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.
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I posted a link to this report on my own blog. A Liberal Democrat (UK) replied with a challenge to the science. Anybody feels like pitching in, you can do so here. http://www.stevetierney.org/blog/?p=3902#comments
Sorry for the shameless plug, but we have to work together. : )
NCD also has its own “surface stations” program and site … apparently created after the Sept 2010 WMO CIMO meeting which endorsed the Leroy 2010 method.
Much hand-waving about establishing benchmarks for surface temp monitoring. Some efforts thru 2011 but appears they’ve made no progress since.
Sure appears to have been largely abandoned – no blog posts – no progress reports – since beginning of year.
A “Benchmarking Position paper submitted for peer review” was scheduled due for April 2012 and appears was never completed.
Almost laughably – to me at least – they show they planned to get around to actually beginning to create benchmarks in November 2015!
Hmmm …. seems to me their first task should have been “Review Leroy 2010 and implement”
@Anthony:
Well done! Time to watch smoke rising from various government and university offices as folks start a slow burn 😉
@RCS:
It isn’t formal “paper” level of grid / comparison, but anyone can find a field of 30 or so thermometers around a given particular one and graph up the relationship. I’ve done that for a half dozen+ major airports and generally find that the temperatures decrease with distance from the airport.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/more-airports-hotter-than-nearby-stations/
BTW, last I looked closely, a bit over 1/2 of all thermometers in GHCN were at airports…
The method takes a ‘snapshot’ of local stations reporting near the target via the Wunderground convenient list of ‘nearby’ alternative stations. Maps can be made from Wunderground via the ‘select station’ button drawing a map of the alternate station locations and a ‘toggle’ that lets you look at groups of 10 on maps.
As it is a ‘snapshot’ the exact granularity of any given ‘nearby’ station has an impact ( some reporting just moments ago, some hours) so picking time of day matters. That is, doing something like ‘after midnight’ means that any laggards are likely to be reporting abnormally high due to daytime heat. That makes it even more robust that the airport is typically hotter by 2 or 3 C…
It would be far better to have 24 x 7 x 365 x 20 years of data for a field of 100 m on centers, but hey, it is what it is 😉
Elmer! Thank you for that “Hitler’s reaction”. Very funny, very good. Worth keeping! 🙂
[Snip. Invalid email address. ~dbs. mod.]
Hitler’s reaction: “Their videos are even funnier than ours!”
LMAO!
Another headline quibble:
“global warming in the USA” — logically, it is either global, or in the USA. Not both.
European warming can be due to Gulfstream fluctuations.(You remember Norway Sweden and Finland are way up compared to similar Canadian climates)Gulfstream can even take new routes if there is volcanic eruption taking place.But there is in Iceland. Gulfstream has straight route to Arctic Ocean and only little changes in Gulfstream has bigger effects on ice cover. Greenland melts more and more. Svalbard is one of the miracles of the world and existing evidence of the power of Gulfstream. Of course all this rolls back to US through climate feedback from arctic sea area. Unfortunately we don’t have public data of arctic weather patterns to make more conclusions.But someone who has should be very intrested in these facts.
As a nit pick, I think you shouldn’t lower yourself to Real Climate’s level and declare “global warming” for a US study.
[Snip. Invalid email address. ~dbs. mod.]
Strangely, I’m unable to find where NOAA ever asserted 0.308 C per decade. Can anyone refer me to that noaa.gov page?
Ally E. says:
How about something shorter, sharper and juicier: ERRONEOUS ADJUSTMENTS CONFIRMED TO DOUBLE WARMING.
========
Throw in a rhyme, it’s even better:
“IT’S NOT AS HOT AS WE THOUGHT — NEW STUDY SHOWS CLIMATE WARMING HAS BEEN LARGELY OVERSTATED.”
“Those of us concerned about global warming can sleep a little bit easier tonight. A new study has . . .”
[Snip. Invalid email address. ~dbs. mod.]
[Snip. Invalid email address. ~dbs. mod.]
[Snip. Invalid email address. ~dbs. mod.]
[Snip. Invalid email address. ~dbs. mod.]
This has the smell of discovery of the smoking gun used by team AGW (intentionally and/or by accident).
Similar findings are being unearthed in NZ, Aust., UK and other countries. The ‘global’ land temperature record is a bomb site of statistical adjustments. Lies, damn lies and statistics?
Anthony = Please send Mosher all the raw data, code and whatever else. His incessant whining is ruining numerous blog posts. Despite the fact that your study has been and will be largely ignored and UEA, GISS and NOAA are being used as a basis to expand government control over our lives Mosher won’t stop bitching until you give him what he wants. He is so tiresome and not nearly as bright as he thinks he is.
Excuse me, there is nothing wrong with my email address.
Even well sited temp sensors in non urban small towns are subject to UHI. Over the last 60 years my small rural town of 4000 people( largest in the county) has seen the trees removed, half the lawns have been converted to parking lots for the homes that have been converted to doctors and lawyers offices, traffic has increased 10 fold, etc. As you leave town you can see the temp drop 5 deg F
So if a temperature station had been located there, it would have registered temp increases that are largely due to UHI but probably would not have met the criteria for Urban area.
It is highly likely that a significant part of the .155 deg C is still due to UHI.
In fact, try sending me an email, I’ll be more than happy to reply.
[My mistake. I probably input the address wrong. I rechecked it and got an “OK”. ~dbs, mod.]
“Tucci78 says: July 30, 2012 at 3:18 pm At 1:27 PM on 30 July, William Roberts kvetches:”
You’re damn right I’m kvetching. There are people in this world qualified to statistically analyze time series. It’s clear not a single coauthor on the study could be included in such company.
“While it would seem to me that what is reported in the manuscript is sufficient to warrant publication”
Not even remotely. A set of data requires proper uncertainty analysis. There is not even a trace of that here. There are some significance tests that are incorrectly implemented (white noise/Gaussian assumption, no DOF justification).
It’s actually a very simple, straightforward path. Monte Carlo, Bootstrapping, Jackknifing, all VERY standard operating procedure in time series analysis. Not a canned ANOVA program from “R”.
At 6:51 PM on 30 July, obviously not knowing that the Yiddish word “kvetches” can mean “legitimately gripes,” William Roberts fulminates:
Well, good for you, Mr. Roberts. And in my post commenting on your earlier kvetch, didn’t I suggest that such analyses might be undertaken by the authors of this study?
You insist that “proper uncertainty analysis” is required in this paper’s immediate publication so as to bring it to a level of reliability you consider satisfactory, and I can’t contest your contention. My limited personal professional experience (apart from the preparation of review articles, ’cause I’m first and foremost a primary care grunt, and we don’t get much involved in cutting-edge research) is in the publication of the results of therapeutic clinical trials, and I’ve never been responsible for the statistical calculations involved in those studies.
Conscious of this, I closed the post of mine which presently raises your ire, Mr. Roberts, with the line:
…and thus far nobody other than myself seems to have paid a goddam bit of attention to the concern you have voiced.
I repeat my request for other readers to participate in the address of Mr. Roberts’ kvetching because, while I am not myself qualified to do so, I recognize that this pain-in-the-tochus might possibly have a point that warrants serious consideration.
Why was my comment on the critical flaw of the Gaussian assumption of the ANOVA was deleted. [Reply: That was explained to you. ~dbs, mod.] So was the question of degrees of freedom. None of which are discussed, quantified or otherwise addressed in the “manuscript”.
…and there are still no ± anywhere in the paper.
My take is that the error bars are whatever they were in the original data. This paper simply shows , very eloquently, that the adjustments had the effect of overstating the heating trend by varying amounts depending on the station quality. It is rather difficult to see how restating the original error bars would make the outcome any more clear or relevant.
Regarding other comments about this just being about the USA I would point out that what Mr. Watts has done is use the CONSUS series as the example to prove his point. The faulty methodology he has pointed up applies to all of the NOAA temperature data but the CONSUS weather station classification was the most accesible. When someone, you perhaps, gets around to looking at other station groups around the world Mr. Watts says you will find a similar bias.
Reg Nelson says:
July 30, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Ally E. says:
How about something shorter, sharper and juicier: ERRONEOUS ADJUSTMENTS CONFIRMED TO DOUBLE WARMING.
========
Throw in a rhyme, it’s even better:
“IT’S NOT AS HOT AS WE THOUGHT — NEW STUDY SHOWS CLIMATE WARMING HAS BEEN LARGELY OVERSTATED.”
“Those of us concerned about global warming can sleep a little bit easier tonight. A new study has . . .”
*
How about:
“GLOBAL WARMING NOTHING BUT HOT AIR.”
🙂 🙂 🙂