From the “we told you so time and again department”, Canadian weather data is a mess. It took an FOIA to get the “fess up” out in the open. Anybody got a copy of the EC report? So far all we have is press reports.
See our WUWT report below, it isn’t just Canada that is in the red with poor data. Though you can see a vast swath of red and lots of missing grey area in Canada.
GISS & METAR – dial “M” for missing minus signs: it’s worse than we thought
From the Financial Post
Sustained cuts to Environment Canada weather-service programs have compromised the government’s ability to assess climate change and left it with a “profoundly disturbing” quality of information in its data network, says a newly released internal government report.
“The common assumption among users is that the data has been observed accurately, checked for mistakes and stored properly,” said the report, printed in June 2008. “It is profoundly disturbing to discover the true state of our climate data network and the data we offer to ourselves and the real world.”
The stinging assessment, obtained through an access-to-information request, suggests that Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines.
Key findings in the report:
• Automatic precipitation sensors are subject to significant and well-known errors, which have significantly compromised the integrity of Canada’s precipitation data;
• National coverage of certain climate elements, such as hours of bright sunshine, have been effectively terminated;
• Human quality control of climate data ceased as of April 1, 2008. Automated quality control is essentially non-existent. There is no program in place to prevent erroneous data from entering the national climate archive;
• Climate data, which could be gathered at minimal additional cost, is not being gathered due to lack of funds;
• Climate data, which could be gathered with minimal additional effort, is not being gathered due to lack of personnel;
• Some existing data, which needs to be interpreted and processed before being placed into the national archive, is being ignored due to lack of resources;
• A significant portion of the volunteer climate network will likely be lost due to a decision on the part of the Meteorological Service of Canada to discontinue processing paper forms and to emphasize electronic input;
• Clients of Environment Canada (both internal and external) cannot obtain the information they need. This has significant implications for programs carried out by all levels of government, the private sector and the international scientific community; and
• Lack of resources and delayed quality control of climate data have resulted in updates of Intensity/Duration/Frequency curves that proceed in fits and starts. Systematic and regular updates are desired by the engineering community in order to design public infrastructure (roads, buildings, sewers) that will be able to cope with severe storms and phenomena associated with changing climate.
• These issues are widely recognized by staff within the department, and are becoming increasingly obvious to outside partners and clients, damaging morale within and credibility outside the department.
Source: Degradation in Environment Canada’s Climate Network, Quality Control and Data Storage Practices: A Call to Repair the Damage. June 2008.
Ok, the certainty may have caveats, the consensus may be a spoon or two short of a picnic but what’s the problem?
We are all doomed. We are going to die.
Youre right, of course, but for the wrong reason!
Death is but the chasm that divides stupidity and
pragmatic acceptance.
That we will die is an axiom that you predicate that we will die because we are evil is an issue that you need to get help for!
Ah yes … blame everything on the Conservatives. As a Canadian , once again the incompetent civil service cries … “We need more funding” … it never ends.
Environment Canada has been pumping the “global warming” for years and one of the most prominent global warming champion was Environment Canada’s Senior Climatologist David Phillips , though of late he seems to have been silent about global warming … I guess we can blame this on the Conservatives as well eh ?
“Perhaps this is the way forward, or rather the way out. Blame the data gatherers (volunteer and otherwise) and exit quietly through the side door of “insuffficient data” over the coming decade”
Z’s got it. This is how the politicians teflon their way out of the public ridicule of AGW that’s coming.
“All those sloppy scientists, who can blame us for believing them…?”
I’m particularly interested that mere employees aren’t being paid off from the ‘Green Billions’.
Harry knows where the skeletons are 😉
Come on people. Just a few threads back we were told so many different models by various independent sources were in good agreement;
the surface station networkGISS wasquality controlledvalidatedreplicated over and over . What is so difficult to understand?Nothing to see here, move along.
It is so important to save the earth now but when asked why the answer is we do not know. The data has been lost or it is unobtainable. But then with enthusiasm paint the unknowns red, that solves the problem.
As a Canadian, I would like to see Environment Canada spending their resources on real data and stop promoting the global warming scenario.
We need a new acronym: IWTWT (It’s Worse Than We Thought).
A few years back I had some correspondence with a manager in charge of EC quality control. I pointed out a number of ‘very unusual’ records (some actually physically impossible). He readily admitted problems, some quite serious – no hesitation whatsoever – (and this was in writing). Shortly thereafter he wrote back announcing his position was being phased out.
Climate has nothing to do with left/right politics. Many of us are putting our political orientations completely aside as we explore the mysteries of natural climate variations. Politics: a complete bore. Natural climate variations (on the other hand): anything but.
200cm of snow appears overnight – and then vanishes….
650cm of snow on ground today, then 0cm the next day, … repeat this pattern at random intervals… (and no helicopters & Olympics involved…)
…And every time the temperature drops below 0 degrees C, even if to -17C, just record 0 (because we all know it “never” goes below freezing in Vancouver, right?) …watch for strings of zeros at some stations during arctic outflows.
Starve the beast. Coming soon to the US once the Dem’s are turfed starting this Nov.
“Canada’s climate network infrastructure is getting progressively worse and no longer meets international guidelines.” So all the funds being poured into climate research, government policies such as British Columbia’s carbon tax,is based on at best fraudulent information and the government must have know this. Climatic research scientists must have know this but keep with thier doom and gloom for more funding.
When will this hudge misdirection of money stop?
I wonder how the data effects this: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
According to this data we beat 1998 this year in the NH by a hair.
How hard is it to read a thrmometer? How hard is it to design an automated system? We have them on a few planets beyond earth. Before you reply that it can be a challenge, I want you to know my rejoinder will be that then it must be impossible to make sensible forecasts of the climate if weather data is useless.and certainly the error bars on 0.1F climate graphs should be increased to about ±2 to 5F. There seems no alternative but to expand the surfacestations project to actually gathering the weather data. The recent revelations of corrupted data from a number of places I believe to have been an avalanche started by Anthony’s project.
Let’s start with a name change from Environment Canada to something like The Canadian Weather Service. The bass-akward naming of Canadian government departments and services has gone on far too long. It’s a Trudeau/bilingual thing that has outlived it’s welcome. Change the name and change the attitude of the employees, do like Reagan did for the air traffic controllers. With modern technology, people really can be more productive than they used to be, all they have to do is get busy.
Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has completely ignored the environment and wants nothing to do with “greenie” type things such as research…
It is a good thing that the Pembina Institute made the Freedom of Information Act request, because very few of the rest of us mortals can. However, the Pembina Institute puts its own political spin on the causes of the calamity by blaming Stephen Harper and his party instead of John Chretien and the Liberal Party, the real culprit responsible for the budget cuts, while the elephant in the room goes unnoticed.
Perhaps the report contained no information on what the elephant is. If so, it is amazing that neither the author of the Financial Post article nor the Pembina Institute were sufficiently astute to notice the biggest problem of all, which is that the vast majority of Canada’s weather stations that once regularly reported on weather conditions now no longer exists.
One could argue that weather satellites eliminated the need for ground-based temperature measurements, but that would be far too simple a reaction. Weather satellites do not measure local conditions such as rainfall-and snowfall amounts, wind-speed and -direction, relative humidity and hours of sunshine — all absolute necessary not only for climate change modelling but also for accurately forecasting the weather.
The deterioration of the weather services programs was not only caused on account of automation, as claimed in the report, but primarily on account of closing down hundreds and perhaps thousands of weather stations. That was done many years before Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada made it into Ottawa and even before the Conservative Party of Canada even came into existence. The fault for the severe cutbacks to the data-collection network lies squarely with the Liberal Party. It did not happen by accident. It happened because it was a deliberate policy of the Liberal government.
Have a look at some pertinent comments on the report (at wattsupwiththat.com)
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MaxL says: August 23, 2010 at 2:45 pm
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Dave in Exile says: August 23, 2010 at 3:16 pm
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Dennis Nikols, P Geol. says: August 23, 2010 at 4:37 pm
One of those comments (the first on the list) was made by a Canadian weather forecaster. It seems to be obvious that no other commenters either at the FP article or at the wattsupwithtthat.com posting have any appreciation of what is necessary to produce accurate weatherforecasts. It even seems that most of the commenters see no need for accurate weather forecasts, which makes me wonder why they bother to comment on the article except to complain that funding for weather-forecasting is a waste of money.
Many of the commenters see the Environment Canada report as a cry to stimulate more funding, somewhat justifiably surmising that the bureaucrats responsible falsely feel that if we only throw more money at the problem, the quality of the data produced by the Canadian weather services programs will be improved. It is very doubtful that will any improvement will happen, although all extra funding will doubtlessly be used up. After all, Environment Canada’s size grew within a relatively short time from an office with with about 15 employees to become a large employer with a workforce that grew to very large proportions.
Environment Canada is a federal government department with approximately 4,700 employees located in 100 communities. (Source: Environment Canada, “What We Do: Key Facts and Figures,” About Us, 31 March 2003, , 13 May 2004)
The Wikipedia entry for Environment Canada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_Canada , presently shows an employment figure of ~6,000, although I have no idea how old that figures is, while it seems to me that not very long ago I read an article that put the total number of Environment Canada employees at 10,000. Darn it, I did not bookmark that.
Regardless of how much money is being thrown at that problem, even with the best intentions, the quality of the data outputs of the weather service programs cannot be better than the quality of the data that is being input: garbage in = garbage out.
Robert says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Maybe it’s because Stephen Harper has completely ignored the environment and wants nothing to do with “greenie” type things such as research…
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I hope you are right. Mr Harper please do not waste my tax $$ on “greenie” type of research
Why is it that the more money gets flushed down the CAGW toilet of research that the poorer the quality the data becomes? Call me naive but I would have thought that the data quality should be getting better?
EC has spent upwards of 4 billion $ on climate change. Long suspected stations where recording junk as manned stations mostly all gone. Strange the decline of data gathering accelerates as Liberals promote AWG. Pausible deniablity?A Canadian joke, how can you tell a liberal is lying?..Their lips are moving. We are truly governed by nitwits and worse. Crazy, lazy and or stupid our civil service. I am sorry to see its worse than I thought at Environment Canada but strangely unsurprised. Just another place Harper can cut with no change in “service” to the taxpayer.
MaxL, Canada has lots of money — more now than in most times past. And yet, your word is that the meteorological budget is getting cut. Any thoughts about where the money is actually going?
Even back in 2002, there were published complaints that the Canadian climate record was not processed to remove any more than the most obvious biases and errors.
For example, Vincent, L.A., Zhang, X., Bonsal, B.R. and Hogg, W.D., Homogenization of Daily Temperatures over Canada, J. Climate, 2002, 15 (11), 1322-1334; doi: 10.1175/1520-0442(2002)0152.0.CO;2.
Quote: “adjustments have only been carried out for identified step changes and the homogenized monthly temperatures have not been adjusted for artificial trends at this time.”
Pat Frank says:
August 23, 2010 at 9:08 pm
MaxL, Canada has lots of money — more now than in most times past. And yet, your word is that the meteorological budget is getting cut. Any thoughts about where the money is actually going?
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The simple answer to that is, I don’t know were the money is going. I know where it is not going. It is not going into improving the forecast system. It is not going into meteorology research, in fact it is still being cut from there. There is a lot of frustration in the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC). The forecasters really do try to do their best but their tools and data are being degraded. There does not seem to be much will on the part of government to invest in science and research, at least not in weather related areas.
The money has been going to mid-level and high-level bureaucrats. It’s been getting worse and worse ever since Samy Watson went through and nearly destroyed the meteorological service by requiring reports on reports on reports from everyone about the most minute things they were doing. The money that would have gone to observation has instead gone to the bureaucracy required just to file and read these reports. He did the same thing at Agriculture Canada.
The observation network is required to be maintained and actually useful (which it largely is not) to provide better forecasts. No extra money is needed, just cut the bureaucracy and let the people doing real work (forecasters, technicians, etc.) do their jobs.
And that’s not even mentioning the pitiful, embarrassing state of the upper air and radar networks.
Government report: Canadian climate data quality ‘disturbing’
Even more disturbing is how much original data is now trashed beyond recovery, and how big of a hole is blown in the side of the good ship Global Climate consistency?
Jimmy Haigh says:
August 23, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Why is it that the more money gets flushed down the CAGW toilet of research that the poorer the quality the data becomes? Call me naive but I would have thought that the data quality should be getting better?
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Right, but in their reverse-darwinian parallel universe, it does not work out that way.
Defies all known laws of logic, reason, and common sense…but in their universe, only the weak…survive!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Johann says:
August 23, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Johann, your comments are right on the mark! It is interesting that you mention the pitiful radar network. Most television stations in the U.S. have more sophisticated doppler radar technology than the Canadian meteorology service.
Jimmy Haigh says:
August 23, 2010 at 8:49 pm
“Why is it that the more money gets flushed down the CAGW toilet of research that the poorer the quality the data becomes? Call me naive but I would have thought that the data quality should be getting better?”
Jimmy, you need to look at this from a less idealistic and more of a practical perspective; and let’s use the case of funding for Environment Canada as a generic example.
Weather service programs make up only a relatively minuscule fraction of the expenditures of Environment Canada. Weather-data-collection efforts have been steadily reduced over the years, for which reason many weather stations (even in the far north, where they should count far more than the other, far more numerous stations in the relatively narrow band along the the U.S. — Canada border) were closed down. Curiously, and perhaps in contradiction, data processing (that is where a lot of the enormous budget figures went) for forecasting, especially for long-range forecasting, have been increased substantially. Considering the cuts in funding for data measuring, collecting and recording, does that make sense? Absolutely!
Think of the votes a few million dollars annually in funding to a university will create in the voting districts involved, versus the insignificant impact of a few additional jobs dispersed over very many voting districts all over the country. Keep also in mind that the expenditures for automation of weather stations happen where the bills are being paid, in Ottawa, not in electoral districts in the Arctic.
Around 50 or so stations existed once in the far North and have been reduced to somewhere around a half dozen (virtually no voters there). In another discussion thread at WUWT is was discussed that only one of the remaining stations in the north (Eureka) is now being used for the GHCN. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/22/dial-m-for-mangled-wikipedia-and-environment-canada-caught-with-temperature-data-errors/
I don’t know why only the data for the Eureka Weather Station are being used for the GHCN and can think only of one possible reason, namely that by extrapolating from the stations farther south an arctic warming trend can be shown for the Canadian North. It seems that of the remaining stations in the North, Eureka is the best for meeting the objective of showing warming in the North. Eureka’s climate is somewhat milder than that of the other weather stations in the North, except, of course, for those along the Pacific coast and close to Alaska. All of those stations will show a warmer Arctic than local measurements would show.
There are various reasons for the closing of the stations in the North. The primary reason is to save money for other things Environment Canada involves itself in. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_Canada#Division
The first item on the list of four major divisions is concerned with weather forecasting, but notice that even within that there are aspects that have little direct involvement with the weather or forecasting it.
Only a very small fraction of the staff of Environment Canada is directly concerned with anything connected to the weather. It appears that the vast majority of Environment Canada caters to the green machine.
I cannot help but feel that accuracy with respect to the weather is no longer the primary objective of Environment Canada (once-upon-a-time it was), but that the politics of climate change drive much of everything they concern themselves with now.
The reason for the emphasis on environmental pollution is simply nothing other than that things like 1,600 dead ducks in the tar-sands settling ponds in Fort McMurray have a much greater impact on upcoming elections than a period of bad weather will have that the forecasters failed to predict. That is why the media kept silent about the plan to eradicate 165,000 Canada geese in NYC by gassing them and why they never say anything about bird-swatting wind turbines. Not expedient, you see?
The dead ducks, by popular demand, can be kept in the front pages and the evening news for weeks at a stretch and repeatedly for years (every time the case goes to court), while unexpected bad weather bores people within a day or so, after which people adapt and soon forget. Politicians will not be held responsible for bad weather, even though they are the ones who are responsible for the lousy quality of the weather forecasts — and they know it.
People expect a poor quality of the weather forecasts. The vast majority of the comments in this discussion thread are proof of that. The politicians don’t need polls to figure that out. Therefore they will concentrate on what gets them elected; and they will make as many cuts as they can get away with to the funding for weather service programs. The commenters at the Financial Post article (except perhaps one) clearly expressed that to be their wish, and very few people who commented here differ.