Something hinky this way comes: NCDC data starts diverging from GISS

I got an email today from Barry Hearn asking me if I knew what was going on with the NCDC data set. It seems that it has started to diverge from GISS, and now is significantly warmer in April 2009.

What is interesting is that while NCDC went up in April,  UAH, and GISS both went down. RSS went up slightly, but is still much lower in magnitude, about 1/3 that of NCDC.  HadCRUT is not out yet.

Here is a look at the most recent NCDC data plotted against GISS data:

Here is a list of April Global Temperature Anomalies for all four major datasets:

NCDC   0.605 °C

GISS    0.440 °C

RSS    0.202 °C

UAH   0.091 °C

It is quite a spread, a whole 0.514°C difference between the highest (NCDC) and the lowest (UAH), and a 0.165°C difference now between GISS and NCDC. We don’t know where HadCRUT stands yet, but it typically comes in somewhere between GISS and RSS values.

Source data sets here:

NCDC

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

Previous NCDC version to 2007 here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_and_ocean.90S.90N.df_1961-1990mean.dat

GISS

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

RSS

ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_2.txt

UAH

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

While it is well known that GISS has been using an outdated base period (1951-1980) for calculating the anomaly, Barry points out that they have been tracking together fairly well, which is not unexpected, since GISS uses data from NCDC’s USHCN and COOP weather station network, along with GHCN data.

NCDC made the decision last year to update to a century long base period, this is what Barry Hearn’s junkscience.com page said about it then:

IMPORTANT NOTE May 16, 2008: It has been brought to our attention that NCDC have switched mean base periods from 1961-90 to 1901-2000. This has no effect on absolute temperature time series with the exception of land based temperatures. The new mean temperature base is unchanged other than land based mean temperatures for December, January and February (the northern hemisphere winter), with each of these months having their historical mean raise 0.1 K.

At this time raising northern winter land based temperatures has not

altered published combined annual means but we anticipate this will

change and the world will get warmer again (at least on paper, which

appears to be about the only place that is true).

So even with this switch a year ago, the data still tracked until recently. Yet all of the sudden in the past couple of months, NCDC and GISS have started to diverge, and now NCDC is the “warm outlier”.

Maybe Barry’s concern in the second paragraph is coming true.

So what could explain this? At the moment I don’t know. I had initially thought perhaps the switch to USHCN2 might have something to do with this, but that now seems unlikely, since the entire data set would be adjusted, not just a couple of months.

The other possibility is a conversion error or failure somewhere. Being a USA government entity, NCDC works in Fahrenheit on input data, while the other data sets work in Centigrade. Converting NCDC’s April value of of 0.605(assuming it may be degrees °F) to Centigrade results in 0.336°C, which seems more reasonable.

Unfortunately, since NCDC makes no notes whatsoever on the data they provide on the FTP site, nor even a readme file about it with anything relevant, it is hard to know what units we are dealing with. They have plenty of different datasets here: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/

But the readme file is rather weak.

What is clear though is that there has been a divergence in the last couple of months, and NCDC’s data went up when other datasets went down.

So, I’m posting this to give our readers a chance to analyze and help solve this puzzle. In the meantime I have an email into NCDC to inquire.

What REALLY needs to happen is that our global temperature data providers need to get on the same base period so that these data sets presented to the public don’t have such significant differences in anomaly.

Standardized reporting of global temperature anomaly data sets would be good for climate science, IMHO.