PRESS RELEASE – U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments.
Chico, CA July 29th, 2012 – 12 PM PDT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A comparison and summary of trends is shown from the paper. Acceptably placed thermometers away from common urban influences read much cooler nationwide:
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.
The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.
Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years of work by Anthony Watts and the many volunteers and contributors to the SurfaceStations project started in 2007.
This pre-publication draft paper, titled An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, is co-authored by Anthony Watts of California, Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville, is to be submitted for publication.
The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller, of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project in a June 2011 interview with Scientific American’s Michael Lemonick in “Science Talk”, said:
I know that is prior to acceptance, but in the tradition that I grew up in (under Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez) we always widely distributed “preprints” of papers prior to their publication or even submission. That guaranteed a much wider peer review than we obtained from mere referees.
The USHCN is one of the main metrics used to gauge the temperature changes in the United States. The first wide scale effort to address siting issues, Watts, (2009), a collated photographic survey, showed that approximately 90% of USHCN stations were compromised by encroachment of urbanity in the form of heat sinks and sources, such as concrete, asphalt, air conditioning system heat exchangers, roadways, airport tarmac, and other issues. This finding was backed up by an August 2011 U.S. General Accounting Office investigation and report titled: Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network
All three papers examining the station siting issue, using early data gathered by the SurfaceStations project, Menne et al (2010), authored by Dr. Matt Menne of NCDC, Fall et al, 2011, authored by Dr. Souleymane Fall of Tuskeegee University and co-authored by Anthony Watts, and Muller et al 2012, authored by Dr. Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project (BEST) were inconclusive in finding effects on temperature trends used to gauge the temperature change in the United States over the last century.
Lead author of the paper, Anthony Watts, commented:
“I fully accept the previous findings of these papers, including that of the Muller et al 2012 paper. These investigators found exactly what would be expected given the siting metadata they had. However, the Leroy 1999 site rating method employed to create the early metadata, and employed in the Fall et al 2011 paper I co-authored was incomplete, and didn’t properly quantify the effects.
The new rating method employed finds that station siting does indeed have a significant effect on temperature trends.”
Watts et al 2012 has employed a new methodology for station siting, pioneered by Michel Leroy of METEOFrance in 2010, in the paper Leroy 2010, and endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation (CIMO-XV, 2010) Fifteenth session, in September 2010 as a WMO-ISO standard, making it suitable for reevaluating previous studies on the issue of station siting.
Previous papers all used a distance only rating system from Leroy 1999, to gauge the impact of heat sinks and sources near thermometers. Leroy 2010 shows that method to be effective for siting new stations, such as was done by NCDC adopting Leroy 1999 methods with their Climate Reference Network (CRN) in 2002 but ineffective at retroactive siting evaluation.
Leroy 2010 adds one simple but effective physical metric; surface area of the heat sinks/sources within the thermometer viewshed to quantify the total heat dissipation effect.
Using the new Leroy 2010 classification system on the older siting metadata used by Fall et al. (2011), Menne et al. (2010), and Muller et al. (2012), yields dramatically different results.
Using Leroy 2010 methods, the Watts et al 2012 paper, which studies several aspects of USHCN siting issues and data adjustments, concludes that:
These factors, combined with station siting issues, have led to a spurious doubling of U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.
Other findings include, but are not limited to:
· Statistically significant differences between compliant and non-compliant stations exist, as well as urban and rural stations.
· Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.
· Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.
· Urban sites warm more rapidly than semi-urban sites, which in turn warm more rapidly than rural sites.
· The raw data Tmean trend for well sited stations is 0.15°C per decade lower than adjusted Tmean trend for poorly sited stations.
· Airport USHCN stations show a significant differences in trends than other USHCN stations, and due to equipment issues and other problems, may not be representative stations for monitoring climate.
###
We will continue to investigate other issues related to bias and adjustments such as TOBs in future studies.
FILES:
This press release in PDF form: Watts_et_al 2012_PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
The paper in draft form: Watts-et-al_2012_discussion_paper_webrelease (PDF)
The Figures for the paper: Watts et al 2012 Figures and Tables (PDF)
A PowerPoint presentation of findings with many additional figures is available online:
Overview -Watts et al Station Siting 8-3-12 (PPT) UPDATED
Methodology – Graphs Presentation (.PPT)
Some additional files may be added as needed.
Contact:
Anthony Watts at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/contact-2/
References:
GAO-11-800 August 31, 2011, Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 47 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)
Fall, S., Watts, A., Nielsen‐Gammon, J. Jones, E. Niyogi, D. Christy, J. and Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2011, Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, Journal of Geophysical Research, 116, D14120, doi:10.1029/2010JD015146, 2011
Leroy, M., 1999: Classification d’un site. Note Technique no. 35. Direction des Systèmes d’Observation, Météo-France, 12 pp.
Leroy, M., 2010: Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land, Climate, and Upper-air Observations JMA/WMO Workshop on Quality Management in Surface, Tokyo, Japan 27-30 July 2010 http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/qmws_2010/CountryReport/CS202_Leroy.pdf
Menne, M. J., C. N. Williams Jr., and M. A. Palecki, 2010: On the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D11108, doi:10.1029/2009JD013094
Muller, R.A., Curry, J., Groom, D. Jacobsen, R.,Perlmutter, S. Rohde, R. Rosenfeld, A., Wickham, C., Wurtele, J., 2012: Earth Atmospheric Land Surface Temperature and Station Quality in the United States. http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-station-quality.pdf
Watts, A., 2009: Is the U.S. surface temperature record reliable? Published online at: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf
World Meteorological Organization Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation, Fifteenth session, (CIMO-XV, 2010) WMO publication Number 1064, available online at: http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/CIMO/CIMO15-WMO1064/1064_en.pdf
Notes:
1. The SurfaceStations project was a crowd sourcing project started in June 2007, done entirely with citizen volunteers (over 650), created in response to the realization that very little physical site survey metadata exists for the entire United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN) surface station records worldwide. This realization came about from a discussion of a paper and some new information that occurred on Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog. In particular, a thread regarding the paper: Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res.
2. Some files in the initial press release had some small typographical errors. These have been corrected. Please click on links above for new press release and figures files.
3. A work page has been established for Watts et al 2012 for the purpose of managing updates. You can view it here.
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Note: This will be top post for a couple of days, new posts will appear below this one. Kinda burned out and have submission to make so don’t expect much new for a day or two. See post below this for a few notes on backstory. Thanks everybody! – Anthony
NOTE: 7/31/12 this thread has gotten large and unable to load for some commenters, it continues here.
Well done!
Kudos! I can hear the stuttering and sputtering from the Usual Suspects already.
It’s popcorn time!
Shades (so to speak) of Steirou and Koutsoyiannis.
Seems legit
the overstated increase is just an honest mistake??
[REPLY: Read the paper first. Please. -REP]
Good work!
Congratulations Anthony, that represents a lot of hard work! I look forward to looking at it in detail.
Bravo!
What we all suspected UHI does have a tremendous effect on surface temps reading so we can conclude maybe 50% of the warming not significant well in the USA there is no AGW so ther is no global either AGW thank you Mr watts
Final nail in the coffin?
[REPLY: Read the paper first, please.]
Interesting. Any chance we can have a list of station IDs with their new classifications to play around with? Replication being important and all that.
SNIP -REP
Real science plus “investigative journalism”. What more can we want! Congratulations on completion. Now can you go on a well deserved vacation?
” and endorsed was endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization”
The word “Vindication” springs to mind.
Small error – shouldn’t the bottom/blue coloring zone in the legend of Figure 20 be listed as 0.0?
-Scott
Very interesting.
Also interesting that Steve M. wrote that he didn’t know what this post was all about on his site…. DId he really not know ? I’d like not to believe that he was telling porkies.
good!
Great work Anthony et al.
Thank you
Just a suggestion — I think the press release needs a headline and lede. Without it, it will take an editor too long to figure out the significance of the release and might get it wrong.
I picture a rug, being pulled hard..
[REPLY: Please read the paper. -REP]
Congratulations on your new paper. Turn about is fair play.
Should we call this the BESTEST study? Since it improves on BEST?
Excellent work Anthony. On my initial reading, your work seems robust and I hope it stands up well to peer-to-peer review.
So which paper is best and which is second-best?
[REPLY: Please read the paper and judge for yourself. -REP]
Congratulations Anthony.
First! Woohoo!
And nice job, Anthony. I’ve been on pins and needles for the last two days waiting to find out what was going on…and I don’t mind admitting that I was afraid you’d sold WUWT, or had gone over to the ‘dark side’.
Great work, any plans on a global analysis ?
What we all suspected UHI does have a tremendous effect on surface temps reading so we can conclude maybe 50% of the warming not significant well in the USA there is no AGW so ther is no global either AGW thank you Mr watts
I wouldn’t go that far.
But it’s safe to say NOAA has doubled the trend. Or even tripled, if you look at only rural, non-airport stations.
Worthy of the weekend of silence. Well Played.
Well done.
“Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward” — adjusted by who?
Three cheers for Anthony, et.al. !
Garbage in, garbage out, BEST. This is what you should have been working on, had you been honest brokers. Anthony, well done, BRAVO!
Well done.
We need to stand back and try to put this information and the just issued Muller paper into their individual and joint context
tonyb
[REPLY: Well said, Tony. Please, everyone read the paper. -REP]
Congratulations. Timely too, given Muller’s “conversion”…
Oh, this should fuel the fires for quite a while!
Anthony, you and your team are stars. I am no scientist but am fed up with the politically inspired garbage that goes under the name of Global Warming (CAGW as it was once called). I look forward to your paper being reviewed BY ALL SIDES and perhaps then it will set a new trend of publishing ALL the data in a timely manner (I’m not holding my breath however). I’m heading over to the Tip Jar now.
Well done Anthony. I think you and your family have now earned that holiday…
P.S.,
NOBODY!
NOBODY!
NOBODY BEATS THE REV!
Typo in the colour chart 1.0 ==> 0.1
At long last!
Oh Anthony, the team will be after you with cluster bombs and napalm now…I hope you serviced the radar and stocked up with SAM’s
That reconciles land data with ocean data and satellite data.
Very interesting, especially coming the same day as Muller’s NYT Op-Ed. The next 10-15 years should give us real answers as we see what predictions and data analysis turns out to be correct.
[REPLY: Bill, read the paper. We are not talking predictions here but historical observations and the tools used to make them. -REP]
Richard Muller just today published an op-ed piece in the NYT explaining why he believes all the alarmist pronouncements are correct. This can’t be coincidence, can it? Sounds like there’s some background intrigue to this whole story.
[REPLY: There is, but it’s not all about Muller. -REP]
quoting Muller– nice touch.
Excellent work, Anthony! You are a true modern day hero!
The outcome of a a massive effort! I’ve awaited this some years now! I’m going to study CIMO-XV, 2010. Those French are sticklers for logical precision 🙂
So if I understand right, you have applied an internationaly accepted standard reference to siting issues and determined that NOAA
fixed the numbersgot the numbers wrong – by 100% Ha!Heh. Heh. Heh.
Good on ya.
Congratulations on the successful completion of one of your projects, Anthony, and a thanks to you, Evan Jones, Stephen McIntyre and John Christy for the work that went into it. Now, I’ll read the paper.
Regards
Hi Antony, great work!
You’ve got a typo: “and endorsed was endorsed” should be “and was endorsed”, I presume.
Cheers,
Mark
Congratulations, some reading to be done by us all.
Brilliant. Now, very quickly, get someone to clean up the typos lest they become the story.
A 1.15C warming bias per decade – wow! Thanks for your tireless efforts Anthony. It seems the truth will out.
No, a 0.15C bias. Half the record. That’s using all compliant stations. Go with rural only, no airports and we’re talking ~ 0.19 — a near tripling.
I’m happy to see John Christy’s name in this work. He’s been working for years to find the real temperature of the earth. You can see from Anthony Watt’s work (with his volunteers help, but mostly him) reasons why the temperatures we’ve been seeing in the earth are not necessarily the real temperatures. I’m also happy to see Evan Jones involved.
This work is real science, an example of how science is supposed to be done!
The trend scale has an error: .05 – 1.0 should be .05 – .10.
Interesting. Why are the figures always higher after adjustments?
Watts: “I fully accept the previous findings of these papers, including that of the Muller et al 2012 paper. These investigators found exactly what would be expected given the siting metadata they had. ….”
A very nice way of saying GIGO.
Figure 20 is very interesting. I would love to see the the same color map evaluation for BEST results. I do not trust their scalpel and suture technique because it must destroy and somehow recreate the critical low frequence data in the Fourier spectrum.
“and endorsed was endorsed by” lose the first endorsed.
Wow! Just wow.
Great work Anthony.
Anthony,
Can you translate the implications of this for mere mortals like myself?
Thank you Anthony for all of your hard work on this project, your website, and all of the other areas of climate study that you have made an impact upon!
Nice job everyone! But I think there is a tremendous uphill battle yet to come for this getting the attention, acceptance and appreciation it (hopefully) deserves!
Oops – should have stated “0.15C” (not 1.15C, of course!)
Excellent news. Let’s hear the Church of Warming respond. Bring on the fraud trials.
“The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller, of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project”
basinga!
Nice work. Found a few typos that you might want to fix in the following paragraphs:
Watts et al 2012 has employed a new methodology for station siting, pioneered by Michel Leroy of METEOFrance in 2010, in the paper Leroy 2010, and endorsed was endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation (CIMO-XV, 2010) Fifteenth session, in September 2010 as a WMO-ISO standard, making it suitable for reevaluating previous studies on the issue of station siting.
Previous papers all used a distance only rating system from Leroy 1999, to gauge the impact of heat sinks and sources near thermometers. Leroy 2010 shows that method to be effective for siting new stations, such as was done by NCDC adopting Leroy 199 methods with their Climate Reference Network (CRN) in 2002 but ineffective at retroactive siting evaluation.
Endorsed is repeated in the first one (sentence in general is choppy) and 199 is missing what I assume is a nine in the second one.
Excellent, can’t wait to see the forthcoming critiques.
Crap, my above comment didn’t work because of unexpected HTML. I think that the dark blue value in the legend of Figure 20 should be listed as less than 0.0, not greater than 0.0. Hopefully Anthony can fix this soon.
-Scott
Awesome! I’m flinging funds in appreciation of your tireless efforts. I must warn you though. Not only is it Oil money, it’s OilSands money. I hope this doesn’t automatically invalidate your research.
“surface area of the heat sinks/sources within the thermometer viewshed to quantify the total heat dissipation effect.”
Neat.
Common sense at last.
Important – the figures are missing from the draft pdf.
REPLY – There’s a separate chart section to download. ~ Evan
Wonderful stuff – congrats, Anthony…
note for mods only, to correct a typo, in 1st sentence of 3rd paragraph “or” should be “of”:
“Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years or work by ….”
Wonderful work. Here’s hoping it does get global exposure. Thanks Anthony for your tireless efforts to peel back the CAGW onion.
Gratz Anthony,
This is what everyone has long suspected, but to see it proved is good news. I know this is a huge project and getting it done must be very gratifying.
Congratulations, Anthony.
Now, all we need is to factor out irrigation and other humidity affecting factors (in the rural sites).
Dear Anthony et al.,
congrats for your paper, will it be published in time to be considered in the next IPCC-report?
All the best
LoN
Outstanding, and given the recent pronouncements of Muller, extremely timely.
So Muller had an agenda but fell flat on his face, the true skeptic wins again.
Well done Mr. Watts.
Well done Anthony!
Was waiting whole weekend, wondering what watts will warm.
Cool, it’s Cooling. Congratulations!
· Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.
Where are these “adjustments” coming from?
It sounds like the data is being manipulated to fit the theory, but that can’t be. The people doing this work are scientists, right?
Where is the paper being submitted to?
Anthony: Minor error found in the presentation slides: >0.0 should be <0.0 (less than).
In science the details matter. Hand-waving is not allowed. Anthony and team have bored into this data (and instruments and physics) with clarity and precision. Well-done.
Heh, Well done Anthony! Of course, the larger question will be is how or will this new method be applied toward global temps?
Bravissimo!
Now let’s add in the “march of the thermometers”, and upward rounding of airport thermometers.
Why do sane people like Mr Watts continue to play the game of the AGW fanatics: 1979-2008? There has been no global warming at all since 1995.
Data trumps hysteria, well at least for those willing to listen to reason. My fear is that reason has left the station.
Dear Moderators;
Typo:
Watts et al 2012 has employed a new methodology for station siting, pioneered by Michel Leroy of METEOFrance in 2010, in the paper Leroy 2010, and endorsed was endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)…
Someone blew Muller’s BEST away.
We do not have a valid climate database from which we can draw proper conclusions. These adjustment methods are dubious and as Mr. Watts shows, seem to be exaggerated in one direction, “up”. In some databases such as NCDC they go so far as to retroactively re-adjust temperatures with each passing month. In these cases the scheme adjust pre-1950 temperatures colder and post-1950 temperatures warmer. These re-adjustments seem to be additive and this database is now used as the input data for others (e.g. HADCRUT4). Below is a graph showing the cumulative “re-adjustment” of temperatures in the NCDC database since May 2008 until June 2012. We do not have an accurate database on which we can base decision making.
http://climate4you.com/images/NCDC%20MaturityDiagramSince20080517.gif
Basically, what we have been basing decisions on is mathematical prestidigitation.
Over to you Warmists, time for Real Science not some post-modernist ersatz-modelling pseudo science you’ve been getting away with so far!
Typo I suppose ……adopting Leroy 199 methods should be leroy 1999 methods.
Thanks for the excellent work!!
Any idea on why and how NOAA came to their adjustment methodology?
Massive congratulations to you. If the numbers are this big the whole edifice is shakey, which gut instinct told many of us when we were first presented with the “adjustments”.
Thanks to all involved.
Thanks for respecting the other work of BEST, etc. That certainly is how science is supposed to be done, one study with more complete data and better methods reaches a different conclusion and supercedes the prior until it too is replaced with better understanding. There are no high fives (except when the Higgs boson is concerned) in science, it is what it is.
Whenever those using real science methodology scrutinize any cornerstone of ‘climate science’, the result is always the same: Disclosure of shabby, manipulated data, which has been deliberately distorted to produce results designed to alarm the general public.
The practice of distorting results and data manipulation is so widespread amongst the practitioners of ‘climate science’ that is has not surprisingly fallen into total disrepute, except to dyed in the wool greenies..
However, there are still far too many dodgy, devious politicians willing to milk the green agenda and use the ‘findings’ of the global warming industry as reasons for raising taxes and supporting economically insane renewable energy policies.
Well done Anthony and others.
The US is how much? 2% of the earth’s surface.
But it is warming at 0.155C/ decade, not far off the IPCC expectation of ~0.2C/decade.
Seems like good and valuable contributory work, to add to the confirmatory analysis of the BEST group of Richard Muller.
Thanks for your persistence, Anthony.
Data Problems
1. Uses GHCN Version 2.
2. In our urban-rural comparisons we use the Urban, Semi-Urban, Rural classifications provided by NASA.
So how does the trend from from good and bad stations compare to the trend from the satellites for the same area? This seems like a critical question.
Just read your press release and went through the powerpoing presentation. I’m impressed with the quality of what I’ve seen thus far. Will dig into the paper in draft. Good work.
Anthony:
I found two typos in the press release. The first is in the 3rd paragraph after the heading “… Anthony Watts commented that”. In the second line after “Leroy 2010” the release says “and endorsed was endorsed by”.
The second is in the last bullet point before the reproduction of figure 20. The first line has “… show a significant differences …”
Very interesting paper. Your hard work has paid off.
Congratulations Anthony and all who worked to make this study possible… The adjustments, the moving of and replacement of sites and the poor quality of sites has always been obvious to all… Thanks for your tenacity in finding the way to bring it all home. Mike
Congratulations.
This is not the end or the beginning of the end. But the end of the beginning.
(Translation: the real battle has just begun)
mpaul wrote:
“Just a suggestion — I think the press release needs a headline and lede. Without it, it will take an editor too long to figure out the significance of the release and might get it wrong.”
Fully agree. Keep it simple and in journo-speak but more understated than Fentonese. Say:
Re-analysis of warming trends in United States yields surprising results.
P.S. Josh even has a toon already over at JoNova
Congratulations! To all four of you!
And what a devastating conclusion from the numbers presented:
Compliant: +0.155C/decade
Non-compliant: +0.248C/decade
NOAA final adjusted: +0.309C/decade What are they doing???
If this will not have big implications, I wonder what would.
And Anthony, you’re a master of suspense now too!
My goodness, I didn’t know what to do to make time fly this weekend.
How is it that I know this will not be treated as good news by the alarmists.
Kudos, Anthony et al. At first reading this looks wonderfully robust, both as to methodology and to results. Peer review (by the dozen! By the hundreds?) will be helpful and fascinating.
And to think: it all started with a bucket of whitewash and some Stevenson screens!
REP: You said “[REPLY: Bill, read the paper. We are not talking predictions here but historical observations and the tools used to make them. -REP]”
I was referring to Muller’s prediction and the data analysis in Anthony’s paper, which I do intend to read.
I did just look at the graphs. I would like to see error bars on the figures and tables.
Interesting and obviously important (once peer-reviewed and published), but I doubt it will have any more effect on the warmists than the new BEST stuff has with us. I don’t really understand the big build-up, but perhaps that was us readers over-interpreting your previous posting.
Excellent! One comment: Shouldn’t >0.0 in the “Average trend” legend on the maps be <0.0?
Much more interesting news than Muller pretending he used to be skeptic,
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html
The Faeces will now hit the fan. Don’t just admire from the bleachers, Fling Funds! Anthony will need them.
Bless you Anthony. I love the way that the Rural MMTS no airports are presented at end almost as an afterthought. This gives some statistical basis to all of the anecdotal no trend situations. Thanks also to Steve M. for (I trust) making sure the statistics are tight.
How will you make the individual station ratings available? How many folks participated in the rating process and what type of quality assurance did you apply to the ratings?
Bravo. Well done. The 0.155 per decade corresponds well with my global result of o.14 per decade since 1980. It would be very interesting for me to know what the trend is for that class per decade since 2000.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Thank you Anthony Watts and everyone else involved in the research.
I was going to mention the typo but that is handled above.
Don’t tell to read the paper–I will go back for the next pass, but I didn’t see if on the first pass–does your son get credit for the UHI experiment a few years ago?
This appears to me to be further confirmation that AGW is in fact a collectivist political theory using temperatures as an excuse to gain implementation to then try to alter reality. In effect changing behaviors to fit a desired compliance model without being honest enough to own up that’s what is going on.
Pick sites to give inflated data. Ignore unbiased data and trends and then corrupt it all to provide the excuse for radical changes to political, social, and economic systems. That no one woul agree to voluntarily in the absence of dire transglobal threats to survival.
It’s Lysenkoism where reality must give way to political ideology.
Whatever it takes to gain the desired servitude.
Good job.
I would have liked to see the in the press release total numbers for stations in each category/location, just to help us more quickly appreciate the extent of the problem — you know, 5 vs. 50 vs. 500 stations is something that can help one wrap one’s head around the issue.
Congratulations on the paper, and the enjoyably subtle dig.
Anthony just brilliant, and such hard work, well done
As an ENGINEER…used to SPC (Statistical Process Control) after reading Anthony Watt’s fine paper and the figures I gather THIS AT FIRST PASS:
There are 10 decades of data, going back to around the turn of the century-
1. Probable NET “real” change, 1.55 degrees C upward from “whatever” would be the baseline.
2. Enough S.D.’s from the normal variance to be a real trend.
3. NO exposition of the DECADE to DECADE changes, which I think would (will, Anthony isn’t just going to “hang it up” now..) show..particularly with the LAST decade in place, warm trends/cool trends,warm trends and cool trends. AND THAT is the “underlying oscillation” which always exists.
THE FACT THAT WE’VE NOW LIVED THROUGH A DOWNTURN SPANNING OVER A DOZEN YEARS…should obviate the CO2 “dominance” argument from an empirical standpoint.
Important CONCLUSION derived from EXCELLENT DATA and assessment of the GIGO (that’s a complex computer analysis term) difficulty.
Sending this link to MANY…
Max
I second (or third) the suggestion to give this press release a heading.
On you pptx – bottom row of legends should be <0.0. Of course, those should never happen – right?
Its was always so obvious that Stevenson boxes situated in cities etc would show this. I was amazed that this was not shown before.. In a way its an anti climax. the obvious has been shown. THERE IS NO AGW. viva la ciencia
Typos in the legend:
>0.0 –> .05 – .10
.25 – 30 –> .25 – .30
Congrats!
“The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller…”
no, “You Didn’t Build That” practice he he…
199=1999. Honest observation of a typo, not nitpicking. I look forward to reading this in detail later, well done Watts et al.
It appears that Annex IV of CIMO-XV 2010 is the pertinent section
I think it’s smart they you did a press-release on your study. Got to play by the current rules or get smashed out of the way.
I agree with David and mpau, snazz this press release up some. Additionally, these two paragraphs, or something similar and more exciting should be first: (grab people)
“Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years or work by Anthony Watts and the many volunteers and contributors to the SurfaceStations project started in 2007.
This pre-publication draft paper, titled An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, is co-authored by Anthony Watts of California, Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville, is to be submitted for publication.”
SHAP down, TOBS to go. You listening Mosher? This is your pal from Climate Etc.
[Moderator’s Note: Let’s not let this get too personal and not let’s cast much aspersion toward BEST. What Anthony is showing is that the selection of tools is important to the result. BEST and the others have been using 15 year old tools, the latest Leroy method is only two. -REP]
So what? This is NATIONAL, not global data about only ONE of many parts of the massive body of data that underscores the case presented by the vast majority of expert scientists who have published peer-reviewed papers concerning climate change. Furthermore, this report is presented by a team with an obvious axe to grind vis a vis mainstream climate science, so the conclusions and methodology are automatically suspect. But it’s interesting that people here want SO much to believe they have a block buster.
[REPLY: John, read the paper and digest the methodological implications…. and keep suggestions of dishonesty to yourself. -REP]
FURTHER REPLY – Suspect away! Unlike that “vast majority of experts” we will be providing full disclosure of data and methods. Upon publication, you will get to check for yourself. Furthermore, when we got totally different results for Fall, et al., we didn’t withhold the paper. We went with it anyway. That’s what honest scientists do. ~Evan
Anthony, mpaul is correct. The PR release document needs a strong headline and lede! Editors simply will glance and pitchr otherwise. (The press has become extremely lazy form my early days.) You need to put the conclusion (the ‘take-away’) in the headline and explain significance in the lede.
Bravo work and brilliant tactical approach on a highly public pre-release, making it obvious that politics are at work if rejected by the journals.
Bravo! Anthony – well done!
Worth the wait. 🙂
From the PPT:
Yesterday over in the Tips page, REP mentioned: What Anthony is going to publish tomorrow is not of the flashy fire-works variety, rather it is a tectonic sort of event. Lots of people are going to be, shall we say, non-plussed? Could even get bloody.
NOAA’s adjustments need some exploratory surgery. The NOAA adjustment disease has metastasized into the great body of published work.
Also on the pptx – recommend making the colors in the text match those in the legend. So most of the NOAA adjustments would show as orange instead of red. And the compliant thermometers would be a lighter blue.
Scott says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Anthony,
Can you translate the implications of this for mere mortals like myself?
==========================================================
Scott,
Skip down to the “Conclusions” at the end.
Haven’t read the entire thing as yet. Looks like an amazing amount of work, for you and others. Well done. It looks as if we can now apply some numbers to what we all suspected was going on.
I hope you inculuded the series of pictures over time of the station at O’Hare airport.
Sorry for any typos.
Tom
Will be interesting to see if this even gets msm attention. I do hope it will.
Even though the hype building stunt and revealing phrase- “The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller” feels like sour grapes and a bit of an ‘eye for an eye’, I congratulate you on your efforts to date Anthony. Let’s hope people focus on the science instead of ‘Anthony is a hypocrite’.
Team Watts et.al.,
I just finished working my way through the power point presentation: Damning evidence of NOAA’s flawed/failed adjustment schema, that makes thermal mountains out of tepid molehills!
I’ll distribute and discuss this with many folks, including several aspirants to local and state political offices, in the coming days and weeks. It is a great education piece, a ‘bedrock’ foundation paper for instrument siting, temperature sensing, temperature trend analyses, and the errors (willful or otherwise) induced by human biased ‘temperature adjustments’ to the data sets.
I look forward to working my way through the referenced materials!
Well Done, to all Team Watts!!!
MtK
Headline:
Alarmist Claims Deflated—
Review of US Temperature Data Shows Very Little Warming for Last 30 Years
Other suggestions?
/Mr Lynn
I hope this will settle the arguments about siting that have been around for so long. It does matter and you can’t make arbitrary corrections. Not anymore!
Bravo! Well done to all.
Richards in Vancouver @ July 29, 2012 at 12:25 pm
And to think: it all started with a bucket of whitewash and some Stevenson screens!
Quite so!
I’m sorry about the error in my comment. But you understand what I mean. Anyway, congratulations!
Rats, hit too soon. This is also the legacy of John Daly.
Can’t wait for peer review to be over. I have several people I know who need to read this but wont until peer review is done because those are the only papers worth reading. AKA AGW proponents.
I still have to read the entire paper and digest it but the slide show is pretty damning of NOAA’s methods.
viewshed: the natural environment that is visible from one or more viewing points
So the result is just like Dr Christy’s PDAT data.
They mixed good and bad and the result was the worst. Who would say that?
“Anthony, mpaul is correct. The PR release document needs a strong headline and lede! Editors simply will glance and pitchr otherwise. (The press has become extremely lazy form my early days.) You need to put the conclusion (the ‘take-away’) in the headline and explain significance in the lede.
Bravo work and brilliant tactical approach on a highly public pre-release, making it obvious that politics are at work if rejected by the journals.”
Agreed. Punch it up Anthony. It’s too important, and you’ve worked too hard.
“Comparisons demonstrate that NOAA adjustment processes fail to adjust poorly sited stations downward to match the well sited stations, but actually adjusts the well sited stations upwards to match the poorly sited stations.”
I wish I was actually surprised.
Just one little typo in the graphs – the y axis of Figure 12 – CONUS station class comparison using gridding, with a Class 1&2 baseline – should read DELTAtemp from Class 1/2.
As mentioned above, the % of global coverage of the U.S. being relatively small, I think it fair to say that the “new” calculation of warming being closer to the IPCC global estimates doesn’t provide any validity to the IPCC. Rather, it opens the door to examine more closely the remaining global network of temperature data.
We could see a whole new picture of earth’s temperature history… and the one we should be seeing. Up, down, the same, oscillating, whatever.. we really do need to know what the truth is.
Antony, there is a mistake in the color scales: it is writen “>0.0” instead of “<0.0"
REPLY – My mistake. (And the other one on that scale.)
“After NOAA Adjustments” …. always upwards.
WELL DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *CLAPPING*
So observational data beat computer generated ‘data’.
To paraphrase:
Chance of these adjustments occurring randomly are vanishingly miniscule…
So either its pure incompetence on behalf of a lot of different people over a long time or a conspiracy of a small set of people.
Will there be scalps taken?
Kudos, Anthony, et al.
(This is useful and that’s a high compliment when I have seen so much “could, maybe, might based on ifs and wishes” published that, IMO, is useless.)
I started learning about “How NOT to Measure Temperature” when I started visiting WUWT at around the time “How not To Measure Temperature #52 (or so)” was posted. I’m just a dumb ol’ engineer so I have a tendency to get a little leery when people are so sure of where we are going when we apparently didn’t know where we were and didn’t know where we’d been, temperature-wise. The hook was well set and I was easy to reel in; I have since been a regular to WUWT and have learned quite a bit about the complexity and issues (political and scientific) that make getting a handle on the Earth’s climate such a difficult task.
Nothing like working on the fundamentals first. Yay! Good stuff!
Well done Anthony! Congratulations and kudos to you and all your volunteers!
Bravo. Worth waiting for and, for me anyway, it does live up to the hype. In fact it is the confirmation of much that I could see when delving into station data, but, frustratingly, not show conclusively in analysis. The result was a sort of cognitive disconnect and I’ve just breathed a huge sigh of ‘ahhh’.
Tucker says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Any idea on why and how NOAA came to their adjustment methodology?
Confirmation bias, layered on confirmation bias, layered on confirmation bias.
AW – Slide 43 since is there a typo NOAA Adj Average at the top is .25 in the map .30?
Great PPT looking forward to the paper. PS I could be wrong.
This is far important than people think. its WORLDWiDE (the UHI effect). There is NO AGW period so this posting is in fact as important as WUWT said.
I’m not credentialed, but my take is he (they?) is talking about the :of record” the warmists talk about.
No way to talk about “cooling since” with out the whole record.
Finally, …
We have a paper and analysis which makes sense.
Which makes sense in terms of all the different situations we have seen with temperatures and trends and understanding that the UHI was an important factor.
Which makes sense in terms of looking at Raw unadjusted data versus how it turns out after NOAA adjusts it.
Which makes sense with our own personal experience garnered over the years looking at these issues and looking in your own backyard.
Which makes sense in terms of how far the NOAA goes to make it impossible to do this analysis without starting from the ground up – surveying all the stations on your own personal time no less.
Congratulation Anthony.
NOAA? We’re with the Humane Association, we know what you’ve been doing, and we’re here to take the pooch away.
I haven’t read the paper yet. But, though I’m not a scientist, I understand that “science” is based on accurate observation or “data”. Accurate data then leads to trying to understand it. Some, it would seem, (I’m being kind.) have taken questionable data and made it even more questionable to support an even more questionable theory that a particular political philosophy has embraced. (Was that a run-on sentence?)
Anthony “et al”, Thanks for your efforts to keep the data honest.
Assuming this holds then, at the very least, you’ve demonstrated that the results on temperature trends are sensitive to siting and that an overestimate of temperature increase is likely to have been made. The fact that this is so far restricted to the US is irrelevant since it has a wider significance. This is important.stuff (if it holds) Well done for getting the work to the stage at which you’re happy that its sufficiently solid such that it can now go out for review. .
You should be prepared that the likely response to it is (a) pretend it doesn’t exist (maybe this will work and you didn’t need to cancel the holiday). If (a) doesn’t work then argument (b) its not even peer-reviewed will be made, ignoring the fact that this doesn’t stop others talking about their work in advance of publication. Argument (b) will be joined by (c ), which is that its written by biased bloggers (with the implication that its therefore bound to be wrong). Failing all of this, argument (d) will be rolled out, which is a complicated refuting argument involving some very technical terms which sound impressive to an uncritical journalist. Peer review will also likely be a little rough….
By the way, why doesn’t BEST and the other groups use this new site classification technique ? I assume its been discussed in the literature. If so, what are stated pros and cons ?
.
FYI – minor grammar typo for/in – on lines 757 & 758
This qualitative approach, including rural-urban temperature differentials with value-neutral distance measurements, most certainly confirms AW’s site-specific Weather Station theses. The fact that Big Government “climate researchers” (sic) have so adamantly opposed such self-evident determining factors is a damning indictment of AGW Catastrophism on every level.
Next up: Might the Green Gang now admit that atmospheric/oceanic circulation patterns plus Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) rather than some negligible trace-gas “forcing” drive cyclical climatic variations– that per a looming 70-year “dead sun” Solar Minimum, Earth faces not a “runaway Greenhouse Effect” [spare us] but a renewed onset of Pleistocene Ice Time in wake of a fading Holocene Interglacial Epoch?
Alas, facts matter little to Kentti Linkola, Rajendra Pachauri, Hans Joachim Schellnberger. But after this, their Zombie Hypotheses will have to prick new dolls.
Zeke Hausfather: Any chance we can have a list of station IDs with their new classifications to play around with? Replication being important and all that
I second the motion. BEST released code and data at the time of their preprint. Will WUWT do the same?
REPLY – All will be forthcoming. Though you may have to wait until publication for every last bit. But you’ll get it all. I didn’t work so hard to see it all chucked in some dang inaccessible archive! ~ Evan
Kudos, Anthony, Evan, Steve & John:
Anthony, the SurfaceStations project shows your farsightedness. The rewards for your diligence and (and that of your volunteers) was a long time coming but your thoroughness and patience seem to be finally bearing fruit. While the initially speculated release of more climategate emails would have been more titillating, the release of new hard science is ultimately of higher worth than any politically oriented revelations. The paper would seem to be a solid first step in re-evaluation of the entire GHCN instrumental record. The temperature records before 1979 are rife with dubious TOBS and other adjustments that mostly serve to cool historical temperatures compared to the true raw data. I salute you and will toast you and your co-authors tonight at dinner.
Be careful, not to be carried away by your enthusiasm. The difference between what you say in the paper and in the powerpoint presentation:
Draft Paper:
This is true in all nine geographical areas of all five data samples. The odds of this result having occurred randomly are quite small.
PowerPoint:
This is true in all nine geographical areas of all five data samples. The odds of this result having occurred randomly are vanishingly minuscule.
is disturbing. Do don’t such things.
REPLY – Depends on your definitions. For all nine areas to be cooler fro Class 1\2 is a 1/512 shot. For all nine to be significantly cooler is more like 1 in 20,000. Then on top of that, it holds for all 5 slices of data. That’s pretty darn vanishingly minuscule. ~ Evan
The fundamental takeaway for me is that they have apparently used the most contaminated data (the most poorly-sited stations) to adjust the least contaminated data (the best-sited stations) to match. That is just plain wrong of them to do, the adjustment process at any given station notwithstanding. It says they have more “trust” in the contaminated data than the uncontaminated data and that reeks of confirmation bias because the contamination moves the trend in the same direction as their hypothesis.
Another question..
Was this work independently reproduced before today ? Here, I mean that there are several authors. Did the lead author ask one of the other authors (or indeed anyone else) to verify with wholly independent software the main results ?
REPLY – St. Mac vetted it. We’ll be providing my spreadsheets. ~ Evan
Well done Anthony et al. Been looking forward all weekend to this post and it’s been worth the wait. The truth will set us free (eventually!).
Anthony, if you want to generate press from this you”ll need to summarise your findings more coherently – or to put it bluntly, sensationally. I doubt you’ll get any publicity from this whatsoever unless you can reframe it in these terms:
1. Temperature rises across the USA mainland over time have been overstated by a significant factor.
2. It is therefore likely the threat of Global Warming has been overstated.
3. This raises serious questions about current CO2 modeling and the urgency to react.
Canonical !
Well done. Your work should become the standard by which others are judged. Given the coverage Muller has had recently it it good that you pushed to get it out in a timely manner. We need to be able to answer that stuff in a timely manner.
Examples: Slashdot HuffingtonPost
What logic can NOAA et al point to that makes adusting temps upward for a station near a heat sink (or exhaust) a sensible idea?
PS I’m sure that anyone who finds or points out a genuine mistake in the paper or this post won’t be refered as a “beetle larvae”. 😎
Hello again 🙂
I had to look it up and post.. Peter (and his dad) knew it all along..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/picking-out-the-uhi-in-global-temperature-records-so-easy-a-6th-grader-can-do-it/
Cheers,
LoN
Hmm, Fig8 — the Rural MMTS stations, excluding airports graph would be my pick for the most uncontaminated site-grouping. The raw data shows averaged US trends during 78-to-present to be a mere .03C/decade.
Oh, but it doesn’t include the TOBS, the TOBS…./sarc
Kudos from Yorkshire, Anthony,
I’m curious about why the SE stations, for the most part, received the least amount of adjustment
I just donated $50.00 Keep up the good work.
[REPLY: Thank you vry much. -REP]
Well done so far (assuming no significant errors are found in the paper). Now the rest of the world’s stations need to be reviewed so there can be a credibility in the global record and put to bed once and for all CAGW story so far.
Congratulations everyone! I guess now Michael Mann will get a chance to peer review Stephen McIntyre’s work, but without having to wait for years to get the raw data.
To me this is the really important paragraph:
Watts et al 2012 has employed a new methodology for station siting, pioneered by Michel Leroy of METEOFrance in 2010, in the paper Leroy 2010, and endorsed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Instruments and Methods of Observation (CIMO-XV, 2010) Fifteenth session, in September 2010 as a WMO-ISO standard, making it suitable for reevaluating previous studies on the issue of station siting.
The surface stations project was ‘just amateur Anthony being picky about the experts. But now the surface stations project data is being put through a World Met Office ISO standard. That will be extremely difficult to wriggle out of.
Kudos to all Anthony.
Congratulations Anthony…a job well done!
TRUTH – Its the new hate speech.
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell.
Spurious doubling of 30-year warming trend from well-sited surface temperature
monitoring stations, 92% of which is due to erroneous upward data adjustments by NOAA of the actual data from those well sited stations? Does this pass the “close enough for government work” test? Wonder how much has been spent by NOAA making these erroneous adjustments, how much has been spent on research employing said erroneous data, and how much has been spent on misdirected public policies influenced by said erroneous data? Taxpayers want and deserve to know!
Congrats, great stuff. Wonderful to see the meteorological standard being used to standardize the methodology. Also great to see the wide distribution of the paper before submission, should make for a more honest and thorough review process and expedite feedback from all perspectives. Poor Muller, your paper takes the wind out of his sails (GIGO).
Beyond the scope of your paper, why is the emphasis in climatology on average temps rather than total heat (why isn’t humidity factored in?). Also don’t understand how surface temps can be used to calculate global warming or cooling when the vast majority of climate heat is stored in the oceans. Last, it seems like the process of computing ocean heat content is not as open as it might be.
This was a study of US stations, not world stations, if I read correctly.
Be hard to say much about the world from that.
Pure ignorance: Do “we” have any information about the quality of the global data (I think I recall a report of a single station being used to characterize all of Siberia)?
Can a math relationship be developed for “US data:satellite data::satellite data:world data”?
Almost as ignorant: Do “we” have the raw data from which to re-work the record, or is that among the things that have been lost?
Is there anyone starting to do the same study for another country which inputs a lot of temperature data into the World’s base data? Perhaps the UK, or New Zealand…?
Figure 23 is impressive as well, tmin tmax and tmean with identical (!) trends for 1/2 sations but heavily increased tmin trends for 3/4/5 stations.
please check line 300 in the article: ‘and are do consider’. Good work!
I’m a bit puzzled; I’ve looked through the paper, but I can’t find it clearly stated whether the data you used for your analysis was the completely unadjusted data, or the data adjusted for time-of-observation (you state, of course, that you’re using the same data as in Fall et al.–but that was unadjusted, TOB adjusted, and homogenized data, with comparisons between all three, while unless I’m misreading things here the primary comparisons in this paper are between your own analysis vs. homogenized data. I can’t find it stated one way or another whether TOB data was used for your analysis or not). Would you mind clearing up this point (or, unless this is just an obvious case of my failing to read what was plunked down right in front of me, perhaps clarifying it in future edits of the paper)?
REPLY – Raw, no TOBS. ~ Evan
In line 498 should that be class 3 rather than class 2?
REPLY – Yes. ~ Evan
Congratulations on a fine bit of work.
I know very little about this, but has this rather simple minded experiment been done? Rather than using a single temperature sensor, a grid of temperature sensors are used at test sites that will encompass “contaminated” areas by heat sources and rather more remote areas. Eg: if one sensor is in a car park, what is the difference between its readings and ones 200, 500,1000 … yards away in a field?
A number of different test sites, i.e. rural and urban would be needed.
Using modern radio methods, logging can be done without cabling.
This would give direct experimental evidence of the effects that are inferred (correctly in my view) in this paper. it would also give a better experimental basis for DESIGNING a surface temperature monitoring system than we have a present (assuming that one will be needed in the era of remote sensing).
Suggested NEW RULE #1 for my fellow CAGWers:
1) NEVER piss off a weatherman.
Lines 299-301 need an edit.
REPLY – My bad. Should read “do not consider”. ~ Evan
Hi AW My father put up all the stevenson screen in Bolivia and Paraguay for WMO between 1963 and 1977 he would totally agree with you findings. He is no longer revolving in his grave about tis AGW ***** BTW I loved my dad very much…..
Congratulations Anthony on a job well done!!!
TRUTH…. Its the new hate speech.
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell.
Congratulations, Anthony. This must represent an awful lot of work: very well done.
The local stations are reporting that it’s 105F right now in OKC. My thirst- o- mometer tells me they are close.
Great job, Anthony (et al).
Thanks for all that you’ve done and not just with this paper.
Ah, okay. Thanks for the prompt response!
Really good to see science as she is done in this much-trampled-over area. The end results are not unexpected, but devastating nevertheless.
Small typo on slides 5&6 of methodology “Compliant (Class 1\2) stations show a trend of 0.102°C/ Decade” should be comment on slide 5 and “Compliant (Class 1\2) stations show a trend of 0.095°C / Decade” should be comment on slide 6 – they are reversed.
Translation in french of the Press release
http://www.skyfall.fr/?p=1077
Thank’s for all the work done !
At 12:33 PM on 29 July, JohninOregon had posted:
Indeed, it’s “NATIONAL,” evaluating the surface stations network considered the technologically most reliable and best-maintained such information source on land surface temperatures in the world.
If this is the best such land area surface temperature assessment system on the planet (covering, as well, a broad range of metropolitan, suburban, and rural areas), and the quality of the system is now proven to be demonstrably more prone to error than had been previously assumed – with the preponderance of error shown to produce the impression of warming in excess of real conditions prevailing – what may be reliably inferred about surface temperature monitoring systems data from even less reliable thermometers all over the rest of the world?
Quoting from a popular science article in Analog magazine’s “Alternate View” column (titled “Lessons from the Lab,” published in November 2009, but written months in advance of 17 November that year), physicist Jefferey D. Kooistra reviewed the preliminary results of Mr. Watts’ SurfaceStations.org project under discussion here. He closed with:
As for the creebing about how these results are being “presented by a team with an obvious axe to grind,” isn’t the process of peer review supposed to be an infallible and absolutely reliable means of sustaining impartial objectivity in the presentation of scientific research?
Well, hell. That’s what you warmist Watermelon clowns have been spouting for years, isn’t it?
Even though Climategate 1.0 (FOIA2009.zip) and Climategate 2.0 (FOIA2011.zip) confirmed the decades-long suspicions that the “consensus” cabal had turned peer review into pal review both to evade error-checking of their own submissions and to suppress the publication of contrarian research and analyses.
Fortunately, those of us in the ever-growing “denier” community are skeptical of every claim, including those supported by data and results which debunk the crippled conjecture of anthropogenic global warming.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:49 pm
NOAA? We’re with the Humane Association, we know what you’ve been doing, and we’re here to take the pooch away.
Leave him alone, he’s a physicist with papers.
3 pages of abstract, 10 pages of references….52 pages in total…..To which journal are you going to send this “paper”???? 🙂 🙂
A typo you may wish to correct in the PPT presentation “methodology — graphs — presentation. On slide 12 in the text at the bottom the 0.73 should be 0.073. Fascinating reading. Good job.
REPLY – Again, my bad. ~ Evan
My Dad who worked for the WMO 1963 to 1977 in South America told me in 1997 that the AGW was a tax grab! he did not even mention the science hahahahahaha
The discussion in 302-316 indicates a need for additional work to validate that the lack of consideration of ground cover and shade from the analysis impacts the results as stated. I wonder what subset of the 779 stations would need to be analyzed in depth to validate the hypothesis?
The problem is that you can’t usually tell grass height from a photo, much less a satellite image. Shade would be easier. We’ll be looking at that eventually. But shade is intimately tied in with heat sink (which generally causes the shade). So separating the effects is somewhat (though not entirely) moot. ~ Evan
MSM won’t touch this especially the NYT, BBC et al and if they do it will be to repudiate it.
Very interesting and congratulations to the four of you but it changes nothing because the alarmists won’t listen and the politics are settled. (Do those last four words sound familiar?)
The other, junk science, camp won the war years ago; OTOH if this turns out to be a game changer after all, a big donation will wing its way to Anthony.
none of this will hit the MSM.
This will make the political controlfreaks…. freak out!
You know, what they hate is normal citizens doing volontairy work to find out truth.
That means they loose control.
THEY as in “THEY LIVE”, evergreen classic movie, check it out.
you should have gone on your holiday!
Tried to donate, but the system didn’t work. You might want to have a look at that!
Excellent work, Anthony and company. I’ll have to read through the paper.
By the way, any tweets from “the Team”? I’m sure they are none too happy (heh)…
We love you Mr. Watts!!
The paper substantiates what I have spent several decades observing both driving and flying low level. Temperatures vary greatly in very short distances, thus one can not conclude that the temperature at location A will be equal to location B in short distances of feet, to surrounding general area of miles. It has NEVER been reality.
We casually observe this, yet it has been used illegitimately by certain agenda driven circles.
Was it stated as to which journal this is being submitted?
It is clear that because of NOAA, the Earth has a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell
Bravo Anthony at al, well done, good to see science at work!
Skeptics are vindicated, comments about data and adjustments are endorsed now with scientific papers asking for more quality data and work!
This issue of station sitting quality was also my feeling that the majority of USHCN data is “UHI poluted”.
It was also my understanding why BEST found decreasing trend in “most urban” against the whole database. “Most urban” are already big cities where the growth is no longer as significant as in smaller areas.
In the 20th century there was worldwide urbanization process and an interesting demographic evolution. Many big cities have “grown up” and a big part of the world reached over 90% urbanization and also ceased to grow. We have seen this in almost all developed countries, with stagnation in Europe, Russia, Japan, South Korea limited growth in North America and Australia, now followed up by China and others.
Interesting to note that the absolute population growth was 75 million in 1968 and also 75 million in 2010 at double the population. But the new 75 million do not add in the same locations.
This phenomenon starts to happen in the 1950s and continues on a larger scale in the next years.
As more and more cities grow and reach a level of what I would call “UHI saturation”, the slow growth of big cities and smaller in absolute values UHI increase for cities from a certain size explains a smaller delta UHI for an urban group that contains cities, in comparison with a UHI contaminated average containing many small locations growing – consistent with the results from the BEST study – divergence appearing in the 1950s – and with the logarithmic dependency of UHI growing trend based on population.
The time period when this de-couplement happens and the increased difference is consistent with the global demography.
Your paper addresses only the time frame from 1979-2008 in the US but it clearly points out at the flaws of not proper using the meta-data of the stations sitting and making statistical adjustments irrelevant to the meta-data and will hopefully serve to a correction of the race to the highest adjustments trend. (It is not only UHI but various stations sitting issues, I know).
————————————————————————-
Toby says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:21 pm
The US is how much? 2% of the earth’s surface.
But it is warming at 0.155C/ decade, not far off the IPCC expectation of ~0.2C/decade.
Seems like good and valuable contributory work, to add to the confirmatory analysis of the BEST group of Richard Muller.
————————————————————————-
Toby, the world did not start to exist with your birth, even if it might appear so to you. If you go and see unadjusted temperature data for longer periods you’ll understand the 0.155C/decade
in a different perspective:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti/north-america/usa-part-1.php
So the dreaded global warming IS man-made – all that affecting concrete, those a/c units, buildings road and airports, yep, every one of them is man-made !
Alan Douglas
REPLY – Some of it, certainly. And some natural warming over the positive PDO period. But there’s still some room for anthropogeniety ~ Evan
So, this means that AGW (or a good portion of it) is really man-made….just not by [CO2]…
REPLY – Mmmm. A good portion, yes. ~ Evan
Just curious … any document downloads from RC or NASA GISS domains yet? Again, just curious and good work …
“Be careful, not to be carried away by your enthusiasm. The difference between what you say in the paper and in the powerpoint presentation:”
I’m going to take Leif’s word concerning how this probability should properly be characterized. And I agree with his larger point, that there’s no need to exaggerate (if that’s what you’re doing). Why give your critics ammunition when you don’t have to? Only weakens an otherwise apparently very strong paper..
Just great!
Query legend: Should the lowest be 0.0 ? And third lowest be 0.05 – 0.1?
Apologies if someone’s already on to this.
To paraphrase someone or other:
I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide sound science for the people and reassurance to the scared-snipless; this was the moment when the rise of bullsnip began to slow and our political discourse began to heal; this was the moment when we ended the climate-war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.
Eh…I’m British, so that last bit doesn’t really work.
Anyway, I can’t miss this opportunity. Hi, Mr. science historian from the future. Give my regards to my great-great-grandson, tell him to work hard at cyber-school and put down those augmented reality glasses once in a while.
P.S. The rumours are true. People in the 2010’s didn’t have to get permission from Department of Political Corrections to express a new opinion. We really did inhale smoke from burning leaves wrapped in paper and drank liquids that killed our brain cells. You don’t know what you’re missing.
But the methodological implications seem to go beyond the USA.
Reminds me of back in 2007 when McIntyre had found Hansen’s Y2K error that misrepresented 2006 instead of 1934 as the US’s warmest year.
Does Hansen’s Error “Matter”?
Steve McIntyre, posted on Aug 11, 2007 at 1:44 PM
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/11/does-hansens-error-matter/
The song remains the same!
It’s my birthday today. Thank you Anthony for a wonderful present. You put in a lot of hard work. And good science. A very many people are grateful. Thank you.
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:54 pm
Do don’t such things.
REPLY – Depends on your definitions. For all nine areas to be cooler fro Class 1\2 is a 1/512 shot. For all nine to be significantly cooler is more like 1 in 20,000. Then on top of that, it holds for all 5 slices of data. That’s pretty darn vanishingly minuscule. ~ Evan
That is not the point. There is quite a difference between ‘quite small’ and ‘vanishing minuscule’ or do you think the difference is vanishing minuscule?. Furthermore, the data are not independent so your calculation of probability is wrong. The point is: you should say the SAME in both presentations.
REPLY – Point taken. ~ Evan
Excellent! I knew there had to be more research into these warming biases coming.
A few scoffers have popped up to say “yes but USA is only 2% of world’s surface….” Yes but if the stats from the most advanced nation in the world are basically wrong/overstated, what credence should we give to data coming out of Africa, S America, for the sake of obvious examples, which together comprise a significant fraction of the worlds surface? If the USA is wrong, nothing (much) is right, therefore we have no reliable global temperature record, therefore global warming may/may not be happening, nobody really knows, in which case policy responses are a trifle premature. The ponzi politicos will have to think of a better wheeze to keep their show on the road.
Line 464: I recommend
“The gridded average of all compliant rural MMTS Class 1&2 stations…” to emphasize that we are still discussing figure 8 in the new paragraph.
Nice work! Could use a few of those NOAA “adjustments” on payments into my bank account …
I bet the BBC does not report this article on the TV or the red button!!
Toby says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Thanks, Toby. Several comments.
First, although the US is only 2% of the earth’s surface, it has arguably the most dense network of stations, and in part because of this, figures regarding the US trends are quoted endlessly.
Second, the same errors almost undoubtedly exist in the rest of the world. It would be foolish to assume they do not. Since this analysis establishes that the canonical estimate of the US trends is almost double the reality, the same is likely true of the rest of the world.
Third, it does not “confirm” the work by Mueller, it directly contradicts and refutes Mueller’s claims. Read the paper.
Fourth, the trends reported are for 1979-2008. The IPCC “expectation of ~0.2C/decade” has not been seen in the last decade of that period … where did it go? No one knows, but post about 1995 the planet definitely has not been warming as the IPCC expected.
All the best,
w.
A quick comment.
None of you posting here have any idea if there is an error in Anthony et al.’s work.
Caution and criticism are likely to be more helpful to him than simple cheering.
The honorable Mr. Delingpole is the first to run the story,
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100173174/global-warming-yeah-right/
Followed by the Boston Environmental Policy Examiner,
http://www.examiner.com/article/devasting-blow-to-temperature-records-u-s-temp-trends-spuriously-doubled
Stephen Wilde says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:15 pm
“surface area of the heat sinks/sources within the thermometer viewshed to quantify the total heat dissipation effect.”
Neat.
Common sense at last.
C’est nous !! The French are renowned for their common sense that’s why we find the English so difficult to understand.
And if anyone wants to send non-climate-blog-reading friends a slightly less technical take on this, it’s here:
http://wp.me/pnsGM-i1
How do you explain the fact that the UAH and RSS CONUSA trend is 0.24°C/dec, Klotzbach (corrected) says the surface-TLT land-only amplification factor is 1.1, and yet you’re arguing for a surface trend of 0.155°C/dec? That’s more than a 1.5 amplification factor.
Either UAH and RSS are biased high or your results are biased low, and frankly the former explanation is not very plausible.
[REPLY: Didn’t read the paper, did you Dana? Didn’t think so. -REP]
Congratulations to Anthony and the other authors for a well written, readable paper. This is real science applied with care. Having the data and algorithms available shows the level of class we’ve all experienced on this website.
For those cheering that there’s no global warming (US warming), yes there is, it’s just not CAGW. Does mankind contribute, is there any AGW? Certainly, we contribute in land use changes, and in topographical changes. Is this really changing the temperature of the planet – yes, but on any given day you’d be hard pressed to feel it, with possible exceptions like the enthalpy of desert regions increasing with the increase in irrigation of yards, crops, etc.
For those protesting this is “only” 2% of the planet, that’s a little off. If the oceans areas are deducted from the surface area, then >25% of North America is a significantly larger chunk of the puzzle. Getting the measurements right here, will go a long way to getting measurements right everywhere – with a Global standard!
And for all those reveling in the feeling of having “our” website set things right, I’ll revel when we get to where this won’t even be a topic for discussion, when correct metrology is a given, not a 1/3 chance (metrology is the science of measurement). In my mind that will occur when we regularly measure the enthalpy of the environment and lead with that, not just the temperature. It was one of the significant points in the paper that this was brought up vis-a-vis the stations in the area of water treatment plants.
Well done, simply well done.
Sentence starting on line 299 seems to need attention on line 300
“…proximity and area ratings from Leroy 2010 and are do consider ground-level vegetation…”
the “and are do” bit.
It’s a good read so far.
it doesn’t matter. It’s only the United States. You haven’t proved that there are problems anywhere else in the world
Well, you do gotta consider that the same boyz that adjust the USHCN also adjust the GHCN, though. So we’re talkin’ “anywhere else in the world”, by definition.
Climate Depot has a nice headline,
http://www.climatedepot.com/
Jonas says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Nice job everyone! But I think there is a tremendous uphill battle yet to come for this getting the attention, acceptance and appreciation it (hopefully) deserves!
___________________________
After it has been thoroughly vetted by WUWT and any and all errors found, make a copy. Then add a one or two paragraph cover letter explaining why the EPA is way off base and trot down to your State and Federal Congress Critters offices. Rub their noses in it. If you can represent a “Group” (NGO) so much the better. (Group = you and your buddies with a fancy name)
Then head down to the campaign offices of all the candidates and do the same.
Showing up in person has a much greater impact, especially if a large number of irrate citizens do so. The goal is to get this issue on the table for the next election.
ANthony et al, thank you for handing us a hammer just when we need it. Now it is up to the rest of us to use it.
This is a nice chart to include: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/residential_electric_forecast.png
As well as this bit of info
Delete “or work” and replace with “of work”. Well done Mr Watts you rock.
Congratulations Antony, I never believed the work of Menne et al. If they would be right there would no reason to have any classification for the measurement conditions of any meteorological station.
We at EIKE http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/ will take care for distribution in german speaking countries . Very well done Antony and all the other fellows.
Michael
I’m still reading through the paper…but good job guys. I love that you’re going to make all data, methodologies, and algorithms available with publication. You’re laying your hands on the third rail of ‘established’ climate science. Yes, that’s going to open the doors to criticism…and lots of it, but isn’t that what science is about? A few dour faces on the other side of the table could learn a lesson or two from your example.
Again, congratulations to all four of you.
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 29, 2012 at 1:28 pm
The point is: you should say the SAME in both presentations.
REPLY – Point taken. ~ Evan
So I expect one of the two be revised to acknowledge the ‘Point taken’
REPLY – Well, once St. Mac gives it the full and complete monty we’ll decide which one we like best. (As of so far, I vote for VM.) ~ Evan
These findings prove again, that most of the US stations, considered before to be the very best maintained stations of the world (until Antony´s volunteer projects show the opposite) exaggerated the amount of warming there by far.
This was the first conclusion if one looks into the real situation on site after the publication of Antonys report in 2009.
But this is not true for the US only but for all major countries like germany also, as we proved several times too.
What will our he local media do?
It is to be expected that mainstream media will treat this message as a local event, that will not change the whole picture. But we from EIKE, like others, will not allow them to do so
best regards
Michael.
Well done Anthony et all
Good luck with the peer review – I hope you don’t get the recent problems that Spencer and O’Donnell got hit with.
Great work Anthony and everyone connected to this paper.
Just a suggestion here in preparation for the droves of people who will try and lambast this excellent work, you might want to change the legend colors for the comparison chart above – maybe use Green instead of blue for the lower temperatures? I can see someone trying to criticise the paper because blue means colder or some such thing.
Yes, congrats to all that have worked so hard !
Lines 505&506 verses figure 10 might use some rephrasing.
Sorry late to the party. Congrats on all the hard work to Anthony et al. Now off to digest the paper….
Typos in the paper: line 300 and 757/758
By the way: which journal will publish?
Discussion paper, line 293:
“In contradiction to Leroy (1999) and Leroy 293 (2010) publicly available review papers for Muller et al. (2012), showed they used grouping of Classes 1,2,3 as compliant sites, and Classes 4&5 as non-compliant sites. In addition to the lack of class binning using surface area by applying Leroy (2010) site classifications, this may also have contributed to Muller et al. (2012) finding no discernible trend differences between station classes.”
Tsk tsk, Muller et al.
Congratulations Anthony, Evan, Steve & John!!!
Here is my suggestion for a short PR headline:
NOAA Adjusts US Temps to support global warming!
(Subhead: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has doubled U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 – 2008.)
(I learned in marketing that a headline should be 7 words or less – well this is 8)
and
The more photos of the actual sites, the better, I remember your original article
had lots of photos of the sites. Many of them were from other countries too.
Anyone who has followed WUWT through the years knows the gargantuous effort that has been put forth by both yourself and all of the gatherers of the Surface Stations survey data and you all deserve a great gesture of appreciation for carrying this to a proper and detailed summary of what has occurred to the land surface temperature records and adjustments by NOAA, NCDC, USHCN and the implications carried into the GHCN dataset used by all major datasets.
Just WOW! Well done Anthony et al.
Well done! Anthony and co-authors. I wonder just how much such a study would have cost had it been done as funded academic research. I also wonder just how many of our favorite warmistas (and others) have taken in enough grant money to do such a project yet didn’t and I wonder just how much they profited personally from their grant money versus their income as celebrities.
It never made sense that temperature readings wouldn’t be affected by local heat sources.
Congratulations Anthony on your hard work – and to your excellent team!
Steven Mosher says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Data Problems
1. Uses GHCN Version 2.
2. In our urban-rural comparisons we use the Urban, Semi-Urban, Rural classifications provided by NASA.
Your cryptic messages do you no favours. This crap has no meaning. Say what you mean or go back to your classroom.
Line 534: “… indisputably higher….” ?
James says:
July 29, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Considering that many comments here have already posted suggested corrections, you’re statement has already been demonstrated to be false.
-Scott
Some (overlapping) questions to Anthony et al.
What is the motivation behind using the new siting methodology ? Are there pros and cons to using it ?
Could using the new methodology in some way create a (counter intuitive) bias such that trends would be *under*estimated ?
Are there good reasons based on the laws of thermodynamics for assuming that one methodology is better than the other ?
Why wasn’t it adopted widely in other studies ? Were reasons given or is it simply too new to have made an impact ?
I realise that answers to the some of the above questions may be found in the reference list. However, like the journalists who read this, I don’t have a great deal of time and would prefer the authors to defend their work. I suggest that answers to the above questions (+ other relevant questions popping up here) be placed in a FAQ section. This work *will* be attacked and readily available well motivated responses are needed.
On another note, its not enough that a method is simply “endorsed”. The CAGW methodology is endorsed by the community and accepted by governments worldwide. To claim the method is endorsed is a useful statement but the argument shouldn’t be overused.
The most affected appears to be the block
of four states, in brown, labelled “.411”.
But is this true? The four States included
are Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah.
From NOAA’s own data ……
A random sample of towns…..
Flagstaff Arizona 1970-2010 :
-0.066 degrees Celsius difference per year
Phoenix Arizona 1940-2010 :
+0.034 degrees Celsius difference per year
Albuquerque New Mexico 1940-2010 :
+0.011 degrees Celsius difference per year
Santa Fe New Mexico 1940-2010 :
+0.01 degrees Celsius difference per year
Boulder Colorado 1960-2010 :
+0.082 degrees Celsius difference per year
Denver Colorado 1940-1960 :
+0.017 degrees Celsius difference per year
Fillmore Utah 1940-2010 :
+0.019 degrees Celsius difference per year
Provo Utah 1940-2010 :
-0.002 degrees Celsius difference per year
Data from NOAA via Wolfram Alpha
Somthing rather odd about that isn’t there ?
None of these figures are anywhere near
the .411 except for Boulder Colorado which
is around Double that figure, but note that
on some other places the temperature actuall
fell over the piece.
OK so the time periods are not the same,
and I did choose some towns at random.
This isn’t an extensive study like Anthony’s
but however there does appear to be a large
discrepancy between these latest “official”
NOAA estimates, and long term measurements.
see widget on index page at the Fraudulent Climate Site
Check out some towns of your own to see whether the
temperature has been rising as NOAA says in it’s
press releases ????
Well done, Anthony. A doubling of the trend. Suppose you were twice as large as you are. You would be Bigfoot. The science is in real troubles if your and your fellows article is accepted.
Steven Mosher says:
July 29, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Thanks, Steven. Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us as to what difference this might make? It’s a serious question. Your cryptic posting style is betraying you again. I suspect you have a valid point, you’re a very smart guy … but what is it?
Me, I suspect that they used USHCNv2 (which is related to GHCNv2, not GHCNv3) so that they could compare apples to apples regarding earlier studies of the US … and as far as I know, there is no USHCNv3 available yet. So it’s unclear what would be gained by using GHCNv3 to compare with previous studies that used USHCNv2. If they did that people would just say “you’re comparing apples to oranges” … and they’d be right.
So what? What difference does it make what you/Mueller used? Again, a serious question. It may make a difference, as may the use of GHCNv2, but until you let us in on the secret, I don’t have a clue what your point is regarding either #1 or #2 of your statement.
w.
Steve Koch says:
July 29, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Congrats, great stuff. Wonderful to see the meteorological standard being used to standardize the methodology. Also great to see the wide distribution of the paper before submission, should make for a more honest and thorough review process and expedite feedback from all perspectives. Poor Muller, your paper takes the wind out of his sails (GIGO).
Beyond the scope of your paper, why is the emphasis in climatology on average temps rather than total heat (why isn’t humidity factored in?). Also don’t understand how surface temps can be used to calculate global warming or cooling when the vast majority of climate heat is stored in the oceans. Last, it seems like the process of computing ocean heat content is not as open as it might be.
Steve – I have stated multiple times that the climatologists are all gathered under the lamppost as its light there – using atmospheric temperature when they should be measuring atmospheric heat content in kilojoules per kilogram taking account of the enthalpy.
Gail Combs has effectively tasked me to assess this 😉 . I hope to generate the integral of heat content for some weather stations using various humidity and enthalpy formulas. I have an idea that the daily heat content may not actually change as the humidity drops and the temperature rises and vice versa.
Great job!
Very well done Anthony et al. It appears to be an excellent and very robust analysis and paper. Roy Spenser just updated his US temperature trend from the satellite record, http://www.drroyspenser.com, it seems to agree quite well with your results.
Turns out the experts were right … Most of their warming really was man made!
– dT
/slow clap
Donation forthcoming – my small part.
I enjoyed the initial read.
Now we need a mechanism to evaluate the adjustments to the historic record, particulally the lowering pre-WW2.
MISO isn’t going to be very happy that they were left out of this ‘operating’ their own territory; please, we went through this once before.
Notice the PJM vs MISO areas: http://www.miso-pjm.com/
The text you copied from Fox has issues …
.