Via Jo Nova, an Australian Surface Stations Project has just reported its results.
The BOM say their temperature records are high quality. An independent audit team has just produced a report showing that as many as 85 -95% of all Australian sites in the pre-Celsius era (before 1972) did not comply with the BOM’s own stipulations. The audit shows 20-30% of all the measurements back then were rounded or possibly truncated. Even modern electronic equipment was at times, so faulty and unmonitored that one station rounded all the readings for nearly 10 years! These sloppy errors may have created an artificial warming trend. The BOM are issuing pronouncements of trends to two decimal places like this one in the BOM’s Annual Climate Summary 2011 of “0.52 °C above average” yet relying on patchy data that did not meet its own compliance standards around half the time. It’s doubtful they can justify one decimal place, let alone two?
We need a professional audit.
A team of independent engineers, scientists, statisticians and data analysts (brought together by the joannenova blog) has been going through the Australia Bureau of Meteorology records (BOM). They’ve audited some 8.5 million daily observations across 237 High Quality and other close sites in Australia. Shockingly, while the BOM calls their database “High Quality” and instructed observers before 1972 to record in tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, the auditors started finding sites with long stretches of records where the weather suspiciously rose and fell only in Fahrenheit quanta, like 72.0, 73.0, 72.0, 71.0, 73.0, 72.0. After 1972, the BOM went metric, and oddly, so did parts of the Australian climate. Numerous sites started warming and cooling in pure Celsius integers.
The bottom line:
- The BOM records need a thorough independent audit,
- It’s possible that a significant part of the 20th Century Australian warming trend may have come from something as banal as sloppy observers truncating records in Fahrenheit prior to 1972.
- Many High Quality sites are not high quality and ought to be deleted from the trends.
- Even current electronic equipment is faulty, and the BOM is not checking its own records.
- Even climate scientists admit that truncation of Fahrenheit temperatures would cause an artificial warming effect.
Ken Stewart has the whole in-depth report at his site: “Near Enough For a Sheep Station”
They have done a huge amount of data crunching. Ken has all the graphs of maxima and minima (people were extra lazy on the minima).
Then there is the wierd effect of rounding Fahrenheit to Celcuis and back and getting results of 0.1 and 0.9 when the regenerated Fahreheit records are used instead of the original.
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Keith Sketchley says:
March 15, 2012 at 1:23 pm
“The Stevenson screen was first introduced to Australia in the 1880s and was installed everywhere, with a few exceptions, by 1910. ”
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ABS@ur momisugly.nsf/Previousproducts/1301.0Feature%20Article22005?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=1301.0&issue=2005&num=&view=
Temperatures recorded to +/- .5 degrees :
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/dad/coop/EQUIPMENT.pdf page 11
I can’t imagine that Australia would be any better than the US surface station report showing that 90% of stations have greater than 1% error. CRU is even worse than BOM, reporting temperatures to a 3 decimal place accuracy. To me it seems that if I held a forefinger in the air and estimated a sufficient number of readings, I too could claim a 3 decimal place accuracy for my forefinger as a temperature sensor.
ThePowerofX says:
For shots and goggles, I checked out the Google cache of your site, named My dog is more sceptical than you.
I found much moaning about the shutting down of pirate sites, this screenshot captioned “A newbie complains” on a post titled Easy when you know how with text “More illegal files, more links, more money.” thus the obvious conclusion is you’re poking fun at someone who’s not making enough off of pirated illegal content.
And the obvious pride of your site, the top post Helping visitors learn, which is composed of well-linked choice quotes from Anthony Watts and many WUWT guest contributors, which highlights the wide-ranging backgrounds and diversity of thought available on WUWT, thus admirably showing the high quality of true skepticism on WUWT despite the harsh criticisms you frequently level against WUWT in your comments here.
Indeed, since the text is just quotes from WUWT, I heartily recommend that Anthony repost it here on WUWT so others may bear witness to this assembled proof of the strength of the skepticism here on WUWT, with appropriate credit to ThePowerofX for putting it together. Every reader here should see it, the compilation is impressive.
Good job, lad or lass. Your work is appreciated here.
Most australians think that the csiro are a bunch of gooses the gillard gov,t controls them it is all about the carbon tax we will be hit with in july , the csiro must report what gillard is preaching or NO grants. a bloody disgrace
I stopped reading after this.
“Warmers quit reading after anything the least bit contradictory to their religious beliefs.”
Sorry, but I have lost count of how many times I have read people of this blog state “I topped reading after they said “we used a model””..
We can’t have it both ways, leave that to the warmists.
You gotta love computers.
They can give you a trend accurate to 1/100 of a degree, using data hand collected from instruments that are only accurate to 1 degree.
Once again it getting the basic stuff wrong in this case accuracy of taken measurements, that ‘defines’ climate science. And once again you have to say this approach would not be accepted coming from an undergraduate but its seen has ‘fine’ by those claiming the robe of ‘expert’
@ur momisugly ThePowerofX
You probably stopped after reading the word INDEPENDENT
So this is the same BOM that did the due diligence on the recent NIWA temp record in NZ. Wow, we KIWIs are so lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
Tez says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:41 pm
Is this the same Australian BOM that some years ago advised the Government that prolonged drought would be the norm in Queensland? This advice led them to build a $6 Billion desalination plant which was never used and has now been mothballed.
If you cant trust their advice what is their point?
=======================================================================
The Tugun Desal Plant cost $1.2 billion, not $6 billion as you state.
And you’re complaining the BOM are rounding figures up.
MarkW says:
March 15, 2012 at 12:34 pm
“I remember an old story from Boeing, back in the slide rule days. ”
I haven’t heard of that app. Where can I download it?
These guys did very good job. Maybe they ought to try to publish it as a paper? It definitely deserves attention but I’m afriad it won’t get enough as a blog post…
Bill says:
March 15, 2012 at 11:35 am
It’s not clear to me why rounding would always bias up.
1 – 4 round down
5 – 9 round up
That’s 4 rounding down, 5 rounding up. On average, rounding will result in an increase.
I remember an old story from Boeing, back in the slide rule days. They recognized this bias and added an extra rule. If the whole number was even, then 5 rounds down. If it’s odd, it rounds up.
4.5 rounds to 4. 5.5 rounds to 6.
——————————————————————————————————————–
I think you’ll find there is a bit of a misunderstanding in your idea and any alleged Boeing “stories” are likely to be apocrophal at least. 0.000001 rounds to 0, 0.999999 rounds to 1. 0.499999 rounds to 0 and 0.5 rounds to 1. No need for extra rules and no bias introduced. Rounding produces NO bias, truncation does.
ThePowerofX says:
March 15, 2012 at 11:55 am
I stopped reading after this.
For some reason the first thing that popped into my head when I read this was was a small child with his eye’s closed and his fingers in his ears, loudly chanting “I can’t hear you! It’s still warming!” over and over again.
Somewhat insulting to Australian Observers of which I was one for 30 years, and over the last few years in charge of Townsville station quality control. In my last year our station was the best performing in Queensland with audited errors showing NIL ERRORS – the only such one in the State. I also Instructed for a period before and after 1972. And at no time were Observers taught nor did they in the Field – round upwards to whole degree. It was to the nearest tenth before and after metrification. If there was a need to round it was done to the nearest odd tenth, for instance 7.55 deg went to 7.5 deg and 10.05 deg went to 10.1 deg.
Any rounding that may have occurred would have been in porocessing data much further down the track, if at all.
I do agree on siting problems however. But here BoM was subjected to an ever decreasing Federal Budget as it was a Federal Dept to which lip service was paid and bounced from Dept to Dept each election. Funding and inspection of correct sitings took a back seat compared to automation and building up Head Office needs.
So Mr Watt, you owe Australian Observers a huge apology for your statement and await yuour writtena apology…..
[REPLY: No offense was intended to the mainly voluntary observers in Australia. People who have taken on this sort of civic-minded responsibility are to be applauded. The facts, however, are what they are. Take it up with the people who did the research. If anything, apologies are owed to those observers from CSIRO and others, perhaps like yourself, who are using the efforts of their work and dedication in areas they were never intended to address in the first place. If there is a “fault”, it does not exist among the observers. -REP]
Dr Burns says: at March 15, 2012 at 2:08 pm
” . . . . To me it seems that if I held a forefinger in the air and estimated a sufficient number of readings, I too could claim a 3 decimal place accuracy for my forefinger as a temperature sensor.”
Using all ten digits, for the same number of readings, would, perchance, allow four decimal places. How accurate is that!
[Is that ‘sarc’ or just slightly cynical about the measuring of temperature – or anything else]?
I feel that there is a culture that’They’ are manipulating ‘us’ – not just in climate science, but in life, and many of the [once legitimately called] professions, too.
Thanks indeed to Dr. Burns for is incisive image that I am here allowed to enhance a little.
Smile when you say that, junior. My Pickett N4-T sits in the top right-hand drawer of my desk at work, just in case.
power of X
Shoddy temperture recording,inaccurate,unreliable
funny, i started to read when i saw this….
Jason Blair says
When you round data off, its usually up, otherwise you call it truncating data.
——-
No. Rounding is supposed to be done in an unbiased way.
Personally I wouldn’t trust JoNova’s fan base to be able to add up a shopping list without stuffing up.
The truncation issue will only have an effect on the trend under certain conditions. I am betting the effect is minor.
The data is being strected beyond its capabilities because it was never the intention that data collected in these global stations would be used for assessing global temperatures to one or two decimal places. They were never designed to be that accurate, no one was that troubled when the stations were introduced.
It is a fact, but one which the warmists do not like acknowledging, that given the margin of error, we do not know whether today it is warmer than it was in the 1880s or 1930s. That is not to say that we cannot be reasonably certain that there has been some warming this past century but in absolute terms, we do not know for sure that it is warmer today than back in the 1880s and 1930s. This, of course, is of utmost materiality to the assessment of natural variation and the ranges that that may encompass.
The only quality data set is satellite data and even that has issues.
Note to all who contemplate warming trends caused by rounding:
Rounding does _not_ introduce false trends regardless on rounding method (including truncating or always rounding up) as long as it is done consistently for all values and as long as the value range is large enough. The second is true for temperature record. The problem is the first one – the same station may have reported precise or rounded numbers completely irregularly, based on current mood of the observer. The frequency of rounded numbers was changing over time (including over time of day) and rounding generally diminishes towards the current time when most of stations are automatic and report precise numbers. It’s the changes of rounding methods over time which may introduce false trends and the nature of the data does not even allow us estimate how big the error is. Not only we don’t know how exactly were the data rounded, it’s even problem for most sites to tell exactly which measurements are rounded and which are not.
Go read the original article, it’s all in there and it is definitely worth reading!
LazyTeenager says:
March 15, 2012 at 3:34 pm
This is an example of dramatic irony, right?
yamaka says at March 15, 2012 at 3:05 pm
I think you’ll find there is a bit of a misunderstanding in your idea and any alleged Boeing “stories” are likely to be apocrophal . . .
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
I work at a Boeing facility (that makes helicopters), and I can tell you I have seen the rounding issue described – BUT as a famous newsman used to say, there is ” . . the REST of the Story . . ” .
The rounding procedure is mentioned in a spec about measuring hardness of metals. The equipment gives a reading to 1 decimal place; for example, 43.1 or 44.6 , and so on. If a number of these readings were to be rounded to the nearest whole number, then four of the decimal point numbers (1 – 4) get rounded down, but 5 decimal point numbers (5-9) get rounded up. This would bias the resulting data upward slightly. That is why the ‘rule’ of if the whole number is even, rounded the ‘.5 ‘ down, and if the whole number is odd, round the ‘.5′ up.
Now in reality, it may not really make any significant difference; and I can’t answer why the readings with the decimal points weren’t added together and averaged in the first place, and then the final number rounded ( I am not and work and don’t have the spec to review). OR if the procedure is used in other specifications, or with more than one number behind the decimal point. The main point is addressing the comment of the ’rounding rule’ – that it is there and I have seen it.
Note that regular WUWT commenter Geoff Sherrington was part of the unpaid group of volunteers (dang, that Big Oil cheque seems to have gone astray in the mail yet again) who put this study together over many hundreds of hours of their own time and using their own money. Hopefully he will be along at some stage to clarify any questions people raise.