NOTE: An update to the compendium has been posted. Now has bookmarks. Please download again.
I have a new paper out with Joe D’Aleo.
First I want to say that without E.M. Smith, aka “Chiefio” and his astounding work with GISS process analysis, this paper would be far less interesting and insightful. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude. I ask WUWT readers to visit his blog “Musings from the Chiefio” and click the widget in the right sidebar that says “buy me a beer”. Trust me when I say he can really use a few hits in the tip jar more than he needs beer.
The report is over 100 pages, so if you are on a slow connection, it may take awhile.
For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here or the image above.
As many readers know, there have been a number of interesting analysis posts on surface data that have been on various blogs in the past couple of months. But, they’ve been widely scattered. This document was created to pull that collective body of work together.
Of course there will be those who say “but it is not peer reviewed” as some scientific papers are. But the sections in it have been reviewed by thousands before being combined into this new document. We welcome constructive feedback on this compendium.
Oh and I should mention, the word “robust” only appears once, on page 89, and it’s use is somewhat in jest.
The short read: The surface record is a mess.
E.M.Smith (03:29:01) :
I always loved Churchill… My Mum lived in England during that time. Left at the end of WWII (with Dad & kid). I was raised with stories of the English Bulldog.
In the current “climate” a couple of rather pertinent quotes from the old dog:
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
and
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
How apt :o)
Cheers
Mark
Nick Stokes (02:39:00) : There is some local averaging with homogenisation in GISS (GHCN is different),
“Some”? Try heaping pots full. Oh, and which GHCN? the “GHCN unadjusted” monthly mean temperatures that are used by GIStemp are ‘almost raw’ data and are NOT anomalies nor the product of anomalies. If you are talking about NOAA / NCDC analysis product, please say so. And if that is what is shipped as “GHCN Adjusted” please explain how it is shipped as temperatures and not anomalies…
but it doesn’t have the sort of effects you speak of. It’s still pretty much the gridding of individual station values.
See the benchmark. GIStemp is a filter that TRIES to remove the data biases and is overwhelmed by the massive bias. The anomalies do change with the station changes. It most certainly DOES have ‘the sort of effects’ in question. (BTW, your statement that is is ‘pretty much the gridding of individual station values’ is in conflict with your earlier assertion that it was anomalies…) Yes, it does ‘grid individual station values’ and that is the problem. That is does so after various broken homogenizing, in-filling , and ‘often wrong’ UHI adjustments is even worse. (BTW, I’ve benchmarked the change profile of the first 2 steps of GIStemp and they impart a warming trend to the temperature data. STEP3 must not only overcome the bias in the data but also the added bias from the earlier steps. It fails at that task.)
A summary finds about 1/2 C of added ’tilt’ to the temperature data ( resulting ONLY from the GIStemp processing through STEP1):
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/gistemp-step1-data-change-profile/
And here are some detailed ‘by country or continent’ blocks of summary data that you can study yourself. Eyeballing it says to me that GIStemp is adding tilt.:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/gistemp-sneak-peek-benchmarks-step1/
And we’ve already seen the link to the “STEP3” benchmark showing that the anomaly processing does not save you…
E.M.Smith (02:36:52) :
“Those station were, in fact, active in 1970. 5997 of them in that year. “
Of course, if a station is collecting data it is active. And most of your “dropped” stations are active now. But I said “active (for GHCN)”. They weren’t regularly supplying data to GHCN, because it didn’t exist.
“So you are saying that the data set is 1/2 obsolete archive and 1/4 usable data “
No. There’s nothing obsolete about the pre-1992 data – it performs exactly the (historic) function that it was intended to have. And there’s no particular reason why new data shouldn’t be added to whatever extent it can be obtained. It’s no more or less usable. It’s just that obtaining and checking large batches of historic data, as was done in the early 90’s, is a very different process to maintaining and checking a flow of monthly data.
Did it never occur to you to mention, in all this flourishing of the early 90’s drop in your graph, that this is where you change from historic to recurrent data collection?
“Firstly, there’s little quantification of such a drift.”
Try looking at the data…
There’s no quantification in this report. And I did look at your website, but it’s a little , er, diffuse and anecdotal. Where are the numbers that say this is how much drift there was, and here’s the effect? There’s a lot of numbers, but when you try to pin it down, it goes away.
For example, you give this table to show movement of GHCN sites from cold/temperate to tropical zones:
YEAR Warm Cold
1839 2.8 97.2
1889 8.3 91.5
1939 15.5 83.8
1989 25.4 73.2
But there’s a lot of gap there – what happened between 1939 and 1989, and then to 2009. Well:
YEAR Warm Cold
1939 15.5 83.8
1949 17.8 81.4
1959 26.8 71.9
1969 29.9 68.6
1979 29.1 69.3
1989 25.4 73.2
1999 24.9 74.2
2009 26.1 72.9
Different picture – after 1959, the movement is if anything the other way.
“And this, frankly, is bull pucky. Station temps are run through a meat grinder of processes long before the “anomaly map” is calculated in STEP3.”
The fact that missing values are filled from neighboring sites does little to alter the fact that the anomalies are locally based. GISTEMP calculates them at grid points, as I said in my previous post. But the grid points don’t move.
“Bald faced assertion with NOTHING in the way of data to back it up. “
The “assertion” is that high latitude sites are warming more rapidly, so reducing them would have a cooling effect. It’s not just my assertion – but I’m not the one issuing a glossy, highly distributed report. If it is to show that moving stations has a warming effect, then it should do so – in the report.
“And does NOT do it by comparing that thermometer data to an earlier self.
Frankly, it is blatantly obvious that it can’t. The “record” is largely made up of disjoint segments of too few years to be usable if they did. Only 10% of it is over 100 years and a hugh chunk of thermometers are less than 25 years. “
You don’t need 100 years of data – you only need a reasonable coverage of the base period (1951-1980). NOAA does now use the climate anomaly method. But indeed, as I said above, GISS still uses the Hansen/Lebedeff method of calculating anomalies at grid points. That’s still local.
Small question Anthony and maybe obvious:
Are you correcting typos etc., as comments come in?
You don’t want to give the warmists ‘issues’ with which to attack you with, no matter how small or irrelevant.
[Reply: Ever since we lost Sisyphus as a moderator, typos are corrected when there’s time, or when they’re pointed out. ~dbs]
Anthony:
A small question.
Are you correcting typos etc., as comments come in?
You don’t want to give the warmists ‘issues’ with which to attack you with, no matter how small or irrelevant.
crosspatch (22:54:00) :
Another thing that SteveM noted about missing months in Siberia. Apparently many of the stations NOAA reported as having missing values for various months actually had monthly values that were available from other sources.
That is what my focus has been. Digging up the missing values for my own area. What are the other sources?
It would be of great benefit for someone to put together a history of station reporting. Far as I know, it all started with ordinary people and a need. In the US, Army Signal Corps to Weather Bureau to NOAA to NCDC…something like that.
Where can original documents be found other than the final destination?
Along the way, there may be archives and copies to be found. How did AMS get it’s data to make it’s Monthy Weather Reviews? Dept. of Interior, USDA/USFS maintained and operated stations, so where in those agencies can copies of records be found?
My own contact attempts with agencies has been rather fruitless, as I suspect any individual would run into with government agencies that don’t have any compelling reason to play along.
NCDC is not the only game in anybody’s town, though they may have the main body of what exists.
Where do we go from here?
The report makes a very misleading comparison on p 12. It shows a GISS global temp map for April 1978, and a purported corresponding map for April 2008, to show how coverage has shrunk.
But that is an incomplete map for 2008. GISS brings out an early version with the data reported to date. Bob Tisdale showed this very map on May 20, 2008. It was what was available on that date. But it’s not the final version. You can see this here. Or you can generate it by going to this GISS page. There are a lot more stations than the preliminary map showed.
More gates than a giant slalom course…
Garbage in, Gospel out.
Great stuff guys, bravo!
Anthony or E.M.Smith or Roy Spencer: Naive question: Are UAH satellites calibrated using these surface temperatures? If so is that a potential problem in view of this work?
Less than 15 seconds on my broadband.
Have been following WUWT and CA for a couple of years. I continue to be amazed by the people that request Anthony and others to e-mail this to such and such a politician, do that etc.
Please people. It is useless for a Canadian or American to e-mail a European politician. Politics responds to the local man/woman who votes for them. If you support the efforts of this blog, then do the footwork, send it off to YOUR politician at the local, province/state and federal level.
The constituency offices gets lots of e-mails that are sorted by the office staff and hopefully summarized as for or against before automatic deletion. It would be much more effective for you to print off this report, or at least the summary, highlight what you see as the signifigant parts and mail it to your MPs. Yes more use of dead trees but at least you are helping to capture the carbon in the paper.
Ruhroh (20:34:16)-Fenyman was one of my science Heroes-as is Anthony and the rest who challenge the status quo of :”the science is settled.”-Good Science is _never_
settled…
Anthony,
Congratulations on releasing this paper. I am sure it will get people talking. On page 62 and in other places in the report you continuously make the point that global tempepratures have cooled since 2001. This claim does not appear to be supported by a reference of any kind. Are you able to point to such a refernce in the paper (I may have missed it) or at least provide such a reference, particulalry one that takes into account RSS/UAH data for 2009?
I’m very glad to see someone looking into the disappearing station problem. I work in physics, and my colleagues all agree that when 85% of your sensors disappear, the onus is on you to measure the magnitude of the resulting systematic error.
It is true that the average temperature of the selected stations increases with time. But the global surface trend is calculated not by taking the average temperature, but by taking the average change in temperature for all stations each year. The fact that most stations are now in the tropics does not mean that these stations will, compared to themselves, be getting warmer. For a more detailed explanation, see here.
Thus your plots of number of stations are compelling, but the plots of average temperature are a let-down. If you want to show the systematic effect of disappearing stations, you will have to do apply the annual changes method, like this.
I realize that you may have other valid reasons for the personal writing style, however, when I submitted my first draft of my research thesis, I was told to get rid of the Howard Cosell-ish “color commentary”, and he didn’t mean “magenta and cyan yellow”. This is especially true of the literature review.
Two points especially:
Disparaging remarks of other research and researchers are, even if done with a very light hand, completely unnecessary. A simple review of what others have done and the conclusion they have drawn, followed by your opposing research and results will speak for and stand by itself.
First person singular is a strange form of writing for a technical report. May I suggest that in the future your reports take on a dry, distant style of writing, using phrasing such as “This author recommends yada yada yada..” versus the pronoun “I”. It paints the issue in a less agenda driven, more scientifically advanced, and more palatable form for those who are still making policy decisions.
Just my teacher view.
Finally did a speed read through this.
Wow!
++++++++++++++
From my working decades my experience is that sleep is an overrated commodity. I can say that now that I’m catching up on it.
“chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
are there enough of these guys left to actually constitute a panel? 🙂
On Page 7. “Meanwhile NASA showed it was the 9th-coldest June in the 30 years of its record.”
Is that correct? Did you really mean RSS or UAH?
As we now know peer review is always peer reviewed.
MJK (06:26:30) :
…On page 62 and in other places in the report you continuously make the point that global tempepratures have cooled since 2001. This claim does not appear to be supported by a reference of any kind. Are you able to point to such a refernce in the paper (I may have missed it) or at least provide such a reference, particulalry one that takes into account RSS/UAH data for 2009?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/plot/uah/from:2001/plot/rss/from:2001/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001
Excellent post Chiefio.
You sure shredded his lame duck defense of the undefendable.
On Page 17, I couldn’t make sense of the map of the Russian snow pack.
Could you graph average station latitude versus time?
On page 7 you use GISS when you mean RSS (referring to satellite data).
On Page 21, I couldn’t make sense of the following paragraph:
“Smith found that in New Zealand the only stations remaining had the words “water” or “warm” in the descriptor code. Some 84% of the sites are at airports, with the highest percentage in southern cold latitudes.”
What does that last sentence mean? It reads as if colder sites were kept, but I think you mean that the colder sites that were kept were airports, which are normally warmer?
Hi Anthony, I have been following WUWT for about a month now since I discovered it, and am so happy to have found a reliable place for information, as well as so many like minded individuals who are more interested in the truth, than they are in advancing an opinion.
I read some comments above that you are happy to accept info on any errors or typos in the document. I have not been able to read it through yet, but one jumped out at me in the Summary for Policymakers. In point 3. you say “…have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed …” Should this not be “…have skewed the data so as to greatly overstate observed …” notice the movement of the word “to”.
Keep up the good work, and I look forward to your peer reviewed article which I am sure will have warmers everywhere in tears.