Record highs? – NOAA staffers are beginning to doubt the accuracy of the measurement system

I got my lesson in inaccurate temperature reporting when I was recently working in Alaska for a few months, and my thermometer never matched the local official thermometer even though I was only a short distance away from,
http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/PABI.html
which has the weirdest anomaly; the Fahrenheit temperature is never in the middle of the range, such as 60.4, 60.5, 60.6 – always the decimal is zero, or one tenth or nine tenths. How can this be?

@frank
Just a guess but if the temps are recorded in Celsius then it could be a rounding error in the conversion to F temps.

Outstanding that other people are taking a serious look at the siting issue !!

The current line from los warmistas is that the SurfaceStations project did not show that the degradation of instrumental accuracy imposed upon the various temperature monitoring systems over the past seven or eight decades (the deletion of higher-latitude, higher-altitude monitoring posts’ recent archival and present readings from the databases, local heat island effects “siting the thermometer next to a lamp,” deliberately slurring station readings showing artifactual high temperatures over contiguous areas in which surface station data was no longer being directly reported, and so forth) had been proven insignificant, and that there has still been alarming global warming going on over the past decade and more.
And yet I can’t find support for that contention of statistically significant global warming anywhere except in los warmistas‘ online masturbation fantasies. No objective evidence anyplace.
What the hell is going on? Are the surface temperature datasets blown all to hellangone in their accuracy and reliability or not?

I hope someone checks KGVL. The Gainesville airport seems to be a lot warmer than what I experience about 10 miles west. It may be that I haven’t cut down all the tress or the I-75 is just east and causes convective showers, but the airport seems warmer both winter and summer. In fact, if you compare it to surrounding instrument readings, it runs warmer than they are as well. Of course, having the sensors in the middle of two runways might have an effect.

This has got to be easy to check. Anthony, can’t you get people in a specific city which has a NOAA station at an airport to record temps for a couple months and check them to the official site?

Is this passage a spoof? It reads as though they were trying to site the station badly (on a roof) in order to get higher readings. Grumm:

As for ASOS sites, if used, we had one really badly placed sensor at KMDT when we opened in State College. The ASOS was aspirated and on grass, not a roof. It ran cooler in parallel to our older unit (was it an unapirated HO83?). We did not officially began using the ASOS until AFTER your 1994 spike. Hitting 100F at KMDT has been extremely difficult since the new sensor. Being on grass and on the ground helps.

Maximizing records broken by hook or by crook? Is this for real?

Is there an equivalent for lows. I suspect there may be many more of those to come as we fall off the top of the upwave.

32 years ago I personally did more ASHRAE 93-77 thermal tests (hundreds) of solar water-heaters than anyone else in the country. This test involved using platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) to measure water and air temps within 0.1 deg C. There were detailed calibration protocols using half-meter NTS-tracable mercury-column and a $5K datalogger. I went through many rounds of improvements to measure air temperature with the NTS thermometer-shed and surrounding white gravel, with solar-powered aspiration through a radiation-neutral inlet. I also had a pyrgeometer to measure sky infrared, which varied seasonally but, interestingly, not with changes in cloud cover. These temperatures were vital to giving each collector model an official DOE performance curve. It turned out that their ratings thresholds were easily crossed by a delta-temp changing by 0.1C, a typical display of perennial bureaucratic ignorance.
I took far more trouble to be accurate than 99.99% of today’s stations, just to get an rms of 0.1 C.
Pardon me as I laugh at the Alarmists’ absurd claims of surface-temperature accuracy, let alone the thermodynamic meaninglessness of any number purported to be an average global temperature or its ‘anomaly’ (They probably picked that term for its scariness connotations — did the Warmistas originate this usage?).

Yes, but, but, it’s the trend, the trend that matters………

don’t know if this has been posted or if it is relevant:
6 July: Herald Tribune: Kate Spinner: Sarasota bucks warming trend
A new analysis of the past three decades of temperatures shows Florida — especially Sarasota — bucking a pronounced warming trend nationwide.
At the Sarasota-Bradenton weather station, average high temperatures fell every month of the year and in some months by nearly two degrees. As a result, Sarasota’s average high temperature for July will drop from 91.3 degrees to 89.8 degrees…
“It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you integrate that over a whole year in terms of your heating bill or your crops, it really adds up,” said Anthony Arguez, a physical scientist who managed the reanalysis of the nation’s normal temperatures for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…
Intrigued by Florida’s departure from the rest of the country in a warming scenario, Martin Hoerling, also of NOAA, compared the last decade of temperatures across the nation to the 30-year record from 1971 to 2000.
Every state in the contiguous U.S. except Florida saw a temperature increase over the period. Florida saw a cooler winter, a cooler spring, a warmer summer and little change in the fall. On a yearly basis, the temperatures average no change…
But Florida’s slowness to warm is not likely to last, said Aiguo Dai, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Dai said short-term weather fluctuations likely buffered Florida’s warming over the past decade, and long-term patterns caused by sea surface temperature changes may have moderated the state’s temperature over the past 30 years…
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20110706/ARTICLE/110709744/0/FRONTPAGE?p=1&tc=pg

David;

the issues with sighting,

— the siting isn’t too great, either!
😉

More on ASOS high temp issues? I don’t think that anything could surpass that Honolulu fiasco, made all the worse by the fact that they’ve kept those “record” high temps, when it was obvious that the equipment was showing temps at a minimum of 3° too high. Bet a record low temp would get a much different treatment.

I live in Hawaii, windward side of Oahu. It’s almost unheard of here for temperatures to top 90 F (32 C) yet that seems the norm at Honolulu Airport. The PTWC temperatures mesh with my day to day expectations while the PHNL thermometer must have been directly behind the hot exhaust of departing aircraft. An 8 F (4.4 C) difference is just not credible.

Really?
Maybe they’ll be able to get rid of that pesky super El Nino.
Remember, they started adding heat to the new electronic thermistors in the 90’s.
Scan video forward to 3:00 and play.

Who’d a thought that badly-sited instruments could skew temps upward. How convenient for the Warmista!
All credit to Anthony for identifying this issue years ago, but why has it taken so long for at least some of the so-called ‘scientific’ community to wake up and catch up?

It is quite simple – NOAA is not a quality agency. In any other area of science or engineering finding errors of this magnitude would be cause for immediate remedial action and removal of the bad data from any records. Staff could expect to be reprimanded or dismissed for their failure. But with NOAA we see a random slap-dash, unconcerned and often defensive approach. This is the mark of an agency that is unconcerned with the quality of its work and deliverables.
All NOAA records (not just temperatures) should now have an ‘asterisk’ added as not to be trusted or used until a formal technical assessment and quality audit is passed by each site and its data handling. If NOAA happily accepts invalid data and poor quality where they can easily be found, NOAA work in other areas must be equally suspect.
What kind of government is it that has formal congressional hearings on baseball players that may have taken performance enhancing drugs, but has no reaction to an agency generating invalid metrics on which the government is basing fundamental shifts in economic policy?

“So we’d better stick to the satellite record instead?”
Great idea. Measure the temperature accurate to 0.1Celsius using a satellite a hundred miles up in the sky with equipment on board that only claims to be accurate to 0.5Celsius. Seems to be a reasonable approach for climate scientists but as an engineer I would dispute how this could ever give you sensible results.
What Team-AGW should be doing is pushing for better more reliable monitoring stations. I wonder why they aren’t?????

Ian W,
Answer in short form – we have gone to a “bread and circuses” approach in government. Give the people a good show and forget the details. While I’m not a fan of wind power, you have to admire the technology when those huge blades are spinning…
But maybe, just maybe there is some light shining in the outhouse…
Mike

Regarding the comment about all the F readings ending in .9, .0 and .1, it is apparently quite a fluke. The C readings, as pointed out, appear reasonably randomly distributed, so if one assumes those are the original readings and calculate the resulting F readings, you do indeed get the numbers shown.
Between 10 and 22 degrees C, 30% of the converted F readings would end in .9, .0 or .1, so there’s a 7/10 probability of getting a F conversion in the .2 to .8 decimal range. The chance of getting 24 readings in a row without a .2 to .8 decimal is .7 to the 24th power or about 1 in 5,000, which is why it stood out. (The odds of getting any 3-decimal range (.3,.4,.5 say) would be 10 times that, or 1 in 500.)
This is a decent example of the result of doing data mining when doing research. Apparent conclusions crop up that weren’t proven. The thread a long ways back about research results reverting to the mean over several followup studies also relates to this example. Only the research results that are anomalous get published, but it turns out that many of them are just getting the occasional random outlier that, as illustrated here, will crop up regularly, if not frequently. Do enough studies and some will certainly yield outliers. Then the outliers get published because they seem to indicate a new reality. And if no followup replication studies are done, that new reality can stick around for a long time.

Except that Fox is not “anti global warming,” not even a bit. They report the same AP news on the subject as everyone else, they just happen to throw in a few skeptical stories from time to time for balance. I wonder if people like you, scottish skeptic, actually read/watch Fox, or simply rely on what the rest of the left-leaning media says about them? Or, are you one of those that cannot fathom the difference between news reports and opinion pieces done by analysts? Either way, it comes across as ignorance.
Mark

Up above, there are complaints related to the ASOS stations. At the NOAA’s new normals post there’s a link to this announcement from NOAA. But while searching for data I found this June 2011 “State of the Climate: National Overview” report with some different wording:

Beginning August 1, 2011, the U.S. ASOS maps and the monthly mean maximum and minimum temperature anomaly maps will be using the newly updated 1981-2010 Normals to calculate anomalies. Other 30-year Normals anomaly-based monitoring products will not be affected by the Normals transition until early 2012.

Does it mean anything that they’re changing the normal for the ASOS maps ahead of others? Perhaps “hide the incline”?

The huge spike of record highs in (especially) 1994 sparks memories for me. I have been in electronic manufacturing for over 25 years now. Many electronic chips require fan cooling. The fans we adopted in the early 1990s had a huge failure rate after a couple of years. It turns out that in cost cutting, they made bearings that didn’t last well. The graph of record highs looks much like our product-return graphs.
So, we have a massive shift circa 1990 to smaller ASOS sensor enclosures that require active convection to get good airflow instead of the passive convection of the earlier larger enclosures. A few years later, there is a huge spike in record high temperatures. Does anyone have access to the repair records for these things?
REPLY: funny you should mention fans, as they ar part of the problem. See this article of mine
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/10/inside-the-ho83-hygrothermometer/

The number of NOAA weather stations that generate rubbish as data is appalling
I am currently baselining this through 2011 as I try to get an independent measure of the vagaries of Earths Temperature
http://91.192.194.209/averagehourlytemp3.png
This is simply the average temperature of 2680ish (as some of the stations don’t “make the grade” every hour) NOAA weather stations taken every hour
I started with a database of ~7500 stations. After I took out the ones whose whereabouts is undisclosed and those that don’t produce any temperature measurement and then those not producing temperatures around the clock and then those stuck on a temp and then those regularly keybouncing 26C into 226C you are left with these 2680
Being land based with most of the land in the Northern Hemisphere it’s getting warmer 😉
At the end of 2011 I’ll have a look and see if any of the 2680 have “gone rogue” and strip them out of the data
This I will be able to do yearly so we are comparing apples with apples and not banana’s
By the 1st Jan 2011 I’ll have a Solar Annual temp taken hourly every hour…then we will be able to see if it goes up or given the Sun’s inactivity and a year of Volcanic note heaven forbid….down
Don’t worry I have all the raw data ready for the FOI request and reproducibility 🙂
Backed up daily off site. No dog ate my homework excuses required 🙂
Dave