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.
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The peer-rejected unpublished BEST paper takes another massive torpedo below the water-line. Since its cargo is pretty much statistical styrofoam and balloons full of brain-flatus, though, it may take a while to sink from sight.
And yet the arctic keeps on melting. Maybe it doesn’t read your blog?
[REPLY: You have noticed that it is the melt season right? Does that every year? -REP]
I know that Arctic is meting every year as I follow sea ice surface. And the site of Anthony is published the best collection of links on it. And I discover these foto of North Pole Melting via the site link’s.
Before I congratulate Anthony, Evan, John et al, I want to give a shout out to all the volunteers who spent the time and effort to gather the preliminary data, and especially photographic documentation, of the various stations sitings. Though I was one of those volunteers, I don’t include myself in the aforementioned group.
Why?
My station was in Yosemite National Park! It’s not as if getting those pictures were work! I hiked to Upper Yosemite falls that day…. Beautiful!!! Hell, if I would have had the resources to do so, I would have gone to Hawaii to photograph a station. This would have been the perfect excuse!!! 🙂
Anyway, congratulations on the completion of this work. It will be slow in coming, but this will generate some serious and long overdue discussions about proper station citing in the press. Remember, the climategate fallout took a few weeks before anyone in the regular press started talking about it.. I don’t expect anything more.
Mike A. (formerly “sonicfrog”)
I said above,
Indeed, the newly adopted WMO/CIMO criteria are identical to Leroy(2010):
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/CIMO/CIMO15-WMO1064/1064_en.pdf
The distinction in the two methods of classification is therefore CRN (old) vs WMO (new), rather than Leroy(1999) vs Leroy (2010). As I mentioned above, although the inadequate CRN system, long used by Surface Stations, was based on Leroy (1999), it oversimplified it, thereby unnecessarily downgrading many good stations.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/#comment-1047424
David: your triumphalism is a bit premature. There could be very serious problems with the paper. I’m heartened to see that Steve Mc, John Christy and Roger Pielke Sr. are on board, but there could be serious flaws in the paper that have not yet been exposed.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/#comment-1047430
“Fixing a comma here and there does not constitute serious peer-review.”
Leif: I think you nitpicked this post. He didn’t say that in toto. He went further: “Best of all though, is that the peer review will be impeccable. If there is a single problem with this paper, it will be found.”
What you said is obviously true, but I think you are being a bit sensitive about the implications for the “ivory tower” that DavidMHoffer describes when he writes, “Ivory tower, meet the blogosphere. Ignore it at your peril.” I too think it’s over the top, but you could have dealt directly with that part of the post.
Speaking of “what’s up with that?” What’s up with this:
http://www.theage.com.au/world/climate-change-sceptics-unwarmed-by-scientists-reassessment-of-cold-facts-20120730-23agk.html
roh roh.
[REPLY: Looks like the beginnings of sanity Down Under to me. Thanks for the link. -REP]
M. Nichopolis says:
July 29, 2012 at 7:48 pm
“……………How much money was wasted on all this madness?
———————-
All of it.
cn
The BBC have an anonymous article on the Muller paper, but have neglected to mention Watts.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19047501
Suggest on line complaints are filed: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/
@John
You do know ice melts due to things other than temperature, don’t you?
[SNIP: Off topic. -REP]
Can you explain what this is supposed to mean? It seems to mix up a number of thermodynamics concepts and I couldn’t make any sense of it.
Apologies, if this appears for the 2nd time:
The BBC have an article reporting on Muller, but neglecting to mention Watts:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19047501
Suggest complaints are forwarded: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/
theduke says:
July 30, 2012 at 8:24 am
Leif: I think you nitpicked this post. He didn’t say that in toto.
Peer-review is not about fixing typos or rewording sentences. It is [should be] concerned with the substance, if any, of a paper. Is the data reliable? are the method and stats valid? does the conclusion follow from the analysis? etc.
Is there a particular reason that the desert southwest is always higher than the rest of the nation, or does Phoenix just emit a lot of hot air? Given the lack of high concentrations of people, and the high altitude of the desert areas makes one wonder…
At 7:21 AM on 30 July, Chris Schoneveld had posted:
First, it’s incorrect to call this preposterous bogosity “the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis,” inasmuch as the term “hypothesis” has a specific technical meaning in scientific usage, which is summarized in physicist Jeff Glassman’s brief layman-accessible article “Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law. The Basis of Rational Argument” (December 2007). From that essay:
Dr. Glassman goes on to contend:
This isn’t a trivial terminological quibble. Neither then (2007) nor more recently was Dr. Glassman unaware of “satellite data” gathered from orbital platforms and employed by that “little clique of quacks” to buttress their presentation of what Dr. Glassman calls their “crippled conjecture.”
Second, orbital instrumental observations provide only a recent record of land surface area temperature assessment, and the methods involved had to be calibrated against the prevailing standards of proximal thermometric determination, the widely-ranged system of meteorological thermometers in these United States providing (as others here have observed) a sort of “gold standard” in terms of technology, maintenance, and reliability as compared with similar broadly spaced systems of monitoring stations.
To any extent that the records of “satellite data” have been used to create assessments of land surface temperatures by way of adjustment to calibrate those observations against the information harvested from the meteorological thermometers which are the subjects of the SurfaceStations.org study, the error has crept into the assessments of the satellite data.
I’m not qualified as an expert on how the “satellite data” is used to develop determinations of land surface area temperatures, but the possibility of a “rubber tape measure” phenomenon certainly seems likely to me.
Among the readers here, is there anyone who can address this consideration from a more informed perspective?
Ok, Anthony. I kicked into your donation pot. You are worth a lot, lot more. sigh….
Hope this keeps Kenji in some high end dog food for a bit. smile. …Lady in Red
[REPLY: Your support is really appreciated. Kenji is important, but your donation is more likely to go for publishing fees and associated expenses. Thank you. -REP]
Just got in from vacation. Well done Mr Watts. Can’t wait to hear the rationalizations from the other side. such as: “It doesn’t matter…”
Alberta Slim says:
July 30, 2012 at 7:06 am
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
I’ve made such a comment several places on the web and even asked that folks quiz their friends and neighbors about what 12 PM means, and so on. The only place where they changed it to 12:01 PM or AM was on a financial site where they had been promising not to buy or sell in their own account until the time of “undefined.” I guess they realized they could be sued or something. Still, this seems to be a lost cause generally.
[SNIP: My mistake. This is off-topic and you don’t get the opportunity to divert the discussion from Anthony’s paper. If you are really interested in that topic, you can start with the WUWT sea ice reference page. There have also been numerous postings on the topic. Then you can wait for an appropriate post to air your views. Capice? -REP]
Anthony, please accept my apologies for a genuinely unintended ‘Straw Man’…
Given that the majority view here on WUWT appears to be that the scientific consensus is simply wrong (or non-existent) – as opposed to mendacious – I should have said “…if anthropogenic climate change is a false alarm you – and your whole team – will without doubt deserve Nobel Prizes”
So in conclusion, global warming is happening, but not as much as some other studies have found. But it is happening.
At 9:22 AM on 30 July, Twisters had posted:
And in other news:
(1) Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
(2) I’m getting older.
These phenomena are not due to anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide, either.
Alberta Slim says:
July 30, 2012 at 7:06 am
12 Noon = 12:00 PM
In the military, time goes from 2359 to 0001hrs. Those 2 minutes are the only time you can call your arse your own.
From Chris Schoneveld on July 30, 2012 at 7:21 am:
This of course cannot possibly be true. I have been repeatedly told by the (C)AGW-convinced there was no valid “coming ice age” scare in the 1970’s, the serious climate scientists were predicting (C)AGW, the current temperature records confirming those predictions. The UAH satellite record starts on December 1978, RSS starts on January 1979. Thus the 1970’s predictions could not have been built on the satellite data as the global warming scare predates a suitable satellite record, the “present” scare being portrayed as continuing from the 1970’s predictions.
Thus once again, the (C)AGW-pushers are undone by their own rhetoric.
****
HaroldW says:
July 30, 2012 at 7:20 am
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.
****
That’s fine. Just pointing out that any TOBS adjustment should go to zero after the change to MMTS.
The Washington Post says that Anthony’s study was
“an apparent attempt to diminish the impact of the Muller paper”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/so-called-blockbuster-climate-change-studies-prove-little/2012/07/30/gJQAZZNMKX_blog.html
Wordsmithing and peer review are not the same thing. The back-and-forth in comments among (some will argue for between) Leif and others shows this. Many researchers are not great writers to begin with and after reading the same paragraphs over and over, with numerous changes, some things are just not seen. One way of handling this is to have someone read aloud to others not familiar with the material. The number problems are another matter (is it .001 or .0001 ?), as are spelling of names and citations (Vol. numbers, pages, table numbers, and so on). Absent using a “pro” for finding these errors, the multiple non-peer approach seems to be working. And that’s what it’s all about.