Darwin Zero Before and After

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Recapping the story begun at WUWT here and continued at WUWT here, data from the temperature station Darwin Zero in northern Australia was found to be radically adjusted and showing huge warming (red line, adjusted temperature) compared to the unadjusted data (blue line). The unadjusted data showed that Darwin Zero was actually cooling over the period of the record. Here is the adjustment to Darwin Zero:

Figure 1. The GHCN adjustments to the Darwin Zero temperature record.

Many people have written in with questions about my analysis. I thank everyone for their interest. I’m answering them as fast as I can. I cannot answer them all, so I am trying to pick the relevant ones. This post is to answer a few.

• First, there has been some confusion about the data. I am using solely GHCN numbers and methods. They will not match the GISS or the CRU or the HadCRUT numbers.

• Next, some people have said that these are not separate temperature stations. However, GHCN adjusts them and uses them as separate temperature stations, so you’ll have to take that question up with GHCN.

• Next, a number of people have claimed that the reason for the Darwin adjustment was that it is simply the result of the standard homogenization done by GHCN based on comparison with other neighboring station records. This homogenization procedure is described here (PDF).

While it sounds plausible that Darwin was adjusted as the GHCN claims, if that were the case the GHCN algorithm would have adjusted all five of the Darwin records in the same way. Instead they have adjusted them differently (see below). This argues strongly that they were not done by the listed GHCN homogenization process. Any process that changed one of them would change all of them in the same way, as they are nearly identical.

• Next, there are no “neighboring records” for a number of the Darwin adjustments simply because in the early part of the century there were no suitable neighboring stations. It’s not enough to have a random reference station somewhere a thousand km away from Darwin in the middle of the desert. You can’t adjust Darwin based on that. The GHCN homogenization method requires five well correlated neighboring “reference stations” to work.

From the reference cited above:

“In creating each year’s first difference reference series, we used the five most highly correlated neighboring stations that had enough data to accurately model the candidate station.”

and  “Also, not all stations could be adjusted. Remote stations for which we could not produce an adequate reference series (the correlation between first-difference station time series and its reference time series must be 0.80 or greater) were not adjusted.”

As I mentioned in my original article, the hard part is not to find five neighboring stations, particularly if you consider a station 1,500 km away as “neighboring”. The hard part is to find similar stations within that distance. We need those stations whose first difference has an 0.80 correlation with the Darwin station first difference.

(A “first difference” is a list of the changes from year to year of the data. For example, if the data is “31, 32, 33, 35, 34”, the first differences are “1, 1, 2, -1”. It is often useful to examine first differences rather than the actual data. See Peterson (PDF) for a discussion of the use of the “first-difference method” in climate science.)

Accordingly, I’ve been looking at the candidate stations. For the 1920 adjustment we need stations starting in 1915 or earlier. Here are all of the candidate stations within 1,500 km of Darwin that start in 1915 or before, along with the correlation of their first difference with the Darwin first difference:

WYNDHAM_(WYNDHAM_PORT) = -0.14

DERBY = -0.10

BURKETOWN = -0.40

CAMOOWEAL = -0.21

NORMANTON = 0.35

DONORS_HILL = 0.35

MT_ISA_AIRPORT = -0.20

ALICE_SPRINGS = 0.06

COEN_(POST_OFFICE) = -0.01

CROYDON = -0.23

CLONCURRY = -0.2

MUSGRAVE_STATION = -0.43

FAIRVIEW = -0.29

As you can see, not one of them is even remotely like Darwin. None of them are adequate for inclusion in a “first-difference reference time series” according to the GHCN. The Economist excoriated me for not including Wyndham in the “neighboring stations” (I had overlooked it in the list). However, the problem is that even if we include Wyndham, Derby, and every other station out to 1,500 km, we still don’t have a single station with a high enough correlation to use the GHCN method for the 1920 adjustment.

Now I suppose you could argue that you can adjust 1920 Darwin records based on stations 2,000 km away, but even 1,500 km seems too far away to do a reliable job. So while it is theoretically possible that the GHCN described method was used on Darwin, you’ll be a long, long ways from Darwin before you find your five candidates.

• Next, the GHCN does use a good method to detect inhomogeneities. Here’s their description of their method.

To look for such a change point, a simple linear regression was fitted to the part of the difference series before the year being tested and another after the year being tested. This test is repeated for all years of the time series (with a minimum of 5 yr in each section), and the year with the lowest residual sum of the squares was considered the year with a potential discontinuity.

This is a valid method, so I applied it to the Darwin data itself. Here’s that result:

Figure 2. Possible inhomogeneities in the Darwin Zero record, as indicated by the GHCN algorithm.

As you can see by the upper thin red line, the method indicates a possible discontinuity centered at 1939. However, once that discontinuity is removed, the rest of the record does not indicate any discontinuity (thick red line). By contrast, the GHCN adjusted data (see Fig. 1 above) do not find any discontinuity in 1941. Instead, they claim that there are discontinuities around 1920, 1930, 1950, 1960, and 1980 … doubtful.

• Finally, the main recurring question is, why do I think the adjustments were made manually rather than by the procedure described by the GHCN? There are a number of totally independent lines of evidence that all lead to my conclusion:

1. It is highly improbability that a station would suddenly start warming at 6 C per century for fifty years, no matter what legitimate adjustment method were used (see Fig. 1).

2. There are no neighboring stations that are sufficiently similar to the Darwin station to be used in the listed GHCN homogenization procedure (see above).

3. The Darwin Zero raw data does not contain visible inhomogeneities (as determined by the GHCN’s own algorithm) other than the 1936-1941 drop (see Fig. 2).

4. There are a number of adjustments to individual years. The listed GHCN method does not make individual year adjustments (see Fig. 1).

5. The “Before” and “After” pictures of the adjustment don’t make any sense at all. Here are those pictures:

Figure 3. Darwin station data before and after GHCN adjustments. Upper panel shows unadjusted Darwin data, lower panel shows the same data after adjustments.

Before the adjustments we had the station Darwin Zero (blue line line with diamonds), along with four other nearby temperature records from Darwin. They all agreed with each other quite closely. Hardly a whisper of dissent among them, only small differences.

While GHCN were making the adjustment, two stations (Unadj 3 and 4, green and purple) vanished. I don’t know why. GHCN says they don’t use records under 20 years in length, which applies to Darwin 4, but Darwin 3 is twenty years in length. In any case, after removing those two series, the remaining three temperature records were then adjusted into submission.

In the “after” picture, Darwin Zero looks like it was adjusted with Sildenafil. Darwin 2 gets bent down almost to match Darwin Zero. Strangely, Darwin 1 is mostly untouched. It loses the low 1967 temperature, which seems odd, and the central section is moved up a little.

Call me crazy, but from where I stand, that looks like an un-adjustment of the data. They take five very similar datasets, throw two away, wrench the remainder apart, and then average them to get back to the “adjusted” value? Seems to me you’d be better off picking any one of the originals, because they all agree with each other.

The reason you adjust is because records don’t agree, not to make them disagree. And in particular, if you apply an adjustment algorithm to nearly identical datasets, the results should be nearly identical as well.

So that’s why I don’t believe the Darwin records were adjusted in the way that GHCN claims. I’m happy to be proven wrong, and I hope that someone from the GHCN shows up to post whatever method that they actually used, the method that could produce such an unusual result.

Until someone can point out that mystery method, however, I maintain that the Darwin Zero record was adjusted manually, and that it is not a coincidence that it shows (highly improbable) warming.

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