UPDATE: Thanks to a reader who pointed out where to find the 2008 version of BOM rainfall data, I’m able to plot the two data sets. There are differences. See addendum below. – Anthony
BOM loses rainfall
by Tom Quirk on Quadrant Online
Shock Murray-Darling Basin discovery
Analysts at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have some explaining to do.
In the last two years some 900 mm of rainfall have been removed from the rainfall record of the Murray-Darling Basin. This startling discovery was made by comparing the annual Murray-Darling Basin rainfall reported on the Bureau of Meteorology website in August 2008 and the same report found yesterday.
The annual rainfall figures are shown as reported in October 2010:
Yearly rainfall in the Murray-Darling Basin from 1900 to 2009 as reported in October 2010 with a mean value of 467 mm (solid line).
There is no significant trend in rainfall through this period but there is large variability with rainfall extremes of a 257 mm minimum and a 787 mm maximum.
The comparison with the August 2008 report is revealing. The difference is a decrease of 900 mm rainfall in the 2010 report. The significant decrease occurs after 1948:
Changes to Bureau of Meteorology record of Murray-Darling Basin rainfall. Data downloaded August 2008 and October 2010
The Bureau is already on record adjusting Australian temperature measurements and they now appear to have turned to rainfall, making the last 60 years drier than previously reported.
One can understand that adjustments might be made to a few of the most recent years as records are brought up to date but a delay of forty or fifty years seems a little long.
This raises the question how certain is the data that is used by policy makers?
When we are confronted by apparently definitive forecasts of our future with rising temperatures and less rain, are we living through a period that brings to mind the Polish radio announcement of Soviet times?:
The future is certain only the past is unpredictable.
============================================
WUWT Reader Charlie A writes:
The Wayback machine comes to the rescue!
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bom.gov.au/web01/ncc/www/cli_chg/timeseries/rain/0112/mdb/latest.txt is the Murray Darling basin annual rainfall archived by archive.org on January 30th, 2008.
The current series can be found at http://www.bom.gov.au/web01/ncc/www/cli_chg/timeseries/rain/0112/mdb/latest.txt
The query form for data and graphs is at http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rain&area=mdb&season=0112&ave_yr=0
So, now having the older data, I decided to run a quick plot to see the difference. I fired up my Dplot program and came up with this in about a minute:
There are differences in the two data sets. The 2010 data has lower values, starting around 1950, just like the Quadrant article. WUWT?
– Anthony
Addendum: I notice the peaks post 1950 seem to be reduced, but the lows are not. Strange.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Michael Hammer,
I believe the second graph shows the adjustments made by BoM. They have “increased” rainfall in th early years and then “decreased” rainfall in the later years. The opposite of their usual adjustments to temperatures.
Thus, the picture BoM is painting with their combined adjustments is that it was colder and wetter (less droughts) in earlier years, and increasingly hotter and drier in later years. All consistent with the AGW predictions…
This is why we keep having to download the data and archive it. The problem is then your data doesn’t match the source at a later period. That is very frustrating.
Messing with the data is real blasphemy.
——————–
————————————
2009 – Near Bellingen on the northern NSW coast ;O)
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200902/r340495_1548650.jpg
I’m somewhat confused by the graphs.
The first shows annual rainfall figures since 1900 as at Oct 2010.
Am I right that what is not shown is the corresponding graph as at Aug 2008?
Then, would the second graph shown be the difference between the Oct 2010 and Aug 2008 graphs, revealing a series of adjustments with a downwards trend?
If so, what might be helpful is the inclusion of the missing 2008 graph. I’m also unsure what is meant by “a decrease in 900mm rainfall”. Would that be the sum of the downwards adjustments over the 1900-2010 record?
Tim F wrote: “Before speculating or accusing further, it might be prudent to actually get some facts. That is, after all, how science (and reporting for that matter) is supposed to be done.”
Tim, people don’t come to WUWT for facts. They come for confirmation bias. http://www.skepdic.com/confirmbias.html
Got’a keep the costumer satisfied.
So the rainfall just evaporated?
Is it possible to have the Aug 2008 graph also ? … perhaps a blink comparator ?
I always like to have the most “raw” info possible.
>> michael hammer says:
October 15, 2010 at 5:14 am
I am confused. The second graph seems to be labelled “2000 – 2008 difference of yearly rainfall mm”. There is a point plotted for each year suggesting this is not averaged data but unsmoothed raw data yet look at the data from 1910 to about 1945. <<
The second graph shows the adjustments made to the rainfall data. It's the difference between the graph/data published in 2008 and the graph/data published in 2010. Perhaps showing the two years with a blink-comparison would have made that clearer.
The missing rainfall has been included in the sealevel rise record;>)
OT – but related to trends
NASA funded peer reviewed paper says basically there has been no trend in global hurricane activity (1965–2008)
http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2010/2010GL042487.shtml
If we are entering into a cooling phase, then rainfall is going to decrease. The greenies are just getting ready for the next change in their narrative. When it is Hot-Wet they talk about the heat. When it is Cold-Dry, they will talk about the drought. They have already convinced the public that Hot = Dry, i.e. Global Warming creates deserts.
michael hammer says:
October 15, 2010 at 5:14 am
I am confused. The second graph seems to be labelled “2000 – 2008 difference of yearly rainfall mm”. There is a point plotted for each year suggesting this is not averaged data but unsmoothed raw data yet look at the data from 1910 to about 1945
I believe that the second graph is just a subtraction of the numbers in the first graph (2010, not 2000) from some other (unsupplied) historical dataset that was captured in 2008. So, for example, the 1960 data point in the second graph really represents the 2010 historical data point for 1960 minus the 2008 historical data point for 1960.
This second graph shows that, after the data point for 1948, the values gathered in 2010 are pretty much uniformly below the values gathered back in 2008, as the result of the subtractions are all below zero. As such, yes, it appears someone has been fiddling with the data, although the reasons are unclear.
The more they lie and cheat like this the more discredit they bring on themselves. If it can be found that they lied to get funding then naturally prosecutions for fraud should follow.
After I saved a BoM page with 1930s heat wave data and then it vanished some 3 weeks later..I started to twig that we also had the AGWbug at work on out weather data.
It is NO Mistake!
they are trying to remove massive amounts of water allocated to our rural ag areas.
this is a Purposeful atempt to make it look like its worse than it is to ram home this policy.
Our farmers have battled drought and debt for 10 years in many areas, and this is likely to ruin thise we have left!
they are among the BEST! farmers in the world coping with conditions that would have made many walk away, they battled on, finally! a good season even with Locust issues, and this lunatic labor/green cadre is trying to Gut the survivors!
IF Joolyabrown, hadnt blocked the report released this week, before the election..
she would be sending her Xmas cards from antarctica as thast where she and her green buddy would have ended up..
OUT in the cold.
its 2c here in spring?
the dry we have had is NO different to any I have tracked back in local settlers journals since the 1800s.
ABC radio the Bom and CSIRO are all in collusion with Govt and a definite agenda!
as an Aussie taxpayer I am wildly angry and disgusted with the lot of them.
they have ruined any credibility they had, and I will Never accept a damn thing they publish now without some serious checking and wanting supporting evidence..and somehow? I reckon thats going to be scarce.
I thank you again most sincerely Anthony and co, as without your checking these mongrels would be a lot more likely to get away with the Murder! of our society, which is..what the AGW con is all about.
is the second graph a moving average, over a number of months? like 72 months or something like that with the y axis being a percentage of the mean over a period?
otherwise the graph makes no sense at all. generally precipitation vary from a 1/3 to 3 times the mean.
Robinson says:
October 15, 2010 at 4:31 am
“Why would you need to adjust rainfall? ”
========================================================
Because it fits the alarmist narrative. Remember, it is now climate disruption, complete with simultaneous floods and droughts. If you don’t have a handy drought, well, you can just make one!
My first observation is that the two graphs show different things and do not match the text very well. I can still digest some information from them though.
There appears in both graphs some kind of post 1940’s change in either precipitation or how it is measured/recorded. More info is needed to explain the shift, which does not appear to be something that occurred recently.
Without explanation of the shift, I would be skeptical of any interpretation of the data.
AGW is not the only political cause shaping science in Australia; the supposed shortage of future rainfall was used to justify building a hugely expensive desalination facility instead of a dam to provide water in Vic state.
Can’t report too much rain. It could scare people.
This is also happening in Portugal. Several stations are not recording rainfall in days when it happened. I’ve documented it, in Portuguese, here:
http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2010/10/chuva-mal-contada.html
Ecotretas
Global dimming adjustment? The evaporation pans in Australia are the most famous ones.
Silly that the reasons for changes and method weren’t included in the release. Irresponsible.
Tim F …
since no accusations where positied in the post what are you talking about ?
Jullia, Here’s the new rainfall numbers. It’s now “worse than we thought!”
Sod the farmers.
BoM
It would appear that these meteorologists and climatologists have no concept of quality management and quality control in keeping and maintaining records. If they were to have shown this ill disciplined behavior in commercial industry they would have been sacked.GHCN
All changes should be openly documented with a reason for the change, how it was made, who authorized the change, how it was checked and accepted as correct and who carried out the acceptance test. The changes, their documented procedures and change records should be open book to the public who pay for the BOM.
Their approach to data matches the approach to GHCN sites – do what you can get away with. I’ll disciplined and slap dash. Yet based on this poorly collected and maintained data global political decisions are being made.
stephen richards says: at 5:33 am
“ . . . add them together and divide by the number . . . ”
The link below shows three (3) [also spelled “Tree”] boxes with dots and labeled as Three types of spatial distribution
http://home.comcast.net/~sharov/PopEcol/lec3/3distrib.html
Have a look. Assume each dot is a measuring station. The right-most box has a cluster of dots in the upper-right and lets assume a storm stalls over the five dots nearest the corner and much rain falls. The other very close by places show no rain – thus showing the local nature of the storm.
The left most box has only two (2) dots, or measurement stations, in the same corner where the other has 5.
Perhaps the mean is not the best statistic to describe the rainfall for the entire area:
http://www.microbiologybytes.com/maths/1011-18.html