Coal Creek Redux

Should we be using tree rings from bristle cones instead of thermometers to be consistant?

Yeah, it sucks. When I was hired they said I’d be able to bike through most of the winter here, but the roads have been covered with global warming for weeks.

Thanks Richard. I’m down the road in Littleton and I enjoy biking up Deer Creek Canyon. But not much chance this winter. Seems like 4 out of every 5 days have been below the December average high of 43-44. Often by a lot. I liked the winter of 98 much better. On many weekends I could bike on Saturday and ski on Sunday.

So, Watt’s the analysis? Is it the PDO, multi-decadal, solar influence, a combination (of course, it must be)… what? All we know at the moment is it isn’t Carbon!

A bit off topic but here is another Climategate documentary that aired on Finnish state television not long ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unKZhr3JMhA
This is not the same documentary that watts posted about earlier.

Ah! a breath of clear, Colorado fresh air, without the pollution of homogenization, uhi, or improper siting. Thanks, Richard Keen. Also, neat graphs.

And I bought property here in Denver based on the IPCC advice that it would soon be beachfront. (/sarcasm)
If I really believed the IPCC alarmism, the most prudent investments would be guns and ammo.

Why is the cooling trend at Coal Creek significantly more than the rest of the U.S.? And is this neccesarily a sign of things to come in the rest of the country?

Those data points look like they need the Darwin adjustment.

Colorado? This guy is in the pockets of Big Shale!

Global warming has forced the heat to penetrate somewhere in the atmosphere, thus pushing the cold out there down to us!
I guess this soon will be found at http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php …

I guess if Coal Creek is teleconnected to the average temperature for Colorado, then the Fraser-Tabernash site (about 20 miles west of you ?) must have been teleconnected to Alaska before it closed down.

I suppose we will soon get GISS’s announcement that December was the, what, the seventh? Hows that sound? Lets go with seventh warmest December on record. Go GISS!

Your data is identical to my data and the data of my friends. The data was gathered in a triangle that stretches from St. Louis to Richmond to Orlando. The folks in Florida are suffering the most unusual winters. December was January like and January is more like January in south Georgia. All the plants in the yard were killed last year and will be killed again tonight. No fun.

E.M.Smith (15:39:26) :
My comments are generally innocuous but for some reason, I & several others have been routinely tossed in the spam bin.
Whatever the issue was, it seems to have been fixed to have been replaced with another bug where I get the message Transferring data from stats.wordpress,com permanently displayed & have to terminate the page load. 😀
DaveE.

Excellent post Richard but scary, real scary!
Studies like yours are the ones that really do matter. Weather kills, climate doesn’t!
Over here in the UK, the conceit of deluded government, fooled and made ignorant by an environmental agenda supported by wilful abandonment of duty by academia and the Met office have set the scene for widespread manslaughter.
The local authorities, here in Scotland, are desperately trying to replenish gritting stocks for main roads. Fife Region, after only a fortnight actually ran out.
Side streets and pavements are left to look after themselves. This is not a trivial task as I discovered when I was told by a local DIY store that sand, salt and gritt was unavailable. The government had bought it all up!
Old and young alike, are breaking bones after slipping on untreated pavements.
The shock, for the elderly, has already claimed lives.
Already heavy gas usage industry has been asked to reduce consumption. This is remarkable. The recession and low level of heavy industry in the UK means that this usage was historically low anyway. Just how bad at doing their job are our public planners?
Thanks to domestic fuel prices being hyper-inflated by planet saving activism, the poor will be struggling to keep their houses liveable. Those on pre-paid metering will just be cut off. Their pipes will freeze then burst.
Gas prices may well be at a seven year low but consumer prices have never been higher!
I’ve always been unhappy about the rise of the “who can I sue” culture in this country but it has its place.
Car damaged?
Pipes burst?
Bones broken?
Grannie frozen?
Business bankrupted?
Who are you gonna sue?
Local Government? National Government? Academia? The Met office?
All of the above?

AdderW (15:42:06) :
The most frightening thing about the current arguments is that the Sun which couldn’t possibly be the cause of warming is now trotted out as the cause of cooling.
Strange how cooling is always natural but warming is our fault
DaveE.

Mack28 (14:54:10) :
The Times quotes a Chinese observer blaming the Big Freeze on Global Warming.
Do you have a link?

E.M.Smith (15:39:26) :
Well, I noticed when discussing Climategate that the word F-R-A-U-D got me tossed in the bin. WordPress has an odd assortment of words it’s ‘hinky’ about… You can add to the built in list, but not reduce it. (Wonder what legal sites do on WordPress? 😉
Test: Put single letter in italics so word is “broken up” to filter but looks acceptable (works on Intense Debate sites).
Result: fraud

Dr. Keen:
Something I’ve been somewhat concerned about with the usage of the surface station measurements aligns with your work here.
Would it be possible to perform a formal calibration of the Coal Creek surface station measurement to the temperatures reported via satellite? I’d be interested in the strictly local calibration, as well as how well that single measurement might serve as a proxy for the state-wide satellite measurement.

DirkH (16:06:14) :
Re: “Where’s the troll spin in this thread?”
Notice for Skeptical Scientists and other Critical Thinkers.
Since the start of the scientific method blackout at CRU in 1986 there have been other cutbacks. Due to the shortage of trained pro-AGW realclimate.com rebuttalists, we have introduced a self-serve rebuttal system.
To use this new self-serve system simply go to the rebuttal site indicated below and cut and paste the rebuttal that most closely matches the topic of your informed statement into the next available comment window.
For a more immediate rebuttal paste it into the same window as your informed comment.
For a more scientific realclimate.com rebuttal you may choose to add the phrase “Oh Yea!” at the beginning and the phrase “So There!!!!!!” at the end.
scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php
Realclimate/CRU thanks you for you support during these trying times.

Gary Hladik (15:19:28) :
So if this site correlates well with the rest of Colorado’s stations, then the state as a whole must be cooling. As a reward, perhaps the state should be exempted from all CO2 emission restrictions.
In fact, I think we should exempt any state whose “official” temperatures start to decline.
Nothing like a little incentive… 🙂

If you look at the official National Weather Service numbers for Heating degree days in Colorado and Cooling Degree Days you see some clear evidence of a cooling trend.
Cooling degree days (Jan 1 to Jan 1)
2009 ….. TOTAL FM JAN 1 533 DPTR FM NORMAL -163
2008 …. TOTAL FM JAN 1 825 DPTR FM NORMAL +129
2007 …. TOTAL FM JAN 1 963 DPTR FM NORMAL +267
2006 …. SEASONAL TOTAL: 961 DEPARTURE FROM NORMAL: +265
2005 …. SEASONAL TOTAL: 927 DEPARTURE FROM NORMAL: +231
(cooling started in 2008 for summer temperatures)
Heating degree days
2009 ….. TOTAL FM JUL 1 2854 DPTR FM NORMAL +260 (July 1 – Jan 3 2010)
2008 ….. TOTAL FM JUL 1 5616 DPTR FM NORMAL -512 (full heating season)
2007 ….. TOTAL FM JUL 1 6056 DPTR FM NORMAL -72
2006 ….. TOTAL FM JUL 1 6208 DPTR FM NORMAL +80
2005 ….. Seasonal Total: 5876 Departure from Normal: -252
(high variability in heating degree days with sharp increase in heating demand this fall and winter)
As you can see this was an unusually cool summer (-163 cooling degree days from normal) and so far a cool winter season with heating degree days running +260 and we have not even seen the coolest part of the season yet. We are expecting single digit lows the next two days and Dr. Keen should see sub zero F temps up where he lives given normal lapse rates. Although sometimes cool air pools down here in the metro area and is not deep enough to effect the upper reaches of Coal Creek Canyon.
When I used to live up there sometimes you would drive down the hill and see a sudden temperature drop as you drove into the pool of cold air as you neared Rocky Flats as H72 leveled off on the high ground above the metro area. The Denver basin is well known for temperature inversions in winter with a cold pool of air that sloshes up and down the Platte River valley each day. Settling near Greeley in the early morning, then sliding up into the Denver metro area as day time heating pulls air up the river valley. It then sinks back toward Greeley every evening after sunset. This is yet another good reason NOT to smear temperature data from one site to another nearby site. In this part of the country, you can see 30 deg F temperature differences between locations only 2 miles apart if their elevations straddle an inversion layer.
http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=bou
Note that for the state numbers that it appears the cooling started around 2007 based on cooling degree days but the Heating Degree Days show much more variability in winter temps with 2005 and 2008 being very warm winters. Massive temperature differences can occur near the front range due to chinook winds here in Denver with the western metro area 20-30 degrees warmer than the official reporting sites on the eastern edge of the Denver area, and this might account for that high variability. (yet another reason not to smear temperature data!)
It is not uncommon to see a sharp temperature gradient as you move out from the front range due to westerly down slope winds, with above freezing temperatures on the western edge of the metro area, below freezing temps on the eastern edge and near zero readings just a few miles farther east out on the plains.
We had a cool winter in 2006 and a very cool winter season so far in the 2009-2010 heating season. It would take a very warm spring to recover these numbers to near normal if late January and the first 2 weeks of February are typical. Our coldest period of the year frequently falls from mid January to mid Feb which is why it is often referred to as “Stock Show weather” locally, as that is about the time the National Western Stock show comes to town each year.
Larry

The recent cooling trend continues, with 2009 coming in at 38.9F, colder than 2008 and a full 3 degrees F colder than 2003. The “Tipping Point” in 2003-2004 is clear on the updated graph.
There has also been longer winters for 4 years in a row now in the Huancavelica region of the Andes Mountains of Peru.
But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/03/peru-mountain-farmers-winter-cold

I met an acquaintance today in the village shop, and she said that our harsh winters (in UK) were due to global warming. I replied along the lines of “Huh?”, to which she replied that Greenland ice melts and affects (desalinates) the gulf stream which stops working so well and so makes things colder. (Let’s forget for the moment that the gulf stream has little effect upon North America or Siberia etc.) When I got home, I looked for some reference to this tale, and found this: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-warming-may-lead-to-colder-winters-in-britain-406084.html. Of course, the usual “could”s and “may”s were sparsely embedded (as in “The sea level could rise by 25 feet within twenty years due to AGW”).
Now I’ve read somewhere that a release of gigantic amount of fresh water from North America some several thousands of years ago did affect the gulf stream. However, I doubt very much whether the much smaller quantity of melted Greenland ice has had other than a miniscule effect on today’s gulf stream.
Does anyone with more knowledge than I care to contribute their thoughts on this subject?

I just had an interesting idea. I know we have several regular contributors here that live in Colorado and the Denver Metro area, and was thinking it would be interesting to do an Urban heat island test, and get a number of individuals to make simultaneous temperature readings (or as close as reasonably possible) across the Denver Metro basin and surrounding areas.
It might be useful to get a snap shot of how much temperature variability you see in this sort of transitional terrain. I imagine it would make for some useful documentation to show a representative example of real metro area temperature profiles vs temperature records which are “reconstructed” by synthesizing data from nearby reporting stations using the sort of techniques used by the “official sources” and their corrections.
If Dr. Keen or anyone else here in the metro area is interested, perhaps we could put together a temperature snap shot project?
Throw in a dozen or two interested college students and we could get perhaps 30 temperatures across the metro basin and nearby terrain.
If so the moderators, can share my email info with others interested in this sort of ground truth project.
Larry

Pat (17:35:01) , this just goes to show that climate is regional. The USA is going through one of it’s coldest winters while Australia is going through an above average summer.
I think more than anything it demonstrates the nonsense of having a global mean temperature. When you have two disparate regions having temperature extremes, averaging them and saying that there was an 0.?? degree increase for the year overall is… well… silly.

Remember not long ago James Hansen and others called for skeptics to be put on trial. Now the situation is reversed, and pro-AGW scientists have betrayed our trust with Climategate. The ramifications of meddling with climate data are severe, including not only a huge waste of money and resources, but also endangering the lives of millions of people who are forced to cope with cold temperatures and misguided legislation.
Madoff went to prison for swindling thousands of investors. Is Climategate any different? There should be a penalty for scientists who knowingly tamper with crucial climate data, like jailtime. It’s our lives, and our Earth that the warmists are messing with. The geo-engineering schemes that have been proposed to halt “global warming” would have even worse consequences.

I believe This are in Colorado is Rural. If you go out to any rural area and do a temp study, you will find no Warming. It is all the Urban Heat Island throwing of the Data. Yesterday it was 21 degrees warmer in my rural area right out-side Minneapolis, than Minneapolis. Get rid of the Urban Heat Island and the Global Warming would disapear…….John….

John from MN (18:21:54) :

Yesterday it was 21 degrees warmer in my rural area right out-side Minneapolis, than Minneapolis.

You’ve just described an urban cool island John if what you say is true, (that your rural site was 21 degrees warmer)
DaveE.

Lots of neat discussion about little ol’ Coal Creek Canyon!
Here’s a few more cents …
>>Bill Parsons (15:31:54) :
It would be instructive to see records from other observers who have quality records of long duration.
I keep wondering whether coop observers would be willing to just start sending copies of all observations to a neutral party from now on. Might pay to have copies of records if they are getting trashed and distorted.
It is, as Dr. Keen notes, his (and other station-keepers’) work that’s being undermined.
REPLY>>
The NCDC publication “Climatological Data – State, Month, Year” and the like have the original unaltered observations, so there’s no need to bypass the system. Here’s the data flow:
Co-op observers send their data to the local NWS office at the end of the month on a B-91 form. The local office looks for discrepancies, and contacts the observer for correction.
The local NWS sends the B-91 to NCDC, who publishes the data in the CD (state, month, year). You can download the B-91 forms at:
http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/coop/coop.html
NCDC does a little automated quality checking with a routine that compares a station with neighboring stations to find issues like a day with a max of 72 when neighboring stations were in the 20’s. It works pretty well in places like Iowa and Florida, but a few times they “corrected” my observations on days when my site was warmer than lower stations due to inversions. I had backup recordings that showed the original observations were correct, and their QC routine was actually introducing error. I griped, and NCDC no longer uses that routine for my site. This is a form of homogenization, but NCDC publishes both the original and the “corrected” data in the CD.
These “corrected” numbers from the B-91 go to the NCDC monthly averages and to other sites like the Western Regional Climate Center at:
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/Climsum.html
Then the climate change interrogators at NCDC, CRU, and GISS get their hands on this original data and, as they say, torture it until it confesses.
>>royfomr (15:49:36) :
Excellent post Richard but scary, real scary!
Studies like yours are the ones that really do matter. Weather kills, climate doesn’t!
REPLY>>
I think the largest (more than 1 degree C) and most important climate changes are regional – Western US, northern Alaska, etc. – and that those variations are dominated by oceanic influences (PDO, AMO, Nino, etc.), which in turn modulate the weather (storm tracks, number of hurricanes, droughts, …). The much smaller “global average” changes are tweaked by volcanoes, solar variations, cosmic rays, and, yes, greenhouse gases, but these are all in the fractional degree range (say, 0.2C or so).
>>Alan S. Blue (16:31:53) :
Dr. Keen:
Something I’ve been somewhat concerned about with the usage of the surface station measurements aligns with your work here.
Would it be possible to perform a formal calibration of the Coal Creek surface station measurement to the temperatures reported via satellite? I’d be interested in the strictly local calibration, as well as how well that single measurement might serve as a proxy for the state-wide satellite measurement.
REPLY>>
Sorry to say, the correlation between CC annuals and MSU satellite temperatures is 0.33. Don’t know why that is, but, for example, the el Nino year 0f 1998 was the warmest of the MSU record for the Colorado grid point, but for Coal Creek it was quite average.
>>hotrod (17:43:55) :
I just had an interesting idea. I know we have several regular contributors here that live in Colorado and the Denver Metro area, and was thinking it would be interesting to do an Urban heat island test, and get a number of individuals to make simultaneous temperature readings (or as close as reasonably possible) across the Denver Metro basin and surrounding areas.
REPLY>>
Check out the personal weather station network on the Weather Underground at http://www.wunderground.com and on MESOWEST:
http://www.met.utah.edu/jhorel/html/mesonet/
You’d have to filter out the rooftop stations, those in garages, etc., but there’s dozens of site around metro Denver.

“John from MN (18:21:54) :
Get rid of the Urban Heat Island and the Global Warming would disapear…….John….”
He’s right! DESTROY THE CITIES!

Today the NOAA long-range forecast was issued for the NE Oregon area, basically
for January “Warmer than Normal and Normal Precipitation.”-due to El Nino-praise
the Profit….
Look out…

“This is an example of how one station’s data can be significant for assessing climate change, but only if the station is carefully installed and maintained, is in a location relatively free of non-climatic influences, has records that are diligently kept….”
I have a bit of a problem with using this as an example. MMS shows that the location of the station was substatially changed in May of ’99, which appears to coincide with a sharp uptick in reported temperatures. Also, the coordinates for both locations do not appear to be credible locations, so unless someone has been there to take a look-see, we don’t know what the immediate surroundings of the station were. There are a couple of buildings in the area which might be candidates. The changeover to MMTS in 2004 also indicates that it will be near a building. This is not a USHCN station, so I can’t consult the gallery. : )

Lance(18:20:56) should also point out that the population of Okotoks Alberta has more than doubled in the past 10 years. In the interests of honesty. It is also only ~10km south of Calgary following the Rocky Mountains. Additionally, it is an area of weather extremes, due to the mountains. We joke about having all 4 seasons in one day. It is often not a funny joke. It is worthy of note that the spokesman of Environment Canada David Phillips is listed as their senior climatologist. He has a B.A. in geography.

Well, I see belatedly that Dr. Keen is in Coal Creek, so I reckon someone _has_ taken a look-see. Relieves my problem somewhat.
John

According to the NCDC website, over the last 11 years (1999 to 2009) the average annual temperature change and winter (Dec thru Feb) temperature change(in degrees F) of the following states…
CO was -1.59 / -3.71
WY was -0.51 / -2.61
NV was -0.65 / -2.52
MT was -0.56 / -2.87
UT was -1.27 / -3.63
So it appears that a lot of cooling has gone on in the mountain states recently…
J2

I wasn’t really focused on comparing CC-to-global-average-temp-according-to-XYZ.
I’m asking about a comparison: (Coal Creek Ground Station)-to-(Coal Creek Temperature according to satellite). Yes, that’s trickier to find. And something more than just a correlation coefficient – a bias, offset, and measurement-error-with-this-instrument sort of information.
So many of the potential issues with the surface data would seem amenable to quantification. If, and only if, they were separated out from the slush-fund “anomaly” values.

Two colder years in a row in my neck of the woods.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.425727450002.1.1/station.gif
The monthly values GISS has for this station in the text are equal to the monthly averages reported by Duluth in their NOW data. I just checked for this year. The last data point is for 2009. Only Dec hasn’t been added. It’ll tick up about 0.2 when it does.

>>Alan S. Blue (19:49:23) :
I wasn’t really focused on comparing CC-to-global-average-temp-according-to-XYZ.
I’m asking about a comparison: (Coal Creek Ground Station)-to-(Coal Creek Temperature according to satellite). Yes, that’s trickier to find. And something more than just a correlation coefficient – a bias, offset, and measurement-error-with-this-instrument sort of information.
REPLY>>
Sorry to say, the correlation between CC annuals and MSU satellite temperatures is 0.33. Don’t know why that is, but, for example, the el Nino year 0f 1998 was the warmest of the MSU record for the Colorado grid point, but for Coal Creek it was quite average.
>>>>I used the MSU data for the grid best fitting Colorado, i.e. “1979-2006 Temperature Time Series Latitude Range 37.5 to 42.5, Longitude Range -107.5 to -102.5 (from the MSU dataset)”. A guess as to why the MSU does not correlate well with the various surface records is that the MSU is weighted to the lower/mid troposphere, where Colorado is, so the microwave radiation picked up by the MSU includes not just air, but emissions from rocks, grass, and trees (yes, even bristlecones). Maybe the MSU experts have some better ideas.

Wonderful post Dr. Keen, I have been wondering about some of that as I have a weather station set up here at home. I realize that it needs some site adjustment as it is a little close to some trees but for the most part it seems to be fairly accurate. I have noticed that the nearest NWS site to me Birmingham, Alabama is almost always 5 to 8 degrees warmer than I am. The official site is at the Birmingham airport. I expect that and that it is on the north edge of the down town area (about 2 miles and surrounded by heavy industry might have something to do with that. I am quite rural with the nearest town only about 4 miles away with a population of 3,000 and no industry not even a power plant. As you say I expect that there are enough private owned weather stations that might be used to do research scattered around the country in true rural areas.
Vboring, if the loss already of crops to the bio-fuel craze and the restrictions on certain fertilizers including CO2. The most prudent investment might just still be firearms and ammunition. If you can grow your own you might have to fight to keep it. The governments getting ready for warming has possibly prepared us to have a catastrophe if the cooling continues at the current rate.
By the way here in NE Alabama we are due to receive some of that white global warming later this week with near record low temps and possibly near record low high temps also. Also talking about record numbers of days below freezing temp with out break. the next couple of weeks will give most of us in the “deep south” about all the global warming we can stand.
Bill Derryberry

A check of a GISS trend map for 1999 to 2009 shows an area of 0.5-1 degree Celcius reduction in temperature for much of mid west US. This well maintained and sited station appears to be agreeing at least roughly with what GISS says the temperature is doing in that location once all the adjustements etc have been made.
This particular 10 year decline is certainly not hidden, at least in GISS, and is quite obvious over a rather large area of North America, and is even stronger in Canada. Of course it happens to be offset by warming in other parts of the Globe.

Cooling and mentions of the IPCC…
http://www.theclimateconspiracy.com/?p=43
The above blog demonstrates, unequivocally (ha!), that using the same logic as the IPCC we can prove 8-9 years of recent cooling.
Excellent post, Dr. Keen.

Meanwhile, in Al Gore’s home town, it was 9F this morning and we are supposed to get 1-3 inches of global warming on Thursday. Oh what fun it is …
I WANT MY GLOBAL WARMING BACK!!!

Highlights on the Show…January 4 – 8, 2010 | Thom Hartmann
… Chance to Save Humanity” Thom speaks with Dr. James Hansen about his new book
http://www.thomhartmann.com/2010/01/04/highlights-on-the-show-january-4-8-2010/
This is ground zero for liberals and the liberal movement, they should be taking callers. hint, hint

Farenheit?
Catch up with the world.

To Patrick.
And yet here in sub-tropical Brisbane I felt cold during the day this winter. Usually I only feel cold at night.
Right now it is summer, and we have had weeks of rain and the temperatures are in the twenties.
I slept with my windows closed last night!

Dr. Keen,
I found your station listed at NOAA here:
http://www4.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-win/wwcgi.dll?wwDI~StnSrch~StnID~20004000
and the given Lat-Lon puts the station in the middle of a forest according to Google Earth. Is the location correct?
Also, I note that NOAA wants to charge for downloading any data. I clicked on the data links and they wanted $10 to $70 to download data which was surprising since I thought the data was now available for free.

Squidly (21:38:38) :
Meanwhile, in Al Gore’s home town, it was 9F this morning
It’s supposed to warm a little on Tuesday and Wednesday but by Friday it’s supposed to be even colder than today.
Wish we had cheaper electricity.

You guys are all missing the bigger picture here. Didn’t you see the animated hockey stick graph? It proves runaway global cooling even more than Mann’s proved runaway global warming! We’re all going to freeze to death, sometime around 2020!
And it’s all mankind’s fault too, though I haven’t yet worked out how we caused it. But I’ll figure out how to blame man soon enough. I’m an environmentalist!

Damned weather here in England! We had -10 deg c here in Bournemouth last night – which is a popular summer beach town usually! We’ve got predictions of up to 10 inches of snow later today. Not good…

eg Real Science: Aeronautical Science. Aeronautical engineer ensures principle of wing lift (higher pressure below wing and lower pressure above wing) is adhered to. Consequences: Passenger flies from A to B in one piece. eg Shit Science: Climate Science IPCC brand. Hopelessly biased commentator issues bulletin declaring a positive temp anomaly where there is in fact a negative. Consequences. IPCC BS agenda is advanced. Wantonly gullible general public further conned. Question: What be the consequences if the aeronautical engineer declared that wing design now promotes higher pressure above the wing instead of lower? Not going to happen. No smoke and mirrors to exploit here. Back to the BS brand of IPCC climate science where the revenue rip off is ripe for the picking.

Also wondering about the sudden downward trend in 2004 coinciding with the change from min-max to MMTS measurement. Do these instrument changes generally agree without adjustment?

Not up on the UK Advertising Standards Authority site yet (it’s DB of decisions is updated each Wednesday), but according to
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/times_asa_wrong/
The Times has just had its knuckles rapped for false AGW advertising.

I mangled my earlier comment. What I meant to say was : imagine if skeptics presented cooling in Australia as evidence of global cooling. There would be a lot of protest because it’s a region specific measuremen, and changes in the global average is what is measured. Yet warming in Australia is evidence of global warming, with no reference to the overall global temp for 2009.

OT:
More heavy snowfalls in the UK and on the BBC 1pm News Paul Hudson was allowed a whole 20 seconds to remind us that the Met Office’s forecast for this winter was as wrong as last winter’s and last summer’s.
Things must be getting really fraught backstage if even such a mild rebuke was aired.

More weather is not climate news: High temps here have been 20f(~10c) below normal for a week, and appear to be continuing that for the next week. Low temps have been 10F(~5c) below normal as well.

“Didn’t you see the animated hockey stick graph? It proves runaway global cooling even more than Mann’s proved runaway global warming! We’re all going to freeze to death, sometime around 2020!”
Not to worry…there is a company named Holley that makes a thing called a ‘four barrel carburetor’. If you bolt one onto your car you’ll produce enough soot in a week to turn a small town black. It’s how we averted the ice-age in the 70’s. 😉

Dr. Keen,
I found this site http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?co1681
and they only have Coal Creek going back 15 years. And for anything past July 2009, it is provisional. How long until they make the information past July official? And do you know why they only go back 15 years on this site?

Bill in Vigo (20:30:32) :
… if the loss already of crops to the bio-fuel craze and the restrictions on certain fertilizers including CO2. The most prudent investment might just still be firearms and ammunition. If you can grow your own you might have to fight to keep it. The governments getting ready for warming has possibly prepared us to have a catastrophe if the cooling continues at the current rate.
By the way here in NE Alabama we are due to receive some of that white global warming later this week with near record low temps and possibly near record low high temps also. Also talking about record numbers of days below freezing temp with out break. the next couple of weeks will give most of us in the “deep south” about all the global warming we can stand.”
Truer words were never spoken. I am getting sick of breaking the ice in my stock tanks. I just hope this kills the fire ants. Maybe it is time to dig up all those nests and let the bugs freeze.
I understand a record number of guns were sold as soon as Obama took office and the stores have trouble keeping the ammo on the shelves. If Waxman has his way between the Cap and Trade bill and the Food Safety Enhancement Bill he will wipe out the US food supply with a double whammy. This is especially if we have a little Ice Age on to of the rest of the political insanity. I am sure Cargill and the rest of the grain traders are rubbing their hands with glee as they anticipate even more record earnings for 2010 and beyond.
“Cargill seemingly escaped the economic downturn in 2008 by reporting sales of over 83 billion Euros and record profits of over 2.5 billion Euros, its sixth straight year of record-breaking earnings….
“Cargill has gained control over huge swaths of the world’s agricultural system, and its ability to influence food prices is pushing millions of people around the world to the brink of starvation,” said Food & Water Europe Executive Director Wenonah Hauter.”
Cargill is linked to human rights violations, including forced child labour… http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/world/europe/press/cargill-poses-threat-to-consumer-health-the-environment-and-human-rights
Cargill is the largest private corporation in the U.S. with over $71 billion in sales and is owned by the the Cargill-MacMillan families.
I sure hope more Americans are comparing the weather outside to the idiotic claims of “warming” in the mass media and are finally waking up. The record hits here on Anthony’s site and all the new names in the comments give me hope.

An additional thought:
As I sit here waiting for the temperature to get above freezing so I can refill my stock tanks, I wonder how many southern farmers and people living in trailers are having to deal with frozen waterlines and pipes? The building codes here in mid North Carolina do not require waterlines to be buried very deep 6 to 8 inches no more than a foot if I recall correctly. Farm waterlines are often no deeper than 3 or 4 inches and I have seen them freeze on the two farms where I helped with the livestock when the owners got trapped in a “freak” snow storm fifteen years or so ago.
Frozen waterlines are a real wake up call that the temperatures are Ccccold.

Have a look at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/no-conflict-between-big-freeze-and-climate-change-1858530.html
Those of you in Canada and Alaska will be pleased to learn from Dr. Dorling of East Anglia University, that it is warmer than usual in your neck of the woods.
Meanwhile on the sub tropical Natal coast, a month into what aught to be high summer, the light rain that began in early spring continues on a daily basis. A month after normal I have had no need to dig our giant fan out of the loft. Measured by nothing more sophisticated than my internal thermometer, this is the coolest spring and early summer by a long way, in the twenty years that I have lived in the same location.

>>hotrod (00:24:52) :
The low correlation with ground truth is bothersome to me. Are you aware of any investigations into the possibility that they are seeing ground clutter temperatures rather than the lower troposphere air temperatures with the satellites ?
Larry
REPLY>>Larry, maybe Roy Spencer has some ideas on this!
>>juanslayton (03:43:48) :
Still suspicious of the apparent step change in temperature in ‘99 coinciding with the station location change. It the temp rise is an artifact of the location change, would a downward adjustment improve the correlation with MSU?
…Also wondering about the sudden downward trend in 2004 coinciding with the change from min-max to MMTS measurement. Do these instrument changes generally agree without adjustment?
REPLY>>Hi John, here’s some details of location, etc. There was no change of any sort in 1999; the entry in the MMS is merely administrative.
SITE LOCATION: At the residence of Dr. Richard A. Keen, near the northwestern corner of Jefferson County, CO (T2S, R72W, Section 13), 105 23′ 27.6″ West, 39 52′ 36.2″ North (+/-0.4″), elevation 8950 feet. This location is approximately 10 miles SW of the Boulder WSO, and 11 miles NW of the Golden Post Office.
The site is two miles SE of the summit of Mt. Thorodin (elevation 10451 feet), and the ground slopes gently down to the southeast. The ground near the thermometer site is grass-covered with scattered aspen trees, with a lodgepole pine forest immediately to the north and open meadow to the south. All observations are for the midnight-to-midnight (Mountain Standard Time) climatological day until October 1, 2005; then 9 p.m. (2100) MST thereafter.
TEMPERATURE:
July 1, 1984 – Nov. 21, 1994: Taylor Model 185 Six’s (U-shaped) max-min thermometer, 5 feet above the ground, enclosed in a homemade 15x17x19-inch louvered shelter
Nov. 22, 1994 – Oct. 27, 2004: Standard NWS Thompson-mounted max-min thermometers, supplemented by Taylor Model 185 max-min thermometer (which is less susceptible to index shake-down by wind vibration), mounted 5 feet above the ground in a standard NWS cotton-region shelter thereafter. Nine months of overlapping data indicated the following differences between the NWS max-mins in the cotton-region shelter and the previous Taylor thermometer in the homemade system: average max 1.0 degree warmer (NWS minus Taylor); average min little difference.
Oct. 28, 2004 – present: NWS MMTS system 7 feet west of the cotton-region shelter, 6 feet above the ground. Three years of overlapping observations indicate a difference (MMTS minus cotton region max-min) of +1F for the max, 0F for the min.
From all this, an adjustment of -0.5F from the listed averages for 1994 to 2004 can be justified. What you see here is the unadjusted temperatures; the adjusted series doesn’t look much different, since the 0.5F difference is small compared to the interannual changes. The 2004 cooling occurred while the NWS max-mins in the cotton-region shelter were still recording.
>>Corey (07:19:30) :
Dr. Keen,
I found this site http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?co1681
and they only have Coal Creek going back 15 years. And for anything past July 2009, it is provisional. How long until they make the information past July official? And do you know why they only go back 15 years on this site?
REPLY>>I became a designated co-op site in 1994, so that’s when NCDC began archiving my data. I’ve offered the earlier data, but NCDC doesn’t retroactively add data. I have one missing month (August 2000, I think) due to a misplaced B-91, and they won’t even fill that month into the record (I do have the full record for that month)! It seems to take 6 to 8 months for the monthly record to get to NCDC, get checked & verified, and published in the CD monthly.

Dr. Keen:
Got it. And thanks for your time.
John

How can I print the animated graph as two separate graphs with and without “the decline” ?

>>Joe O’Laughlin (15:04:23) :
Here in Boulder, CO ~ 10 miles north of Coal Creek we have not had any Chinook winds this winter! El Nino?
REPLY>>
Hi Joe, well, we’ve had wind, but not the nice warm snow-eating Chinooks! Usually el Nino causes a split jet, with the southern subtropical jet dominating to dump snow on California, Texas, and freeze Florida, all of which has happened. But the higher latitudes, like North Dakota and new England, sit high and dry. But the cold PDO seems to have overridden that, and is bringing lots of nice chillies into the norther U.S. Joe d’Aleo on ICECAP.us has some nice articles about this.
>>tokyoboy (21:19:06) :
How can I print the animated graph as two separate graphs with and without “the decline” ?
REPLY>>Go to http://www.icecap.us and find this same article. Joe wasn’t able to get the animation to open on his site, so he posted the two charts separately.
Enjoy!

Hi, you say in your article that the station record is 27 years. The NWSLI for CCCC2 says the paperwork for the station was submitted 5/13/1994. I was wondering where the data for the other years are taken from? Thanks.