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.
Two little typos —
Line 300, “and are do” doesn’t make sense.
Line 387, change May to Many.
The data is where, when….Anthony? Photos? Time/date stamps?
That wonderful little 3×5 inch large card file about everything that’s important….?
The stuff that all the geeks and nerds want to see, to pick at everything — and to make the paper most perfect. Where, when will that get dumped? …..Lady in Red
Anthony, if anthropogenic climate change is a hoax you – and your whole team – will without doubt deserve Nobel Prizes. However, I would recommend waiting for confirmation from Oslo before booking flights or accommodation. Nevertheless, I wish you good luck (your gonna need it).
Well Anthony….
Ive read your article now and I just have to congratulate you. Youve given us all a real “Paul Potts moment” in front of the big climate audience. Its a beutiful job done checking the fundamental basics of climat science by genuine traditional relible fotwork as far from modelled and “homegenized” bullshit you can come.`Nobody is laughing at you now Anthony…nobody!!
Togheter with Koutsoyiannis analyze for the hole GMT WMO has to have a new coulor introduced into the insides of their pantíes. We have all with special thanks to Mr Goddard and others whohave highlitet many different obious symptoms of the desease fudging the numbers. Now we have enough evidence to go after the sytematics in the fudging. Its proven with both many symtoms , by your sytematic check of sites and mathematicly by Koutsoyiannis.
The game has changed and the question of professionalty has fallen into the right laps. NOOAA GISS BOM WMO they have answers to delivier ond responsability to take.
I could only donate. Good luck!!
[REPLY: George, all donations are greatly appreciated and are an important contribution to Anthony’s efforts. There is still a lot to be done and their will be fees and costs incurred. Thank you for your support. -REP]
Assuming there was no intent to distort the data it would be important to understand how the NOAA adjustments came to exaggerate the temperature increase as much as they did. The same cause could be at play in processing of other data and understanding it may prevent it.
Reblogged this on Sherry's Space and commented:
It is definetly is a big change right. Maybe someday we will all wake up and realize what is going before it is to late
I never read all the comments, but I would suggest that the TIME of the release should be corrected.
i.e. there is no such time as 12 PM. It is 12 Midnight or 12 Noon
Will the BEST study now be called 2ndBEST, or more accurately the WORST Study?
This is a comment from Wm. Briggs site.
If true, it suggests that Richard Muller has always been a warmist diehard (or blowhard).
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5946
The Truth about Richard Muller
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html
“I was never a skeptic” – Richard Muller, 2011
“If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion – which he does, but he’s very effective at it – then let him fly any plane he wants.” – Richard Muller, 2008
“There is a consensus that global warming is real. …it’s going to get much, much worse.” – Richard Muller, 2006
“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” – Richard Muller, 2003″
“The Law of Warmist BS” strikes again.
Headline: BEST study is no good.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/28/the-gleick-tragedy/#more-57881
“The Law of Warmist BS”
“You can save yourselves a lot of time, and generally be correct, by simply assuming that EVERY SCARY PREDICTION the global warming alarmists express is FALSE.”
beng: “For just the MMTS stations, I don’t think TOBS is applicable.”
The paper classifies any station which was MMTS for over half of the period as “MMTS”. (Cf. line 559 et seq.) Thus, even those stations can have experienced equipment/Tobs changes over the record. It doesn’t seem correct to compute a trend over disparate measurements. I find plausible the paper’s overall conclusion that homogenization has the undesirable effect of spreading the poorer stations’ influence. However, a calculation of “raw” trend which ignores recorded changes in measurement is equally inadequate.
The present “global” warming scare is based on satellite data rather than on spurious NOAA station data covering the US only. In the unlikely event that this — far too lengthy — paper gets accepted in a reputable scientific journal, its impact on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis or on the MSM’s biased opinion of this hypothesis will be negligible. I realize that the intention of this paper is to demonstrate that US surface data are unreliable and not to challenge the hypothesis, yet many commenters seem to think that this paper puts a nail in the coffin of AGW. It doesn’t of course, how much I wished it did.
“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
– Bertrand Russell
What bothers me the most is 100% of the time Hansen been proven to manipulate the data to look like Global Warming is happening. He is arrested over and over for protesting as a environmentalist, he is biased and needs to step down and work on the science to prove his side, not manipulate the data to his belief. I think it is time to start demanding congress to defund his salary, he is costing the American people billions and billions of dollars for his political beliefs.
This is not news. We have known about the Urban Heat Island effect for years. The thing to remeber is the Urban Heat Island effect as far as earth’s climatic system goes is nill. What the UHI accomplishes is, it gives a bias toward higher temperatures, due to the placement of thermometers in relation to the UHI effects.
The UHI efects on the climate ,just like CO2 are nil. That will be proven as this decade proceeds ,and the temperatures trend down.
The state of the science of climate is dreadful, and when you have to correspond to someone as dumb and non informed as Muller,it just proves my point. The guy is clueless.
We will soon be coming out with a comprehenive study as to why the climate changes and how it will be changing as this decade proceeds.
‘Peer Review’ (as best I can with very limited time available):-
All the essential contents of the paper appear to be logically sound. I have only minor comments:
At line 88 “the USHCN has a significant portion of stations affected by such changes, with approximately 10% of the USHCN remaining classified as “well-sited” using the Leroy (1999) classification method”
I had to read twice to see that the “ significant portion” wasn’t the “10%” cited, but the other 90% (I think).
At line 174 “binning of stations quality ratings”. Binning? It presumably means classification or categorising. (‘Normal’ meaning is ‘putting in the rubbish bin’).
At line 238 “A total of 1065 USHCNv2 stations were surveyed, comprising 87.4% of the 1218 station USHCNv2 network”.
Is there an explanation for why some of the stations were not surveyed?
At line 356 “The results of the analysis suggest that these differences may be due specifically to the station siting characteristics or be due to other characteristics that covary with station siting, such as instrument type. “.
Given the nature and consistency of your findings (eg. At line 368 “Without exception, in each region, compliant stations have a lower decadal scale trend than non-compliant stations “), and the numbers of stations involved, I feel that this wording is too weak, and should use, eg., “indicates … are” instead of “suggests … may be”.
At line 513 “Note also that while all classes of stations higher than Class 1&2 demonstrate higher trends than nearby Class 3&4 stations, “ – (1) “higher than Class 1&2” is curious wording since Classes 1&2 are the highest classes ie. the highest quality – (2) the sentence doesn’t make sense to me since ‘classes higher than class 1&2’ seems to mean classes 3-5 (higher class numbers), so they can’t generally have higher trends than ‘nearby class 3&4 stations’.
At line 528 “[the observation that] Poorly sited stations show greater trend results than well sited stations […] Will be either supported or disputed by the many various comparisons which follow. “.
I think you mean that the comparisons are made in order to test the proposition (“observation”). The way it reads is that some comparisons support the proposition and some dispute it, but as I understand the paper – at least wrt the first proposition – in fact the comparisons fully support it. Apart from clarifying the language, I suggest also that you use a word other than “observation” here. You appear to have used it to mean “something said here”, but if read as in “scientifically observed data” it would be difficult to make sense of the sentence.
At line 575 “In order to demonstrate that these differences are a result of equipment bias “.
I think “demonstrate” should be eg. “test whether”. Otherwise it reads like the actions were taken to prove something desirable rather than to find the actual situation.
At line 617 “suggests” maybe should be eg. “indicates” as per my above comment at line 356.
The strength and consistency of your findings would surely render any other explanation implausible.
The line 617 comment also applies at line 655 and 664.
[Lines 669 to 748 skipped – very short of time]
At line 785 “Future investigations could test […]“.
Equipment housing deterioration (mentioned earlier in the paper) could perhaps be included here.
Typos:
At line 299 “only the heat source/sink proximity and area ratings from Leroy 2010 and are do consider ground-level vegetation or shade. “ – ?’and are do’.
At line 338 “(CONUS)” – brackets () not needed.
At line 387 “May airports“ should be “Many airports”.
At line 757 “This is true for, in all nine geographical areas […]“ – “for, in all” should be “for all” or “in all”.
Side comment:
At line 191 quote from Aseada et al. (1996) “most of the infrared radiation from the ground was absorbed within 200 m of the lower atmosphere, affecting air temperature near the ground“.
Does this contradict the IPCC claim that most of the warming from AGW occurs in the troposphere over the tropics at an altitude of several km?
Anthony great work!
Congratulations to all participants on getting this released. I will dig through the paper in detail when I get the chance but initial impressions are that it is a valuable contribution to the debate and well worth all the effort and time invested.
Larry
Excellent work, but I think the new headline is misleading. “Artificial” generally means ‘man-made’ (a term which is typically used as the opposite of “natural”). So what the headline states is that half of the US warming is due to humans, and half is not. This does not reflect the important assertion of the study, which is that US warming has been significantly overestimated due to inappropriate measurement techniques and adjustments.
It might be making some sort of impact in Europe: http://notrickszone.com/
dana1981 says:
July 29, 2012 at 1:34 pm
[REPLY: Didn’t read the paper, did you Dana? Didn’t think so. -REP]
Well of course he didn’t read it anything that could destroy his faith in his religion is forbidden literature and this would shake the faith of the most ardent.
There was a young fellow named Watts,
Who published some graphs with some dots.
Those graphs, he said, proved
Climate goalposts had moved,
And always towards the hot-hots.
Anthony,
I haven’t finished reading the paper, but when I read the following a thought came to my brain:
When I look at pictures of the CRS and the MMTS structures, I see blade-fins pointed down. Has any work been done to categorize any possible convection bias due to these designs? I would think that a thermometer with a clear bias towards convective accuracy would have unnaturally warmer early evening temperatures as cold air from above drops down, but I’m just speculating.
I follow your information since years. May be the temperature in the US are false. But if you look to one on your link about Sea Ice you will discover these picture
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2012/WEBCAM1/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam1_20120730082348.jpg. First time I discover sea ice melting at the North Pole.
Melting occur at temperature up 0°C or 32°F… No need of a themomether.
In reality, the Press Release title is an egregious soft-pedalling. The actual gold standard measurements (isolated rural MMTS) found show that the total “warming” touted by NOAA etc. has been exaggerated by about 12X, not just “double”. (4°C/century vs 0.34°C).
Well of course he didn’t read it anything that could destroy his faith in his religion is forbidden literature and this would shake the faith of the most ardent.
I’m unable to understand how anyone who cares about the environment or the advancement of scientific knowledge could welcome this as anything but good news, subject only to proper verification as the scientific method requires. I just don’t get it. (Yes I know the usual reasons, I’m just unable to appreciate that kind of thinking).