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.
DR-
You completely missed my point. I am not criticizing the UAH data (in fact, in an earlier post I pointed out that GISS, Hadley, UAH, and RSS all show essentially the same trend over the long run).
What I am pointing out is the blatant double standard exhibited by some/many here.
GISS/Hanson make a mistake involving a small area of the earth for a single month and (some) posters here want Hanson’ head on a platter.
But UAH’s mistake- which affected 20+ years of data, well, that’s not even worthy of mention.
GISS’s argument that surface stations provide more reliable results than satellites becomes increasingly untenable. When you try to explain to an earthling, i.e. someone not obsessed with climate, why the Goddard Institute for Space Studies uses surface stations you can watch their eyes roll as they try to make sense out of the thing. Maybe there is no sense to be made out of it anymore?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
2008-11-11: Most data posted yesterday were replaced by the data posted last month since it looks like some mishap might have occurred when NOAA updated their GHCN data. We will postpone updating this web site until we get confirmation from NOAA that their updating programs worked properly. Because today is a Federal Holiday, some pages are still showing yesterday’s data.
well;
RealClimate; our comments under attack.
We in the peanut gallery. under attack.
well…well
Bizarre, totally bizarre. It’s time to get a new weatherman, lol – Hansen is obviously out of his element now. He can’t even figure out which data is good and which is corrupt. Satellites rule, GISS drools.
[…] GISS Releases (Suspect) October 2008 Data […]
<>
Except for the media reporting October 2008 as the warmest October ever. And since this is really more about driving policy than it is about science, this is actually the bit that actually matters.
**Of course, this issue will resolve itself. After all, no one really acts based on one month’s climate report.**
Except for the media reporting October 2008 as the warmest October ever. And since this is really more about driving policy than it is about science, this is actually the bit that actually matters.
(I posted this comment earlier but it might have fallen foul of the spam filter)..
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.
Whom gods destroy, they first make mad.
I suppose everyone thinks that the temps coming from Russian weather stations are totally reliable, and that Putin and Co. would not manipulate data to their own advantage if possible. Come on, folks, get real. Putin’s not stupid, he knows that the more we spend on this CO2 folly, the longer our economies will be flat on their backs. When the data conflicts so drastically with that of our own satellites, I think it’s time we reevaluate the data stream from Russian ground stations.
BC,
I’m not saying that there is any solid proof that AGW has caused changes in wildfire incidence rates or severity. I certainly didn’t say that, nor did the paper I cited say that. Neither would I support the NOAA chap you quote, presuming that they were accurately quoted. The upward trend in wildfire incidence and the apparent correlation with rising temps is likely superficial. I was actually talking about the variability in climate, so was the paper I cited. I’m saying that climate variability undoubtedly plays a role in modulating the temporal and spatial variability in incidence rates and severity of boreal forest fires. The paper I cited is one example of many highlighting the correlation between wildfires and climate variability. Can you honestly ignore the impact of El Nino on wildfires in places like SoCal and Indonesia for example? True, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but how you can state that knowing full well that temperature and precipitation control growth season, dry fuel loading and peat/humus drying rates is odd. Given this, how can you so confidently rule out the possible influence of future climatic change upon wildfires….bizarre!
I wholeheartedly agree with your statements regarding the influence of misguided human management of forests upon wildfires and the influence of the spread of sub-urban dwellings into fire prone areas upon wildfires. This is not in question. I just don’t see how this somehow undoes what we know about plants, rainfall, temperatures and dry fuel loadings.
Chris V
We are not paid to get it right. Hansen is paid to get it right and spends his time lobbying for CO2 reductions and supporting AGW civil actions world wide. NASA has created a non science climate in their own house and attempts to perpetrate it on the world. It was not just a simple error but one of continuing errors. If we are to believe the president elect he will spend trillions of dollars fixing a non problem. Simple mistake indeed!
Mountains, molehills
There were 90 stations for which October numbers equalled September numbers in the corrupted GHCN file for 2008 (out of 908). This compares with an average of about 16 stations each year in the last decade (some earlier years have bigger counts, but none as big as this month, and are much less as a percentage of stations). These other cases seem to be mostly legitimate tropical stations where there isn’t much of a seasonal cycle. That makes it a little tricky to automatically scan for this problem, but putting in a check for the total number or percentage is probably sensible going forward.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mountains-and-molehills/langswitch_lang/fr
MSU TLT Oct Rank warmest
1995 10 0.205 9
1996 10 0.125 12
1997 10 0.22 8
1998 10 0.461 2
1999 10 0.063 14
2000 10 0.103 13
2001 10 0.327 5
2002 10 0.139 11
2003 10 0.464 1
2004 10 0.331 4
2005 10 0.394 3
2006 10 0.315 6
2007 10 0.225 7
2008 10 0.181 10
Thanks, MartinGAtkins.
But wouldn’t it be more accurate [and honest] to say that October 2008 ranks as the 5th coldest, rather than the 10th warmest out of the last 14 years?
John Phillip-
There were only 908 stations globally used for the October 2008 numbers? That seems awfully low, considering that the U.S. has thousands of NOAA recognized stations alone…
The GISS error points out, if it needed to be pointed out again, the advantage of satellite data over ground station data…
One or two Russian bloggers have commented that October seemed to be about as mild as September, a possible explanation for the similarity in the two datasets. Now I didn’t have the energy or the brains to work out the odds on this; I did however do a quick scan of the UK Met Office UK climate dataset. In any two succesive years the chance of a particular month showing an identical temperature for both years are about 1 in 80. The chances of two months following each other being identical are of course much lower. There is no year recorded where October was as warm or warmer than September, although theoretically possible the chances of this must be fairly minimal. The odds against identical temperatures being recorded over a number of stations dispersed across Russia must be astronomical.
In similar vein has anyone ever thought to calculate the minimum number of stations needed to give a meaningful world average temperature? I would have thought a mere hundred would do if they were properly scattered. At the moment there seems to be a tyranny of numbers, surely fewer stations of absolutely unimpeachable quality would give a more accurate figure. And less chance of a GISS type screw up. I would do this myself but lack the neccessary geek qualities.
IIRC Hansen said it could be done with as few as 60.
Seems to me like a lowball.
John Philip:
Suppose UAH or RSS was off one month by something like 0.7 degrees, do you think RC would classify it as “a molehill”?
Of course mistakes happen, what is interseting is that an obviously absurd result sailed straight through GISS, most likely because it was wrong in the “right” direction. I am quite sure this would never have happened in March/April for obvious reasons.
Jared,
GISS doesn’t need to have many stations when they do 1200 km smoothing.
Jared – Messrs Watts and Goetz know far more about this than I but from memory I believe the Met Station element of GISTEMP is built on about 4000 land stations globally, being the subset that have a reasonable history. There’s a list of the stations actually used here
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/station_list.txt
US Stations have a country code cc=425.
I suspect Gavin means the corruption is confined to a single data file containing 908 station records, but I could be mistaken. If it is 90 stations affected globally then a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that correcting this foulup is unlikely to move Oct 08 off the top spot as warmest Oct in the GISS dataset.
I’ll wager that when the corrections are made another couple of warm spots will pop up.
is this change we can believe in?