Things are changing with global sea level data reporting. As I mentioned in my post April 6th:
What’s delaying UC sea level data from being updated?
As you can see in the graph above, the data has not been updated since mid 2010. Normally an update would appear sometime in Feb 2011 based on their previous update schedules.
I had sent email queries, and they went unanswered. So I made a phone call. I got an answer, described here:
An answer to the question about why UC’s sea level data has not been updated since mid 2010
The answer from the chief researcher, Dr. R. Steven Nerem, was:
“We are updating our web page to a new design, and that is the reason for the delay.”
I replied with: “OK I understand, but the SL data hasn’t been updated since mid 2010, and people are asking questions about it.”
“Well we only update a couple times per year anyway. Sea level changes pretty slowly you know.”
I said: “Yes, but in looking at your previous release schedules, you would have been due for an update in February 2011, and that hasn’t happened. “
To which he replied:
“This new website design won’t work with our current format, so if you can just be patient and wait a couple of weeks we’ll have it online.”
During the same post, in comments, Peter Miller found what might be the “new” website and commented:
Anthony, here are the updated figures – you may be using a redundant site.
A little scary as you can see ‘this new improved version’ shows a greater rate of sea level rise than previously, but most important and ominously it is clearly obvious a whole heap of data points on the chart have been/changed/manipulated/strangled.
But why?
That website had some updated “look and feel” and an updated graph, which matched the presentation of the SL graph on the http://sealevel.colorado.edu website, but the data for the graph still ended in mid 2010 even though it had a 2011_rel1 stamp on it.
I figured: “OK, they are making a new website on another server, and they are going to switch it over and redirect the DNS pointer to the new server at some point. I didn’t even bother to make a screencap of the new website since I figured it would be updated soon.
In the meantime, WUWT and CA regular, stats guy RomanM got impatient and decided to find out for himself what the most recent data looked like. He was able to locate that JASON data and plot this ensemble. Note the slight downtrend in the last year.
While that in itself doesn’t prove anything, since we have had slight short downtrends before in the satellite SL data, it was interesting in that it appears this one has been going on a bit longer.
Today I got an email from a colleague wondering “what’s going on with sea level” and saying that he too was not getting any response from Dr. Nerem regarding his email inquiries. That prompted me to check http://crozon.colorado.edu/ again, and to my suprise, I found it “forbidden”, blocked at the server:
And the main website still isn’t updated: http://sealevel.colorado.edu
But they do have this message:
2011-04-25: We are currently making improvements to this site, and a new site and sea level estimate will be released shortly. Thanks for your patience.
So, we’ll watch with anticipation to see what the new website and data might look like.
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Jeron B, in Government contracting there is a phrase: “Errors so egregious as to constituted deliberate fraud.” I think we’re rapidly approaching that point in Climate (so called) Science.
Note even NOAA stopped updating data at their SeaLevel site on 15 January 2011. That’s more than 3 months ago.
A blink comparison movie of four graphs from sealevel.colorado.edu to visually compare the changes in plotting and data over approximately six years.
The four graphs are from 20040215, 20041223, 20060930, and 20100923.
The video has a HD 720p quality for best viewing.
Looking back in time at the sealevel.colorado.edu main page the graphic they present changes as they add more data on the right side… however they seem to stop plotting peak data points on a number of the graphs. I don’t know if that is just their plotting program settings or if it is an attempt of some form of manipulation, it is curious though. A detailed analysis should be done to see if the graphs have other hints of data manipulations of earlier data in later graphs. If they do they better have damned good and already well documented reasons for such mannipulations.
Also they don’t expand the size of the bit map at all, you think as they added data they’d make the bit map wider but they don’t. The effect is that the slope of the sea level rise steepens. I find that this practice in climate science to be deceptive. In presenting information to humans you must keep the graph consistent in scale. Altering the x-axis scale as you add data will lead to misconceptions about the data. I’m surprised that scientists don’t know this, or maybe they do and take advantage of it. Clearly they should provide a version with the same scale if they wish to be honest and have scientific integrity.
Jeroen B. says:
April 25, 2011 at 2:36 pm
To sum up:
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
That goes against the precautionary principle. One always have to assume a worst case scenario when evidence to the contrary is lacking.
“philincalifornia says:
April 25, 2011 at 11:57 am
Anyone know what kind of data massaging is done to the data?”
I really have very little idea about the processing, but I do know from the JASON-2 products handbook that the raw data may include measurements that the prudent user might not want to use. At the very least, they seem to think that one might want to discard data that has the (very heavy) Rain or Ice flags set because the data probably is not a valid sea level measurment (might somehow be useful for someone interested in sea ice though). http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/J2_handbook_v1-3_no_rev.pdf
ew-3 says:
April 25, 2011 at 1:55 pm
philincalifornia says:
April 25, 2011 at 11:57 am
In the spirit of honesty, that image may not be what I thought it was. It appears to be Jason only data starting in 2002. There is no data up past early 2010.
Oddly it does not match well with their final product for during those years at
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
—————————————-
Right, the calibration curve looks like it went totally off-kilter in late 2009, early 2010, but the final posted data pretty much follows the trend. This would almost certainly cause problems with this years data if, in fact, sea levels were decreasing or even plateauing then.
Martin Brumby says:
April 25, 2011 at 11:36 am
@Lady Life Grows says: April 25, 2011 at 9:32 am
“Tuvalu, with the famous pictures of an underwater meeting held with snorkels, is rising.”
“Actually that was the Maldives. Same con trick, different bunch of SnakeOil salesmen.”
And a reporter had the presence of mind to ask the governor/mayor/whatever how much house prices had fallen because of the rising waters. Of course, the governor said none. I am watching this closely. I want a bargain basement house in the Maldives.
rbateman says:
April 25, 2011 at 11:38 am
“Anyone, and I mean ANYONE, can go down to their favorite beach and see immediately that there is no sea level rise that can be discerned. So, who do they think they’re fooling?”
If you talk to a Green sea level person about this, they will explain to you that local conditions prevent your personal sea level from rising while the global average sea level continues to rise. /sarc, yeah, but this has really happened to me.
Anthony,
Oceans fluctuate but overall they lose .00025mm/yr to the escape out of the atmosphere.
In simpler terms this translates to 2.5mm/ 10,000years.
It was a few hundred meters lost at 1 billion years.
“We are updating our web page to a new design, and that is the reason for the delay.”
Very odd, and very incompetent. The new website should be up an running, fully designed and operational BEFORE the old one has ceased updates, then the switch can happen in a couple of hours.
Imagine the effect of a 5-6 month delay on upgrading a commercial web page, while no updates happen on the old one.!!
Guess it IS only tax-payers money they are using , so it doesn’t matter.. they have an assured flow of funds.
To be uncharitable, they are trying to figure out the algorithm to
hide the declinecorrect the errors in the data recording systems.A slow 2 second blink comparison movie (it speeds up at the end) of two graphs from sealevel.colorado.edu to visually compare a noticeable change in plotting and data from 20041119 and about a month later on 20041223. The graph format changed and possibly the data points where changed or deleted.
The 60 day smoothing doesn’t show the peaks in the later graph that is showed in the earlier graph. This is a statistical distortion and is disturbing.
I find this deceptive as the smoothing line hides the actual data and thereby distorts the graph giving a different impression; they should plot the data with a line between the data points and then add the smoothing line.
The earlier graph show more red data points at the 1997-1998 peak, a cluster of red dots that are not shown in the later graph a month later. This is of concern, what happened to those data points? Where they deleted resulting in data distortion fabrication? What happened to them? Are they just not plotted? If so why not?
There are also many other red dot data points that seem to move from their values. That is disturbing and hits at data manipulations. They better have a good explanation that isn’t just hand waving.
Looking back in time at the sealevel.colorado.edu main page the graphic they present changes as they add more data on the right side… however they seem to stop plotting peak data points on a number of the graphs. I don’t know if that is just their plotting program settings or if it is an attempt of some form of manipulation, it is curious though. A detailed analysis should be done to see if the graphs have other hints of data manipulations of earlier data in later graphs. If they do they better have damned good and already well documented reasons for such mannipulations.
Also they don’t expand the size of the bit map at all, you think as they added data they’d make the bit map wider but they don’t. The effect is that the slope of the sea level rise steepens. I find that this practice in climate science to be deceptive. In presenting information to humans you must keep the graph consistent in scale. Altering the x-axis scale as you add data will lead to misconceptions about the data. I’m surprised that scientists don’t know this, or maybe they do and take advantage of it. Clearly they should provide a version with the same scale if they wish to be honest and have scientific integrity.
One lesson for the climate scientists is that when they make their presentations of graphs they need to always provide a link to the data used in the graph they are showing preferably with the commands to the graphing software to reproduce the graph exactly pixel for pixel. They also need to show the RAW unmodified data as part of their chain of custody to prove it’s not been modified or distorted by their “smoothing” function or other statistical games. In other words they need to show their work on public web pages just as they are supposed to do in scientific papers. They seem to fail to realize that they now have caught the attention of a serious scientific literate audience in the public who won’t put up with their shoddy work and graphs and lack of access to the data they represent in their communciations. Sure they need to learn to communicate better, they need to follow basic protocol of the scientific method and communicate ALL the steps of their work in visual and numeric forms! They need to back up their conclusions with the data and graphs step by step. In other words they need to communicate their work by showing it!
I suspect they now realize that many people are watching them and that changing the data instead of updating it is a bad outcome for them. And yet a drop in sea level is bad outcome for them if their masters want to see another rise. I don’t envy them at CU.
Due to the number of times I was making adjustments to the blink comparison of Mean Sea Level graphs at Colorado University I converted the comment into an article here, http://pathstoknowledge.net/2011/04/25/questions-about-the-historical-global-mean-sea-level-graphs-from-the-university-of-colorado , and I’ve added the static pictures for the graphs in question as well as additional observations and questions.
Poor fellows are dependent on their funding. If the outcome is not as predicted, do you think they are likely get any more funding? Less likely than if there was a continual and accelerating rise, I think.
This is not about sea level but about reluctance to display data. Here is the link http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2010 I have used this for some years and the data has been displayed objectively and accurately. Now if you examine the graph you will see that since August 2010 it has not been updated. This also applies to RSS data. He has lots of other data sets that can be displayed all which are up to date. I suspect the author has just lost interest but maybe someone on here knows about it. In the meantime I have located the another email address for the author so I will try him again.
Another thought: is the another site that provides the same service?
Climate 4 you – http://www.climate4you.com/ has sea level data up to january 2011 and you can download a txt file of the data.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_global.txt
‘Also they don’t expand the size of the bit map at all, you think as they added data they’d make the bit map wider but they don’t. ‘
One word: Marketing.
They also choose millimeters, which makes the slope steeper.
How many millimeters in Jim Hansens 10 feet?
3048
How many millimeters has the graph risen?
55
janama says: “Climate 4 you – http://www.climate4you.com/ has sea level data up to january 2011 and you can download a txt file of the data.”
Sea level data appears to be exactly as on colorado.edu and goes only to Sept 2010.
If the ‘calibration’ graph (as in Thon Brocket’s comment) is the second on this page, then it may only be more correctly a graph establishing the continuity from satellite to satellite, not establishing any absolute calibration between the satellites and any “fixed” site on the earth’s surface, if such exists. Are the satellite orbits stable to within a few millimetres, or are variations monitored to that accuracy? How do changes in wave profiles and swells affect the measurements?
He was able to locate that JASON data and plot this ensemble. Note the slight downtrend in the last year
when I used to monitor HADCRUT each and every month (until I learnt just how much of a conniving bunch of untrustworthy people they were and how much they actively changed data through climategate), I noticed that almost without exception, cooler months were delayed compared to warmer months. Given it was a monthly figure, the data would be delayed by over a week if the previous month was cold. In my naivety I assumed this meant they were doing “extra checks” which in itself told me they were biased about their analysis.
To this day, I still can’t fathom how any real scientist could delay results based on the monthly direction of trend. You can’t be a scientist and be partisan about data, because by its very nature the data must all be treated equally to be scientific.
I hear the climate widget is still showing February C02 levels… I rather expect CO2 levels to track sea level rise. Now if the rise in both is slowing significantly, it really is the end of the current incarnation of AGW and the script needs to be rewritten. Well, Team, this is what you need for the mo:
Anthony,
A good acid test on this would be to see if they have ever been late with an update before. How long has the site been running? Has it ever taken this long to update? Whilst i am also happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on why it is taking time to update, you must admit that it is not a good look to be so evasive.
Allan
They’ve cooked the dish (data), and will serve it to the public ASAP!
Mistakes are very common but it makes me nervous to find them on NASA’s site as well.
Sea level from this NASA page [ http://climate.nasa.gov/ ] is stated as “3.27 mm per year” yet if you continue to the Eyes on the Earth 3D page, its stated as “3.27 mm since 1992”.
If you continue on to look at the current visual representation by entering Eyes on the Earth 3D and choosing OSTM / Jason 2, you’ll find a 10 day variation that shows the areas with negative and positive sea level rise on a scale that isn’t defined.
IMO, they’re not going to win any prizes for technical communications dispute the fact that they should; wonderful presentation graphics and approach. Also, why do we even need UC’s 2 cents when NASA is already processing the data?