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.
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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.
“Is there an addendum showing all the calculations?”
OOPS! Got it.
Hi Anthony:
Two things.
First, thank you for putting in the considerable legwork to gather and analyze the actual data. I truly hope this important paper will receive the attention it deserves.
Second, I have to agree with Larry, mpaul, Mr. Lynn and Major Johnson that I’m concerned that it won’t, because it’s not properly written.
As others have noted, a press release needs a headline and lede.
This is NOT because the MSM is lazy, stupid, Republican or Democrat, or innumerate. It’s because the purpose of a press release is, ahem, to release information to the press, and the expected and traditional format of “releasing information” requires a high-leve description of the event (headline) along with the canonical components of journalism (who, what, when, where, how, and why). That allows the journalist to quickly and easily decide whether this is an issue s/he wants to delve further into (if s/he’s a good journalist) or to reprint (if s/he’s lazy).
What you have written is not a press release, and I say this as a scientist and engineer who has worked in the world of technology journalism–both creating releases and receiving them.
If you want this to garner the attention it merits, you need something like:
“US Temperatures Significantly Inflated from 1979-2011, Study Finds
Your Town, California, July 29, 2012
The most comprehensive study to date of US surface stations from 1979 through 2011 finds that virtually every analysis of the data significantly inflated the readings from a majority of stations, thus vastly overstating the degree of warming that has actually occurred in the US. Therefore, this study casts considerable doubt on all current global warming models, which rely on this data as validation.”
Or something like that (and please note I have not read the paper, so my statements may be factually inaccurate—but I HAVE read the “press release”, which is more than most folks will do if you issue it as stands.)
Again, I am saying this as someone who deeply appreciates your efforts and has no quibble with your findings. But there’s a standard format for press releases, which exists for a reason, and deviating from it will not help, and may hurt, your efforts to promote your findings.
Very nice! Great work!!!! Well done
Congratulations Anthony and team.Yours is a landmark achievement.
When looking at the Tmin USHCNv2 adjusted data for rural stations, we observe that it is adjusted higher in value, from 0.127°C/decade to 0.249°C/decade, effectively doubling the trend,
I think we need to start asking for the rationale behind what these people have been doing.
Leave 3 out. It sounds more like advocacy. “Significantly” is boring and leaves open, “What? You mean like 10 or 20%? Less?” Use “doubled”. It’s closest to the truth; the difference really is that stark.
Other than those quibbles, I totally agree with your point!
I had the opportunity to camp at one of my favorite, secret campsites in the House range of western Utah last week. While stirring the small campfire looking over the nearly mile-high drop off Notch Peak I was dumbstruck thinking about the ignorance of something as mundane and consequential as station siting, over time, and the 1996 discovery of the PDO/AMDO could have possibly been misinterpreted by a supposedly scientific community as due to a trace gas which has merely paced normal abrupt climate change. I mean here I was, having 4-wheeled for a few hours to reach this special campsite, easily using a couple of gallons of fuel, and releasing stored carbon-based energy as CO2 as well as particulate, matter pondering just how much science has devolved in just my lifetime!
In all that Homo sapiens has accomplished in just the last mere 200 years of the probable end-Holocene, this is as far as we have come? Attacking plant food as the agent provocateur of a climate catastrophe which wouldn’t even register on the low-end of end extreme interglacial noise?
Galileo would surely be as disappointed as I was that wondrous evening by my campfire. In hip nomenclature, I would be a near perfect “flat-earther” in the blatant perfect pretzel logic that would make such an assignation applicable to one that comprehends the pacing of our climate by the 3 orbital variables of precession, obliquity and eccentricity. The weeklong conference I was returning from populated mostly by those who had not a clue about “when we live”.
Sitting there, poking my fire, I contemplated the sagacity of those that knew not how badly we have managed just the last ~150 years of hominid generated data. The cognoscenti not merely ignorant of the precepts of quality assurance/quality control, at not just surface stations but the latter manipulation of clearly contaminated data, but arrogant in proclaiming the purity of the data and what that means.
Is this as far as we have come as a species? I asked myself as I placed a little more deadfall on the coals. In another day I would be back in the land of where the “principle of establishing a cost to carbon pollution” would raise the price of gasoline another buck soon to admitted inconsequential climate effect. Again, I say is this as far as we have come as a species? Really? Really?
Add Australia’s to California’s effort at ameliorating the “global warming” effect of CO2 and you net an effect we cannot even measure. As I sat there by that campfire it was just so absurd. Even MIS-11, the Holsteinian interglacial, the last one, like the Holocene, to occur at an eccentricity minimum, netted perhaps 1.5 to 2 precession cycles. And in-between those two optima it got very cold for thousands of years……
You mean to tell me that on the basis of now obviously flawed data you want me to believe that scavenging what you obviously consider a GHG from the atmosphere (here I assume that prognostications of warming feedback, whatever the magnitude, are correct) is the true and proper course of action at a half-precession old intergacial?
You have got to be kidding. Knowing that abrupt and frequent climate changes attend the end extreme interglacials, and accepting your premise that CO2 can either cause warming by whatever process you propose, or ameliorate the drop to the glacial state, applying the Precautionary Principle absolutely requires that we avoid any possibility of climate back-sliding over the next, at least, 4,000 years:
“Investigating the processes that led to the end of the last interglacial period is relevant for understanding how our ongoing interglacial will end, which has been a matter of much debate…..
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416 Wm2, which is the 65oN July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428 Wm2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.”
Surely, surely, we have come farther than this intellectually! As I read Watts et al 2012, building on the results of the surfacestations.org releases, I feel both proud and ashamed of when we live. Extended interglacials are rather specious, and they are not ideal all of the time. We have glimpsed just two, one after the MPT (MIS-11) and perhaps another pre-MPT, so we sort of know what has happened during extended interglacials. The absolute best we could possibly hope for is to mitigate the millennium-length cold-spells in between the insolation maxima. Only so few of us even recognize that……..
How many realize that messing with the orbital paced variables invariably yields peaks of ~100,000 years, ~41,000 years and ~19-23,000 years? Would even the wise wise one (Homo sapiens sapiens) stumble past the precession-minimum looming over the next 4,000 years? We have only been massively burning fossil fuels for about the last 200 years or so. KNOWING that CO2 gas is a GHG, and KNOWING that we might need to bridge the gap to the next, several thousands of years-away rise in N65 insolation, what would you do, hominid, if it was all left up to you?
And would you base that decision on use, or dismissal, of Watts et al 2012?
It’s a fair question
Anthony,
Figure 12 appears to have a mis-labeled y-axis
Y-axis says “delta-T from a Class 3 in degrees C/per decade” but both the title and the actual plot show that it is Class1/2 that is the baseline (ie at zero) not Class 3
James says
“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.”
Anthony has explained why this has been released “early” – to follow Dr Richard Muller’s excellent advice,
“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.”
……and of course the IPCC would wish to be cognisant of this information, albeit in draft form, prior to their next report wouldn’t they? After all that’s why governments accept the CAGW arguments in the first place.
They noted that USHCNv2 used was identical to Fall et all 2011. Perhaps this is part of the reason for more direct comparison. Or, possibly just having availability of the data set.
Well done and congratulation seems to be the appropriate words here.
It is good to see that when you know you’re right, polite stubbornness is winning through in the end.
I hope this paper will be submitted to Nature. They would try to find some way to refuse it, which will be even more damaging for them than if they were to accept it….
A great thanks to ” ALL ” the authors of this study. It is wonderful to see Real Science at work. I can only imagine the time and effort that went into this. Anthony it sucks you lost your vacation but the timing was, how would I put it? Perfect.
Hi Anthony,
I don’t mean to keep flogging this pony, but a good description of a press release (and why each component actually matters) is here: http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Press-Release
Again, I really, REALLY want to see this get the broadest possible coverage—and the first step in ensuring that is to make sure the press release is in the proper format that journalists are expecting.
Hot damn, ya did it!
PERFECT. NOW you have a press release!!
Johna, look at all the responses the pre-release of this paper has gotten just here on this blog, not to mention social media likes/shares, and the fact that RC, Tamino et al., will be forced to respond with some half baked defense…
bit dissapointed really. Another climate paper saying 0.1C rise here or there.
I was hoping for a leaked video of Mann and Jones et all at a dinner party with international bankers laughing and joking about their big global warming scam.
[REPLY: Watts et. al. 2012 invalidates all the major data sets and your’re “dissapointed”? No pleasing some people… -REP]
Interesting. Pulls the surface station data to be pretty close to the trend seen in satellite data.
Willis, the methods used in USHCN v2 is the methods used in GHCN v3 not GHCN v2. So USHCN v2 is related to GHCN v3 not v2.
USHCN v2:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/
GHCN v3:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcnm/v3.php?show=homogeneity_adjustment
This to me is important: If the procedure in Menne et al 2009 can not deal with the problems in the USHCN network due to siting bias, and the USHCN is considered top tier compared to the rest of the world, then it will not work in the worse off GHCN network and the results in GHCN v3 dataset. From there that bias will flow into other datasets like GISS because, unlike GHCN v2, there is nothing remotely like a “raw” dataset in GHCN v3.
Perhaps this paper could be described as “Screening Whitewash“ since as was pointed out by Richards in Vancouver above, Anthony started this marathon with questions concerning Stevenson screens and whitewash.
Thank you for sharing Anthony and for all the hard work your team put forth to deliver this very important data.
First read through was enlightening and corroborates much of what many of us have felt for years.
Attach this to the antics associated with homogenization, smoothing, and the infamous extrapolation, let alone the ongoing exposure of significant deficiencies of the governing climate models and the picture becomes very clear.
Accidents rarely repeat themselves.
I am certain the rapid response team has been called in for OT this fine Sunday 🙂
Cheers!
Most telling picture is Figure 17.
The rural siting shows that the worse the compliance of the instrument, the more the Tmin trends up and the greater the disparity between Tmin and Tmax trends (ie a systematic non-climatic warming)
With suburban and urban, the spurious non-climatic trends are due to both location AND siting compliance with location making Class 3 as bad as Class 4 or 5.
Since the Democrats took control of the budget/Congress (and therefor the economy) in the 2006 election, I have seen my retirement funds sink some 50%. (I had a lump sum payout.) Still, you and your associates are doing important work in “Defending the Ramparts of (Scientific) Freedom against the Forces of Darkness”. Literally. That’s worth another “Grant” in the tip jar.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Excellent work, Anthony et al! Timing was everything with this, and doing it with no sneering, insults, or other such boorish behaviour is icing on the cake – congratulations! Now to read the paper :).
Meanwhile…
or rather, a few hours ahead of this announcement, The Guardian informs that the BEST team has found there was a 1.5C temp increase during the past 250 years, laregly man made, and which turned Muller from a sceptic to a believer, or rather ‘knower’.