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.
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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.
Actually the Waddington figure is more worrying. The Sept duplicates are easy to spot but who would have spotted the Waddington error if it hadn’t been for the duplicates. Would the Russian temperatures, say, have been picked up if they were just a degree or two above their true values.
Being a non PC person, I wonder, can some contributers kindly use “man made” instead of “Anthropogenic”?
Thanks in advance,
Brian Johnson NLAMN [No Letters After My Name]
GISS – Gives Inaccurate Scientific Statistics
Was this the “October surprise” that everybody was expecting?
Here the october data of 222 russian sites
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gclimat?lang=en&mode=1&state=Russ&ind=&ord=REV&verb=no&year=2008&mes=10&months=
The current temperature in Olenek, Russia is -28 deg C, 31 degrees below the “October” GISS Olenek temperature, and is predicted to go to -33 deg C on the Day After Tomorrow. Dozens of related links, jokes, observations, explanations are summarized in my text about this story,
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/11/rss-msu-0013-deg-c-month-on-month.html
Real temperatures could be 0.5c lower if you multiply 10c (average temp drop from Sept to Oct in Russia) by 0.125 (Russia is 1/8th of world’s land mass) by 0.4 (rough approximation of land cover on earth). Cuuld be a higher reduction due to UK, Ireland and possible issues elsewhere.
I expect it’ll just be 0.2c ish though!
[…] Read more on the fraudulent GISS data on the websites below: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/10/giss-releases-october-2008-data […]
Anymouse:
it’s at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ to the right of fig 3
In the old days of chivalry, those responsible (in charge) would have fallen on their swords and resigned, with abject apologies for allowing such poor quality control (even a lowly minion should have seen something was wrong).
It will be interesting to see the blame being apportioned (or the whole sorry story just quietly dropped with business as usual continuing).
Money on Hansen resigning? 1000 to 1 against?
[…] Oh the Wheels on the Bus are Falling Off, Falling Off 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. watts up with that […]
Here in Western Europe, it’s already in the newspapers today: “October 2008 is warmest October month ever according to NASA temperatures”
Just my ol off topic self.. but is anyone else having a hard time seeing the latest sunspot? And the hopeful Nasa strikes again….. hehe
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/07nov_signsoflife.htm
I have got the average temp for Olenek, from weatherunderground. I used the mean temperture from every day. It was -6.5 deg C.
Range was 2 (1 Oct) to -18 deg C (19 Oct).
You’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?
Actually, I think Anthony should re-instate monitoring GISStemp graphs each month
– it would help show up gross errors like this
Although Anthony doesn’t believe that GISStemp is reliable, it’s still a very important data-set
Besides, the general trend for GISStemp isn’t *that* different than RSS or UCH
– and it would be worth being able to discuss why there are such differences.
Otherwise, this site might be accused of just promoting data that agrees with it’s view-point.
More sloppy ‘science’ from a group of so-called professionals who (apparantly) don’t give a whit about accuracy.
Let’s hope this time they don’t respond in a condescending or snarky manner.
The credibility of the American-nay, Global scientific community is eroding at an alarming rate which is of great concern to many.
It’s been mentioned before (Michael Ronayne, back in April, I think), but is worth mentioning again.
This is rather like the scene in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm shows the people in the control centre that the dinosaurs are breeding; the computer hasn’t been programmed to take into account the possibility that the total number of dinosaurs could be increasing, and of course no-one has given the odd readings much thought, because they knew an increase couldn’t possibly be happening.
The same kind of blinkered mindset at work in NASA GISS?
RIP, Michael Crichton; you understood the mentality of these people very well.
To misquote Dr Malcolm: God creates Global Warming. God destroys Global Warming. God creates Man. Man destroys God. Man creates… climate models.
The credibility of climate science is melting faster than the modelled ice 🙂
Global warming IS man-made, after all :^)
This is so simple. Hansen needs the perfect data to feed Obama for his major CO2 cap and tax programs to be added in 2009. GISS is worthless data but perfect for political reasons.
Looking toward the Eastern sky, someday I am going home.
Steve
“John Finn (00:48:22) :
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.
Actually the Waddington figure is more worrying. The Sept duplicates are easy to spot but who would have spotted the Waddington error if it hadn’t been for the duplicates. Would the Russian temperatures, say, have been picked up if they were just a degree or two above their true values.”
Interesting John, I guess if they had just fabricated the numbers it would have been harder to spot. However this type of “mistake” does give them some way out. What am I saying, has GISS ever owned up to a mistake?
I think the mistake was one of laziness. The recent cooling has made the old algorithm insufficient to produce desired results, hence the new tack.
I wonder if this is a new trick or has it been used repeatedly in the past? I bet this little prevarication has been used repeatedly but not noticed. Thank you John S.
It might also be possible that october temperatures were more or less the same in some regions of russia, no? There were some post from guys in Moscow on climate audit telling that october has actually been warmer than september in that city. I think we’d better wait for corrections (if any) before going crazy about this.
The NOAA error seems to be with the processing of the .dly files. I did a spot check of a couple Russian sites that have the September / October twins at GISS. The NOAA .dly files show a clear difference in temperature. The resulting NOAA GHCN v2 file, however, contains the twins.
Not to pile on, but in doing more comparisons with Weather Underground, it does appear that several of the Russian sites consistently show higher mean temps in GISS than they do in WU:
Moscow WU GISS
Oct. 7 10.9
Sept. 10 10.9
Aug 17 17.5
Jul 18 19.1
Jun 14 15.6
May 10 11.3
April 9 9.4
March 1 1.8
Feb -3 -1.5
Jan -7 -5.8
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 3 8.6
Sept. 8 8.6
Aug 14 15.2
Jul 17 18.8
Jun 16 18.0
May 8 9.5
Vytegra, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 7 8.2
Sept. 8 8.2
Aug 15 14.4
Jul 17 16.4
Jun 13 12.6
May 8 7.8
April 3 4.3
March -2 -2.0
Feb -5 -3.5
Jan -7 -5.5
Kazan, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 7 7.8
Sept. 10 10.0
Aug 18 19.1
Jul 20 20.7
Jun 16 16.4
May 11 12.4
April 7 8.2
March -1 0.1
Feb -7 -6.6
Jan -12 -11.7
Narjan-mar seems to be an exception, skewing a little colder:
Nar’jan-mar, Russia
WU GISS
Oct. 2 5.7
Sept. 6 5.7
Aug 9 9.7
Jul 15 15.9
Jun 9 9.0
May -1 -1.1
April -8 -7.6
March -13 -14.5
Feb -15 -14.5
Jan -9 -9.2
IF Weather Underground is rounding down all of its mean temps, GISS’s anomalies may be less noticable. If not, then, with very few exceptions, the data skew warmer for GISS.
It looks like they also have the duplicate problem with Sept.-Oct temps in Gabes and Gafsa, in North Africa.