It should be noted that NIWA is not the official Meteorological Service of New Zealand. From their FAQs: Is NIWA the Met Service?
No, the MetService is a separate company which can be found at www.metservice.com. NIWA does perform climate prediction and monitoring services, however, but these are more long term.
… and…NIWA is a Crown Research Institute, established in 1992. It operates as a stand-alone company with its own Board of Directors and Executive.
– Anthony
Crisis in New Zealand climatology
by Barry Brill
May 15, 2010
The warming that wasn’t
The official archivist of New Zealand’s climate records, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), offers top billing to its 147-year-old national mean temperature series (the “NIWA Seven-station Series” or NSS). This series shows that New Zealand experienced a twentieth-century warming trend of 0.92°C.
The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C +/- 0.5°C for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.
The NSS is the outcome of a subjective data series produced by a single Government scientist, whose work has never been peer-reviewed or subjected to proper quality checking. It was smuggled into the official archive without any formal process. It is undocumented and sans metadata, and it could not be defended in any court of law. Yet the full line-up of NIWA climate scientists has gone to extraordinary lengths to support this falsified warming and to fiercely attack its critics.
For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website.
Internationally, the NSS 0.92°C trend is a foundation stone for the Australia-New Zealand Chapter in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. In 1994, it was submitted to HadleyCRUT, so as to influence the vast expanses of the South Pacific in the calculation of globally-averaged temperatures.
The Minister of Research Science and Technology, the Hon Dr Wayne Mapp, has finally become alarmed at the murky provenance of the NSS. The Government has directed and funded a 6-month project to produce a new national temperature record, with published data and transparent processes. The replacement record is to be the subject of a scientific paper, which is to be peer-reviewed by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
Hon Rodney Hide, a climate sceptic who is a Minister in the current Government and leader of the junior coalition partner, the ACT Party, has called upon his ministerial colleagues to formally repudiate the NSS and to withdraw all publications and formal papers which are based on the spurious warming trend of 0.92°C. The Government has not yet responded to this challenge.
New Zealand is a small country, with a strong tradition of open Government, and is not an easy place to keep secrets. The acceptance of the NSS for so long offers evidence of the dictum: “you can fool all of the people some of the time..” But if that can happen in New Zealand, how much greater is the probability that similar shenanigans could be happening in larger, more complex, jurisdictions?
BACKGROUND
The New Zealand Meteorological Service, with its forebears, has been measuring and recording our weather since 1861. In 1992, it published a booklet containing a detailed history of all its weather stations, along with 140 years of climate data. In that year, NIWA came into being and has now published most of the Met Service data online.
In 2007, the then Prime Minister announced her party’s intention that New Zealand should lead the world in fighting climate change, and aim to be the world’s first carbon-neutral country by 2025.
Earlier in 2007, NIWA produced a web page, followed by a printed brochure, with a graph showing that New Zealand had already warmed by an amount far in excess of global averages. The web page claimed a temperature increase of 1.1C during the 144 years of Met Service records, and a 0.92°C trend during the 20th century.
These are remarkable claims. They came out of the blue and do not accord with any written histories, or the personal impressions of our older generations. They don’t square with “hottest day” records held in provinces and city archives. They were not accompanied by big changes in rainfall or winds or sea levels. In these claims, NIWA is a very lonely orphan.
Read the entire substantial essay here at Quadrant Online
h/t to WUWT reader A C Osborn
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Partisan thermometrics.
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Through the Thermometer Glass.
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“[…] For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. […]”
(Emphasis mine.) So any claims that “the models agree” with observed data is an indictment of the models. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Good grief. That makes Phil Jones look like a careful and conscientous documentarian!
In northern Iowa this morning for some surfacestation hunting!
[REPLY – Great! Be SURE to include measurements from pavement or buildings, and if possible, make the shots include all such heat sources/sinks with the station visible. I’ll be having to add a Google Earth measurement view to any surveys you make, and it can be very difficult without all that. But you are an old hand at this, so this is just a reminder. Thanks, and happy hunting. There’s nothing more exhilarating than that initial spot! ~ Evan]
Peer reviewed by the Australian BoM? You got to be kidding. That’s like appointing Bernie Maedoff to audit the Enron accounts. What a crooked joke.
Absolutely amazing.
Why is it, that even in developed countries, a single individual can get away with manipulating “official” records so dramatically and for so long, and government policy be blindly driven by this forged data?
We have seen it in the UK, we see it in the US and now in NZ.
A compact country like NZ is an ideal place to choose as a control on a science out of control. The big problem in climatology is impatience. There is no need to alter historical records at all except to insist on quality siting. If there is warming of significant amount the record will show it to us without fudging, fiddling and trying to tease out of the data more than is in there. Same with sea level. It’s fine to manipulate data for research purposes and for speculation on what may be, but it’s unacceptable to alter the official records. To do that is like altering the genetic code to make a match with that of a suspect in a crime.
I wonder if Dr. Salinger is any relation to J. D. Salinger, the famous FICTION writer.
“Internationally, the NSS 0.92°C trend is a foundation stone for the Australia-New Zealand Chapter in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. In 1994, it was submitted to HadleyCRUT, so as to influence the vast expanses of the South Pacific in the calculation of globally-averaged temperatures.”
Take that 0.92°C trend out of HadCRUT and what happens?
Hahaha. Good point, H. R. Wanna bet that if forced to remove the influence that somehow that model will end up with roughly the same results anyway? These people may be zealots, but they’re intelligent zealots and they’ll figure out a way to get where they want to go anyway!
Makes you wonder what other shennanigans are going on with other data sets. With the AGW issue being so political, it is hard to trust at face value any data sets presented by government entities
We should have more sunlight, the world’s best disinfectant.
Just how many wheels does this wagon have? Surely there cannot be many left to fall off.
Expect to see this splashed all over the MSM as New Scientist claim happens … not!
My concern when I highlighted this to Anthony was do with the Global Temperature asa well as the sheer arrogance of what was doen here.
Is New Zealands Temp series used for any fo the surrounding “Grid Bins”?
tarpon says:
May 15, 2010 at 7:07 am
‘We should have more sunlight, the world’s best disinfectant’
I’m going to push for more sunshine laws. If it takes putting audio and video recording devices in very hook and cranny in every corner of every room in Washington, so be it. There will be so much light it will make the streets of London look like the dark side of the moon.
NIWA have since named a different list of nine mainland stations “with long-term records where no significant site changes have occurred” and challenged anyone to download the data which is available on the NIWA site..
Here are the 9am temperatures at those stations from 1960 onward (there’s no data earlier). There is a slight downward trend.
http://i40.tinypic.com/353dra9.jpg
Here are GISS temperatures for Auckland Airport from 1880 to 1990.
There is an insignificant trend.
http://i43.tinypic.com/643tba.jpg
Something the article didn’t mention is that one of the stations in the NIWA Seven Station Series is dropped from the NASA GISS product because GISS can’t do there UHI correction on it. This was something I stumbled across months ago when I found Auckland NZ had no final adjusted output from GISS even though it is in the station list for stations used by them. I sent an Email to GISS and got areply back from Dr. Rudy about that station and why GISS doesn’t use it:
Amazing how NIWA thinks that is a good station to use but even GISS doesn’t use it because it can’t be properly adjusted.
“Take that 0.92°C trend out of HadCRUT and what happens?”
poof
Then they would have to explain the trend going down.
PJP says:
May 15, 2010 at 6:44 am
The governments are not blind. Their key people have horses in that race.
This just shows how the deletion of monitoring stations is so dangerous. Just one perpetrator in a grid can alter, using “interpolation” algorithms, all the data sets in the world.
I wish we could have a benefactor to set up monitoring stations in the many remote “holes” that have become so critical. Here’s where Bill Gates could put some of his “mad money” to good use.
I would place improved Stevenson screens at slightly higher altitude, away from the ground effects, fully automated, taking readings every few seconds, and with satellite radio then reporting to a secure server. I’m sure it’s been thought of.
Maybe then, perhaps, climatologers can begin to be climatologists again.
Post modern math. You can draw the slope from a single point. When I grew up, (the olden days) it took two points to create a line and see the slope.
Here’s Auckland NZ Decadal Average Temperature by Month (a Willis type graph) – -data ex GISS
http://i41.tinypic.com/311ur2t.jpg
1950 was the highest decade between 1881 and 1993 (the only data at GISS). 1990 was the lowest in June.
I’m going to recomment.
I wonder if Dr. Salinger is any relation to J. D. Salinger, the famous FICTION writer. J. D. Salinger is well known for being secretive.
Wow…If the GISS don’t even want to use it. it must really stink.
GISS…..NSS……. It’s no coincidence they’re all truncated to *sses.
PJP says:
May 15, 2010 at 6:44 am
Absolutely amazing.
Why is it, that even in developed countries, a single individual can get away with manipulating “official” records so dramatically and for so long, and government policy be blindly driven by this forged data?
Policy is not set by the data. The data is transformed to fit the policy. Social Justice was the solution and climate change was the “problem”.