Note: See update below, new graph added.
There’s a new paper out by Dr. Edward Long that does some interesting comparisons to NCDC’s raw data (prior to adjustments) that compares rural and urban station data, both raw and adjusted in the CONUS.
The paper is titled Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets. In it, Dr. Edward Long states:
“The problem would seem to be the methodologies engendered in treatment for a mix of urban and rural locations; that the ‘adjustment’ protocol appears to accent to a warming effect rather than eliminate it. This, if correct, leaves serious doubt for whether the rate of increase in temperature found from the adjusted data is due to natural warming trends or warming because of another reason, such as erroneous consideration of the effects of urban warming.”
Here is the comparison of raw rural and urban data:
And here is the comparison of adjusted rural and urban data:
Note that even adjusted urban data has as much as a 0.2 offset from adjusted rural data.
Dr. Long suggests that NCDC’s adjustments eradicated the difference between rural and urban environments, thus hiding urban heating. The consequence:
“…is a five-fold increase in the rural temperature rate of increase and a slight decrease in the rate of increase of the urban temperature.”
The analysis concludes that NCDC “…has taken liberty to alter the actual rural measured values”.
Thus the adjusted rural values are a systematic increase from the raw values, more and more back into time and a decrease for the more current years. At the same time the urban temperatures were little, or not, adjusted from their raw values. The results is an implication of warming that has not occurred in nature, but indeed has occurred in urban surroundings as people gathered more into cities and cities grew in size and became more industrial in nature. So, in recognizing this aspect, one has to say there has been warming due to man, but it is an urban warming. The temperatures due to nature itself, at least within the Contiguous U. S., have increased at a non-significant rate and do not appear to have any correspondence to the presence or lack of presence of carbon dioxide.
The paper’s summary reads:
Both raw and adjusted data from the NCDC has been examined for a selected Contiguous U. S. set of rural and urban stations, 48 each or one per State. The raw data provides 0.13 and 0.79 oC/century temperature increase for the rural and urban environments. The adjusted data provides 0.64 and 0.77 oC/century respectively. The rates for the raw data appear to correspond to the historical change of rural and urban U. S. populations and indicate warming is due to urban warming. Comparison of the adjusted data for the rural set to that of the raw data shows a systematic treatment that causes the rural adjusted set’s temperature rate of increase to be 5-fold more than that of the raw data. The adjusted urban data set’s and raw urban data set’s rates of temperature increase are the same. This suggests the consequence of the NCDC’s protocol for adjusting the data is to cause historical data to take on the time-line characteristics of urban data. The consequence intended or not, is to report a false rate of temperature increase for the Contiguous U. S.
The full paper may be found here: Contiguous U.S. Temperature Trends Using NCDC Raw and Adjusted Data for One-Per-State Rural and Urban Station Sets (PDF) and is freely available for viewing and distribution.
Dr. Long also recently wrote a column for The American Thinker titled: A Pending American Temperaturegate
As he points out in that column, Joe D’Aleo and I raised similar concerns in: Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? (PDF)
UPDATE: A reader asked why divergence started in 1960. Urban growth could be one factor, but given that the paper is about NCDC adjustments, this graph from NOAA is likely germane:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
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If a handful of trees on the Yamal peninsula were considered sufficient to calculate global temperature trends, I can’t see the argument against using 50 odd sites for just the continental US.
and now we have a hockey stick too!
In Dallas the temperature is taken at the DFW airport which was a cow pasture in 1977.
A small city of 30,000 has grown up along with runways and buildings etc so that even with excellent surface station placement the UHI effect is undeniable.
I compared it to a site 15 miles away with no change in population density and there was no warming in later years.
I live in a suburb of Dallas and DFW is usually 3 to 4 degrees warmer than my back yard.
As far as the “social” temperature” I actually had someone make the argument to me, my jaw dropped and I was almost speechless. Then I laughed.
AleaJactaEst (03:31:54) :
Robinson (02:03:16) :
Robinson – the BBC new website also carried this news but, amazingly did not spin it with any reference to AGW.
What they did day however, was the fact that the cooling effect of the ‘berg, blocking super-cold bottom water flow and hence heat conveyor belt sea currents may cause several harsh winters ahead of us. This primes the current cooling argument to be parried by the “global warming caused the calving and now the world is cooling”
Heads we win, Tails you lose.
The BBC story did talk about the conveyor belt and may cause winters earlier today, however, they have now changed the story, which no longer mentions cold winters, but does talk about the iceberg causing food shortages for pengiuns, which will have to travel much further for food.
Interesting results: is exposure of the “adjustments” at last the start of sanity?
Its never been clear to me why ” global warming” has to be demonstrated by analysing thousands of places. Or why measuring stations which changed position or context (e.g. through urbanisation) are included in any analyses, as the information is obviously confounded, and misleading. “Correction” of such data does not help, as it is not creating observed data, but irrelevant garbage determined by its creator.
Has anyone analysed only the raw data of “non-changing stations”? (Without cherry picking) . Whats the result?
Congratulations on this post, Anthony
Me I aint no boofhead Boffin.
I would separate rural stations even further out from town stations.
I would start from white water out. I would take my pure white water stations as base line.
But I aint a boffin. I would say this is land temp nat. I would say this is my baseline.
I would say this is ambient temp and then I would measure out. In sampling of this nature mathematically, your base line must be one of two things, normal or abnormal you dont get to pick mathematically or statistically arbitrary points.
Your base line for measurement must be pure.
In a question of ambient temperature, your baseline must be ambient temperature. Mathematically and Logically you have no choice.
I’ll bet if you changed that rural, raw data to a 13mo, instead of a 13yr it would match the Satellite data for the U.S. pretty well.
Oh, I get it. Steveta_uk is calling us all physicists.
How does one get the source code of the NCDC software to open in Windows?
I want to see how they are inventing this data (only in climate science is this tolerated) , as well as how they actually “adjust” the numbers.
David (02:37:32) :
I think there is a real problem with his methodology that needs to be overcome. Given the disparity in size between the states (Texas is 174 times the size of Rhode Island) there must be a better way to represent the whole US than to select one rural and one urban station per state.
No matter where rural, urban pairs are compared with each other the outcome is invariably the same, little or no warming trend at rural sites, it might be 10 degrees warmer in one place than it is in another but the trend is the same.
This research better be solid – the AGW machine is wounded but not dead, and they will be coming after it.
Just a quick note. Still analyzing Canadian station data, but I have found something interesting.
2 Arctic stations show an increase in the summer temps as well as an increase in the winter temps. The Arctic is warming over all and the range is also narrowing. Now before the Warmists jump up and down with joy, the max temps are all below 25C. While the drop in summer temps seen in the lower lattitude are all above 30C. Why is this important?
Because in the summer months the Arctic can never be hotter than the lower lattitudes. Thus the Arctic trend and the lower lattitude trends are converging to a single temp. It’s 27C by 2016 when the two meet.
This begs the question, then what?
MODS! TYPO in 3rd paragraph of article, 3rd line:
DavidM — someone has to prove to me that there is a “global” temperature gradient, first. Then we can discuss trends, sample density, and finally speculate on cause and effect relationships.
Apologies if this question has already been answered by regular commenters, or is plain dumb: Has the UHI effect been assumed to be stable, or has it been measured to be more pronounced in winter months / colder areas? Could it be reasonable to expect that an urban increase in heat output from buildings in winter could outweigh the contribution from air conditioning units / warm tarmac etc. in summer months? If this is the case then in cooler weather, NCDC would have more temperature ‘headroom’ in urban areas as compared to rural to influence their adjustments (particularly if performed arbitrarily by software that might assume the UHI is stable), thus helping to iron out cooler temperatures in the adjusted data in cooler months and contribute to a warming bias in the data. Is there any validity in this? Just interested, thanks 🙂
OVERHEARD AT REALCLIMATE: “How on earth did this get published? M&M and Watts are behind this. Get Pachauri on the phone… He’s what?… when?… Oh crap, hold all my calls!”
I’m extremely surprised that something like this hasn’t been done before. This would seem to be an obvious step given the issue of the UHI effect. Or maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe it this investigation HAS been performed, but the results have been hidden inside “censored” directories that haven’t been discovered.
Seriously, though, no one has ever done this until now!?!?
I work near Philadelphia and live further away in a more rural area. My car has an air termperature guage and I always like comparing the temperature along my way home. My home is always 5-10F cooler than my work area, in all four seasons. In the summer with the windows down you can actually feel it getting cooler as you drive away from the city.
Another favorite pastime: My local hometown paper carries the diary of a local guy born in the 1840′. He wrote on this day in 1902 it was 52F and raining and he thought it wasn’t all that strange. Today it’s 25F and we are having a blizzard with high winds. For the past 5 years of comparing his diary with the current temperture I get the impression it was warmer back then. Someday I’m going to plot his temps versus the current temps to see the actual correlation.
This is not a smoking gun.Its the bullet itself.
And we realize the Curry-talk is a smokescreen.
Now the question is; The data flowchart…..
NCDC raw (no AGW) -> NCDC fudge (AGW) -> CRU ??
In that case ; Did CRU know?
It’s global weirding all right.
My thoughts on this study, for anyone who is interested:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/12882
Sorry, I think I have missed something.
Why is the rural data adjusted at all?
Wow. I have two hopes: there’s a group of scientists somewhere doing a full-tilt analysis like this on all the stations, and someone from Sen. James Inhofe’s staff is reading this blog to gather ammunition for his investigation.
Primary questions: what is the justification for ‘adjusting’ temperatures from rural stations upward? What phenomena is causing those stations to read a COOLER temperature than reality? Virtually everything Man does results in artifically warmer temperatures including deforestation, land development, and roads. Please list those things which would result in an artificial cooling temperature, keeping in mind that some things such as site relocation and equipment changes could cause cooling OR warming artifacts so those things should come close to averaging out.
This is remarkable IF it is true. Guys like Gavin Schmidt at Realclimate will be highly skeptical, not least because SPPI is hardly non-partisan, and because the use of one pair of sites per state gives a big skew in data density towards all those little states on the east coast of the USA. Also, how adjacent are the rural/urban “pairs”? Finally the explanation accompanying the graphics on Page 13 is obscure, to say the least – I know what he means, but I’m pretty sure he says the exact opposite.
This work urgently needs to be checked and replicated -“climate skeptic audited” if you like. Because if it’s true it will be evidence of outright fraud.
Grumbler (05:26:58) :
Re: Steveta_uk comment…
I took steveta’s comment to be sarcasm, but you never know nowadays! 😉
—————-
I thought the last line was a giveaway myself, but included it just in case any of our colonial friends didn’t get the joke. Apparently, some still didn’t. So it goes…