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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This must have been a very satisfying effort. My congratulations to you, Anthony
and to those who assisted you so ably.
Well done.
So what?
Can someone please explain to me how this will turn into an actionable item, changing warmists’ minds? What Anthony has done is science. Warmists aren’t interested in science.
So what?
What? NOAA fudging the data to support a preconceived conclusion? Do tell!
I think a great many of us who visit here every day are “believers turned skeptic”, as Fox News has described Anthony. It’s probable that many of us are inquisitive. We question always. When we are satisfied with the answer, we move on to other queries and challenges. When we are not satisfied, we dig deeper.
Not many of us however, I surmise, would have the conviction and fortitude to quarterback such an undertaking as Watts et al 2012.
My most sincere and humble gratitude to Mr. Anthony Watts for what he has contributed in the ongoing global debate on climate.
More Press,
Canada Free Press,
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/48436
Human Events,
http://www.humanevents.com/2012/07/30/the-debunking-of-global-warming-continues/
Power Line
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/07/breaking-from-best-to-worst-in-less-than-a-day.php
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/30/weather-station-temp-claims-are-overheated-report-claims/
“the climateers will go to DefCon1 on this whole matter”
LOL! Love the way that was put ! ☺
Re: “Temperature Smoothie” Hmm. Not bad, but I was holding the blender analogy for BEST’s scalpel and suture process.
By cutting up individual temperature records into smal pieces, BEST says they are eliminating reliance on highly variable absolute temperatures and hanging their hat on the trend of each segment. The trouble is, by mathematical necessity, the cutting of long records into short ones eliminates the real low frequencies from the small segments. When they suture them back together, some low frequencies reappear, but since they can come only from the suture process, the low frequencies are counterfeit, a figment of the suture process, not in the real data.
I will not believe a word of BEST’s results until i see a defense of the process from a Fourier Analysis domain. The Global Warming signal is totally low frequency. As I read of BerkleyE’s process, they chop of the low frequiences into high frequency noise. Temperature records fed into a meat grinder.
This isn’t a case of GIGO. Garbage is not going in. What goes in are nice long temperature records contaminated by some unknown amount UHI effect, macro and micro. What is going in is steak, of various cuts, with different amounts of fat. What comes out of the mincer is at best hamburger and at worst ‘pink slime’, nice and uniform in consistency. What would you rather eat?
No response to my questions unless I’ve missed this ; if so, sorry. I’ll ask again.
“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.”
A fundamental message of the paper is thus that better quality sites have a lower temperature trend. What are the uncertainties on the values quoted above ? In general it is wholly meaningless to quote a measured quantity without an associated error. +0.155C +- X , +0.248 C+- Y , 0.309C +-Z . What is the complete list of contributing sources of uncertainty to X, Y and Z and how were the relevant uncertainties combined ? Are X, Y and Z correlated in any way ? Are the uncertainties to be regarded as normally distributed ? If so, why can than that judgement be made ?
If an undergraduate had written the top paragraph I would have insisted that they go back and put the uncertainties next to the measured quantities.
Great Work! Unbelievable that no government ever requested this information prior to making policy decisions.
____
There might be a small error on page 46 of the “Overview of the paper (PPT)”
Comparison Rural, no Airports Compliant Raw vs. Compliant Adjusted
Compliant Stations, Raw Data: .108
Compliant Stations, NOAA Adjusted Data: .251
Below it says .310 instead of .251 – a typo?
markstoval says:…Please tell me how “conformation bias” alone could account for the “keepers of the data” from not seeing it, and that they were not involved knowingly in scientific fraud.
Note to mods: I am trying to be calm here and the question is a serious one to me.
Let your passion fuel a dispassionate and truly scientific involvement. Truth needs to get out and you know what your talents are to help that process…
Anthony,
Has anyone given thought to going back through the old Signal Corps
data to add those three-times-a-day professional (as could be
with Corps training) observations to the U.S. temperature database ?
There’s also a number of 19th Century higher educational instutions that
made the standard daily observations and logged that data conscientiously for
decades.
Some of the Signal Corps observation stations may even might even have
been near some of the higher education facilities, and perhaps, near some
few current Stevenson screens.
Or would gathering that much diverse information need large grant $$ to
locate & compile ?
Gail, et al.,
If you suspect you internet connection jitters or packet losses may not be
caused by your computer or ISP check out:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/
As of Tuseday morning, 6:13am EDT, the U.S. rating was down.
Don’t forget that huge power grid failure going on in India that’s screwing
up a lot of global internet traffic.
Indeed Lucy.
This was crime when Al Gore got on a public stand and, relying upon the authority of being presidency capable just ripped off, told people if they didn’t install his policies in spite of the election or they’d die, that was terrorism. Not maybe it’s the definition people, of terrorism.
In the same act Al Gore also broke insider trading laws when he sought to swing markets toward his alternate energy laden Occidental Oil portfolio.
Two crimes of two types by the candidate for presidency of the United States, in everyone’s face tells everyone being protected by his immunity to law enforcement, that the coast is clear, and the criminal activity – international criminal activity by Gore, in swinging of markets, alone,
is fully protected and authorized by the Federal Govt of the United States of America.
Period.
Someone please come claim those aren’t true statements and not make everyone snort coffee onto their keyboard.
A ‘real’ life analogy:
A few years ago my doctor in London told me I was suffering from furring of my arteries due to my so-called ‘excessive’ lifestyle, and that if I didn’t change my diet and start doing some exercise, I stood a very real chance of serious coronary problems in the not too distant future. ‘What a load of twaddle,’ I thought. I mean it’s not as if I’m the first person in the world to live on a diet of fried food, chocolate and tubs of carbonated drinks; all washed away by an exercise regime that basically constitutes driving past my local gym in my 1964 Bentley shouting, ‘Suckers!’ out of the window as loud as my ailing lungs will allow me.
You’ll be pleased to know that I am still alive! And despite an obvious conspiracy among doctors in my own country who all (predictably) concurred with the first doctor’s diagnosis, I have at last found one in Bangladesh (more of a vet than a doctor it has to be said, but then ‘watts up with that?’), who is adamant that all the other 99 doctors I went to were probably just looking at my generous frame and drawing their conclusions without even bothering to take any proper readings. As far as he’s concerned I’m as ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’. You can probably imagine my relief. I hate pasta and vegetables and other junk food like that. And as for exercise – do I look like a sucker?
Keep up the good work, I for one am sleeping better knowing you’re debunking those climate change nutters, who, as far as I’m concerned, are probably just basing their conclusions on irrelevant things like record summer temperatures, melting ice-caps, rising sea levels, weather chaos, increasing crop failures, species extinction, ocean acidification…blah, blah, blah. Yawn.
[REPLY: I’m sure the Bangladeshi doctors will be amused with your characterization. And why is it that people making the appeal from authority never think to actually look for themselves? As for the medical establishment and consensus, look up “Ignaz Semmelweis”. -REP]
If there is a US flag in moon I believe they were there.If the Ice melts from Arctic Ocean and Greenland and glaciers are vanishing around the world I believe that is happening.
So why fight over measurements? Measuring is very difficult task if not impossible.So what?
Be prepared and buy boats if you feel you need. Maybe warming happens in such slow pace we have time to adapt. I would consider the bad air quality in big cities to be more serious problem for those who has to live there. There are cars and factories.Cars can use electricity(which makes them more efficient). No one wants to inhale any much dirt in any form so let’s cut it down at least.
I’m afraid I’m a true sceptic on this so far having read it and a lot of the rebuttals on other blogs. Anthony’s paper is for me half-done and a lot of stuff in it is simply not clear. People seem to be desperate to think it is perfect and will sink the work of thousands of very intelligent people backed by a media who question nothing.
If it ever passes peer review and gets published, then lets rejoice yeah?
Congrats Anthony and Co. you have hit Fox News.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/30/weather-station-temp-claims-are-overheated-report-claims/?intcmp=trending
Weather station temperature claims are overheated, report claims
Aha! You’ve found the crack! — Now, the light can get in!
@ur momisugly Anthony et al., — Thank you for becoming scientists instead of corporate/government hacks!
[Snip. Posting with the d-word violates site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
Anthony is quoted in Foxnews as saying global warming is real, albeit slower than NOAA/UNIPCC predicts. With .1555 degrees Celsius per decade, by my accounting we’d reach 2 degrees C warming by 2130 instead of 2100 as UNIPCC predicts (at low end of their modeling). Seems to me you could be emphasizing the areas of agreement and doing a much greater service to scientific inquiry and debate instead of sensationalizing via the headline you chose.
“Keith AB says:
July 31, 2012 at 3:56 am
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.
”
The error bars on the original data are only the beginning of robust uncertainty analysis in the trends.
I see that Slashdot has picked this up, and the Believers are out there in force doing their usual – ‘not peer reviewed – doesn’t count’ thing… ‘
Congratulations to all involved on the completion of this massive project and best of luck in the submission to a peer-reviewed journal.
There is an old saying in experimental physics that it is both better and easier to fix a problem in hardware than it is to try to model it after the fact in software.
The NOAA post processing is a set of guesstimates: GIGO.
They need to get out of their air conditioned offices and into the field more often.
_____
Now if only the same could be done for the enthalpy of the atmosphere – the heat energy content – taking the humidity into account.
Reading Anthony’s paper and then looking more into NOAA’s activities involving education produced these revelations on just how the Belmont Challenge and the Future Earth Alliance fit in. And CIRES in Boulder? Interesting that these agencies have dropped the references to Climate Change in favor of Global Change. And the now clear dominance of the social and behavioral sciences over the natural sciences.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/ is the result of what seemed like a baton pass on Sunday. I don’t know much about meteorology but I have the economics, political theory, and education implications down.
And motive is always a good addition to the coffers of knowledge.
I always preferred Armistead’s rejoinder in Gettysburg:
“All science trembles at the searing logic of your fiery intellect. “