A couple of days ago, I located the “long lost” Honolulu Observatory GISS weather station on the Island of Oahu with just a couple of hours of digging. That one apparently got “lost” because the station name changed, and the inter-agency communications seemed to be the cause, and nobody at GISS bothered to look to see if there was still current data coming from the station.
Today I found one in under 5 minutes. I wasn’t even planning on looking for one, it happened by accident. I was watching the Discovery Channel TV show this afternoon “Deadliest Catch” where crab fishermen brave the worst imaginable weather to keep crab shacks running nationwide. They are based out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
While watching a scene where they were coming into the docks, I saw an ever so brief flash of what looked like a Stevenson Screen off in the distance near the docks. I hadn’t expected to see one and I wasn’t 100% sure, but I thought I’d check NCDC’s metadatabase (MMS) for Dutch Harbor, AK. Sure enough, they have a COOP station there with a Stevenson Screen there that is “current”.
When NCDC says “MAX-MIN THERMOMETERS”. that means mercury thermometers in a Stevenson Screen.
The MMS Location description tab had this:
Topographic Details: TOPO- STN NEAR WATERFRONT, ACROSS HARBOR FROM DUTCH HARBOR ARPT IN VILLAGE OF UNALASKA. MNTOUS ISLAND. STN EXPOSED TO STRONG TURBULENT WINDS AND TEMPS INFLUENCED BY SURROUNDING WAT
I assume the last word was to be “WATER” and they ran out of characters in the database field. The MMS database also mentions it to be located at REEVES TERMINAL, which I assume is the ship terminal/dock.
Here is where the lat/lon given by NCDC places it, I seem to recall my brief glimpse was closer to the docks visible near the top of the image, but the lat/lon given by NCDC is not always accurate:
So I was curious to see what the temperature record looked like in this very remote part of Alaska. I figured if it was an active weather station, GISS would have a plot of it. They did indeed but it was not what I expected to find:
Here is the link to the GISTEMP graph above.
Huh. Big data hole. But NCDC said it is current? WUWT?
So I decided to look at the COOP section of NCDC, and sure enough it WAS current to April 2009. I found the most current B91 form and downloaded it.
Here’s the PDF of the form: Dutch_Harbor_April2009
Seeing the big hole in the GISS data, I decided to look for the data forms backwards, and sure enough, it is current all the way back to 1985 where it picks up in January and appears to have every month through April 2009.
So why does GISS not have this data? Remembering the name change which happened in Oahu, names again come to mind. I can’t be sure, but it might have something to do with the station name spelling.
- I spell the station name this way: Dutch Harbor
- NCDC MMS spells it this way: Dutch Harbor
- NCDC B91 selector spells it this way: Dutch Harbor
- The station COOP observer spells it on the B91: Dutch Harbor
NASA GISS spells it on the graph header and web page station selector:
Harbour? WUWT? It’s an American port!
I checked this guide for differences in British, Canadian, and American spelling, and sure enough:
Note to Gavin: change the spelling in the GISTEMP database and the station data might automatically kick in on the next data pass.
Glad to help! Got any more lost stations and station data you need found? We’ll look for the last 20+ years of Dutch Harbor data to show up in GISTEMP real soon.
UPDATE:
In comments “timetochooseagain” writes-
I’m reminded of this from John Christy:
“the use of a few popular stations for which the data are easy to find, leads to too much warming when the averages are constructed. I have published research for North Alabama, Central California and in a few months East Africa, in which I went back to the original sources of data to augment the number of stations by roughly a factor of ten – indeed, ten times more stations. This effort requires significant time in searching for and manually digitizing the records for scientific purposes. In each case, I’ve found that the data sets based on a few popular stations overstate the warming by up to a factor of three.”
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy/ChristyJR_WM_Written_090225.pdf
Update2: I’ve removed a sentence related to Gavin Schmidt and British spelling of the station name, since he’s not at fault, GHCN managed by NCDC is the source of error -Anthony
Not to me it doesn’t. They are funded by taxes. They are not businesses. That data is public. It’s our data. Charging for it is bogus. They make public policy based on that data, and we have a right to know what it is and they have an obligation to provide it. Is it to be “data for the rich”?
It’s my data. Gimme.
The principles of cost recovery go back to the 1980s – and the dominant ideology of that time. I think we can all remember that era, and the “government is the problem” dogma that took hold.
So every single item of ‘government’ data should be available, free of charge, to every single citizen?
Good luck with that, and the tax rises required to fund it.
Philip Jones, I take it that you’re unaware of the backstory on Gavin. Late Superbowl Sunday, I posted at CA that there were some problems with the Harry station used in Steig et al. – the archived version at the British Antarctic Survey was a splice of two unrelated stations though I hadn’t then worked out which stations were in the splice. A couple of readers and I traded ideas and I signed off the night.
Although Gavin had no prior record of any interest in station data, while I was busy with my family, Gavin pored over minutiae of station data and got the BAS data changed the next morning. At realclimate, he told a CA reader that someone had “independently” discovered the problem with Harry and blamed me for failing to promptly notify the BAS of the error. It seemed remarkable that someone could have “independently” identified this obscure problem referred to at CA, but that was Gavin’s claim. Why was this mystery man? http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5077
Soon afterwards, the BAS outed Gavin as being his own mystery man. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5093
Gavin pretended that his only concern was the veracity of station data. OK, if he’s red hot concerned about the veracity of station data, then he should be as aggressive in getting Dutch Harbor fixed as he was in getting Harry fixed.
If he is not particularly interested in minutiae of station data (as he now says), then his explanation at the time – that he was merely interested in the veracity of station data – is untrue.
Anthony and I are both aware of this back story and that’s the reason for the jibes.
Given Gavin’s new story (and it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the Team), readers should ask themselves why was Gavin so red hot to get the screwed up Harry data expunged from the BAS archive? (And it was expunged within 24 hours without any record of a change being made. A change notice and record of the flawed data was only posted after my request.)
I meant Philip Johns.
Sorry bout that. Freudian slip.
Gary, it is my understanding that NOAA does not charge university researchers for the data. Giiven that Anthony’s purposes are academic rather than commercial, as I noted above, he has every right to request a waiver of the fees.
Anthony can certainly request a waiver – I recommend that he do so, in fact.
Philip Johns (18:54:49) :
So every single item of ‘government’ data should be available, free of charge, to every single citizen?
Good luck with that, and the tax rises required to fund it.
That’s like the parricide asking leniency from the court on the grounds that he’s an orphan. I’ve got the suspicion that a national data library would run a lot less than what has already been allocated for “stimulus” and is certainly less than cap and trade will cost. Data that is being used to drive important national decisions should be available to everyone who wants it free of charge.
The formulation of a national data policy is not something that can be reduced to a snide one-liner, but in the long run, yes, publicly funded data should be publicly available. There will almost certainly be issues of national security, fair use, individual privacy (I’d love to have the census data set….) …. Maybe RP Jr. would like to stop by and address this issue….. but yes, Mr. Johns, to resurrect an old slogan, data wants to be free.
Al Gour ?
Regarding taxes, costs, and fees:
Why does it cost us anything to go to a State or Federal Park? Usually there is an entrance fee. Do you want to camp? Do you want an electrical hookup? Do you want to dump your camper waste? At what point are my tax dollars paying for your camping experience? I accept and willing pay taxes that we might have a national park that I may never visit. If you want to use electricity therein to keep your beer cold I am in favor of you paying a fee.
Anthony, ask your local university to request the data. Someone mentioned that should work and be free.
John F. Hultquist (21:32:34) :
Regarding taxes, costs, and fees:
Why does it cost us anything to go to a State or Federal Park? Usually there is an entrance fee. Do you want to camp? Do you want an electrical hookup? Do you want to dump your camper waste? At what point are my tax dollars paying for your camping experience? I accept and willing pay taxes that we might have a national park that I may never visit. If you want to use electricity therein to keep your beer cold I am in favor of you paying a fee.
Anthony, ask your local university to request the data. Someone mentioned that should work and be free.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but we are talking about data that exists already on government servers that is being sold instead of allowed open access.
That is somewhat a different matter than charging to provide services for individuals.
Yes. Also one is not basing public policy based on camping. The data is being used to bring about heinously expensive public policy. There are no issues of proprietorship nor of national security. Therefore, the data should be freely available.
Mike McMillan (20:20:19) :
Al Gour ?”
He runs the DOC in Dutch Harbore.
RE Philip Johns (12:37:08) :
You wrote:
“Another analogy would be a retailer who ordered several thousand live lobsters, inevitably a proprtion would be DOA. The business that ordered a postmortem into every last dead crustacean would not be in business very long.”
I’ll suppose that you have never done retail. Typically, in a retail contract, there is a stipulated DOA rate. For example in electronics I would warrent a DOA rate of <2%. FA ( failure analysis) is typically triggered if the DOA rate
goes above the expected rate. even when the FA is below 2% we would periodically perform FA. If I manufacture a device that costs 1000 dollars and warrant a DOA rate of 2%, the cost of DOA is 20 per unit.
If the cost of FA is low relative to this, then FA of every unit might make sense, at least initially, especially if I can lower the DOA rate to say 1%.
Some of these data ( like serial numbers and date codes )are collected as a routine part of the return process.. " hey joe, we got another crate of dead lobsters from Jiffy lobsters, thats the third this week!" anyways your analogy falls flat: The cost of doing QA, even routine QA, on the data sources that GISS uses is small. Very simply it would be a part of any serious research proposal into global temp. The code is trivial. I know, I've read it. And some of the QA required but not performed is also trivial. Look now at the cost of getting it wrong, cost to the credibility of the AGW story.
Second, in the retail example, the retailer is constantly getting a new supply of lobsters. As long as the DOA rate is low, you are right there is no sense
in checking EVERY dead lobster. Check a few. But the case with Temperature stations is entirely different. Their number is fixed. Further, we know from Climate science, nay from gavin himself that "60 good stations" are all we need. If you only need "60 good stations" then it would only make sense to invest the one time effort to identify those stations that are good and shit can the rest. In your lobster example, it would be like finding the bad supplier and stopping orders from him.
"Actually, given that a lot of the data is online, a systematic investigation into ‘missing’ NCDC data feeds might make an interesting volunteer project, as long as the expected result was not predetermined, naturally."
Funny, you predetermine that the wholesale lack of such an effort on the part of GISS is not of interest.
"But I fear the relevance of Dr Schmidt’s nationality still escapes me, given that
– GISS does not own the Station Inventory File
– The data dropout dates from 11 years before Gavin joined NASA
;-)"
Oh gosh, In one of my first jobs I had to process the sensor inputs from 1000s of stations. The provenance of this data was spotless
and highly classified. Again the math was trivial, just combine that data from this disparate set of sensors ( spread throughout the former easter block) into one number. As part of of my routine I "looked" at each individual track. Man it sucked and nobody could figure out why I would check data that was A) collected before my time. B) already been validated by 3 letter agencies. C) took so damn long. They didn't laugh when I found a error that had escaped people for 10 years. I didn't OWN the inventory file. I used it. and before I used it my sense of getting things right said " do some sanity checks" Look for missing data, change points, outliers, duplicate records, all those silly errors that creep into "validated" data sets. And it wasn't that hard, just a bit tedious. Finally, you don't get gavins role in this because you havent followed the discussion closely enough.
Seven 10ths of a degree over 100 years is a major foundation in the Alarmist house of cards.
Raw USHCN shows +0.14C. With TOBS (calculated by unreleased algorithm rather than taken from B-91 forms), it’s +0.31.
With FILNET/SHAP, it’s +0.59 (SHAP being a positive adjustment is an enormity).
And this does not consider microsite issues, which I believe add a spurious +0.2C to the record.
Long story short, I doubt it’s even as much as +0.7C.
One wonders how much tolerance one would have if, for example, a Mr. Balfor made a deposit at his bank and it was instead improperly credited to a Mr. Balfour’s account. Not much I suspect.
If the nations’ banks can, for the most part, keep their millions of accounts [datasets] correct to the penny, each month, year in and year out, then why should we not expect a little better accuracy from GISS or NCDC or whoever is responsible for missing/misplaced/misfiled/misspelled data?
In my dealings with several banks over a period of five decades, I have encountered less bank errors than the number of digits on my left hand. [A few more than that for my errors, though!]
Steve Mosher But the case with Temperature stations is entirely different. Their number is fixed.
Get your facts right (you could start with reading Gavin’s RC comment), the stations that release monthly data (or not) each month is decided by NOAA, and the data is then collated by GCHN. NASA have no control over which stations they receive data from each month. Once again, you have the wrong target.
REPLY: Your previous comment was deleted, feel free to resubmit it sans the insult. It was uncalled for, and I don’t much care for it, especially from somebody with a false identity. If you want to insult Mr. Mosher and I have the courage to use your real name. – Anthony
Mr Johns…
It’s not the target that is important… It’s the slipshod and incompetent methods of data collection that are the problem.
OK. Let me be quite clear, I am not defending the data loss,if you read back you will see that I described it as an ’embarrassing foulup’ or similar. And WUWT deserves credit for identifying what may be the cause of the data dropout.
Still the OP is problematic,
Maybe it has something to do with Gavin Schmidt being British? …Note to Gavin: change the spelling in the GISTEMP database and the station data might automatically kick in on the next data pass.
Which is nonsense and kicked off a cascade of personal jibes [Steve M’s word, not mine] in the comments.
This displays a flawed understanding, GISS do not maintain the station list, Gavin has no hand in running GISTEMP, and the data first disappeared from the record over a decade before he joined NASA. His nationality is thus an irrelevance, and it is GHCN who need to fix their station list, not NASA.
AN attribute of a good auditor is impartiality, strange then that Steve McInytre drops by to make an anti-Schmidt jibe but is nearly silent on this misinformation, hmmmm? You can read Gavin’s side of the BAS data correction kerfuffle here…
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/warm-reception-to-antarctic-warming-story/#comment-111354
Since this thread is apparently now more about attempts to personalise the issue, and ‘jibes’ than serious debate, I am signing off.
The lobster analogy is dead. 😉
jeez:
Philip Johns. It is very simple, Gavin Schmidt is a liar and if he had a real job where he would be under scrutiny for ethical violations from a real employer he would be fired.
Read more here.
Steve Mosher:Oh gosh, In one of my first jobs I had to process the sensor inputs from 1000s of stations. ….
Admirable, but were you also conducting climate research for publication in peer-reviewed journals at the time?
Philip Johns
This attempt at retort is so weak that a succinct description fails me-I’ll just post alternate examples.
1. You’re not a woman, how can you possibly have an opinion on [child rearing, rape, birth control, custody issues, sexual harassment, makeup, etc.]
2. You’re not Black, how can you possibly understand [power issues, oppression, curly hair, race relations, inner city education, drug problems etc.]
3. etc. etc. etc.
Yes, by all means, let me pay you to provide a product, and then pay again for the product itself. And, no, I don’t mind doing my own QA on the product I’ve already paid for… twice. Makes sense to me.
SQUEAK.
Somehow being dead seems to suck, no matter how you slice it, but then i am not dead so i am not entitled on having a opinion about it, right?
Jeez, my point clearly went sailing over your head, it was not about expertise, it was that investigating issues in National Weather Service climate stations is not in Gavin’s job description, therefore the comparison is not valid. You rather make my point that the aim here as much about demonising Dr Schmidt as it is constructive criticism of the data issues.
And RP Jnr is not a reliable source on the politics or the math.
Philip Johns:
So your extra smarty point that my poor little head is incapable of understanding is that the people at GISS are just too busy to check their work or ensure any level of quality. Powerful argument there. I hope someone smarter than me can understand it.
As far as calling Gavin a liar, I am one of the people who witnessed the events unfolding in real time. He is a liar.
Look for yourself where Seth Borenstein calls him out on this thread at RC.
His credibility is sinking to an all time low, except with his disciples and fellow Team members.
Given the massive number of screwups involved in the temperature records (and climate science “studies”), no rational, moral scientist would rely upon it to advocate massive changes to the world economy.
The first step in any analysis has to be to insure the quality of the information. Otherwise, garbage in, garbage out. The scientists in charge of maintaining the database have failed. The scientists who allocate resources have failed. And the scientists who never bothered to check the quality of the records have failed miserably. They shouldn’t be trusted or relied upon for policy advice because they have proven that they aren’t up to the job.
I agree with Philip Johns on one and only one point. The jibe in the head post that spelling error had something to do with Gavin Schmidt being British was inappropriate on two counts: 1) the mis-spelling long preceded Gavin Schmidt and, while there are jibes that are warranted, this particular jibe wasn’t; 2) going a bridge too far enables people like Philip Johns to pick one weakest issue and ignore the other issues.
I suggest that the crack about being British be removed with a note in the comments that you’ve removed a crack.
In return, perhaps Philip Johns would agree that Gavin Schmidt’s changing stories about the nature of his interest in station data don’t hold up. If he is uninterested in station data details, as he now says, this story is inconsistent with his story when he was outed as his own Mystery Man.
REPLY: Thanks Steve, I actually thought Gavin’s British heritage was germane, and that it was relevant to the spelling error, but in the interest of keeping the peace I’ll remove it. – Anthony