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.
Can we just go back to a system where actual temp is measured over the course of a month and an adverage temp is reached by adding them all up and dividing by the number of days in the month. who came up with this anomily crap anyhow?
evanjones,
As I recall, without a link to verify, it was Gavin Schmidt that said 60 good stations worldwide would be sufficient. He may have been referencing someone else’s work at that time…
I have a simple question, does anybody at GISS know the meaning of data quality auditing? Or is it now 100% ideology nonstop?
What would any legitimate business do if one of their research groups published this obviously flawed data set? Why yes, you are right, they would be fired.
Science deserves better.
Chris V.,
I don’t think this error is comparable to any error that occured with one of the satellite systems.
This error was ridicilously obvious, and should have been discovered and corrected immediately.
Either there is practically no quality control at all, or the software is just to poor to be maintained or checked.
Both cases demand, that GISS/NOAA should no longer be used or referred to in scientific literature.
Thanks for the info, John Phillip.
But I guarantee fixing this error will remove October 2008 from the top warm spot. Remember, because of GISS’s smoothing methods, as described by others in this thread, those 90 stations can cover a very big area (and do, in this instance, if you look at the absurdly large 4-13.7C anomaly on the GISS map). Russia is geographically the largest country on earth.
Once again, look to the satellite data. RSS and UAH are showing Oct 2008 to be one of the coldest in the past 10 years, so there is no way I’m going to believe GISS if it still says October 2008 is even close to the warmest ever.
GISS was slow to realize their mistake because the wrong answer looked so atractive to them.
>>John M (16:15:28)
HAHAHAHA, thanks for a good laugh!
Thanks and keep up the good work WUWT.
Unless Gavin has an inside track, where is he getting this 90 of 906 stations?
Secondly if that is the case, even so, the correction should be significantly down to below “record” values.
[…] was the hottest October ever recorded. Wait! September?” Read more here and also here. […]
If local climate is long term weather in one place, and if we accept that it is variable and extremes will cancel out in the long term to reveal a trend, would it not be more valuble to examine say a 10 year running average of climate at specific sites ?
If we were to take a small number of well spread reliable stations (60 as Hansen suggests? or more?) what would the trends be? Could we then average the trends and how would that look? Has someone done this already? Am I suggesting something ludicrous?
“has anyone ever thought to calculate the minimum number of stations needed to give a meaningful world average temperature?”
One would have to find a place where surrounding conditions are relatively static. I suppose that fixed buoys scattered about the world’s oceans would do the trick. No need to have land stations at all, really. There wouldn’t be such a wide range between high and low either. Use buoys to measure “surface” temperature globally between the arctic and antarctic and use satellite data to fill in the polar regions. That should give a pretty darned good idea of “global” temperature, I would think. No need to go measuring all that noise introduced by land masses since most of the planet is ocean anyway.
I have no words but one: unbelievable
Come to think of it, we can probably already do that. Chances are that at any given time there is a ship of one sort or another in just about any grid square one might draw up in the oceans. Just have ships report daily air temperature and position at a given time each day. It could be automated. The ships would report local current air temperature at, say, 0000Z, automatically. That would give you a “snapshot” of world temperatures at that given moment. You could track changes in average global temperature on a daily basis that way.
Since the ships would be reporting their position along with their data, you select one closest to the center of the grid if more than one report from that square. Such a thing would probably be a lot more accurate than land-based temperature measurements.
Today the Danish government tripled Bjørn Lomborgs research budget for 2009. The reason: He is constantly mentioned as one of most influential scientist’s world wide and the Government is hosting a big environmental event next year.
The decision to raise his research budget however is heavily criticized in the local media because of the fact that he doesn’t think that global warming is the world’s biggest treat.
Lomborg thinks that problems like malnutrition, malaria, AIDS and poisoned water in the 3. World is more important to solve than reducing Co2 emissions…What evil thoughts!
You ask: How much is his budget next year? 1,5 million $….
I don’t even think GISS could buy a desent data cleansing application for 1,5 M$
How many polar bears will drown before we come to our senses?
Global WARMING (or freezing.. I’m not sure) can be stopped if we all stop driving, eating meat, buying things, going to work, drinking water from plastic bottles, using plastic bags for groceries, spraying crops, killing seals, voting for right wing leaders, having kids, and building homes.
Listen to those that know – we are doomed.
Considering the costs such “science” could bring, this is far more embarrasing and worse than the Mars Polar Lander imperial/metric scandal in 2000.
But, lets look at the positive side; They do not control nuclear power plants…
Copy of e-mail sent to our friend James E Hansan of NASA this evening
Dear James
Re: Heatwave – Russia – October
Read this on your NASA profile:
“One of my research interests is radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres, especially interpreting remote sounding of the earth’s atmosphere and surface from satellites. Such data, appropriately analyzed, may provide one of our most effective ways to monitor and study global change on the earth. The hardest part is trying to influence the nature of the measurements obtained, so that the key information can be obtained.”
Well once again you have influenced the measurements obtained.
Hockey stick revisited me thinks. Surely retirement beckons.
Kind regards
Richard Lawson
Ps apparently there is some great skiing to be had in the Urals at the moment!
Daily Tech just reported this.
The article’s last sentence:
“Dr. Hansen could not be reached for comment.”
The error “might” have been a legitimate error – Hansen is so careless with all other data and statements that form all of the parts of his zealous “mission to convert the earth” that he would NOT be checking himself or expecting an error when/if he (or his underlings) makes a mistake that shows temperatures are HOTTER.
(Note that if the mistake had shown a negative or lower temperature, Hansen would have been all over it immediately.)
However …. This DOES demonstrate that Hansen’s basic, fundamental “scientific methods and practices” as head of GISS is fatally flawed and politically motivated.
—
Note that this “error” by Hansen is being picked up by sevarel political websites, as additional evidence of the false hysteria associated with Hansen’s AGW religion.
When you run a scam its a scam ,very simple really ,you have no quantified equasion that can predict the furure ,if you did you could predict everything ,without it you have nothing but rhetoric ,dont you people know its simply impossible .
The secret society of climate science continues.
Hansen could never be reached for comment because these folks (Hansen, Schmidt, Mann, etc.) think they’re so exclusive because they’re the gate keepers and key holders to the most important scientific data around these days, the temperature record.
None of them ever want to discuss their adjustment procedures, computing algoritims, or data collection processes (ie. which station to use and why not to use others).
I bet we’ll all see some press release in the coming weeks explaining that 2008 is the 5th or 8th warmest year ever recorded by GISS and how remarkable it is because we weren’t having an el nino. And WOW, could you imagine if we WERE having an el Nino? Those 4-13.7°C anomalies would be centered over the Pacific instead of Russia.
GISS should be tossed to the scrap heap. The number of mistakes found that artificially inflate temperatures are increasing with each month that passes. Temperatures from the 1920’s and 1930’s remained the same for 50-60 years until global warming became an issue and Hansen was put in charge of keeping the NASA temperature record. Suddenly it was adjusted colder at the beginning of the 20th century and wamrer at the end. Then it was found out that an error in GISS algoritim was the cause of this mistake. I guess when someone has to readjust the data dozens of times to suit their point of view there’s a greater chance for a mistake.
The thing that bothers me about this incident is “why / how” it was caught.
I am ashamed to say that when I grabbed the GISS data yesterday I looked at the anomaly graph, saw the dark red splotch in the middle of central Asia, and did nothing more but mutter “that’s interesting” to myself. I had simply become used to seeing big red splotches in such maps.
What’s worse is that the folks at GISS apparently did the same thing. I did not ask and they did not ask “why”. Collectively we assumed that it made sense.
Then comes along John S. who actually looks into the reason why, and he discovers a flaw in the data. A couple emails fly, I update this site with the discovery and Steve McIntyre writes of his classically witty posts on Climate Audit describing the problem. Emails fly to GISS and NOAA and the faulty results are pulled until they can be fixed.
The even-handed folks at RC note that even though “nothing of any consequence has changed in terms of our understanding of climate change”, it is good so many eyes are fixed on the data and results because it means a “few more i’s have been dotted and t’s crossed.”
The error was pretty big – some 10+ degrees Celsius. That seems a pretty big I or T to me. I worry about the small i’s and t’s that go unnoticed. Remember that we are talking about a fairly small trend here (oh sure, it looks big when I display it as an anomaly on a magnified plot). Case in point, Jean S. noticed this very same problem occurring with Finish stations in September. But it was not large enough to grab anyone’s attention (although it seems to have been fixed, perhaps by the addition of new Finnish records).
I am left thinking how large must the error be for it to be noticed, or how small must it be to go unnoticed?
[…] LINK TO HANSEN SHENANIGANS […]
Come on Manfred!
Do you really think that the GISS error (which involved less than 10% of the stations, for a single month, and was discovered within 24 hours) is more serious than the UAH error, which significantly affected their global anomaly trend for more than 20 years worth of data?
That there was an error in the UAH data was also “ridiculously obvious” to many for a long time, because it was so different from the GISS, Hadley and RSS temperature trends.
Would you be as magnanimous if GISS announced a 20+ year error, and suddenly increased their temperature trend by 25%?
But the UAH temperatures are produced by Spencer and Christy (who are on the side of goodness and light), while GISSTemp is produced by the evil Hanson. 😉
I don’t think the UAH data should now be thrown out because they made a mistake- they fixed it! And I don’t think the RSS or GISS data should be thrown because they made (and fixed) some mistakes.
You also might want to take a look at this:
http://cce.890m.com/giss-vs-all.jpg
and tell me which temperature set(s) “should no longer be used or referred to in scientific literature”, and why.
From DailyTech:
“NOAA’s Deputy Director of Communications, Scott Smullens, tells DailyTech that NOAA is responsible only for temperature readings in the US, not those in other nations.”
Ok, but isnt the temp trend still going up? It still looks like GW is real. There have been cooling periods around 1950 and 1965. Its not like the temp is going to go straight up.