by John Goetz
Update: Thanks to an email from John S. – a patron of climateaudit.org – we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS.
Update 2: The faulty results have been (mostly) backed out of the GISS website. The rest should be done following the federal holiday. GISS says they will update the analysis once they confirm with NOAA that the software problems have been corrected. I also removed the subtitles since the GISS data no longer reflects October as being the warmest ever.
GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISSTemp) released their monthly global temperature anomaly data for October 2008. Following is the monthly global ∆T from January to October 2008:
Year J F M A M J J A S O
2007 85 61 59 64 55 53 53 56 50 54
2008 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78
Here is a plot of the GISSTemp monthly anomaly since January 1979 (keeping in line with the time period displayed for UAH). I have added a simple 12-month moving average displayed in red.
The addition of October has changed some of the temperatures for earlier months:
GISS 2008 J F M A M J J A S O
As of 9/08 14 25 62 36 40 29 53 50 49 ..
As of 10/08 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78
The 0.78 C anomaly in October is the largest ever for October, and one of the largest anomalies ever recorded. Although North America was cooler than normal, Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave.
Also, after several months of being downgraded to a 0.61 C anomaly, 2005 has been lifted back to 0.62 C.
Sponsored IT training links:
Enjoy the first hand success with 646-046 online training. This all in one 642-975 training package includes everything you need to pass 000-106 exam.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Les Johnson (19:21:05) :
[“But, in business, if one of my suppliers makes a mistake, my client does not sympathize with ME. Rather, he blames me.
Rightly so. I should have checked the product before sending it out.”]
I absolutely agree…. As a Australian prawn trawler owner operator. If I shot my trawl away in a national park closure due to a navigational error…. I would loose my licence, be called a criminal and be fined more money than my business could ever pay back… Just one little mistake…. And this has happened to a few guys…
Don’t forget that Australian Trawlers have Satellite tracking devices on them which are linked and watched in real time by Australian Fisheries Service personnel….. These are honest mistakes in navigation or interpretations of closure lines made by the trawlermen…
Yet Scientists can simply just say anything they please. Mistakes, deliberate distortions and all…. Whether this be Climate science or Marine Biology. Makes no difference.
There is one rule for the Elites and another for the poor slobs that thought working for themselves was noble and enterprising.
If it keeps going like this, there will be tears before bedtime…. It is getting intolerable.
If they are going to politicize Science… There needs to be accountability.
People claim that blogs aren’t doing “real science” yet situations like this prove how valuable blogs can be. Without a blogs like this one and CA and their devoted readers I seriously doubt this error would have been found this quickly, if at all!
And yet some people still believe we know the temperature 200+ years ago within .2 degrees. Amazing.
Lets see, NASA flew a space craft into Mars because they didn’t know the difference between yards and meters. They also blew up one shuttle because they wanted to save a few dollars by only having two rubber bands instead of three. They also ignored protocols and launched when the temperature was too cold. Then they had a problem with slabs of ice smashing into another shuttle causing it’s destruction. Having spent tens of millions of dollars trying to solve the ice problem, they have yet to succeed. To think that this Agency is still listened to is… well just wrong.
John Goetz (19:03:51) :
I partially agree. However, I work on software that is littered with various tests to make sure the data we’re working with makes sense. I work on file systems, not climate, so tests are for things like “is there actually a data block for the part of the file we’re looking at?” “Is the file size negative?” Or “is the block we’re freeing already marked as free?”
It wouldn’t be much to ask GISS to verify things like anomalies are in the range that are normally seen and flag things like the 15.7°C anomaly as being so wrong that the input data may be corrupted or bad. Then again, from what I’ve read about their code quality, perhaps it is too much to ask.
I assume enough people have contacted GISS about this that there’s no point in having the rest of us do so.
Google News doesn’t have any stories about the warmest October (except for Hong Kong and Los Angeles), so the bad data point has broken free yet.
Was the NSIDC press release due to the erroneous GISS information? But I’m not finding that press release at the NSIDC site, nor on news sites. Where is this press release?
evanjones (19:17:40) :
> Try to remember the kind of September….
Hear how the wind begins to whisper.
See how the leaves go streaming by.
Smell how the velvet rain is falling,
Out where the fields are warm and dry.
Now is the time to run inside and stay.
Now is the time to find a hideaway
Where we can stay.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can see it.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can tell.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
What are we gonna do?
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can feel it.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
I can tell.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
What’ll we do with you?
We’ll find four limbs of a tree.
We’ll build four walls and a floor.
We’ll bind it over with leaves,
And run inside to stay.
Then we’ll let it rain.
We’ll not fell it.
Then we’ll let it rain,
Rain pell-mell.
And we’ll not complain
If it never stops at all.
We’ll live and love
Within our own four walls.
We’ll find four limbs of a tree.
We’ll build four walls and a floor.
We’ll bind it over with leaves,
And run inside to stay.
Soon it’s gonna rain.
Come run inside to stay!
Soon it’s gonna rain.
For soon it’s gonna rain.
I can see it.
I can feel it.
Run inside and…
Then we’ll let it rain.
We’ll not feel it.
Then we’ll let it rain.
Ran pell-mell.
And we’ll not complain
– Happy ending…
If it never stops at all.
Then we’ll let it rain.
Why complain?
We’ll live and love within our walls.
Happily we’ll live and love,
No cares at all.
Happily we’ll live and love
Within our castle walls.
[REPLY – #B^1]
Regarding questions about GISS’s UK mean temps, here are comparisons with WeatherUnderground:
WU GISS
Bournemouth 10 13.7 (same temp as in Sept. 2008)
Waddington: 9 10.3
Valley 10 14.0 (same as Sept. 2008)
So it looks like Bouremouth and Valley are input duplications from Sept., and Waddington is just GISS’s typical ginning up the temperature by 1-2 degrees.
Add these as duplicates:
Eskdalemuir
Leeming
Tiree
Malin Head
Dublin Airport
Casement Aero
At first glance I was stunned at the anomaly, especially after seeing the UAH satillite data set for October. I have never trusted GISS. This is just another example of why NASA needs to dump the program. The Russians seem to have trouble with submarines as well. Hats off to John S. for looking a little harder.
These pictures acted as a catalyst for some kind of perspective on Earth for me thought you lot might like to see too, http://www.jordanmaxwell.com/articles/pictures/pictures2.html (sorry to be off topic.) Ed.
Congrats to John and others for finding this rather startling error. Let’s hope it get’s some traction in the media. Andrew Bolt has already covered it on his blog.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hansen_september_the_hottest_october/
Chris V,
In your gleeful posting concerning UAH, you fail to mention not only the recent RSS adjustments that come more into line with UAH, but their earlier admission to a major error (.1k) this year, and that Spencer & Christy were credited for aiding in the diagnosis of this most “grievous” error 🙂
You also failed to mention a recent study by Randall and Herman that concluded UAH is the more accurate data of the two groups. It is also true UAH is transparent and fully discloses and documents all adjustments with explanations. It appears you simply cannot bring yourself about to admit there are serious problems with surface station data.
ftp://ftp.remss.com/msu/data/readme_jan_2008.txt
January 16, 2008
We discovered an error in our processing of AMSU data from NOAA-15 for TLT. A new version,
version 3.1 is now available and should be used for all applications. This new version
is in much better agreement with other sources of tropospheric temperature. We apologize for
any inconvenience.
What was the error?
Last January, I made a small change in the way TLT is calculated that reduced the absolute
Temperatures by 0.1K. But I only used the new method for 2007 (the error).
When the data are merged with MSU, MSU and AMSU are forced to be as close as possible to each
other over the 1999-2004 period of overlap. This caused the error to show up as a downward
jump in January 2007. To fix the problem, I reprocessed the 1998-2006 AMSU data using the new
code (like I should have done in the first place), and merged it with the MSU data.
We would like to thank John Christy and Roy Spencer, who were very helpful during the diagnosis
process.
Carl Mears, RSS, January 16 2008
It comes down to this. When the belivers at GISS see a high anomaly they think nothing of it. It validates their belief. So they don’t think to check the sources–NOAA.
Given the using-last-month’s-data issue in both Russia and the UK, it would make sense to look through the raw data for the past, oh, say, 30 years, to see whether this exact problem may be one that has corrupted GISS anomaly values for any, or all, of the period.
Without asserting bad motives, one might want to see whether the pattern is generally one using the warmer month’s data, i.e. on the falling side of the yearly curve.
I understand that GISS uses satellite data for its estimates of sea surface temperatures. I note that most oceans have missing data in the GISS October 2008 Graph (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008). Since oceans cover 70% of the earth, is there an impact on GISS by missing the ocean data? Also, GISS seems to have data on oceans when there is an island in the area! How far into the ocean does GISS assume the island temperature to be representative of SSTs — thereby wiping out the need for satellite information?
Serious questions need to be asked of NASA’s management. For Hansen to still be employed by NASA is a sad indictment of the NASA administration. The public needs to start calling for massive funding cuts to NASA. They are not competent enough to be spending public money any longer if they can allow this sort of scientific fraud to go on.
Correcting obvious errors of these data is commendable if it can be accomplished but anyone that thinks they can accurately determine the earth’s surface temperature at any point in time is either delusional or has ulterior motives.
Nibblin’ on sponge cake
Watchin’ the sun bake
All of those Russians covered with oil
Strumming my six-string
On my front-porch swing
Smell those shrimp they’re beginning to boil
Wastin’ away again in…
[…] was the hottest October ever recorded. Wait! September?” Read more here and also here. […]
What is the bet that this story breaks in the MSM – BEFORE the correction is noted?
What is the bet that the correction is never noted by the MSM?
Steve M at Climate Audit covers this also http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4318,
Note that he also includes a link to actual russian weather for a simple check on what’s been happening during October.
This story kick’s Ar$e…
LOL.
It really goes to the whole data management quagmire at GISS. The GISS data is not worth the cost of the electrons…
So what was are the real global temperatures for October fron GISS?
[…] – this time NCDC’s Karl 10 11 2008 It has been one of those days…first the GISS data train wreck in apparently reusing last months temperatures to make this months “hottest October […]
Here in sub-tropical BRISBANE, I had the blanket on the bed for the third night in a row! Roll on global warming!
Climate science on the warmer side has degenerated to competitive lying. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars of grant money at stake. Hansen saw Willis fiddling with the XBT data to remove the recent cold trend, and knew he had to make a big move to show his new political masters that he still had what it takes. There is no way that carrying over selected stations could have been accidental. It doesn’t matter that he got found out, the important thing is that he made the effort to tell a big one. That is what will please them and it shows that he can still be relied upon.
This is a link to Willis’ XBT story: http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/11/correcting-ocean-cooling-nasa-changes-data-to-fit-the-models/
It is like living in the old Soviet Union. NASA is preparing us for a change of history. Does it really take that much effort to process the Argo data? I think we need Spencer and/or Christy to take on the oceans as well. It should be possible to get monthly updates on ocean heat content.