Corrected NASA GISTEMP data has been posted

After GISS’s embarrasing error with replicating September temperatures in the October analysis, the NASA GISTEMP website was down for awhile today (at least for me).

This evening, the new gridded data was posted, and I generated a world temperature anomaly map with the new data. It clearly has some changes in it from the previous erroneous version.

See below:

GISTEMP 11-12-08 – Click for larger image

You can plot your own here at this link to GISTEMP’s map maker

Now compare the above corrected version with the erroneous one below:

GISTEMP 11-11-08

I’m sorry for the small map, as I was traveling during much of this debacle, and was not able to be online much at all. This one above comes courtesy of Kate at SDA who saved one (thanks Kate).

Note the bottom scale, the top end on the erroneous one was 13.7°C, while the corrected one tops out at 8°C. That alone should have set off alarm bells at GISS. Personally, I don’t believe the 8°C anomaly either, since much of the Russian weather data is suspect to start with, and the data distribution is sparse.

So far, no mention of the new data beyond this yesterday at the NASA GISS news page:

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.

We live in interesting times.