ago. And we got record cold all over the place, with right now, after noon, Chicago is experiencing windchills of -41°F. And why was the world record hot temperature set way back in 1913? Certainly a century of runaway warming would have broken that record somewhere, but, alas, the 1913 record still stands! Something is fishy. A lot of people suggest the 1930s were hotter than today. That’s why this work on the “adjustments” made to the temperature record is so important.
And another thing, when we look at the past 100+ years of temperature change, even when we have to try to peer through grossly mis-adjusted warmist data and a growing urban heat island effect, we see little discernible changes in the rate of early 20th century (low CO2) and later 20th century (higher CO2) change. It suggest NO signal from CO2. And we also know that the original IPPC contention that there was a causal relationship between CO2 and temperature was clearly rebutted in 1999, yet the ipcc fought this tooth and nail until 2003 when they finally conceded, and yet in 2005 Al Gore still deceptively put forward the discredited points about CO2 in his movie (yes, see what I’m talking about regarding Al Gore & CO2 in this key 3 1/2 minute video). Look, throughout history you cannot ferret out ANY effect of CO2. You can say that maybe there’s been an effect, or that our their theory suggests an effect, but data doesn’t show it. And the fact that we’ve had this 15 year temperature stall out, and that the warmist adjusted 20th century temperature record appears to have had only mild (NOT hockey stick style!) warming, and before that, going back hundreds of thousands of years and even hundreds of millions of years, there’s no evidence at all of CO2’s effect, all this suggests that the IPCC is plain wrong on CO2.

Mr. Burton: As the saying goes, SHIRELY YOU JEST!
“Really? Didn’t they use Six’s registering thermometers for recording daily highs and lows? If so, the time of observation would not be very important, most days.” Just because an old journal publishes an article on something which could give a better temperature record, DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT WAS USED from that time or anything of the like. This is ‘backwards fantasy” from a forwards perspective. Check out surface stations.org, and other resources. The gathering of PEAK and LOW temperatures prior to WWII around the world, was more of a matter of “by guess and by golly. THE INORDINATELY low temperature from the DEW line had to do with people feeling it was TOO COLD TO GO OUT and so they Guessed or exaggerated for the entertainment of the Russians.
Sorry, again, the older the measurement, the LESS likely to meet any modern “quality control” standard. That is the primary reason that 1 to 2 to 3 degree variations (degrees C) in averages are suspect if not meaningless.

Bill Yarber says:
January 6, 2014 at 9:49 am
“Excellent start to uncovering the adjustments (i.e. lies). Historical data should NEVER be changed.”
Thank you so much, it was exactly my wish that this was some kind “start”, hopefully a snowball that could get the process started, get many people to collect even more data, make peoble contact their governments if the meteorological institutes refuses to deliver tax paid results to the public.

Eric Simpson says:
January 6, 2014 at 10:12 am
And the summary?….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
English is not Frank Lansner’s native language.
Not only has Frank done the enormous amount of digging and organizing for this data, he is reporting it in a language he is not really comfortable with. (His English has improved quite a bit since the first I read an essay of his.)
I thank Frank for his great effort.

I wonder if this whole OAA and OAS thing is just a proxy for urban heat island?
It seems to me that coastal areas tend to be (in general) more likely to be urbanized than non-coastal areas. People just like to live on the coast. Also, people will probably be more likely to want to live in the yellow areas (from fig 4) than the blue areas, so again, maybe this signal is just an indirect measurement of land-use and urban heat island. Just a thought.

” And if you want to stitch two datasets its gets very noisy if they have quite different kind of trends.”
I was quite curious as to why the “HISTALP” site contains data from a couple of sites such a Paris which are hardly “ALP” , much nearer the coast and a major metropolis. Not surprisingly the data have significant difference in form.
The motivation for including such records in HISTALP is not made clear.

jorgekafkazar says:
January 6, 2014 at 10:26 am
Excellent post, Frank. Diligent, thorough, outstanding.
My understanding is that the TOBS corrections were accomplished with model algorithms, resulting in corrections where in some cases none were needed.
You are correct. Look for Karl Peterson papers.

Gail Combs says at 11:19 am
And the summary?…. English is not Frank Lansner’s native language.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
To make it clear I intended no criticism of Frank Lasner’s excellent work. I was just hoping for a summary, of which I thank temp for a good one, though I’m still asking any others who want to, to give there versions of a summary. Because it’s that important, to have a concise useable summary(s) of this to replay in various venues.

A C Osborn
Thank you so much for your comment!
Yes the whole idea is to start a wave of data sharing, demands to get access to ALL raw data of temperatures. The reason that i “shut up” about this project for so long was that i wanted some kind of granate chock effect when releasing in order to finally get the snow ball roling of demands to see tax paid data everywhere.

Alex Rawls: “I can’t begin to fathom how there could be decadal persistence of inland-coastal temperature differences when the air circulates in days. How to get a persistent difference? ”
Land warms quicker than ocean with the same change in radiative input : specific heat capacity being the main reason. That much is not contraversial.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=219
I was also doubtful at first since oceans basically rule the climate, but since the difference is only a few tenths of a degree it is not impossible for a small difference to be maintained by an sustained increase in radiative input.

Eliza says:
January 6, 2014 at 9:54 am
“Ant[h]ony This is probably is one of the most important and scientifically significant posts concerning global average temperatures ever put on this site. I am amazed how little attention has been given it. It should be a top top sticky post for a week at least!!! …”
Ditto Eliza. I have to duplicate and state my agreement, it’s importance is paramount and at the center of what everyone keeps dancing around on the edges.

Stephen Richards says:
January 6, 2014 at 10:22 am
Great effort Franc. huge piece of worK. Oh and it’s “pasteurization”
Ohhh thankyou!! Now I can sleep tonight, brilliant!

@ Paul Homewood- I should have phrased that better. My understanding is that other countries have *always* had standard observation times, it is *only* the US in which this was not true (a few other countries, too, but to my knowledge none of the countries focused on above (except the US)). And since it *is* now true, in the US that would lead to widespread changes in the time of observation-which would not occur elsewhere since they had standard times to begin with.

Anton Eagle, Always nice to speculate a little, but the OAS / OAA differences are not at all a result of UHI on the coast.
In many countries, the coast stations are actually smaller places, a lighthouse often. And the OAA data – the ocean air affected stations far from the coast – are often hill or mountain stations, quite rural.
And this “rural-ness” of OAA stations is used be BEST to claim that UHI is not a problem.
This BEST claim is Just as STUPID as claiming that the emperor is not naked when he in fact is, because “the smart guys says so”.

This work is so important it should be given its own sidebar for easy reference and for those coming into this site for the first time.

Awesome stuff. That’s a heap of work. Well done. I have noted here in Oz that same difference in coastal vs inland temperature trends
See http://eyesonbrowne.wordpress.com/2012/10/27/is-it-getting-warmer-in-australia-well-that-depends-on-where-you-live/.
Ciao.

Frank Lansner says:
Greg,
you write: “could you please provide a link to the “ORI” data files from HISTALP?”
The ORI files are the ORIginal datasets, the ones taken from the original meteorological year books published long before things got political and perhaps criminal.
===
Yes, I know what they are , that’s why I’ve been asking for them, since you said you have that data.
Now I know English is not you main language, so which part of “could you please provide a link to the “ORI” data files from HISTALP?” are you having trouble understanding?
Thanks.

http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/content/view/34/1/index.html
“Station-mode series are present in HISTALP as “homogenised” and as “original”.
…
Austrian hom- and ori-station-mode-series are downloadable for non-profit research without restrictions.”
DO YOU HAVEA LINK TO THAT DATA?

@Claimsguy at 9:55 am
Whatever happened to the Watts 2012 paper?
Ditto. Who is reviewing the paper? Lois Lerner’s department at the IRS?

Excellent work and fair questions.
Finnish meteorological institute has decided to publish a major part of it’s meteorological and oceanographic datasets as Open Data. http://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/open-data-manual. I don’t know about data suitability for OAS analysis or data completeness/reliability in general, but it’s available electronically and for free of charge. It’s perhaps of assistance.

At the moment the website Michael Smith News includes a discussion on record warm year in Australia. I would love to have your experts consider the facts presented by a blogger. It is a new topic for michael, although in general he is suspicious of Main Stream Media bias.

@holts at 1:02 pm
S Mosher if you don’t try and use all the data that is available(or don’t even try to get it!) then your results are not much use really!
My take is about 120 degrees different from yours. BEST takes a lot of pride in having 40,000 stations, but when you look at their record length and gaps you get on
(12/20/13 8:09 am)

(from 3 of 14 datasets, 31,485 unique station ID sites)
7,113 sites have at least 10 years of data, and less than 12 months of gaps
4,343 sites have at least 30 years of data with less than 36 months of gaps.

Remember, BEST discards the absolute value and only considers the trend in temperatures, after slicing and dicing the records beyond recognition. (See Denver Stapleton Airport)
Another statistic from (RichardLH 8:31 am above)
Unique BEST Station IDs with any temperature records : 81370
1 degree Lat/Long grid cells >60 years coverage : 173
1 degree Lat/Long grid cells with any coverage : 9,660 (RichardLH 12/22 12:41 pm)
Total land area 1×1 deg grid cells = 18,792 (RichardLH 12/22 2:19 am)
You should not cherry pick data in a scientific study.
But you should cherry pit the data.
When I am preparing a meal, wholesomeness is a concern.
Keep the pits, the dirt, the stems, the flies, the maggots out of the food.
Garbage in, Garbage out applies to almost everything except pig raising.
Even with pigs, you better cook the final product properly.

Jaakko Kateenkorva says:
“Finnish meteorological institute has decided to publish a major part of it’s meteorological and oceanographic datasets as Open Data. ”
Brilliant, thankyou, at first glimpse i could not actually see data, i think i did not press the correct links.
Anyway, its interesting if this is raw data, but it also has some value if phoney.
Thanks
K.R. Frank

I think the best source for unadjusted New Zealand data is here – you have to sign up but it is free and automatic:
Sign up for free access to NIWA’s raw climate data http://cliflo.niwa.co.nz/
If you want to double check that it is the raw data the original Official Year books are all online and have the temperatures as reported at the time:
http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/snapshots-of-nz/digital-yearbook-collection.aspx
Finally this report of the INTERCOLONIAL METEOROLOGICAL CONFERENCE HELD AT MELBOURNE IN 1881, which can be found by searching on this site http://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs (sorry I couldn’t work out how to give a direct link the the page, but you will find it no trouble)
outlines the decisions taken in 1881 on how the various meterological variables were to be collected in a systematic way across Australasia (ie both Australia and New Zealand). It also gives as an appendix the stations reporting regularly at that point in time across the various Australasian colonies, their latitude and longitude and height above sea level.

Impressive Hercules work !
I hope Mosher and others will have a look at this within their own projects AND even request the data to be used in their own data basis (I assume Frank Lansner will share it freely)
Summary as I understood:
Ocean air sheltered stations (OAS) in Europe (and perhaps the whole world) show little or no warming since the previous warm period in approx. 1930-1960.
His theory is, that the sea surface has been warming since the little ice age, and ocean air also warmed coastal and other ocean air affected regions, but not OAS regions.
The greenhouse effect would have required OAS regions to warm as well, therefore, this result is not consistent with GHG theory (except for a very low sensitivity or a counteracting unknown effect). It is then also an indication, that the recovery of sea surface temperatures from the little ice age may not be due to GHGs.
Additionally, he shows, that OAS data is poorly represented in global temperature data sets, such as BEST, and that some data, used as input had already been “pasteurized”.

“I think all in all on the described basis it is fair to conclude that the missing warming in areas in shelter of ocean air is likely to be a global phenomenon. Any protests?
Is it fair then to call the missing warming after around 1930-1940 of areas in shelter of ocean air a global problem for the CO2-theory?
Or do CO2-theory explain why temperature stations in best possible shelter against ocean air winds cannot really show warming after 1930-40?”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Frank:
Concerning comparison of coastal station historical record of temperature. As someone who lives near and at times on the coast, and who additionally forecast the weather professionally at RAF bases on both coast (RAF Valley, Angelsey Wales ) and inland in Lincolnshire. I detect an obvious (?) missing variable in this analysis. And that is SST’s.
Coastal temperature is greatly regulated by on-shore winds, which in turn are greatly regulated by sea temperatures. What about sea temperatures in the period 1920 –1950? How were they behaving?
Well it turns out that both the PDO and the AMO were in +ve (warm) phases…..
http://i53.tinypic.com/a0gf2g.jpg
Also, from the above, it can be seen the cold phases coincided ~1960-90.
Now, this cycle would necessarily have affected coastal stations to a greater extent than inland ones. Generally in an onshore wind-regime, coasts will have greater sunshine than inland stations (convection/stratification of cloud due higher temp) and sea-breeze affects tending to clear coastal cloud in summer. So the warmer SST’s in the 20-50’s era would have impacted coastal affected stations preferentially over sheltered ones with temperature more directly correlated to SST’s.
Then another factor appears…
It is also a well accepted fact that global temperature for the period ~1960-80’s were affected by “global dimming”…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
“Global dimming is the gradual reduction in the amount of global direct irradiance at the Earth’s surface that was observed for several decades after the start of systematic measurements in the 1950s. The effect varies by location, but worldwide it has been estimated to be of the order of a 4% reduction over the three decades from 1960–1990. However, after discounting an anomaly caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, a very slight reversal in the overall trend has been observed”
This dimming effect (of darker clouds) would have had a greater impact away from coasts due the greater cloud fraction there and hence an enhanced –ve radiative imbalance than just cloud fraction alone.
To further quantify this effect, whether or not my reasoning is objected too, then at the very least, a correlation over the period of the air temperature trend needs to be carried out against surface sea temperature anomalies in both the Northern Atlantic and N Pacific.

Frank:
Just 2 mins of looking and I have data from the station I worked at in 1987 – going back to 1930.
it’s 03302..
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/valleydata.txt
And a few mins more….
Also for inland Oxford is available back to 1853
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/oxforddata.txt
or Sheffield 1883
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/sheffielddata.txt
In Scotland there’s Stornoway 1873:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/stornowaydata.txt
and Eskdalenuir 1914:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/eskdalemuirdata.txt
Have you see this paper?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/HadISST_paper.pdf
I still maintain that a sea fetch will have high correlation with SST’s of closest approach to the station of interest.
Yours

Frank, the more I look at your site and work the more I am impressed. Yours is not only the best, but the only coherent explanation I have ever come across explaining why most rural stations in Nebraska, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri to name a few, your dotted area of this effect in the US, all show nearly flat records, some even negative, from 1895 onward. I look forward to absorbing some more as I get more time (broken pipes put a bit of kink in that). You seem to be on to it.

TB says:
January 6, 2014 at 3:28 pm
Very good points to raise about linkage with SST. The coastal affected vs non coastal area distinction that Frank is looking at is interesting but needs to taken in context of known meteorology without being too simplistic.
There are all sorts of known phenomena which will affect cloud cover as air comes in land and rises over mountains. It takes very little change in cloud cover to make the tenth of degree scale changes everyone wants to get excited about.
I think the truely alpine stations of the HISTALP project may be informative if we can obtain the “ORI” data before they added 1 degree warming to the data.

Frank Lansner says:
Greg, i have only a link to what i used from HISTALP/ZAMG, the homogenized data:
http://www.zamg.ac.at/histalp/Statmod_AT_T01.html , see the ZIP files in the bottum, here fore Austria.
My original files has not been put online. At some point this is of course the goal but i dont want to face legal problems, so im not sure i can put these data in digital format online.
But I would like to hear opinions on this.
=====
Thanks for the clarification. HISTALP claim on their site that ‘original’ data is available but that does not seem to be true. My guess is that it was included at some time in the past but has now been hidden from sight. They have not removed the text where they claim it is available.
If you read the Boehm 2009 paper that shows the flawed and speculative adjustments that they have derived from Hohenpissenberg 😉 and applied to all other stations. Equally the hourly data and documentation of the changes does not even appear to be in peer reviewed literature. Simply some “conference proceedings” document which is not even linked anywhere.
http://i43.tinypic.com/x41aoo.png
You can see in the original data that 1780 was warmer than 1950 ! Most of 19th and first half of 20thc gets cooled by almost a full degree. Then we start to worry about almost a degree of global warming.
It’s also interesting that this record bottoms out around 1880 unlike the usual SST records that are coldest around 1918 and still quite warm in 1880.

Greg Goodman says:
“Yes, there is a whole bunch of monthly station data available from Met Office, this is what Euan and Clive Best used for their recent article on sun-hours.
However, they seem to keep the daily data under wraps. ”
If you adjust data, normaly you fiddle with the yearly data. You dont adjust every hourly reading or so, and yes, hiding daily data does smell a little. Especially when we talk about climate data.

Frank, congratulations on a really impressive piece of work!
Here’s something I just discussed on the topic of Norwegian temperatures that might interest you: We’ve just had the rainiest snowless Christmas for years, and today there’s around +7C outside, not the typical January temperatures. Of course, some alarmist are seizing this opportunity to sell the idea of “No more White Christmas”, despite several recent Decembers having been extremely cold (which also was blamed on “climate change”, of course).
So I had a look at the official Norwegian December record – and it actually shows that the Decembers of the thirties were slightly warmer: http://eklima.met.no/metno/trend/TAMA_G0_12_1000_NO.jpg
However, the current warm period is wetter:
http://eklima.met.no/metno/trend/RRA_G0_0_1000_NO.jpg
It’s interesting to see that the “great European climate step change” which seems to have occurred around 1987-1989 isn’t very visible in Norwegian temperatures (at least compared to some of your records above, where it is easily visible), but it’s clearly visible in the precipitation record. I guess a warmer Atlantic may give a wetter Norway?
In any case, has anybody been able to give a good explanation of what really happened in the 1987-1989 European climate shift?

tonyb says:
January 7, 2014 at 1:32 am
“As you know my particular interest is in historic temperatures prior to 1850, as there was generally greater variability and lows and highs of temperatures and weather extremes then. (see my link at 1.17 above)
I visit the Met Office library frequently.
”
Hi Tony my good old friend 🙂
Again thankyou for all your intense studies year after year!!!
Now… What does it take for me to make you go to that library, take photos of UK meteorological year books, the summaried for the stations???
If it is of any comfort, I have taken 42.000 pictures of handwritten sheets in the Danish National archives… he he… And the meteorological year books will be done within a few days….. notch notch notch??
I can offer champaigne and whatever it takes-…!
All the best to you too, always cosy to hear from you!
K.R. Frank

About “sticky post” etc: Thank you for the kind words.
But see this from Anthonys side: The truth is, that this work is done without the power af a large organization. This means that the risk of “something wrong” is there although i think my findings are solid.
If Anthony makes too much out of this and then “something is wrong” its a blow to the credebility of his site and nobody wants that.
Instead, check out how many articles are coming out on WUWT now, and notice that Anthony none the less took the time to publish this large writing. For this im grateful.
Perhaps when all are sure this is solid it will be taken to a higher level.

great work Frank….I did something along these lines for Arctic stations in preparation for my book ‘Chill’ (2009) and went through all available online material – usually NOAA stations, selecting only those stations with a record going back far enough to capture the 1920-1940 warming and enough to the present to capture the very recent Arctic warming (2000-2005 as I finalised the draft in 2008). It was clear from all stations that there was a double-humped camel and not a hockey stick! Yet the camel disappeared in regionally homogenised data sets – I think a Swedish professor took NOAA/IPCC to task on the Scandinavian results which disappeared the first hump.
Out of 32 stations with long records, only 5 had warmer second peaks around 2000, and 3 more or less the same, all others had higher first peaks around 1940. When I looked again around 2011, there were more high second peaks – about half of the stations – and NOAA’s average for all its Arctic stations now showed a distinctly higher second peak – but of course, this would have included adjustments.
I note your interest in Czech data….if you are local to Czech, do drop me an email as I am currently visiting the country and having some very enlightening talks with geophysicists in Prague about geomagnetic correlates with atmospheric wind patterns! You can get the address from my ethos website above.
Note to Henry Clark! and all others at wuwt who like to take a swipe at ‘environmentalists’….I am such with a long history of working to clean the oceans of pollutants….you guys need to appreciate your environmental history or get condemned to repeat it – it was activists that cleaned up most of the pollution in the US and Europe….NOT governments, who always sided with industrial interests – with the honourable exception of Scandinavian governments and the Germans. When it came to stopping the dumping of radioactive waste in the world’s oceans (led by UK and not participated in by the US), it was Greenpeace and the Seamen’s Unions (in response to their activism) that stopped the dumping – I was then a scientist/legal activist advising NGOs such as Greenpeace, AND when the governments eventually got the message that they had to clean up their act, I helped the UN create better protection of the marine environment. I actually wrote a peer-reviewed paper on what was wrong with the UN system, but nobody refers to it! Thus, the IPCC repeat all the old ‘mistakes’, especially the reliance on models.
Those were the days before the corrupt influences of AGW. I admit now that I stand alone among environmentalists….they have all lost their critical faculties (just as happens with many bloggers on WUWT when they pontificate on world development issues and environmentalism). It is not just a sad state of affairs but a dangerous and unprecedented alliance of ‘greens’, bankers, brokers, UN bureaucrats, turbine makers, and of course, computer modellers….but it does not help to blanket them with terms such as fascists/commies/socialists as if that described anything useful….this is a modern syndrome for which we don’t yet fully have the vocabulary (I am working on that!).
Thanks again Frank for this mine of useful information….I agree with others, it is one of the most significant posts at wuwt.

Australia’s raw data is available here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/stations/
And the adjusted Acorn-Sat data is here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/#tabs=Data-and-network
I’ve done some charting close to home and the Acorn-Sat adjustments are obvious!

@Peter Taylor
thankyou for your kind words! But no I dont live in the Czech Republic but I have friends there, in Olomoud.
Environmentalists!
I find your writing very uplifting, and I think i am in the same boat, perhaps “worse” than you. I have a passion for wind wills even though it may be irrationa. Just the feeling of standing next to this “thing” that just make energy out of the thin air!! Amazing, truly.
I like very much if people understand that being sceptic about climate fraud is not and never will be a political agenda, its a scientific opinion. Thats why it nice to have also “environmetalists” aboard the ship, let people know that we all want to protect our Earth – obviously – but lies and fraud is just not the way.

tonyb says:
“I have seen the US Weather survey records in the reference section of the library but not the UK ones. I will specifically ask…”
Are you saying that there perhaps are NO meteorological year books in UK for the british people to see? Not even in libraries? Its great that you will ask! Maybe at least you can find out what exactly those books are titled?
Tonyb:
“Just to ensure I know your exact requirements I understand you are looking for the original daily meteorological records for each of the UK stations….”
Actually not. Meteorological year books normally comes in first a daily section and then often section 2 is Monthly/yearly summaries. These are what i want photographs of. All countries even banana republics have such year books from at least 1920-30. My guess is that UK have these books from around 1850.
its absolutely fantastic that you will assist here, and no matter the result, then the knowledge it gives is a step forward.
K.R. Frank

Said in a more simple way, the comparison between different periods of time should be done between stations with a similar siting. A constant geographic position is better, but it does not guaranty a constant siting. It should be better to look for pairs of station with a similar DTR and similar variability from day to day, similar amount of rain etc… The comparison could also be done with station a long distance apart if it is possible to calculate their theoretic normal. Constant geographic siting is not constant siting, so it is important to look to other stats.

Hi Jaymam,
You can only get daily data this way? And from Auckland only? I think there will have to be better ways to do the trick. Are you in New Zealand? If so, perhaps goto the national library and look for meteorological year books for New Zealand and Australia, that would be very helpful. These have a section with monthly and yearly summaries for most stations. That would be much more effective.
All the best!!
K.R: Frank

Edit: in the red box in #3: “to a large extend extent”
Hiding of the public’s meteorological records is data-crime.

Frank
I seached for Auckland weather, because that’s where I live. As you can see, those words are high-lighted. Yes, there may be weather data published in books. However I want raw data, with no processing at all. I can do any processing needed. It is more likely that the data published in a dozen different newspapers back in the 1800s will not have been altered by someone with an agenda.
I have obtained Auckland data from everywhere I can find, and that is from GISS and NIWA. Here is about all I have:
http://i41.tinypic.com/5u07q8.jpg
I don’t understand why there is no recent data. I see no hockey stick.

The problem with global temperature record graphs — even if one is able to obtain an unadjusted record going back 100+ years; is that one is not comparing the same station data from the past compared to the present.
There were less stations in the past and new stations were being added all the time over the past century, along with some being dropped. A graph showing the global average temperature for the year 1900 – 2000 contains different stations for the year 1900 compared to what the year 2000 does. Essentially, the 2 years are not comparable (different data sets) — yet there they are on the same graph. This is either misleading or has the potential to be, as different sets of data (different stations) are being compared on the same graph of the temperature trend over the last 100+ years as if it’s the same data source.
Secondly, and this is the more important issue related to the different station data for different years — is what is the mix of rural/urban stations? Since urban stations show a higher temperature (on average) compared to rural stations (on average), having more urban stations in the mix will increase the overall average temperature of even an unadjusted data set. The point is, that if more urban stations have been added to the temperature record over the past 100+ years, then a positive temperature trend will show up on the graph just from that fact alone.
For example, suppose in the year 1900 the station mix is 50/50 rural/urban and that urban stations have on average a 1.0C higher temperature than rural stations do. The urban stations in this case would be raising the overall average temperature 0.5C compared to just the rural stations alone. Now move to the year 2000 — what is the mix of urban/rural stations now? Suppose the mix in 2000 is now 20/80 rural/urban. Then the urban stations would now be adding 0.8C to the average of the rural stations. A 0.3C increase over a century by just the changing mix of rural/urban stations.
I used 1.0C higher average for urban stations just as an example, but maybe the figure is higher and it may have also increased over the years compounding the effect on a graph showing the global average. Adding more urban (or rural) stations with a higher and higher UHI effect wold increase the average global temperature data even more.
What is the change in the mix of rural/urban stations from the year 1900 to the present in the temperature sets like GISS or HADCRUT4? What account has been made of the increase in the global average from just changing the mix of rural/urban stations?

In Fig 22 you state that “air masses from the Pacific first have to pass more than a thousand kilometres of mountains and thus the temperature trends in the US Midwest have unusually little noise from ocean air temperature trends.” Having lived most of my life in the upper Midwest, I would suggest that much of the midwest is actually more affected by Southern Gulf air masses than Pacific air masses. Just wondering if you should account for or at least note this in your study. Great work overall.

@DTFoz
Thank you !
Its true that the US Midwest at times have winds originating from the South, the Mexican Golf.
However the longer periods with the dominating Western winds, plus Nothern and Eastern winds are much larger that the periods with Southern winds. Therefore in the US Midwest it is only a smaller fraction of the time that winds from ocean can influence temperature trends.
(Also, if you go near to the equatorial region it seems that ocean temperature trends has little heat trend only. I dont know if this has an impact.)

@J Hosfield
You write: “Do you suggest that C02 is not a greenhouse gas that is accumulating in our atmosphere?”
Dear J Hosfield. I simply present data as they are. And I simply point out that the bulk orignal data is often not used in climate science, and data is in fact kept away from public access.
On my religion: I am honest when I say to you that there seem to be no warming in areas over land in areas where ocean air do not dominate temperature trends, then its true.
This is NOT supporting that the very small changes in CO2 forcing should have led to a enormous warming at all. Perhaps some warming that is so modest that it is hard to even measure in the temperature data. Maybe.
This is what data tell us. Are we then “naysayers” if we mention this?
Those who wants dissenting voices silenced, are they the ones that will ensure progress to humanity?
CO2:
In 2008 on WUWT i wrote this article. No one has ever managed to argue against the findings, please read, I would be happy to hear your comment:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/
K.R. Frank

Dear Tony!! Thank you so much for your enquiry!
Even countries like Uganda, Angola, Bolivia and Costa Rica have published meteorological year books from at least from around 1930-40. But supposedly not the UK??
What makes your findings look even more dodgy is, that you do find something around 1870-1910 then… pretty much nothing? … And then again something from around 1980.
This pattern resembles what I have seen here and there for other countries, the warm years 1930-50 are harder to dig up. As far as I can see, the helper at the library could not offer you data that continues from 1930 and foreward. I find this so odd that the word “dodgy” is on my tongue.
I will try to use the email address and hear what they have to say about this, thankyou verymuch!!!!
K.R, Frank

Better link:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/archive/monthly-weather-report
It looks as if the did not make the content of the Monthly Weather reports public?
I think this is what we are looking for. And i would like Ireland too 🙂
K.R. Frank

Possible they use some other excessively verbose and “precise” terminology for “year books”?

PS: Tony, I have some UK stuff already 😉

Frank;
“Writing” is not an English noun, except perhaps as an anachronism. Use “write-up” or “article” or some other term if you don’t want us to guess each time you use it.

Thanks Brian, where are you from?