Ken Stewart shows how GISS adjusts temperature records in two adjacent sites in Australia
This issue was also recently covered on the Climategate blog here
Introduction
Despite its assurances, GISS has adjusted the temperature records of two sites at Mackay to reverse a cooling trend in one and increase a warming trend in another. This study presents evidence that this is not supportable and is in fact an instance of manipulation of data.
I decided to have a look at the temperature records of the weather stations closest to where I live, near Mackay in North Queensland. The Bureau of Meteorology lists 3 current stations: Mackay MO, Mackay Aero, and Te Kowai Exp Station, plus the closed station Mackay Post Office. GISS has a list of nearby stations. One is “Mackay Sugar Mill Station”. I had never heard of it. Te Kowai Exp Station, only a few kilometres from Mackay, is in fact at the same co-ordinates as Mackay Sugar Mill. I checked on AIS for the GHCN site, and there is Mackay Sugar Mill on the map. The co-ordinates given by GHCN put it in the middle of a cane paddock 600m to the south of Te Kowai Sugar Experiment Station, so that’s definitely it! (If not, it’s identical in every other way!) And that is the closest weather station to my home, so I became even more interested.
Te Kowai is an experimental farm for developing new varieties of sugar cane, run by scientists and technicians since 1889. It has a temperature record of over 100 years with only a couple of gaps. So in fact it’s an ideal rural station for referencing a nearby urban station, as it should have a similar climate.
Analysis
I plotted data from BOM for maxima and minima and obtained the means for Te Kowai, all Mackay city stations, all GHCN stations in our 5 x 5 grid, and several other towns and cities with long records (Te Kowai’s starts at 1908). This is because “ In our analysis, we can only use stations with reasonably long, consistently measured time records.”
GISS combines GHCN data from all urban stations at the same location, and then homogenises this with data from neighbouring rural stations. So I then plotted the same-location data and the post-homogenisation data.
A problem that appeared immediately is that the GISS annual mean runs from December to November, while BOM’s raw data is for calendar years. Most of the time it matches pretty well, but there are several examples of poor quality data. Another problem is that BOM does not compute a mean for any year with even one month of data missing, while GISS tolerates several missing months.
Here are graphs of the results.
Read his entire post here
Ken Harvey – you asked about the link. It is authentic. I corresponded with the author a month ago.
What country do you live in?
Peter Plail (12:08:33) : Peter, you raise an interesting point, but in my limited knowledge, may I suggest that the answer is Energy Conservation; i.e. the energy we give out = the energy we take in. Regards, Bob.
Looking at the monthly data from BOM it is evident that there is much more variability in the earlier data.
The end of the 1930 hump in 1932 is evidenced by a measurement change of 4 deg C in 1 month (not impossible but other april may periods show now similar change.
http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/5994/tekowai.png
The beginning of the hump is less pronounced with many gradual changes.
Surely it is correct for GISS to correct this?
On another matter the copyright notice for the data is:
The copyright for any data is held in the Commonwealth of Australia and the purchaser
shall give acknowledgement of the source in reference to the data. Apart from dealings
under the copyright Act, 1968, the purchaser shall not reproduce, modify or supply
(by sale or otherwise) these data without written permission
i.e. although I paid nothing for the data I have no right to pass it on – just like CRU!
Curiousgeorge (08:48:03) :
Anthony, this is way off topic, but given your interest in solar power, etc. I thought you’d like to see this. And I don’t know of any other way to contact you. This sounds like a game changer for small installations on homes etc., where solar is a reasonable alternative.
From:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10451641-54.html
That article reads in a somewhat confused manner, you need to see this abstract to follow it better.
The 40% improvement is only over other solar cells made from “copper, zinc, tin, and sulfur, or selenium (CZTS).” Currently commercial silicon-based and thin-film cells beat it. The major things are these are using more common materials, and they are thin-film cells made with a “printing” process that does not use vacuum technology. With improvements these might go from the current 9.6% efficiency to perhaps 12%. At that point the “watts per (area times cost)” factor makes them look attractive. Except, on small home installations you only have so much area to work with, so that’s a built-in limiting factor.
Now, over at Uni-Solar Ovonic they “print” flexible cells the size of football fields, that get cut into rolls that can be deployed like roofing material. They’ll work nice over a tin roof. They are not as efficient as a “normal” solar panel. However, as detailed in this paper, they work with diffuse light, they do not require bright direct sunlight. Thus they yield more electricity than more-efficient cells. And since they can cover a roof nicely, they sure look more aesthetically-pleasing than traditional panels with far less installation hassles.
It is nice to want to use less-rare materials. However, for practical solar electric power that people will prefer to use, there are other factors to consider.
Bob (Sceptical Redcoat) (13:22:43) :
The energy input of the body is food but the energy out is useful power and heat accompanied by CO2; the energy input of a power station is coal, or gas, or oil and the output is useful power and heat accompanied by CO2, etc (I’m ignoring waste products for simplicity). I picked the human example as the easiest given that the figure for heat output is generally accepted and pretty consistent. I suspect that other human activities generate greater quantities of heat per capita, certainly in colder latitudes.
The point I was trying to make though, is that all the processes that generate CO2 also generate heat. I lack the skills to do the physics, but it seems to me that there is a possibility that at least part of the temperature rise attributed to man-made CO2 might actually have arisen from the heat produced at the same time that the CO2 is produced. If this is the case then that would make CO2 even less potent.
Sydney sceptic: I can possibly do Adelaide and surrounds, not that there’s many stations within cooee that GISS use.
Please, please send this out to a list of climate scientists in the US and Australia and ask them what they think is going on and whether they continue to be willing to use GISS data from before 1979 despite example after example of raw data that looks to be “tweaked” to suit the AGW hypothesis.
In fact, Anthony, it would be great if someone could compile a list of, what, a few hundred climate scientists who would get a short email and a link everytime this site serves up data that questions whether climate science is on sound footing with its dependent variable. After all, these analyses do not show up in the “peer reviewed” literature, so are likely to be overlooked by “respectable” climate scientists.
Oh, by the way, isn’t it interesting that the upward adjustments stop at about 1979, when satellite temp data starts becoming available such that it would have become obvious if there had been GISS temp fudging after that date?
So far, an all-time record for snowfall at DFW airport has been recorded: 8.7 inches –
– breaking the old record of 7.8 inches.
Just coped live off-the-air from WFAA-TV CH 8 here in Dallas, Tejas.
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Please people let’s get some perspective here, consider the nature of the actual “raw” data; per nosa
therefore it’s completely synthetic, made-up, has no basis in reality so it doesn’t matter how it’s adjusted or homogenized, ground-station thermometers have no scientific validity in climatology and were never intended to be used for that purpose. At least if they consistently used TMax or Tmin, we would have a number that was actually measured in the real world.
NWS Ft. Worth office announcement:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/productview.php?pil=PNSFWD
PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FORT WORTH TX
808 PM CST THU FEB 11 2010
…SNOW EVENT ONE FOR THE RECORD BOOKS…
AT 8 PM…DFW AIRPORT HAD RECORDED 8.7 INCHES OF SNOW TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE PREVIOUS DAILY RECORD FOR FEBRUARY 11 OF 1.4 INCHES SET IN 1988. THIS ALSO BREAKS THE PREVIOUS 24-HOUR RECORD FOR FEBRUARY…7.5 INCHES ON FEBRUARY 17, 1978 AND FEBRUARY 25, 1924.
THIS IS THE GREATEST CALENDAR-DAY SNOWFALL TOTAL ON RECORD FOR DALLAS/FORT WORTH. THE PREVIOUS RECORD WAS 7.8 INCHES ON JANUARY 15, 1964 AND JANUARY 14, 1917.
THIS BRINGS THE SEASONAL SNOWFALL TOTAL TO 11.9 INCHES…WHICH
IS THE 4TH HIGHEST SEASONAL TOTAL ON RECORD FOR DALLAS/FORT WORTH. THIS IS THE SNOWIEST WINTER IN 32 SEASONS (SINCE 1977-1978).
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Re; GISS adjustment …
“Why …even Father Lonegan had a mother!”
“What did you expect?”
The world will be focusing on Vancouver Canada soon.
The warmers will be making a big to do over snow depths and banging on how it’s due to GW.
So to any BC readers, a local examination of GISS adjustments will be worth a ton of snow in Washington DC.
NASA applies an urban correction of its GISS temperature index in the wrong direction in 45% of the adjustments. Instead of eliminating the urbanization effects, these wrong way corrections makes the urban warming trends steeper. My article discusses Steve McIntyre’s audit of the GISS corrections at:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/CorrectCorrections.pdf
Years ago (before 2003 and after 1998), I became interested in desert temperatures (specifically Death Valley). One of the predictions of greenhouse theory is that dry regions, like deserts and polar regions, will show the effects of CO2 warming more than other areas. This is because CO2 effects are masked by water vapor, so dry regions are the “canary in the mine” signal of GW. Unfortunately, during the hot year of 1998, Death Valley had a cold year–third coldest in fact. I stored my data away and didn’t check Death Valley temperatures until recently. The current data show that 1998 is still a cool year, but something has changed. The temperatures now shown for Death Valley weren’t as I remembered them. So I pulled out my old data and checked. Below is a comparison of these datasets. The first graph is the pre-2003 plot of my saved data. The second plot is the current GISTEMP values. In the third plot, I overlay the two datasets. Apparently Hansen’s been busy “correcting” these temperature values during the last few years.
The linear trend slope of the pre-2003 data is 0.0143 °C/year and the current data has a linear trend slope of 0.0192 °C/year.
Have fun trying to figure out the temperature modification algorithm. I tried to check the original B91 forms and that’s a lot of work. Too bad there isn’t a fancy OCR program that will scan these forms. The two years that I checked don’t match either dataset.
Jim
My picture link works fine on my site and on other sites, but it doesn’t work on this site. You might as well delete my previous post as it doesn’t make sense without that link.
[WordPress doesn’t support picture links. ~dbs, mod.]
Jim
You gotta adjust for lack of UHI, come on!
Re: Jim Masterson (Feb 12 02:34),
Hi Jim. Wasn’t a new weather station added to death valley? I’m checking now at the late John L Daly web site.
Yes HERE it is. Badwater was set up to try and obtain the world all time highest temp record. The original station was at Furnace Creek. Fascinating read. Daly actually traveled to there and took photos.
Seems NASA isn’t new to “tricking” temp data.
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Baa Humbug (08:32:07) :
Hi Jim. Wasn’t a new weather station added to death valley? I’m checking now at the late John L Daly web site.
Yes HERE it is. Badwater was set up to try and obtain the world all time highest temp record. The original station was at Furnace Creek. Fascinating read. Daly actually traveled to there and took photos.
Seems NASA isn’t new to “tricking” temp data.
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I reposted my previous posting on John Brignell’s Number Watch web site (www.numberwatch.co.uk); where, unlike WordPress, his site supports picture links.
Let’s see–moving a weather station changes all of the historical values? I think that’s a little too much homogenizing.
(John Daly’s Death Valley temperature plot matches my pre-2003 data, so there’s some confirmation.)
Jim
Gday folks!
Well the games up, and I can’t rely on Queenslander! for anonymity anymore.
Thanks all for your very interesting comments. I’ve had modem problems (it died) this week so I’m using the local library…
Neil McEvoy:
Thank you- that’s it in a nutshell. They make out a farm to be a town.
E.M.Smith:
thanks for the hint about the drop up box- I’ll look for it! But it really makes very little difference unless December or january is has an extreme up or down. Most of the data matches pretty well. I’ve been urged to contact you so will shortly, if you don’t mind.
ponoke:
Yes Te Kowai is a Maori name. Possible from the blackbirding days when 1000s of pacific islanders were brought to work in the canefields.
geo: Actually, there are instances of GISS correcting UHI properly. I show this in my Postscript post- Rockhampton and townsville both adjusted down which is nice. So why Mackay and te Kowai?
JP Miller:
They do make some adjustments after 1979- see Rocky and Townsville. It’s not as straightforward as we might think. THEY cherry pick!
Thanks Anthony for giving me a go!
Funny how the warmists are pointing to snow as proof of AGW when only a short time ago that CRU guy (Onions?) said that snow would be increasingly rare and children wouldn’t know what it was.
An interesting document from BOM:
http://www.oesr.qld.gov.au/queensland-by-theme/demography/single-publications/qld-past-present/qld-past-present-1896-1996-ch02-sec-02.pdf
Note this table:
This shows no heatwaves corresponding to the 1915 to 1932 hump. I would have expected high monthly average temperatures to have been caused by heat! but the table has an absence of anything outstanding during this period.
http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/6208/queenslandheatwavesa.png
Jim, let me take a stab at posting an HTML ‘href’ link to the image (as opposed to posting an HTML ‘img’ link):
“… I pulled out my old data and checked. Below is a comparison of these datasets. The first graph is the pre-2003 plot of my saved data. The second plot is the current GISTEMP values. In the third plot, I overlay the two datasets. Apparently Hansen’s been busy “correcting” these temperature values during the last few years.”
Three data plots as follows:
1) Pre-2003 data plot
2) Current GISTEMP plot
3) overlay of the two above
“The linear trend slope of the pre-2003 data is 0.0143 °C/year and the current data has a linear trend slope of 0.0192 °C/year.”
Now, I click SUBMIT COMMENT and see what happens …
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All,
You must write to your local member to stop the madness on so called global warming. This will not end until Rudd is out of office and there is no climate minister. Penny Wong is getting a wage on a false pretence and must be stripped from that title and office. Then and only then the debate is over. Legal action must then be taken to recover monies spent on a false premise, and people need to go to jail or be fined who propagated the deceit.
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_Jim (08:45:52) :
Jim, let me take a stab at posting an HTML ‘href’ link to the image (as opposed to posting an HTML ‘img’ link):
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Thanks _Jim. If I had remembered that img links didn’t work on WordPress, I probably would have used an href link instead.
Jim