Readers may recall some months ago that the Met Office planned to “do over” the surface temperature data sets:
Met office pushes a surface temperature data “do over”
The effort has started, and a website has been setup at http://www.surfacetemperatures.org
They write:
Surface temperature datasets for the 21st Century
To meet 21st Century requirements it is necessary to reconsider our analyses of historical land surface temperature changes. This is about much more than simply re-engineering existing datasets. These datasets were adequate for assessing whether climate was changing at the global scale. This current exercise should not be interpreted as a fundamental questioning of these previous efforts. But these pre-existing datasets cannot answer all the questions that society is now quite rightly asking. They do not constitute a sufficiently large sample to truly understand our uncertainty at regional scales. At monthly resolution they are also of limited utility in characterising extremes in climate and their changes.
Regardless of the causes, climate is not and never has been stable. Changes in climate impact all of society. But it is not changes in the monthly mean at scales of hundreds of Km that impact us all. It is changes at much more local scales and that last a few hours or days that have a major impact upon society. Whilst the long-term changes characterised by the current datasets can ameliorate or exacerbate the effects these datasets are fundamentally ill-suited to meet most of our needs as a global society.
The challenge set out in the proposal from the Met Office to the Commission for Climatology (CCl, see background link) is to produce a new suite of datasets capable of answering these questions. This requires more than the work of a single institution to do at all. It certainly requires very many partners to do properly. Following the positive outcome of the CCl deliberations an organising committee has been convened and the Met Office will be hosting a workshop in September in Exeter, UK. The organising committee, with substantial international representation, includes a broad range of expertise and perspectives and is undertaking planning activities. As yet planning is at too early a stage to publish details. More specific information will be posted by mid-June. However, the expected outcome of this meeting will be an in-depth plan with multi-institution sign on as to how to proceed. Broad aspects to be covered will be:
- Data recovery, digitisation and provision;
- data homogenisation and homogenisation system performance benchmarking;
- and communication, engagement and auditability
The plan is to solicit white papers on the range of topics to be discussed in advance of the meeting and post these on a (moderated) blog for broad input so that non-participants in the meeting can still have some meaningful input. The invitee list includes representatives from a number of relevant disciplines including a number that need to be engaged if the project is to be a success: climatologists; metrologists (measurement scientists); and statisticians amongst others. To be effective the meeting will have to be relatively small but, as stated above, stringent efforts will be made to entrain input from non-attendees in advance. And, of course, participation in the work will not be limited to attendees of this initial planning meeting only – to be successful it needs lots of participants, many more than will be at the meeting.
Update: 7/26 A revised version of the agenda is now available with only minor changes from the original. The white papers have begun to be posted at http://sites.google.com/a/surfacetemperatures.org/home/whitepapers (all hopefully to be posted within a week) and a moderated blog for public comments is available from http://surfacetemperatures.blogspot.com/ until August 23rd.
Update: 8/20 New version of agenda and comment period will remain open until September 1st.
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Here’s my take on it:
1) The effort, while noble, is a reaction to a series of data transparency blunders rather than a proactive approach to open replication. In the original Fox News article I cited on Feb 23rd, 2010 they write:
At a meeting on Monday of about 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain’s weather office quietly proposed that the world’s climatologists start all over again to produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and “rigorous” peer review.
After the firestorm of criticism called Climate-gate, the British government’s official Meteorological Office apparently has decided to wave a white flag and surrender.
While this effort is a step forward, it is unfortunate that it took Climategate to break free the idea of open and transparent data, and of surface data that has gone through rigorous quality control procedures. As we’ve seen recently, Canada’s own surface weather data is in such a mess that Environment Canada squelched their own embarrassing internal report and it took a freedom of information request to pry it loose. They called the state of the network “disturbing’.
2) This statement from the white paper 3, item 8 discussed here says:
A parallel effort as an integral part of establishing the databank is required to create an adjunct metadata databank that as comprehensively as feasible describes known changes in instrumentation, observing practices and siting at each site over time. This may include photographic evidence, digital images and archive materials but the essential elements should be in machine-readable form.
Is essentially a stamp of approval of my surfacestations.org project. Without knowing the changes in measurement conditions surrounding the century long experiment in climate monitoring, it is impossible to know the true quality of the data. I see this as a positive step forward.
3) Making this effort known to the climate community has apparently not been a strong suite of the Met Office, for example, I only found out about it a couple of days ago via a reporter asking questions about my views on it.
The Met office needs to be far more proactive in communications.
I encourage readers to make submissions before the Sept 1 deadline, as only a few days remain.
Stephen Mosher,
“There never has been any “dropping” of data or stations. Just an inglorious task of historical research that stopped for GHCN in the 90s.”
I think you need to take a remedial english course along with those remedial physics courses. They were using data from particular stations. They then were NOT using data from all the same stations. The stations, whose data they stopped using, were DROPPED!!! You need to say what you mean. There is no empirical evidence that the stations were PURPOSEFULLY DROPPED!! In fact, with the adjustments that are applied to stations, whether they are needed or not, it is likely that they may have reduced the trend by allowing the drop of stations. But then, if they had not allowed their trend to be reduced it would be pretty darned obvious that their series was flawed. What would be happening right now if the GISS and HadCrut series were 3c/C and the Satellites weren’t??
Of course this shows that creating a factual, accurate temperature series was not high on their priority list or they would have been paying more attention to the details and this large DROP of stations would not have been allowed! We see this with many of the primary data series from the Climate Community. They are apparently quite happy with the data until it conflicts with their models, at which time they suddenly find enought time and money to fix or “ADJUST” the data or reANALyse it!!
Now, you and your buddies can reconstruct the temp records all you want and all you are showing is that you are sycophants to the big boys. When you start addressing how the adjustments are done and how they are actually implemented on the raw data in a meaningful fashion you will be doing something USEFUL!!!
Remember, GIGO. Your temp series is just as useless as the Official ones for just this reason.
They say:
* Data recovery, digitisation and provision;
* data homogenisation and homogenisation system performance benchmarking;
* and communication, engagement and auditability
How come they don’t SPECIFICALLY state:
*With all data freely available/downloadable
*With all data transformation processes easily reproduced and open to the public
*With data collection processes and their inherent limitations
*With monitored public forums
Are we supposed to trust them with “communication, engagement and auditability?”
Those words can be true within a faulty peer-review process, including only hand-picked auditors.
I’m not impressed. They’re not as forthcoming about the openness I was expecting–and the scientific community should require.
I wish I had joined this debate earlier, but it has all been said above.
The Met Office has disgraced UK science, along with a “mickey mouse” university in East Anglia and the once noble Royal Society (Newton must be turning in his grave!). Out UK taxes have risen because of these idiots and 1600 decent people lost employment in Redcar at a 100 year old steel works in order that “carbon credits” could be cashed in by India.
I would urge every UK reader of this website to write to the Prime Minister about this travesty. I cerainly will (again!).
It is most certainly TRUE that GHCN does not carry forward all stations post-1990/91 that report in the CLIMATs. Station 51463 has no data in GHCN post-1991 but it has almost a complete record through 2010 in the CLIMATs, so it has been “dropped”.
The much vaunted C E T record is just a crock, over the years the recording stations have changed geographic location many times and those that remained in the same location for a period have been built around , found themselves in the middle of an international airport or downwind from the UK’s busiest motorway.
As an historic ‘continuous’ record it is meaningless.
Anthony, a couple of suggestions as you consider your input to surfacetemperatures.org.
Assuming that they do include adequate daily temperature data (yes, big if), I’d like to see them add meta-data for the annual (or decadal) population figures for each station, so that UHI effects can be adjusted for. (For airport sites, that might be average number of daily flights.)
And, if not already included, they should add the altitude of the station, in addition to the latitude, so that benchmarking and adjustment for this might be possible.
1st commandment of intelligent people: DO NOT BELIEVE IN NAMES, because it is a fallacy by definition.
The modern science reader simply has too much trust in the big names.
http://www.milesmathis.com/tide5.html
They want you to believe in them and in the names of their supposedly HOLY and UNMISTAKABLE institutions. Tell them you have the biggest and most humane name of all they should be, also, to believe in: LIBERTY.
A do-over? After all their huffing and puffing about how accurate their temperature data was.
Fifty years of lies I guess.
So the temperature data was never as “robust” as they claimed.
This thing reads like some pretentious romance novel..
KUDOS to you Anthony!
Didn’t Jones claim the data was lost in the move?
If Jones couldn’t retrieve it, how is the MET retrieving it?
Actually the experts they employ in this makeover should NOT include any of the usual suspects. Why would independent mathematicians, physicists, geologists, archeologists, historians…. not be trusted to do this work. What kind of knowledge is required – how to read a thermometer? How to guage whether the record is skewed by urbanization, how to deal with missing data. Also, I believe Finland or Sweden have a 200 year old plus temp record with a series on the ice break-up in the Baltic. The Irish have a comparatively long series. The US has a long series and there are long series in the Arctic that haven’t been compromised- particularly in eastern Greenland plus Arctic and Antarctic expeditions’ measurements (with the exception of the ignominious Catlin Expeditions).
I’m afraid I don’t trust them. They already have three “whitewashes” under their belts to embolden them to do another one. I believe skeptics and uncommitted should do a parallel study using all the long series data. Publicize this and serve notice that we will have a “referee” set of data to judge them by.
Former Head of the MET Office?
Why, none other than Sir John Houghton! Global Warming alarmist extraordinaire!
And he’s still hard at work waving his shrouds around. Check out:-
http://www.zcb2030.org/downloads/ZCB2030.pdf is the 384 page report with a foreword by – Sir John Houghton and ‘funded and partnered’ by (amongst others)
The Met Office (and UEA!).
This has to be one of the most tendentious and dishonest “reports” ever written. An eco-fascist “Mein Kampf”. It pretends that the UK could not only be “zero carbon” by 2030 (without nuclear) and that this would be “affordable” and “create jobs”.
Just check out the recommendations and laugh – or cry.
Remember this when the MET Office is winding up the spin machine.
A review of world temps headed by the UK MO. Can anyone spell UK HMG funded (to the tune of many hundreds of millions of dollars) arm of the WWF. But let us assume for the moment that they want to come clean and even discover an error of two tenths of a degree (not likely but.. either way, irrelevant). So what? My only shock is that the Earth can maintain temps over hundreds of years to within a few tenths of a degree.
That aside, what exactly are they going to prove? Perhaps that temps have increased since the very well documented LIA or that it is warmer now than it was when Skara Brae was abandoned some 4000 years ago (but not when the settlement was established). Perhaps they can explain why it seems so crucial [in the climate science community] to remove many tenths from the raw record of the 1930/40’s.
When you get right down to the bone though, what it is all about is keeping us all arguing about FDM versus RSM and tenths of a degree here and there while WWF, Goldman Sachs, BP, Shell, Deutsche Bank…. all make you work an extra day a week for no return other than paying your “carbon obligation”. Rent seekers, Politicians and their “useful idiots”.
What these thieves should remember is that “taxation” without representation never ends well. The Guillotine rarely cuts based on what part you played – unlike “climate” it’s a kind of binary judgement.
Cassandra King says:
August 25, 2010 at 7:44 am
The met office has blown any credibility it had IMHO, too many ridiculous assertions based on a political narrative and too many false predictions based on flawed data and methods.
The met office led and directed by by possibly the worst leader ever placed in such an office and the reliance on a very expensive super computer running corrupted models has destroyed a magnificent national institution and sullied its reputation as the father and mother of the art of meteorology.
When I think of hundreds of dedicated staff stretching back to the dawn of the industrial age and how they would feel now if they could but regard the wreckage that is the met office of today, what a tragedy.
It will take years of effort and a detailed reformation to rebuild the met office to a shadow of its former self, if they ever do.
Did you know that the Met Office was started by Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin’s Captain of The Beagle on the journey to South America and The Galapagos.
Fitzroy was a meticulous surveyor, whose work even today, aligns very closely with modern mapping.
He would have been apalled of the way in which real data is altered by value-added techniques. If you value-added Fitzroy’s mapping using this method, The Straits of Magellan would be located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! Oh he also ended it all by commiting suicide. It is worth a good read, much more interesting than Darwin.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fitzroy-Remarkable-Darwins-Invention-Forecast/dp/0755311825/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1282767734&sr=1-3
The project should start with a detailed description of the “signal” it intends to measure. This includes an account of signal characteristics, such as dynamic properties in space and time.
(If we could define the signal in this way, we would have all we need to be able to agree a standard test for statistically significant changes and trends.)
When the signal is understood as set out above, the project can then move onto the specification of a sampling system. Sampling must capture enough data for accurate re-construction of the signal shape from the sampled data.
(Reconstructing the shape of a signal from sampled data is much more demanding than the data required to estimate statistical aggregates.)
The sampling system must satisfy the requirements of the Sampling Theorem in space and time. In practice, data sampling will need to be at least 10 times the theoretical minimum.
I suspect the project has set itself an unachievable objective if it is setting out to measure a global average surface temperature (whatever that may mean).
The cost and effort of data sampling will be too great, and not enough information will be collected. All we’re gonna get is sub-standard sampling and data totally ruined by aliasing. That’s not gonna be worth the effort.
A few long-dated series at rural sites would have greater utility because we can at least understand what the data does and doen’t represent.
Anthony,
I disagree with your analysis. This is no white flag from the Met Office it is a gigantic piece of smoke and mirrors concealing their real trick which ensures that only true believers can get to the data.
If you go back in time just 9 months the Met Office web site offered downloads of nearly raw, up to the last month, surface station data. To be exact you had to select the data then copy and paste in to a file and then in to Excel so it was difficult to do in bulk but it was there and freely available.
There was even a statement on their site that talked about why the historic raw data had been destroyed. Apparently it was technically too difficult and expensive to keep back in the 1980’s (even though a whole world set of data would fit on about 5 tapes).
These data included the stations in Australia and New Zealand and crucial records such as Oxford and Armargh and contained Tmax, Tmin, hours of sunshine and precipitation by month.
Bulk temperature data for a whole rake of countries could be downloaded. It was a bit tedious because you had to open each file and figure out what it one contained but it was there.
None of that data is now publicly available.
No white flag just deeper trenches.
The purpose of propaganda is not to tell people what to think, it is to provide an excuse to not think. This statement by the Met Office is designed for that purpose. It uses a lot of words to avoid saying anything. This is the standard MO of the Met Office.
The people: “You said it would be a BBQ summer.”
Met Office: “We didn’t say that.”
That particular game changed with last winter. Last winter the complaint was not over what they said, but what they didn’t say.
The people: “It was the worst winter for 40 years and you didn’t tell us.”
Met Office: “We didn’t say that.”
The people: “We know, that’s what we’re complaining about!”
Met Office: “We didn’t say tha…Oh…well stuff you, we’re not going to give medium term forcasts any more.”
The people: “The ones wrong 6 times out of 6? Good.”
Met Office: “The year 2010 is going to be the hottest ever.”
This data “re-alignment” is going to be interesting because the political background has changed. Not only are they up for sale, but the new government has taken many of the Green projects they supported in opposition out back behind the woodpile. Whether or not the Met Office has taken to heart the game has changed remains to be seen though.
We need a completely new agency with new people to undertake this work – professional statistiscians who are objective.
Let the fox recount the chickens?
I’m sceptical that this represents a genuine effort to change, rather than a new opportunity to get the same result and say “I told you so”. We have entered a period of Post Modern science whereby only the science that supports the political and social agenda is “good” science. Just as Post Modern history rewrites the historical narrative to suit current agendas, scientific data can (and perhaps must) be rewritten to suit the current political narrative. The Met Office will chase the funding to provide whatever outcome their political masters want.
kuhnkat you need to read the history of the project. the way people write about it they seem to imagine that NOAA was collecting data and then stopped collecting it in 1990 on some stations. That’s just factually wrong. But if you want to know the history just read the documents or do an FOIA. My last FOIA to NOAA arrived in the mail a bit a ago. about 400 pages on the decision to take some metadata down off the web. I will start to take people more seriously when they actually engage in the process of seeking the truth. That means reading the documents that are available, spending more than 5 minutes on a problem, actually filing some FOIA. FWIW.
“They are wrong from the getgo. There is no mention of revisiting the papers that established the adjustments including UHI and homogenisation. ”
1. GISS is the only service that adjusts for UHI. CRU do not.
2. There is no standard proceedure for homgenization. menne will offer a paper on the new proceedure. GHCNv3 will use that proccedure.
3. Non homogenized data would be available as a level 4 data product. Did you read?
I would suggest that you make positive comments to improve the process. Time is short.
Here’s a (somewhat paranoid) thought: If a climate model was really useful in predicting climate change, it would have serious military implications–extremely serious. If you understand how climate works, chances are you also understand a lot about how to change it. Do we really want Islamic nutcases and other potential enemies knowing that sort of thing? Wouldn’t it be logical to make sure any non-classified models are run by second-raters and are going down blind alleys? That would explain a lot.
There would almost have to be classified military efforts to understand climate, if for no other reason than to understand what potential enemies might try in terms of altering it. I suspect that it would be focused primarily on regional impacts, with a secondary effort at understanding how those regional impacts interact–a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one, though that approach isn’t necessary to the idea .
The military would certainly have the resources to have more data on worldwide climate conditions than is publicly available. With all of the Cold War submarine cat and mouse games the military almost certainly knows more about the temperatures of different levels of the oceans than are publicly available. They certainly did have rather advanced weather prediction capabilities for the time as far back as World War II. That doesn’t necessarily give them climate prediction capabilities, but that would be a logical extension of weather prediction efforts.
Climate is scary-complex, and I’m not sure even with a lot more data and competent people in charge of the effort the military could come up with something militarily useful. And of course playing with climate alteration is an extremely dangerous game. I would be very surprised if the military didn’t have both offensive and defensive strategies at least being talked about, modeled far more competently than the publicly available models can model them, and maybe tested on a small scale though.
Lucy
“If we take advice from McKitrick for starters, and work on the cumulative distortions of basic records from UHI etc, we seem to be looking at 0.5 deg C overshoot at least.”
I believe ross claims that AS MUCH AS 50% of the warming seen ON LAND since 1980 is explained by a function that includes ‘literacy’ in 1979 (LIT79 ) as a predictor and GISS population figures ( 1990 figures that are not very accurate), national coal production….go read the regression equation, just to double check me ok?
“The correlations are quite robust to the inclusion of atmospheric circulation indicators, confirming the presence of significant extraneous signals in surface climate data on a scale sufficient to account for about half the observed upward trend over land since 1980.”
” A substantial fraction of the post-1980 trends in gridded climate data over land are likely not “climatically real” but result from data quality problems and local environmental modifications.”
Lets see. GISS 1980 is about .2 and now about .7.. heck make it .6C warming over land.
Then You go do the math. the land is 30% of the total. Ross claims that AS MUCH AS 50% of the rise seen since 1980 an be explained by a function that uses the variables I described above. So if the rise over land was .6C from 1980, then.. .3C of it can be explained by a function that uses coal production of the country, the literacy rate in 1979, the population in 1990, and whether or not its in the soviet union, and a dummy variable for proximity to water ( coastal warms more slowly) and cosine of latitude. I would not call that UHI. UHI is caused by physical changes to the surface.
In any case, you end up with maybe .15C of the TOTAL global warming that can be explained by the regression equation. (Want to see how that regression works as a prediction? It cant. or whats the literacy rate in 1979 got to do with UHI in 2030?)
In any case. I like Ross’s work because it shows just how SMALL the possible contribution of UHI is.
“This is about much more than simply re-engineering existing datasets. These datasets were adequate for assessing whether climate was changing at the global scale.”
And does anyone expect the new datasets to prove anything different?
An article on this appears in The Economist
https://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/08/climate_science
(A most curiously combatative tone for this mag)
I haven’t heard of a general house cleaning at the top of The Met, I do notice a rather new PR Meister (Alan Shepherd, Strategic Marketing & Product Director) but can’t imagine that this is anything more than a diversion by the “Kid” to throw the warmists off their scent and get a little breather. The proof is in da’Puddin.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/board/executive_info.html
Now they want people to sue us for “climate change” impacting weather – this is the real mind set of the Met office diktocrats
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727754.200-time-to-blame-climate-change-for-extreme-weather.html