Metadata fail: 230 GHCN land stations actually in the water

Quick. Somebody notify John Abraham and the AGU. Those pesky skeptics are at it again. (See the preceding article on WUWT.)

Every one of these stations get serviced at least occasionally. How hard would it be to visit every single site over the course of, say, a year, get a GPS based location, and update the database? It could be done with little or no additional cost above the basic maintenance.

Actually getting the raw data would be the easy bit..and your proposal is a fine one.
But the real problem would be to construct the technical, procedural and cultural ‘infrastructure’ to make use of the data so collected.
We have seen in Harry_read_me that CRU for example are absolutely clueless about data archiving and retrieval, that they have no consistent process for handling their ‘adjustments’, that they most definitely do not want any form of outside scrutiny of their work in exchange for their grant money and that their standards of Information Technology disciplines fall far short of those expected of even a talented amateur in the field.
But the most revealing (and worrying) thing that Harry inadvertently revealed is that they are unashamed by this! Charged with keeping one of the three global datasets that may hold the key to ‘the most important problem facing the world’, they are content to bumble along in their shambolic way..occasionally wiping the fag ash and cobwebs off a pile of old Chinese papers just to ensure that they don’t want to let others see them.
They seemingly have never even thought to visit other institutions whose mission is to keep data secure and with meaning. No concept crosses their collective wisdom that others have faced and solved similar problems and that perhaps there are lessons that could be learnt. Nor that their ‘mission; is suffciently important (or so some believe) that they have a professional and social duty to use the highest standards that have been developed…not the lowest.
It will take years, even with a complete change of personnel in such an institution, to get the data they do have into a state where your most helpful suggestion can be fully exploited (which doesn’t mean that a start should not be made).
The changes needed are primarily cultural….to imbue the whole field with the importance of consistent accurate and verifiable data collection. With consistent accurate and verifiable ‘adjustments’ if these prove necessary. With a relentless focus on the data as the only actual truth…not on modelling predictions.
There is a long, long, long way to go. But until we arrive at somewhere much nearer that ideal, everything else that has been done is just castles in the air.

The fact that 230 stations were found to have coordinates in the sea proves that at least 230 stations are incorrectly assessed for UHI. 230 is the minimum number that are wrong as the method used (land/water masking) only detects those that have this charateristc.

John S:
As they switched from relying on interpolating coordinates from maps to direct GPS measurements, they have been updating the database. One complication: rather than correct the existing reported coordinates, they enter the new, corrected coordinates as a station location change, leaving the old coordinates as an apparent previous location. Took me about a year and a half to figure this out; meanwhile I wasted a lot of time and effort trying to run document locations where there had never been a station.
Juan S.

Now I understand why these are called ‘wet bulb readings’ ….
😉

Don’t like salt water? Go to Northport, Washington. Both GISS and the MMS will put you into the Columbia. For real location check the Surfacestations.org gallery : > )

Latimer Alder says:
The changes needed are primarily cultural….to imbue the whole field with the importance of consistent accurate and verifiable data collection. With consistent accurate and verifiable ‘adjustments’ if these prove necessary.
I would second that!
Irrespective of which side of the “fence” anyone sits, it ought to be common ground that the quality of these measurements should be first class. When they seem to have nothing else to do, what are we paying for except world class data handling?
Anyone who has ever installed a quality system knows the principle that in a quality system you have as much concern for the smallest/simplest problems such as the position of stations, because if you’re failing with the simple basic things then it is almost certain you are failing with the more complex issues.
We know the present system has no credibility because we know the quality is totally abysmal. That should not be a partisan issue — even if you believe the world is warming due to mankind, you still want to have good accurate data on which to base action.
One of the clearest indicators that global warming is not a serious problem is that we can see that none of the establishments are at all concerned about the abysmal quality of the present compilation of temperature data … poor quality, poor data handling, and a group of “professionals” who seem to spend more time editing wikipedia and real climate than correcting the many and obvious errors in the temperature record! If they don’t care about the temperature record, then why on earth should anyone else?

Sure Abrahams’ “Climate Rapid Response Team” was built to work out such failures.

Am traveling and don’t have access to my data to address the question: is this merely an issue of precision (x.xx vs x.xxxxxx) in the database or are these systematic / siting problems?

And this just audits errors in the current sitings. What about previous site locations which may have had much different temperature measurement issues?

A bit O/T but also relevant. Read on….
The Royal Society is apparently having a bunfight to discuss / promote “Geo-engineering” solutions to the awful Irritable Climate Syndrome shock-horror-disaster.
The BBC invited some tame “boffin” onto their resolutely alarmist Today “news” programme this morning. After briefly mentioning some of the dopey solutions that had been suggested to stop us frying (even as we shiver), he was asked what was his personal favourite “Geo-engineering” wheeze. Interestingly, this “solution” didn’t involve mirrors, white paint or artificial volcanoes. Instead he suggested getting farmers to plant crops with shinier leaves. (It is to be hoped that these wouldn’t be products of GM technology…Aaaargh…the horror…).
The interesting point (and the one relevant to this thread) followed, with his estimate that the “shiney” leaf crops could make a difference of one degree to Global Temperatures!
Hmmmmmmmm.
Perhaps that’s what they mean about ‘green jobs’. Well someone has to take a damp cloth and polish those leaves.
But how much of a temperature increase have we seen so far since the start of the Industrial Revolution?
I wondered what allowance the “models” already include for changes in the ‘shineyness’ of vegetation in that period? Would this allowance be more or less than the allowances for UHI effect, dodgy records, the march of the thermometers, CRU tweaks, the end of the Little Ice Age, the effects of oceanic current fluctuations, moose dung next to Yamal trees and all those other exciting little things that we have learned about on here?
Definitively, worse than we thought.

No wonder those hippies are all screaming about the looming doom of sea level rise.
Bwaaap, haha, see what I did there?