Ever wonder why NASA’s Jim Hansen (and many others) see red at high northern latitudes?
Above 2011 Temperature Anomaly. Source: NASA GISS interactive plotter
With all that red up north, you’d think Jimbo, Gore, and Trenberth would want to get a look at that firsthand, instead of making a fossil fueled boat trip to Antarctica during peak of the southern summer melt season so they could give us grand proclamations about the melting there.
All the “hot action” is up north according the the latitude plot that accompanies the GISS anomaly map:
Funny how in the anomaly map above, with the great Texas Heat Wave this year, Texas is not red. WUWT? (The way it was portrayed in media, you’d think it was a permanent condition).
It seems to be all in the adjustments. Cooling the past helps the slope of the trend:
How GISS Has Totally Corrupted Reykjavik’s Temperatures
Guest post By Paul Homewood
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
Now that GHCN have created a false warming trend in Iceland and Greenland , and GISS have amended every single temperature record on their database for Reykjavik going back to 1901 (except for 2010 and 2011), we should have a look at the overall effect.
The red line reflects the actual temperature records provided by the Iceland Met Office and shows quite clearly a period around 1940, followed by another 20 years later, which were much warmer than the 1970’s. GISS, as the blue line shows, have magically made this warm period disappear, by reducing the real temperatures by up to nearly 2 degrees.
Meanwhile the Iceland Met Office say that “The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik”.
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Just for completeness, here is the GISS trend map and latitude plot for the start of the GISS baseline (1951) to 2011.
UPDATE: 1/26/2012 10:30AM
I added (The way it was portrayed in media, you’d think it was a permanent condition) to the body of this post. since my intent with that statement about Texas wasn’t clear. I got distracted by phone calls and other business in the middle of writing this post and lost my train of thought (and I haven’t been following comments on it either). It is one of the pitfalls of trying to run a business and family while trying to keep up with the demands of this venue. Apologies to anyone who thought I was suggesting Texas summer temp data would show up in December data. Such transient events are just one more indication of the synoptic scale blocking high which caused that event, not any long term climate issue.
Paul Homewood sends his email correspondence and supporting data from the Icelandic Met Office. Here is a PDF file containing the data (referenced in the emails): Reykjavik-1871_Akureyri-1881_Stykkisholmur-1845
From: Trausti Jónsson
To: paul homewood
Cc: Halldór Björnsson
Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 17:40
Subject: Re: monthly temperatures
We have sent a questions to the GHCN database regarding this and they will look into the problem. Regarding your questions:
No we were not aware of this.
No, but we are asking for the reasons
GHCN are both valid and of the correct value? If so, why?
The GHCN “corrections” are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik but not quite as bad for the other stations. But we will have a better look. We do not accept these “corrections”.
No.
No changes have been made in the Stykkisholmur series since about 1970, the Reykjavík and Akureyri series that I sent you have been slightly adjusted for major relocations and changes in observing hours. Because of the observing hour changes, values that where published before 1924 in Reykjavík and before 1928 in Akureyri are not compatible with the later calculation practices. For other stations in Iceland values published before 1956 are incompatible with later values except at stations that observed 8 times per day (but the differences are usually small). The linked paper outlines these problems (in English):
Click to access Climatological1960.pdf
The monthly publication Vedrattan 1924 to 1997 (in Icelandic) is available at:
http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=278&lang=is&navsel=666
and earlier data (in Icelandic and Danish – with a summary in French) at:
http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=240&lang=is&navsel=666
http://timarit.is/view_page_init.jsp?pubId=241&lang=is&navsel=666
Monthly data from all stations from 1961 onwards :
http://www.vedur.is/Medaltalstoflur-txt/Manadargildi.html
Best wishes,
Trausti J.
Til: “Trausti Jónsson”
Sent: Mánudagur, 23. Janúar, 2012 17:09:30
Efni: Re: monthly temperatures
From: Trausti Jónsson
To: phomewooduk
Cc: Guðrún Þórunn Gísladóttir
Sent: Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 11:19
Subject: monthly temperatures
I attach a table including the monthly temperature averages for Reykjavik (1871), Akureyri (1881) and Stykkisholmur (1845).
Best wishes,
Trausti J.
Lýsing: Could you please send me, or let me know where I can access, annual mean temperatures for Reykjavik and Akureyri, back to 1900,(or when records are available from).. Many thanks Paul Homewood –
Nick, Tom Curtis, R. Gates etc:
If, as Nick claimes, there is no difference between the raw data and the homogenized data’s results, what scientific basis is there for all these revisions etc?
As a simple layman, I don’t get it. I know the further you remove yourself from the raw data, the errors increase.
GISS has adjusted mean monthly temperatures in Reykjavik downwards by an average of 0.12C prior to 1965.
Since 1965, they have been adjusted upwards by an average of 0.11C.
At another Icelandic station, Vestmanneya, GISS has adjusted mean monthly temperatures downwards by an average of 0.85C prior to 1942, and left them unchanged since.
And this doesn’t affect the trend?
Nick Stokes, Paul Homewood:
In this blog, http://statpad.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/ghcn-and-adjustment-trends/
the assertion that the GHCN records are a mess is done twice.
I don’t know computer code anymore. At least not the code skills required to do what has been presented in the above so have to rely on folks skilled in this, just as they rely on me to grow food.
As a person who uses stats for a different purpose, one basic premiss has always been the accuracy of the underlying data used to make business decissions. When I see charts that average the errors, rather than finding the errors and correcting them, I have little faith that said charts are valuable as a basis for making sound decissions.
It does seem that GHCN data is a mess. Nick, you seem to say that the mess is ok. From my experience in the world, I find that messes create more messes.
At this point in the discussion, I am not ready to yield to authority as it appears that authority is not ready to yield to accuracy. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/accuracy
I find this very troublesome.
Camburn says:
January 28, 2012 at 9:23 am
………..
At this point in the discussion, I am not ready to yield to authority as it appears that authority is not ready to yield to accuracy. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/accuracy
I find this very troublesome.
=========================================================
Welcome to the world of skepticism. This discussion is “old hat” for most of us. The alarmist arguments are unyielding and predictable……. “they’re making adjustments, but not revising history”……..”it doesn’t make any difference to the total historical record”…….. “the errors average themselves out”…….. But all of this is hand-waving, attempting to distract people from the facts. The facts are Iceland has recorded and adjusted their temps accordingly. Our climate data collectors, GHCN, GISS, Hadley, NOAA, ……. they all then fiddle with the numbers presented to fit the narrative they wish to present. Their defenders are unwilling to acknowledge that these agencies of alarmism simply lie. They lie to them, they lie to use, and they lie to the entire world.
Camburn
The process of GHCN homegeneity adj is designed to isolate “non-climatic” factors, but in practice only weeds out “step changes” ,e.g. station moves. (For this reason it cannot identify UHI which happens gradually – GISS do this).
As long as these adj are done correctly, it should not matter whether they are positive or negative in total. What does concern me is where they weed out genuine climate factors as may be the case here.
Even though the incidence and effect of these “errors” may be low, for a system to generate confidence, it must have robust quality precedures that both check for potential slip ups and allow for their correction.
This does not seem to have happened here, as it has needed independent observers to spot them.
Paul Homewood:
The solution is quite simple.
We pay people to do this correctly, with accuracy
You have found one point of contention. The question I have is, how many other points of contention are there?
Why is accuracy so hard for our employees to understand?
And why settle for average errors on something so important?
We all make mistakes. Man/Woman up, admit mistakes, correct the mistakes with the goal of 100% accuracy
James Sexton says: January 28, 2012 at 7:49 am
“As I stated earlier to some others, the people in Iceland are aware of these issues and already have made the proper corrections. Then GHCN corrects the corrections…”
No! You don’t seem able to get your head around these files. GHCN maintains an unadjusted qcu file. They make great efforts to ensure that the data is as reported by the Met organization at the time, and then it remains unchanged. No “proper corrections” from Iceland or anywhere. No “rewriting of history”.
The adjusted file is processed (from the qcu file) with a universally applied algorithm. GHCN has 7280 stations from over 100 countries. They can’t rely on a patchwork of adjustment policies. A single algorithm can be properly analyzed statistically. And if you come up with a “better” algorithm, it can be universally applied from the same starting point. That is what has happened here.
Camburn says: January 28, 2012 at 6:45 am
“Why not just use the raw data and then there are no questions/doubt created.”
No, there would be different doubts, and I’m sure they would be loudly expressed here. A global average is reasonably tolerant to unbiased noise, but affected if there is a bias. When you have a mish-mash of station moves etc, it is likely that some will be warming, some cooling etc, with little nett effect. But you can’t be sure.
The homogenization catches most of these (and their bias, if any), but introduces false positives, which come from the fluctuations in the time series. But you have a better chance of analyzing these for bias. You know the statistics of what you are dealing with.
The likely outcome is that the original non-climatic issues would have cancelling effect. But you can’t know until you have made the correction.
“the assertion that the GHCN records are a mess is done twice”
Assertion is cheap and frequent, and on blogs rarely substantiated. The BEST enterprise was an attempt to substantiate, but ended up with far more of a mess, and results which do not contradict GHCN-based results. I think the GHCN records are good. At least they are accessible, and in the case of the qcu files, rarely modified. And they are the best we have.
Nick Stokes:
Thank you for your response.
Can you point me to a site or documentation of what the divergence is if one ran a temp chart for the whole period of GHCN qcu file and the newest version of the adjusted data file?
I have spent the last hour trying to find this and have not come across a site that has done so.
I feel at a loss as I don’t have the skill set to do this. I find it hard to believe that no one has not done this either who has the skill set to do this.
Paul Homewood says: January 28, 2012 at 3:50 am
“I think you said you still had Version 3.0 from last July. Do these adjustments appear then or only in Version 3.1 released in November.
According to Reto Ruedy at GISS, they switched straight from Version 2 to Version 3.1 in December, so I cannot tell from their dataset.”
The files are pretty big, but I’m working on a program and blog post to update the histogram for the latest V3, so I’ll run the July files through that as well.
I don’t think the July qca affects GISS. My understanding is that prior to Dec 2011, GISS worked from GHCN unadjusted (v2 and v3 are very similar there) and applied their own algorithm, which was somewhat similar to GHCN. It would make sense for them to agree on one method, and it looks like they are both happy with the Menne/Williams version. I assume that GISS no longer adds its own homogenization.
Camburn says: January 28, 2012 at 12:25 pm
“Can you point me to a site or documentation of what the divergence is if one ran a temp chart for the whole period of GHCN qcu file and the newest version of the adjusted data file?”
No, I’m not aware of anyone having done that. Steven Mosher has an R package which should make it fairly easy, provided you’re prepared to tackle some R scripting.
A dynamic ever altering history…… because alarm is a horrible thing to waste.
Nick:
Oh boy, I didn’t even know what R scripting was. Remember, I am an old fellow. I used to write my own programs for accounting using basic, but when Lotus 123 came about I went spreadsheet with macro’s etc. And programs have since evolved that I just buy them and use someone else’s intellect at programming skills. This would be beyond me I think.
Altho, with that said…a challenge is always good.
By the way, you have a nice blog. I see you have skills, altho, I do wish you would go back further in time as I mentioned in a post there. Maybe you could do this? Or Mr. Mosher?
Camburn says: January 28, 2012 at 2:17 pm
In terms of programming, I was pretty antiquated too. But it’s amazing what modern software makes possible.
As I mentioned there, the problem going for really long periods is that you run low on stations with continuous data. That’s less of a problem with a global average than with individual trends.
Nick:
Yes, the lack of stations would increase the spatial error.
The reason I mentioned this is that by only going back to 1950’s, you loose the warmth of the early 20th century and it somewhat distorts the actual amount of warming that occured during the 20th Century and negates that. The trend over a long time period is not very steep, at least in CONUS. I know that isn’t the world, but certainly a part of the world.
Camburn
The early 20th century can be a bit misleading if you look at it just as the global trend. Several things happened between the 20’s to 50’s that call into question the degree to which that warming actually was ‘global’. Firstly, the warming in SST’s seems to have been more focused on the late 30’s, 40’s. And when the records have been looked at there is very strong evidence that the mix of nationalities of the ships that measured SST’s back then (there were no buoys or satellites) underwent significant changes. Different nations used different methods to measure the water temperature and each method will have its own bias. This isn’t a problem so long as the biases don’t change and the % of ships from each nation taking part don’t change. But that wasn’t the case. During the war years the proportion of US ships taking the readings increased markedly. Then dropped off sharply in Aug 1945. Exactly the same time that SST’s seemed to drop sharply. The Hadley SST record is being released as a new version that attempts to deal with the bias issues associated with this problem. It seems to have significantly smoothed out the 30’s/40’s hump.
For land temps, the 20’s – 40’s warm period seems to have been longer but less pronounced. But when you look at where the warming occurred, it really seems to have been Arctic warming. The rest of the planet barely changed. So not really Global at all. And it may even have been that it was particularly warming in the Greenland/European sector of the Arctic.
The third thing happening during this period was that measuring stations in the polar regions were only just being established. The Canadian arctic, Greenland, Nortern Scandinavia and then later Siberia. Then during WWII this coverage increased for military reasons. But any start on extending comparable coverage in Antarctica didn’t happen until the 50’s.
So for 30-40 years we had an assymetrical coverage of the polar regions, just at a time when one of those polar regions, the Arctic, may have been seeing a local warming event.
So how much confidence should we have that the record of the ‘global’ trend during that period isn’t really a local warming in the Arctic,, and perhaps to some degree an artefact of the transition in station coverage.
I sometimes wonder what a global temperature series for the 20’th century would look like if a rule was enforced that if there is inadequate station coverage at a latitude on one side of the equator then data from the same latitude on the other side of the equator should be ignored. So for example, ignore new Arctic stations when the corresponding Antarctic stations don’t yet exist.
Maybe an interesting challenge for the ‘amateurs’ who work on temperature data.
Glenn
The rest of the planet barely changed.
According to GISS most of the Northern Hemisphere was warmer . The few areas that were cooler were mainly sea, which you correctly point out suffered from measurement problems.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1950_1975_1930_1950/GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1950_1975_1930_1950.gif
Glenn
Compared to 1910-30, there is significant warming in most areas during 1930-50.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/NMAPS/tmp_GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1930_1950_1910_1930/GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom1212_1930_1950_1910_1930.gif
You may or may not have seen this:
http://climate4you.com/ClimateReflections.htm#28012012:%20Reflections%20on%20effects%20on%20NCDC%20and%20GISS%20global%20data%20series%20by%20transition%20to%20GHCN%20version%203
See the graphs for Reykjavik at the bottom of the page.
Regards
Agust
The above mentioned page http://climate4you.com is tended by
Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography
Department of Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Norway.
See http://climate4you.com/Text/BIBLIOGRAPHY%20OLE%20HUMLUM.pdf
Thanks for a great link Agust,
Dr Humlum about the adjustment removing earlier warm periods: “It is somewhat difficult to understand the background for the number and magnitude of adjustments introduced in the GISS ‘after removing suspicious records’ data series, especially as the resulting data series differs significantly from the official Icelandic data series. ”
(from the climate4you.com , the ‘20120128: Reflections on effects of the NCDC and GISS transition to GHCN version 3’ section)
Paul
Your links don’t work. However from the contents of what your links are saying it appears you are using the anomalies for just Dec rather than the whole year. And your link is showing Land & Ocean combined. And using one period as the baseline for the other period.
Below are some links that should work. What I have done is use a common baseline for everything of 1950-1980. I have used annual means rather than just one month. Then I have shown 3 periods all relative to 1950/80 – 1910/30, 1930/50 and 1939/45. And done this separately for Land & Ocean Data. Finally I have included GISS Zone vs Time graphs for Land & Ocean separately. Things to note. On the Land Maps the station coverage in the Arctic is incomplete and there is no coverage in the Antarctic. And the zonal maps are showing the time transition of this coverage. So we are looking at periods of significant change in station coverage. Also illustrative is to show the same land maps but with smoothing set to 250 km. Then you see that stations in the Russian arctic appeared between the 10/30 and 30/50 plots and these very stations are showing some of the highest warming.
Also note that GISS aren’t using the newer SST data from HadSST that has attempted to compensate for these nationality of shipping biases.
An interesting analysis, perhaps something someone like Nick could do, is look at what the temperature record looks like if a rule is imposed that if their is inadequate station coverage at one end of the Earth, then stations at the same latitude at the other end can not be used. I wonder what the temperature record would look like if data from the high Arctic wasn’t acceptable until the 50’s when Antarctic data became available as well?
Another interesting exercise is to look at GISS map plots of ocean data using a common baseline and working forward in 5 year intervals for the mean. Between 1940/45 a range of ‘warm areas’ appear that are gone again in the next 5 year interval. And ‘look’ like they correspond to areas of major naval & convoy activity – North Atlantic, US to Hawaii and the North Pacific, Indian ocean West of Australia. I might be reading too much into this but a study that uses the updated HadSST data to look at geographical impacts of the compensation would be really interesting.
So, the graphs:
Map Land 10-30
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1910&year2=1930&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Land 30-50
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1930&year2=1950&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Land 39-45
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1939&year2=1945&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Ocean 10-30
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1910&year2=1930&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Ocean 30-50
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1930&year2=1950&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Map Ocean 39-45
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2011&month_last=12&sat=-1&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=1939&year2=1945&base1=1950&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Time & Zonal Land
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/modelEt/time_series/work/tmp.4_observedTs_12_1880_2010_1950_1980-0/map.gif
Time & Zonal Ocean
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/modelEt/time_series/work/tmp.4_observdSST_12_1880_2010_1950_1980-0/map.gif
Moderators!! Is there any way images can be embedded into a post, rather than just linked to?
[Reply: Sorry, no. Posting an image requires Editor permissions. ~dbs, mod.]
Glenn:
When looking at the short anamoly for the oceans, 39-45, I am not so sure that the area surrounding the US is abnormally warm. The St. Roch sailed the Nothern Route of the Northwest Passage in 1944. I have Capt Larsens log and am about to re-read it. For that little ship to accomlish this was a feat in itself. Even as low as the ice has been the past few years, I don’t believe the route he took was open.
DMI did a reconstruction of Greenlands surface temps. There most deff was a warm period as also shown in Icelands temps. By extrapolation, and guessing, one would have to guess that the Arctic as a whole was warm because of the St. Rock making it in a single season.
Thank you for going to work to do this. I am tired, and am going to re-visit your post tomorrow.
Trausti Jonsson of the Icelandic Met Office has started a new blog in English,
http://icelandweather.blog.is/blog/icelandweather/
At the moment, commenting is difficult because you have to answer an arithmetic question written in Icelandic, but I think I managed it with some help from google.
He says he will discuss the recent controversy on his blog in a few days.
The climate4you page linked to above is interesting, but the situation is very confused because that page does not distinguish between the adjustments made by GHCN and those made by GISS. It seems there are two different agencies each making their own erroneous adjustments and changes. As Paul H pointed out, GISS have changed their numbers by about 1 degree some time during the last two weeks, but there is no mention of this on their web page.
Paul.
Re Trausti´s English blog.
This simple arithmetic question is just a spam filter (=Ruslpóstvörn). You only have to answer this question if you want to write a comment.
For example: “What is the sum of three and eight [ 11 ]”
To help you with the numbers:
0 núll
1 einn
2 tveir
3 þrír
4 fjórir
5 fimm
6 sex
7 sjö
8 átta
9 níu
10 tíu
11 ellefu
12 tólf
13 þrettán
14 fjórtán
15 fimmtán
16 sextán
17 sautján
18 átján
19 nítján
20 tuttugu
Other requierd information:
Nafn = Your name
Netfang = Your Email
Veffang = Your web or blog address if you have any
I hope this helps
Regards
Agust
Tom Curtis writes “Given the very specific nature of the adjustments at Reykjavik, with the large adjustment coinciding, first with the first introduction of commercial air traffic to the airport”
And what about the decade before that? Do you have a hypothetical excuse for the cooling adjustments made then?