I know, this sounds like “save the whales”.
Amazing as this sounds, weather stations used to monitor near surface temperature for the global climate record are disappearing worldwide at and alarming rate. There are two things going on here: 1) Stations are actually being closed down, particularly in Canada and in Russia in the early 1990’s. 2) Some stations while open, have disappeared off the reporting radar for global temperature metrics such as GISS.
Watch the video here prepared by our www.surfacestations.org super volunteer and unofficial historian John W. Goetz. It outlines how the worldwide network has grown since the 1890’s, and then dwindled in modern times.
If you wish to play the video at full resolution in Windows Media Player, here is a link to the WMV file.
The USA remains the world leader not only in the number of weather stations but also in the quality of the network. Given what problems I’ve found thus far in the USHCN network in the USA, this does not bode well for the quality of GHCN stations in the rest of the world.
John recently did a writeup on this on Climate Audit called: Historical Station Distribution
In response to that, Steve McIntyre recently found that a number of stations that went missing from the NASA GISTEMP dataset are still actually in operation, and producing data, are not being updated into the GISTEMP dataset for some reason. Irregardless of the reason, the problem of dwindling data for the ROW as demonstrated by the video above is real.
What is strange though is that some obviously easy to locate data, (link to data) such as Bern, Switzerland, where the headquarters of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) are located, are missing from NASA GISTEMP. Nearby stations such as Zurich, Switzerland are included in the GISTEMP database.
Other stations, such as Crater Lake, OR, are removed from the GISS source code released last year, with a citation saying they are excluded (but exist online in GISTEMP), but no reason is given. yet other stations like this terrible rooftop station cum heat anomaly (and closed by NWS for that reason) in Baltimore, MD are included.
I find this odd since GISS has been working hard to include and apply as many station corrections as possible. Why would they include Crater Lake in the online database, but not in the Model E Global Circulation Model code they run and released last year?
It begs the question: what could be the explanation for such randomness in whether or not stations are used? Why are some stations with known current data excluded from the NASA GISS online database and climate modeling?
the big drop off of stations in 1990 was equal to about 30 % of the stations . The average temperature increases about 1 degree celsius during the drop off in number of stations. Thats accordign to one graph I saw, and that 30% decrease in stations represented about 1500 ground stations. P.s. the raw temperatures from the stations are also changed according to formulas that are used to account for and discount the effects of “heat islands” and what have you, so we have to have a lot of faith in those people crunching those numbers. P.s a 30% decrease in stations and a .2% increase in Kelvin temperature ( that is what a 1 celsius increase is equal to in Kelvins which is on a scale of 450 points. look it up) happened around the same time. + on another note: look up the effects of volcanic ash on light getting through the armosphere at the hawai stations in the early 90’s from Pintatubo.
If you are really interested in global temperatures, do read:
Jones, Wigley & Wright, “Global temperature variations between 1861 and 1984”, Nature 322, 31st July 1986, p.430ff.
Since 1986 the temperature data, which are published and used, are “corrected” data, where about 960,000 sets of data from the period 1861-1945 have been removed because “this difference is also **likely** to reflect a non-climatic inhomogenity in either the MAT data or the land data, **probably** the former.”
The article contains lots of “considered”, “thought to have”, “suggesting”, “generally assumed”, “likely”, etc.
The temperatures have been reduced by – (two examples from the list: 1861-73: -0,4 C; 1942-45: -0,54C).
The actually measured temperatures were published in Oort et. al.: “Historical trends in the surface temperature over the oceans based on the COADS”, Climate Dynamics 2, pp. 29-38, 1987.
[…] know from John Goetz work as well as this artcle in Nature that Russian weather stations had been closing with regularity due […]
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