Met Office turns to crowdsourcing climate data

And when the historical data does not match the results produced by the models, they will secretly, BUT scientifically adjust the historical data rather than the models, because the models are right and the planet is wrong.
Anybody who queries this methodology is an idiot and clearly not a climate scientist, and is funded by big oil. So there! (With knobs on)

What a novel idea, using anecdotal historical evidence to come to a better understanding of our climate. Who’d thunk it? Well, better late than never. I’m going to volunteer to participate when time permits!

Americans can also plow through the data stashed away
by the Army Signal Corps from 1861 – 1942 titled:
“U.S. Army Signal Corps/Weather Bureau Annual Reports, 1861-1942”
and found at:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/cso/data_rescue_signal_corps_annual_reports.html
These annual reports are spotty for the first 10 years,
but they pick up in quantity and quality in the mid 1870’s.
The are some good weather system maps in the reports,
and one of the first international weather maps ever created.
I brought this up a year or so ago at Climate Audit. Some
folks pooh-poohed the mound of information because of
the “old” instrumentation involved.

Is it just me or are there real problems with this. Do the logs describe how the temps. were taken: windy day, calm day, ship againt the wind, with the wind, on the deck, on the bridge, in the sun, in the shade? What about the time of day: one day early a.m., one day later a.m., noon, afternoon, evening? And then location? Isn’t there something wrong here? Is this really scientific method? And how bout the volunteers?How are they vetted? Will they transcribe the logs correctly? They end result will be something totally subject to interpretation. Maybe what they want.
Our waste of taxpayer dollars is: ‘worse than we thought’.

Chris Lintott is famous for his appearances on the BBC both in their “The Sky at Night” broadcasts and on an ad hoc news expert basis. I think he is a genuine guy and the MO are right in saying that if they can put all RAW data into this wonderful new database for open use then the science will have moved a long way but it is not their doing. They would never have done this if not for the pressure from blogs such as Anthony’s and SteveMc.
I hope they find it in their phsycy to do an honest and thorough job but I have my doubts especially if, as the data is aggregated, it starts to show wrongdoing at the MO .

“Gee, where have we seen this pioneered for gathering data before? Of course, Professor Stott saw fit to not invite Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., myself or anyone who has any experience with this sort of thing.“…”But, a hat tip would have be nice. But, as we know, we aren’t dealing with nice people. ”
You really can be a right sour-puss at times, Anthony.
REPLY: Peter, walk a mile in my shoes for a day, experience the insults, the mudslinging, the ridicule, and yes even the hatred that I experienced for starting and writing about the surfacestations project, and then you might understand.
You have not done one constructive thing over the years except complain about people like me and the work. I’ve actually done the work, despite people like yourself telling me how wrong or stupid it is, and yet, my work was presented at Exeter (without attribution in some cases) and now they are following the lead without so much as a peep of acknowledgment. The paper coming will change a lot of this, but I fully expect “nice” people to trash it because it really doesn’t fit their world view.
Remember this? “In a way, this is cheering news” (Climategate email from CRU on the Death of skeptic John Daly). Or how about the fact the Dr. Menne used my incomplete data (against my formal written protests) to write a preemptive strike paper before I could actually finish the surfacestations project? Yeah, really nice people.
Of course if the situation were reversed, you would be howling FOUL! You really do need some perspective on yourself and the people you support. – Anthony

The concept of using members of the public to obtain data is valid, assuming that there are adequate controls or verification techniques in place. There are well known scientific endeavours where “amateurs” still have a significant role to play. One that comes to mind is Astronomy.
As for the weather records mentioned in the article, old naval data may be an excellent source.

Related project here:
http://www.corral.org.uk/Home
Check out (eg) HMS Fury and HMS Hecla’s Northwest Passage expedition, 1824 – 1825… interesting stuff.
http://www.corral.org.uk/digitised-logbook-observations/hms-hecla-1824-5

send a email to them stating your thoughts

Is this a wise move by the Met Office. I mean if data comes in to show warmer than present average Arctic temperatures / sea temperatures what will they say? Transcription errors, deranged seaman, heat from the propellers. :o)

Anthony,
You mentioned a Professor Stott in your introduction, which gave me a bit of a shock. Then you listed Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office within the body of the post, so all seems well. You may no have been aware that there is another Professor Philip Stott who is a staunch sceptic as far as politicians are concerned.
“Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. In this blog, I hope to be able to deconstruct the ‘myth’ in order to reveal its more dangerous and humorous foibles and follies. I shall focus as much on the politics as on the science.”
Here is his blog. He is absolutely not a man who would decry all your good work.
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/A_Hot_Topic_Blog.html
Best wishes,
Perry
REPLY: Thanks, I found out today that there are two George Taylors also. – Anthony

I think it was Hansen and his ilk that wrote about that climate models were just simplified weather models that the meteorological folks are using. Something about weather models being to complex and inherently non-linear which they can’t apply to 5, 10, 50 or a hundred years time line.
So there fancy and bugged out models begin with a modeled average stretched out over a 100 year period but that average lacks the accumulated daily weather data, instead the data is just fantasy statistics of what could be if . . .
To see if such looney models are accurate they’d actually need to invert the process down to individual daily weather data (and not fantastically smeared out statistical averages of ones own creation) and see if those are spot on for real world daily weather data for any historical time period. When they can present something like this, they’d be getting lots of converts, but until such time they’re just be the simpletons looking for easy hand outs.

What annoys me about this is that there is already a much larger project to do this using the records in the National Maritime Museum both of RN ships and HM packets to investigate the weather going back to the 1760’s with especial reference to Arctic ice extent because the packets out of Halifax to Falmouth generally sailed as far north as they could given the ice conditions: which they routinely recorded with the reports filed with and retained after each voyage by the Post Office. This was a regular route with sailings throughout the year: although frequency declined steadily as US mails were increasingly carried by private lines out of New York such as the famous Black Ball line: much to the fury of the Post Office which not only paid ship letter rate on incoming mail, two old pence per letter, but also lost much of the outgoing traffic. When the packets were replaced by steam navigation the RN established a regular Arctic patrol which operated with some gaps until the end of the nineteenth century.
And given the Wegman controversy does this new project count as plagiarism?
Kindest Regards

On a related subject, I vaguely recall reading accounts of the US Navy using the logs of whaleships for basic info about the many Pacific Islands for which there was very little knowledge recorded anywhere else.
I also think that the US Navy used the weather observations of the whaleships to generate basic climatological predictions and predictions on prevailing currents.
There’s a lot of info out there, although the old records are hard to access.

@Ric Werme
Yes. There are several transcription projects in genealogy (census, BMD data, &c.). They all seem to work on (variations of) a ‘tell me twice’ approach – the transcribed data is often color-coded – one color/shade for transcribed once, another for twice & agreeing, thrice & agreeing & so on. They must have a procedure for dispute resolution (finger trouble the most common, I suppose), but I’ve only (parasitically) used, not contributed.

The daily issue of rum to both officers and men on Royal Navy ships until comparatively recently was, by today’s standards, formidable.
Photographs of antique brass ships’ thermometers do not inspire confidence in any data collected from them.
Descriptions of the methodology deployed in temperature collection also give rise to some concern.
In short, a quaint little excercise, but hardly robust enough to have any bearing on the quest for an extended global temperature record.
Now where’s that Pussers Rum……………….? Hic!

Our PM in Australia does the same – have climate meetings and panels but exclude climate skeptics. Our department of climate change only has policies on glbal warming, so does the CSIRO. It is censorship extreme!

Ecotretas says:
October 15, 2010 at 10:27 am
It might be interesting to grab all the original data. I bet the original data will disappear when the massaged “value added” data gets out…
Ecotretas
Jimbo says:
October 15, 2010 at 10:38 am
Is this a wise move by the Met Office. I mean if data comes in to show warmer than present average Arctic temperatures / sea temperatures what will they say? Transcription errors, deranged seaman, heat from the propellers. :o)
I find this to be the saddest part of this whole politicization-of-science affair. Once people trusted the experts in a field. Then we had the various food scares “Eggs are good/bad/good/bad/good/bad/good/bad/good for you” and the revelations of Vioxx killing you, but unpublishedly, and then the cherry-picking revelations of various studies, then the background mechanations of Climategate, then various “adjustment” sagas (like New Zealand), and so on and so forth…
Now, if a prominent scientist was in your house, not only would you be arguing with his conclusions (as you should), you’d want to know the ins-and-outs of his revenue stream, and if he knew his peer/pal reviewers, and you’d now also treat his “facts” and “records” with scorn and suspicion.
On top of that, you’d count your silverware in case it got “adjusted”.
The fall-out from this will reach many years into the future. This is starting to be the sort of level of trust/derision politicians and bankers frequent.

Leif Svalgaard says:
October 15, 2010 at 10:15 am
vukcevic says:
October 15, 2010 at 9:19 am
By close monitoring of the NAP process (as shown in the attached graph) it may be possible to anticipate in good time another radical change in direction of the climate movements.
How could they do this if you have not described the ‘process’? Perhaps you are reserving that for your 2-page Nobel Prize paper…
And of course, you’ll publish your ‘learned’ rebuttal on a PostIt® note, right?
Your posts fairly reek of condescending arrogance.

Phil’s Dad says:
October 15, 2010 at 9:38 am
Could I suggest that anyone who gets involved in this make their findings public so that any “adjustments” to the collated result can be spotted?
So you’re having doubts too, like me. It’s going to be hard to justify adjustments on this one though because so many public eyes will be on it. The adjustments that we are accustomed to in ‘global warming’ have been done behind closed doors, and even then they were noticeable. 🙂

I find it hard to believe that these 24 years of ships’ logs are “it”. I’m no scholar of seagoing records, but I know that logbooks have been kept since before the spice trade started taking British, Dutch, Spanish and Portugese ships around the world, in the depths of the Little Ice Age.
Accurate temperature readings may not be found that far back, but anecdotal information from which qualitative data may be inferred will be present throughout, as mariners have always been keen observers of such things, for upon such information they staked their own survival.
Giles Milton had little difficulty accessing reams of penetrating insights from ships logs for his wonderful book (highly recommended reading!) about the British spice traders, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. I doubt much large-scale crowdsourcing is required here — what they need is a few dozen dedicated and patient volunteer transcribers for the project they have begun. They may need a couple of hundred to cover all of british maritime records back to 1500. And perhaps a small crowd of about the same size for Dutch, Portugese and Spanish logs.