Watts Up With That?

Lucia beat me to a post on this, so I’ll give her the honor here. Interesting thing though, the delay of Hadley may have provided a better data presentation. – Anthony

Guest Post by Lucia from The Blackboard

Guess what? The much anticipated Hadley monthly surface temperature anomalies are now available. I always use the NH+SH simple average.

Guess what else? According to this metric, the global surface temperature anomaly September 2009 cooled relative to August 2009 dropping from0.548C to 0.457C. In contrast, GISSTemp, NOAA/NCDC, UAH and RSS all reported distinctly warmer anomalies in September relative to August. This divergence is a pit surprising– though I’d have to plough through numbers to see if this sort of mismatch is unprecedented in the record.

One of the interesting happenings this month was Hadley’s decision to delay processing because they considered the some data they received to be obviously wrong. We don’t have details on precisely what was wrong about it, but I noticed large blanked out areas on their map:

Figure 1: Missing temperatures in Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

By Joseph D’Aleo, AMS Fellow, CCM

In this recent post, we discussed the problems with recent data that showed the argument presented by the EDF’s millionaire lawyer playing clueless environmentalist on Lou Dobbs Tonight that this will be the warmest decade is nonsense. This claim was well refuted and Al Gore’s credibility disassembled by Phelim McAleer, of the new documentary Not Evil, Just Wrong that challenges the lies and exaggerations (totalling 35) in Al Gore scifi horror comedy film, An Inconvenient Truth. 9 were serious enough for a UK judge to require a disclaimer itemizing them be read whenever, the movie was shown in the schools.

The world’s climate data has become increasingly sparse with a big dropoff around 1990. There was also a tenfold increase in missing months around the same time. Stations (90% in the United States which has the Cadillac data system) are poor to very poorly sited and not properly adjusted for urbanization. Numerous peer review papers suggest an exaggeration of the warming by 30%, 50% or even more. The station dropout can be clearly seen in the two maps below with the number of station going from over 6000 to just 1079 from April 1978 to April 2008.

April 1978 GISS global plot - click for larger image

April 2008 GISS global plot - click for larger image

See the big gaps in the recent data in Canada, Greenland, Africa, South America, parts of western Asia, parts of Australia.

SEE FOR YOURSELF Read the rest of this entry »

That windchill is vicious, be sure to dress warmly going outside at Key West. Cold kills. Actually the new record low was colder than that shown above. It hit -27F earlier. See the complete NOAA report here (PDF)

OK fun aside, this is obviously another ASOS thermohygrometer malfunction, but one in the opposite direction that we usually see. But, there’s an interesting twist here that will provide a useful test of the integrity of data handling policy within NOAA/NWS. Please read on. Read the rest of this entry »

People send me stuff. My Inbox bursts daily with ideas, suggestions, papers, and photos.

Here is a climate monitoring station in Tremonton Utah. Notice anything peculiar about the placement of the temperature sensor? It is the white “bee hive” on the pole on the asphalt.

Tremonton UT COOP-A Climate station looking south - click for larger image

Note the conduit for the cable to the MMTS. This underscores something I’ve been saying about the MMTS installation for some time. The COOP managers that install these aren’t given the tools or time to get past obstructions like asphalt and concrete, thus the MMTS ends up closer to buildings than the “wireless” Stevenson Screen.

Randy Julander writes in:

Randy Julander here, snow survey supervisor, NRCS, USDA. Here are a few pics from the Tremonton Utah MMTS site which is right outside our NRCS field office in Tremonton. Normally there is a large truck parked right next to the sensor. As you can see, next to the building, next to the air conditioner, asphalt everywhere. Nice placement.

I’ll say, right on the pavement, 10 feet from the building. Randy mentions a truck being parked by the sensor. It shows up nicely on the Google aerial view: Read the rest of this entry »

Roger A. Pielke Sr. Comments On The NCDC Talking Point Response To The Report “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” By Anthony Watts

The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) has responded to the excellent report

Watts, A. 2009: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? 28 pages, March 2009 The Heartland Institute [hard copies available from The Heartland Institute 19 South LaSalle Street #903 Chicago Illinois 60603]

which I weblogged on at “Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” By Anthony Watts.

The NCDC “Talking Points” released on June 9, 2009  are available at

Talking Points related to: Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

Unfortunately, the author of the NCDC Talking Points cavalierly and poorly responded to Anthony Watts report. They did not even have the courtesy to cite the report! {UPDATE 7/3/09: They have now cited Anthony’s report, but retained the original date of the Talking Points of June 9 2009).

Below, I comment on their response. Read the rest of this entry »

Orland CA and the New Adjustments

In my last post, I observed that NOAA’s Talking Points applied their new “adjustments” to supposedly prove that NOAA’s negligent administration of the USHCN network did not “matter”.

In order to illustrate the effect of the new methods in this post, I’ll compare the new adjustments (post-TOBS) to the old adjustments (post-TOBS) on a “good” station – Orland CA, a prototype “good” station, discussed at the outset of surfacestations.org, discussed at WUWT here and CA here in early 2007.

The station history for Orland (at CDIAC) says that it has been in its present location for (at least) most of the 20th century and has had minimal changes during that time, other than perhaps time-of-observation (TOBS). The TOBS adjustment is carried forward into USHCN-v2. As I understand it, NOAA’s New Adjustment Method replaces station-history based adjustments for instrumentation changes and station location (the latter formerly done in FILNET).

As a benchmark, here is the difference between FILNET (adjusted) and TOBS for Orland in the “old” USHCN. Adjustments in the 20th century are negligible – in keeping with station history information that indicates no changes in location. Read the rest of this entry »