Guest Essay By Walter Dnes
There have been a number of posts on USHCN temperature adjustments, including 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. They have focused primarily on annual adjustments. Whilst looking into the USHCN adjustments, I noticed that each of the 12 months is adjusted differently. Here is a plot of average USHCN temperature adjustments, for each month plus the annual average, by year for 1970-2013:
Here is the full plot for 1872-2013.
The calculation of average monthly adjustment consists of:
- Calculating the total accumulated values of (final-temp – raw_temp) where the raw and final values of USHCN monthly temperatures were both non-missing
- Count the number of occurrences where the raw and final values of monthly temperatures were both non-missing
- Divide item 1 by item 2.
As you can see, there are marked differences in adjustments since 1970 for each month. To analyze in more detail, we need to look at some numbers. In the table below…
- The columns “2013” and “2014” list the average adjustment in Celsius degrees for the corresponding months in the years 2013 and 2014 (where available).
- “Slope” means the slope attributable to USHCN adjustments, in Celsius degrees per century, during the period from 1970 to 2013.
| Month | 2013 | 2014 | Slope |
| January | 0.1206 | 0.0991 | 1.432 |
| February | 0.1735 | 0.1687 | 1.519 |
| March | 0.1357 | 0.1313 | 1.455 |
| April | 0.0089 | 0.0101 | 1.281 |
| May | -0.0785 | -0.0828 | 0.955 |
| June | -0.0842 | -0.0856 | 0.775 |
| July | -0.0922 | -0.0881 | 0.676 |
| August | -0.1344 | 0.783 | |
| September | -0.1298 | 0.949 | |
| October | -0.0751 | 1.046 | |
| November | -0.0244 | 1.206 | |
| December | 0.0283 | 1.220 | |
| Annual | -0.0126 | 1.108 |
What are the implications of the USHCN adjustments?
- The talk about winters in the USA getting warmer may be an artifact of the adjustments. The adjustments for January/February/March are the highest of the 12 months. In 2013, they combined to average +0.1433 Celsius degree, while the overall annual adjustment for 2013 was -0.0126 Celsius degrees.
- This is a booby-trap for the unwary. When you see articles in February/March/April about HUGE upward adjustments by USHCN so far during the year, you’ll know why. By the following January, the adjustment will cover the entire calendar year and look more reasonable. Mind you, this is still over half a Celsius degree above the adjustments for the 1930s.
- Speaking of the 1930s, one wonders if this an attempt to disappear the heat waves and droughts of “The Dirty Thirties” in a manner similar to attempts to disappear the Medieval Warm Period. It’s hard to talk about “the hottest ever”, when there’s “inconvenient data” around, showing that the 1930s were hotter. The 2nd graph shows the adjustments from the 1870’s onwards. Compare 2013’s -0.0126 annual adjustment with annual adjustments for the 1930s…
- 1930 -0.5586
- 1931 -0.5628
- 1932 -0.5639
- 1933 -0.5770
- 1934 -0.5877
- 1935 -0.5851
- 1936 -0.5846
- 1937 -0.5907
- 1938 -0.5852
- 1939 -0.5810
Data Sources
USHCN monthly data is available on the web in the ftp directory ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ The specific files used for my analysis were…
- readme file (data formats and basic instructions): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/readme.txt
- station metadata: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn-v2.5-stations.txt
- raw monthly mean temperature data: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.raw.tar.gz
- final monthly mean temperature data: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.FLs.52i.tar.gz
Odds and Ends
Interesting stuff I stumbled across whilst working on this article…
- Station USH00381310, i.e. “CAMDEN 3 W”, South Carolina has raw data for August 1853. The next piece of raw data for that station is August 1906. The first piece of any final data for any station is 1866. I wonder if the date is a typo.
-
- There is some USHCN raw data for the years 1853, 1868, 1869, and 1871 onwards.
- There is USHCN final data from 1866 onwards
Wait a minute. Where does the USHCN final data for 1866, 1867, and 1870 come from, if there is no USHCN raw data for those years? A closer look shows that the small amount of data for those 3 years is all from station USH00303033 “FREDONIA”, New York. It’s located at 42.4497 -79.3120 which translates to 42° 26′ 59″ North 79° 18′ 43″ West. This is near the shore of Lake Erie, not that far from Canada. Let’s check what nearby Canadian data is available for that time span.
- Point your web browser to http://climate.weather.gc.ca/advanceSearch/searchHistoricData_e.html
- Select the “Search by Proximity” tab
- Select 200 in the “kilometres away from” menu
- Click on the “location coordinates:” radio button and enter latitude 42 26 59 and longitude 79 18 43
- Click on the “for years from” radio button, and select 1866 to 1870
- Click on the “Search” button.
The 2 closest sites are Simcoe at 90 km, and Hamilton at just over 100 km. There are another 6 sites within 165 km of Fredonia.
It sort of makes sense that the Fredonia data was created from these sites. I can’t think of any other semi-reasonable explanation. I’ll leave it to professional meteorologists like Anthony to comment on the validity of using data from sites located northwest of Lake Erie to generate estimated data for a site southeast of Lake Erie.
- “The Rise and Fall of USHCN Raw Data” is of interest, in that the less raw data available, the more estimation has to be done to fill out the data set. The theoretical full annual complement of data is 1218 stations with 12 months of data per year, meaning 1,218 * 12 = 14,616 station-months each year. The following graph shows the number of raw and final station-months in the USHCN data over the years. The graph ends at 2013.
- Plots of adjustments over period of record first alerted me to the fact that adjustments were 12 separate data sets, 1 for each month. I ran a script to crank out adjustment plots for all 1218 stations in USHCN, “to see what I could see”. The plot below is an example. Note the period from 1904 to 1911. The adjustments for all 8 of those years were…
- January -2.91 degrees each year
- February -2.94 or -2.95 degrees each year
- March -3.00 degrees each year
- April -3.03 degrees each year
- May -2.93 degrees each year
- June -2.84 degrees each year
- July -2.86 or -2.87 degrees each year
- August -2.87 or -2.88 degrees each year
- September -2.90 or -2.91 degrees each year
- October -2.88 or -2.89 degrees each year
- November -2.95 or -2.96 degrees each year
- December -2.94 or -2.95 degrees each year
Other portions of the data have their own stretches of the same adjustments 12 months apart.
Walter Dnes – Click the pic to view at source
Hail, hail Fredonia, land of the brave and free!
Very important post.
What they do at times is troubling.
…That’s why I keep my own original
data, and do much more accurate
analysis of local stations of interest.
Reblogged this on Catholic Glasses and commented:
I’d say [they’re] fudging the graphs
Re-Writing history. Or, more accurately, changing history.
It is not the scientific method.
The individuals doing this need to be removed from their positions as soon as possible before they do more damage to the human race. Re-writing history has never been in the general interest of the human society, only a few select individuals at the expense of everyone else.
Walter or JTF…I was under the impression “adjustments” were made every time a station reported….which is once a month
Between the USHCN temp adjustment residuals shown here and from those shown StevenGoddard.WordPress, the data manipulation is getting worse. But Nature has a way of imposing the truth in an in-your-face sort of way whenever Man thinks “he” is in the climate driver seat.
IF (BIG “IF”) we had an honest and accountable Federal government, preparations for a bitterly cold winter would be underway. Even if it doesn’t happen, the consequences are trivial of being prepared and not having one, versus the catastrophe of being unprepared if it happens. This is what happens when America elects politicians who don’t feel accountable for their decisions.
Some steps the Federal government SHOULD be doing:
– Appropriations to move additional money to state-run supplemental heating programs for the poor.
– Relaxing restrictions on natural gas drilling on Federal land.
– Relaxing coal fired electricity regulations to ensure the electrical grid can keep cities warm.
– Using tax credits to encourage natural gas suppliers to stockpile supplies in underground reservoirs.
– Providing propane suppliers with incentives to stockpile reserves.
– Encouraging people to provision wood for their wood fired heating units to relieve the burden on electricity, fuel oil, and natural gas in the Northwest, where wood burning heat supplementation is more common.
Of course, every one of the above prudent steps are an anathema to Obama and his band of eco-nuts bent on driving their agenda down America’s throat regardless of the consequences.
Their narrow escape from climategate encouraged them…they are all in.
USHCN =Usual Suspects Have Control (of the) Numbers….
Looks untrustworthy to me.
Just leave them alone to their insane machinations.
There will come a blatantly obvious moment when they realize the game is up and they are going to be spending many years of nights in a Federal pin with a same-sex sweaty bunk-mate not of their choosing nor educational background.
Well, that fate is for them. Leave them to their fate.
> Latitude says:
> August 23, 2014 at 5:25 pm
>
> Walter or JTF…I was under the impression “adjustments” were made every
> time a station reported….which is once a month
As I mentioned in the “Data Sources” section, there are “raw” temperatures (where available) and “final” temperatures for each site/month. This post uses data downloaded in early August 2014. Barring the correction of typos, I hope that “raw” data for 50 years, in this download, ago ends up absolutely identical to the same site/month “raw” data for 50 years ago, in next month’s download.
I think you’re asking whether the “final” value for a site/month 50 years ago stays constant, or whether it follows the example if GISS and changes with each monthly download. I don’t know the answer to that question, because I haven’t been following USHCN. I should know the answer in a couple of weeks, when I download the next batch of data. It’ll have August data available, but I can also compare past data to this month’s download.
How about adding a parenthetical explanation–e.g., (U.S. Historical Climatology Network)– to the title or first occurrence of USHCN as a matter of courtesy to readers. Lack of such explanation is a frequent , and unnecessarily obfuscating, occurrence on this site. In this case, reference “2” was the first one to decipher the abbreviation.
Dunno, how you guys dredge this stuff up; and I use the word “dredge” advisedly, because it does appear to come out of the muck.
But however you do it, sure impresses the hell out of me.
So thanks for the enlightenment. Their machinations never cease to amaze.
G
Walter Dnes says:
August 23, 2014 at 6:19 pm
I think you’re asking whether the “final” value for a site/month 50 years ago stays constant, or whether it follows the example if GISS and changes with each monthly download. I don’t know the answer to that question, because I haven’t been following USHCN. I should know the answer in a couple of weeks, when I download the next batch of data. It’ll have August data available, but I can also compare past data to this month’s download.
=====
thanks…I think you’ll find the same type of algorithm in place again
Looking forward to you update
Thank you Walter,
Yours is another article that shows how so much of critical analysis and peer review is done in the blogdom. Your data mining and analysis is another look at temperature adjustments that, whether justified or not, show amazing tone deafness to the suspicions of data torture that exist among skeptics and probably anyone who studies the data. If adjusted data records can better reflect past reality, climate scientists need to do it with footnotes which include rationale and adjusted data. Leave original data alone! Knowing that Roger Maris’ home run record was in 162 games instead of 156 is valuable information. I appreciate the footnote, Adjusting Babe Ruth’s record to 62 homers is unacceptable. Perhaps a few more NL homers are hit now because of the high altitude ballparks Atlanta, Phoenix, and Colorado. Should old homer records be adjusted up or newer ones adjusted down. Of course not! Why are data more sacrosanct in baseball than in climate science?
Thank you. Very, very good work!
Wow! A hockey stick graph if ever I saw one – it proves that increased CO2 levels have had a direct affect on the adjustments to the measured temperature!
The USHCN folks present their data to the uninformed (me) as if it is all good and equal in quality and accuracy. Yet, it seems they adjust it every year, and it seems like it is always adjusted in the same direction (cold in the past, warmer today). Would it not be more appropriate for them to provide an error range rather than adjustments, because obviously every adjustment is due to uncertainty about the original numbers. Should we have any faith at all in the data? Is the original raw data still available, and why is that not presented along with the final revised data with explanations. The USHCN isn’t science any more, it is propaganda.
What was done to “disappear” the Medieval Warm Period?
By the way, can you show us where is the data for Lamb’s hand-drawn graph? .
Or provide a scale for the vertical axis, on the graph shown here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/29/the-medieval-warm-period-a-global-phenonmena-unprecedented-warming-or-unprecedented-data-manipulation/
Doug Allen says: “Why are data more sacrosanct in baseball than in climate science?”
Because no one has figured out how to justify a worldwide tax on energy usage by changing baseball data.
This is an ongoing crime. The original data must be restored and it is available to do so.
About a year or so ago they were having a contest in the office where my niece works. It was a weight loss contest and there was going to be a monetary prize for the employee who lost the most weight. The day of the weigh-in at the start of the contest my niece developed a virtually insatiable thirst which could only be satisfied by chugging gallons of water. Needless to say it was strictly coincidental that she had a virtual lake full of water sloshing around in her belly as she stepped onto the scale. It’s amazing how much weight loss can conveniently occur following just one admittedly lengthy vacation at the toilet following a weigh-in.
Now, I know the foregoing little tome doesn’t sound very scientific. But I can’t help but wonder if the USHCN is sort of the same thing in reverse. And there’s no denying that there’s prize money involved.
You must understand : this is world-best-practice. 97% of weather station data are treated this way with excellent results.
Here’s further evidence of fraudulent depression of the historical record in order to generate a spurious warming trend: http://endisnighnot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-past-is-getting-colder.html?m=1
Some mention here if the top relalizes what is being done, and when they find out, these folks will be punished. I think its obvious that the top knows and has ordered that proof be found by any means possible. (they are just following orders, it serves the agenda, same as with the IRS)