The first press release announcement thread is getting big and unwieldy, and some commenters can’t finish loading the thread, so I’m providing this one with some updates.
1. Thanks to everyone who has provided widespread review of our draft paper. There have been hundreds of suggestions and corrections, and for that I am very grateful. That’s exactly what we hoped for, and can only make the paper better.
Edits are being made based on many of those suggestions. I’ll post up a revised draft in the next day.
2. Some valid criticisms have been made related to the issue of the TOBS data. This is a preliminary set of data, with corrections added for the “Time of Observation” which can in some cases result in double max-min readings being counted if not corrected for. It makes up a significant portion of adjustments prior to homogenization adjustments as seen below in this older USHCN1 graphic. TOBS is the black dotted line.
TOBS is a controversial adjustment. Proponents of the TOBS adjustment (Created by NCDC director Tom Karl) say that it is a necessary adjustment that fixes a known problem, others suggest that it is an overkill adjustment, that solves small problems but creates an even larger one. For example, from a recent post on Lucia’s by Zeke Hausfather, you can see how much adjustments go into the final product.
The question is: are these valid adjustments? Zeke seems to think so, but others do not. Personally I think TOBS is a sledgehammer used to pound in a tack. This looks like a good time to settle the question once and for all.
Steve McIntyre is working through the TOBS entanglement with the station siting issue, saying “There is a confounding interaction with TOBS that needs to be allowed for…”, which is what Judith Curry might describe as a “wicked problem”. Steve has an older post on it here which can be a primer for learning about it.
The TOBS issue is one that may or may not make a difference in the final outcome of the Watts et al 2012 draft paper and it’s conclusions, but we asked for input, and that was one of the issues that stood out as a valid concern. We have to work through it to find out for sure. Dr. John Christy dealt with TOBS issues in his paper covered on WUWT: Christy on irrigation and regional temperature effects
Irrigation most likely to blame for Central California warming
A two-year study of San Joaquin Valley nights found that summer nighttime low temperatures in six counties of California’s Central Valley climbed about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 3.0 C) between 1910 and 2003. The study’s results will be published in the “Journal of Climate.”
Most interestingly, John Christy tells me that he had quite a time with having to “de-bias” data for his study, requiring looking at original observer reports and hand keying in data.
We have some other ideas. And of course new ideas on the TOBS issue are welcome too.
In other news, Dr. John Christy will be presenting at the Senate EPW hearing tomorrow, for which we hope to provide a live feed. Word is that Dr. Richard Muller will not be presenting.
Again, my thanks to everyone for all the ideas, help, and support!
=============================================================
UPDATE: elevated from a comment I made on the thread – Anthony
Why I don’t think much of TOBS adjustments
Nick Stoke’s explanation follows the official explanation, but from my travels to COOP stations, I met a lot of volunteers who mentioned that with the advent of MMTS, which has a memory, they tended not to worry much about the reading time as being at the station at a specific time every day was often inconvenient.. With the advent of the successor display to the MMTS unit, the LCD display based Nimbus, which has memory for up to 35 days (see spec sheet here http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/nimbus-spec.pdf) they stopped worrying about daily readings and simply filled them in at the end of the month by stepping through the display.
From the manual http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/nimbusmanual.pdf
Daily maximum and minimum temperatures:
· Memory switch and [Max/Min Recall] button give daily
highs and lows and their times
The Nimbus thermometer remembers the highs and lows for
the last 35 days and also records the times they occurred. This
information is retrieved sequentially day by day. The reading
of the 35 daily max/min values and the times of occurrence (as
opposed to the “global” max/min) are initiated by moving the
[Memory] switch to the left [On].
So, people being people, rather than being tied to the device, they tend to do it at their leisure if given the opportunity. One fellow told me (who had a Winneabago parked in is driveway) when I asked if he traveled much, he said he “travels a lot more now”. He had both the CRS and MMTS/Nimbus in his back yard. He said he traveled more now thanks to the memory on the Nimbus unit. I asked what he did before that, when all he had was the CRS and he said that “I’d get the temperatures out of the newspaper for each day”.
Granted, not all COOP volunteers were like this, and some were pretty tight lipped. Many were dedicated to the job. But human nature being what it is, what would you rather do? Stay at home and wait for temperature readings or take the car/Winnebago and visit the grand-kids? Who needs the MMTS ball and chain now that it has a memory?
I also noticed many observers now with consumer grade weather stations, with indoor readouts. A few of them put the weather station sensors on the CRS or very near it. Why go out in the rain/cold/snow to read the mercury thermometer when the memory of the weather station can do it for you.
My point is that actual times of observation may very well be all over the map. There’s no incentive for the COOP observer to do it at exactly the same time every day when they can just as easily do it however they want. They aren’t paid, and often don’t get any support from the local NWS office for months or years at a time. One woman begged me to talk to the local NWS office to see about getting a new thermometer mount for her max/min thermometer, since it wouldn’t lock into position properly and often would screw up the daily readings when it spun loose and reset the little iron pegs in the capillary tube.
Some local NWS personnel I talked to called the MMTS the “Mickey Mouse Temperature System” obviously a term of derision. Wonder why?
So my point in all this is that NWS/NOAA/NCDC is getting exactly what they paid for. And my view of the network is that it is filled with such randomness.
Nick Stokes and people like him who preach to us from on high, never leaving their government office to actually get out and talk to people doing the measurements, seem to think the algorithms devised and implemented from behind a desk overcome human urges to sleep in, visit the grand-kids, go out to dinner and get the reading later, or take a trip.
Reality is far different. I didn’t record these things on my survey forms when I did many of the surveys in 2007/2008/2009 because I didn’t want to embarrass observers. We already had NOAA going behind me and closing stations that were obscenely sited that appeared on WUWT, and the NCDC had already shut down the MMS database once citing “privacy concerns” which I ripped them a new one on when I pointed out they published pictures of observers at their homes standing in front of their stations, with their names on it. For example: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/newsletters/07may-coop.pdf
So I think the USHCN network is a mess, and TOBS adjustments are a big hammer that misses the mark based on human behavior for filling out forms and times they can’t predict. There’s no “enforcer” that will show up from NOAA/NWS if you fudge the form. None of these people at NCDC get out in the field, but prefer to create algorithms from behind the desk. My view is that you can’t model reality if you don’t experience it, and they have no hands on experience nor clue in my view.
More to come…
I am writing this after looking at your PDF on the figures that go with your discussion paper. Here are some suggestions, on some changes.
Figure 1; in the pie chart you used I found the class 3 and class 4 colours much too close to being the same shade. Lighten the colours up please. The class 5 colour was too strong a shade in my opinion.
Figures 4 through 8; I would widen those graph bars to show an emphasis between the three sets of data. Darken the colours a bit more.
Figures 10-18; I was a little confused about those graphs because there was no vertical lines in between that data points of each class of stations.
By the way I didn’t see figure 19, just to pass the information on to you.
I do appreciate all the time and effort you put into this, and I thank you.
Susan
Maus, you are either unable or unwilling to see the forest from the trees. Those are about a dozen peer reviewed journal articles–by people that spend a whole lot more time studying this issue than you do–that 1) document the existence of TOB in temperature measurement, and 2) set forth a methodology for correcting for TOB in temperature data. It’s really that simple.
Here is an analogy: Say we want to know the exact average height of group of people. The problem is, when we take measurements, half of them are wearing shoes and half of them are barefoot. Shouldn’t we correct for the ones wearing shoes? There really shouldn’t be any controversy about that. You can argue about the methodology one uses to remove a bias from your raw data, but not the need to remove that bias.
That is why the surface temperature data is adjusted.
markstoval @ur momisugly 4:02 am
You’ve put very simply what I was thinking.
I am still trying to get my head around all of this.
Amazing work Anthony et al.
Tamino weights in:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/much-ado-about-nothing/
Self labelling title indeed…
From Steve Goddard:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss/
“Data Tampering At USHCN/GISS
The measured USHCN daily temperature data shows a decline in US temperatures since the 1930s. But before they release it to the public, they put it thorough a series of adjustments which change it from a cooling trend to a warming trend.”
Great animated graphics – here is one:
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/ushcn26.gif?w=640
Chris – they completely failed to address the most important point of the Watts paper – the difference in siting quality when applying the Leroy(2010) standards. In my opinion and observation, as is their usual M.O. – they threw a whole lotta garbage against the wall, made a lengthy dissertation strictly intended to refute – all the while ignoring the primary and most important premise. There is only one reason for that IMO – and that is to obfuscate the real story.
The old adage comes to mind:
“… if you can’t dazzle ’em with your brilliance – baffle ’em with your BS …”
A. Scott, you have completely missed the point that you can’t say anything about the Leroy (2010) standards until you first homogenize the data by removing the other biases. This point was very clearly stated in the SkS post several times, so I’m not sure how you missed it.
Anthony Watts wrote:
But have the conclusions not already been foregone? At least according to the previous thread and press release, where Watts said:
“New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial
PRESS RELEASE – U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments.”
So what again were the previous assertion and the press release about?
Watts’s statement about “global warming in the USA” doesn’t make much sense, anyway. What is “global warming in the USA” supposed to mean? The term “global warming” refers to the globally averaged temperature anomaly trend, but not to the temperature anomaly trend in an area that comprises only ca. 1.6% of the area of the whole globe.
[REPLY: Jan, you really are better than this. “Global Warming In The USA” really was sort of a mal-mot. We’re talking about warming trends in the US. And if you think the issue is restricted only to USA temperature records, then you are not doing any service at all to your current employer. If the Watts et al. analysis proves to be valid, then the results will be, as I’ve said else where, “tectonic”. I think you recognize that. -REP]
After looking at my comments, I went to research on how colour graphs work in reports. I found this site,
http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/rules_for_using_color.pdf
I hope it gives you some help with the presentation of the illustrated figures. So ignore my earlier comments and go for a professional look. Stephen Few has more of an understanding than myself in this matter.
A. Scott: Seems everything is there to reproduce the work for the people who question the results. I did it on my own.
Ron Broberg: You were able to recreate the list of USHCN station ids and their associated Leroy 2010 classification? Well done!
A. Scott: Nope. And I never indicated nothing or the sort. Stop putting words in my mouth I did not say.
If you did not reproduce the work in question, you should not have said that you did so on your own. The confusion is directly tied to your own words. The fact is that we can only guess at which stations that Watts’ has classified, what those classifications are, what methods were used to derive that classification, and if potential biases in his classification could be affecting outcomes. As long Anthony choses to withhold that information, the public review will be incomplete.
J. Philip Peterson says:
August 1, 2012 at 9:32 am
beng says:
August 1, 2012
“If the station is otherwise consistent/unchanging, being in a frost hollow has no effect on the trend.””I agree and if the station is atop a 6288 ft mountain it has no effect on the trend:
http://weather-warehouse.com/WeatherHistory/PastWeatherData_MtWashington_MountWashington_NH_August.html
______________________________________________________________
Just for amusement I calculated the ten year average, 1948 to 1957, and compared it with the ten year average for the most recent 10 years. The older mean is 47.1C and the newer 48.86C.
The trend is +0.27C per decade.
____________
Which month did you calculate for? I made several graphs in excel for ‘Mean Temperature’ for the months of Jan., April, June and Oct. and only April showed an increase from 1948 to 2012 of approx. 3 degrees F max. The other 3 months were even or even trended down.
——————————
I used the August figures given in the link. I could not persuade the site to disgorge annual figures and its too near my bedtime for a marathon calculation. If you can find the annual mean temperatures a calculation based on them would be interesting.
From the silly but fun category of data …
amino Alexa rank 329,436 … Reputation: 602 (sites linking in)
SkepticalScience Alexa rank 144,526 … Reputation: 2,489
RealClimate Alexa rank 166,512 … Reputation: 4,546
MediaMatters rank 19,783 … Reputation: 9,833
WUWT Alexa rank 20,001 … Reputation: 5,112
Anonymous Coward: ” 1) document the existence of TOB in temperature measurement, and 2) set forth a methodology for correcting for TOB in temperature data. It’s really that simple.”
The midpoint of a range is not an arithmetical mean no matter what you may like to do to it. It’s mathematically ignorant and, by your evidentiary references, a demonstration that no one in the last 37 years has been able to suss out the difference. But beyond the simple an anti-arithmetical notions that the midpoint of a range can represent a ‘mean’ temperature is that there are indeed timing issues. By the construction of the equipment, as a historical issue, Tmin and Tmax have no temporal reference outside a 24 hour window. Due this it is likewise improper, if you are interested in trends, to consider the midpoint at all. This is all basic lab tech junk.
But because they wish to and have been using Tmean, the midpoint, as a foolhardy and nonsensical reference to the average temperature per day then they are somewhat stuck. Numerous short-term weather forecasting models and agricultural models (planting times) are based on this lackwit use of data. Weather forecasting couldn’t care less, as a matter of necessity, as to when the measurements and resets are taken.
But as a significant issue to agricultural issues — and this was mentioned in one of the papers in your link dump — TOB issues can cause erroneous signals as to when planting should be undertaken. But this is not a flaw of the measurement nor data. It is a flaw of the use of a midpoint as representing a mean. Feel free to insert any joke here you like about aggies, sharecroppers, and other fly-over hayseeds.
And for that specific use, and given the available instrumentation, there is absolutely no other option than to fudge. Completely make things up. And it is completely meaningless if it is off by any significant degree. For example, and again from your link dump, the paper on TOB adjusts in Canada found differences of 0.5 to 12.5 degrees of both signs when attempting to ‘move’ one of Tmax or Tmin out of one 24 hour period and into one calendar day. Another paper, the one with that mentioned but did not calculate skews, find TOB adjusts binned by time-of-day whose standard deviations ranged from 0.05 (IIRC) to 0.32. This is per day. Not per month, per year, per decade, per sextadecadalwhatchamacycle. But per day.
But if we accept, arbitrarily chosen, 0.5 Celius per decade then the per calendar day warming comes in it 0.00014 (Remarkable precision, eh?) degrees. No leap years or anything fancy. But if we know there is skew and the SD of the *best* deviation from a model that only *estimates* Tmin/Tmax is 357 odd times greater than the daily warming? Then the whole idea is a nonsense.
But more to the point these TOBS adjusts are only necessary for getting a correctly wrong answer to the Tmin/Tmax for a given calendar day. But climate models don’t give a fig about such notions. They care only about trend over long term scales. To the degree that there are good arguments for TOBS, and there are for practical matters, they have no relevancy to climate science.
What is relevant to climate science, and also again you will find in your link dump should you happen to read it, is that we can detect differences or alterations in the time-of-day in which the measurement was taken. As this allows for keeping things nice and tidy for our 0.00014 per day trend line.
But there is no excuse in defending an idiotic metric chose for pragmatic reasons, due instrumentation capabilities, a century ago as any valid notion of current measurement. Let alone arbitrarily fudging it for uses that have no bearing nor relation to climate issues. Feel free to stake your claim in the AGW camp as you like, but have care not to hoist yourself by your own petard.
I looked at a station near me, and the TOBS adjustment they did to it. The metadata available through MMS and the monthly obs reports I downloaded for the history of the station (218419) which is a part USHCN and GHCN, and they don’t match the changes made via TOBS.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn_map_interface.html
https://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry/login.cfm
Available metadata from MMS and the forms show unknown time until the start of 1948. From 1/1948 thru 8/2007 reading time is listed as 1500 LST. 9/2007 until present show 1400 LST. Now the TOBS adjustments change in the record more often than that. The dates of change they have via the adjustments are 1895-1902, 1903-1952, 1953-1963, 1964-1967, 1968-2007, and 2008-present. The switch in 2007 is the only match. They must have come across different stuff, and didn’t care to show it or they are using from somewhere else (there is a tendency to smear stuff around). And all adjustments are negative because of pm readings. Max is hit hard, especially after 1968.
Anonymous Coward says:
August 1, 2012 at 2:42 pm
Here is an analogy: Say we want to know the exact average height of group of people. The problem is, when we take measurements, half of them are wearing shoes and half of them are barefoot. Shouldn’t we correct for the ones wearing shoes?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, and if we’ve been recording their heights from childhood to adulthood, how do we go back after the fact, twenty or thirty years down the road, so adjust for shoes on or shoes off in each year if that information was never recorded? How do we adjust for some periods of time when the rule was “shoes off” but some people recording the info didn’t get the memo? How do we account for periods of time when the rule was “shoes on” but some people said “I’ve always done it shoes off so I’m not changing”?
The more I read about TOBS the more I agree with Anthony. It is one thing to sit in an office and scrutinize data in the hopes of identifying these things strictly from statistical analysis, quite another to get out in the field, talk to the people who do the recording, and soon discover that all the assumptions you thought made your statistical analysis accurate were bad ones. TOBS is a red herring.
Further, even if it is legit, I think it is a distraction from the core issues, of which there are two:
1. Bad sites were in general adjusted upward. There are prescious few siting issues that can cause a reading to be lower than it should be, they almost all result in readings being higher. The adjustments are bogus from that perspective, and one needs no statistical analysis to reach that conclusion.
2. Pristine sites were adjusted upward even more, the justification being that they were outliers of some sort, in disagreement with the majority of the sites adjacent to them. This too is bogus. Since the sites were pristine, they should have been considered the more accurate depsite there being fewer of them. Again, one needs no statistical analysis to arrive at that conclusion.
The only think one needs a statistical analysis for is to compare the disparity in trends. This is where the misdirection with TOBS begins. TOBS and other adjustments only matter if one is focused on calculating an accurate trend. Given all the variability in the data and how it was collected over time, I consider that a fool’s errand. But to conclude that the methodologies being used artificially increase the trend substantially by applying adjustments in the wrong direction, making any conclusions drawn from completely unreliable, requires no more information than what I have quoted in points 1 and 2 above.
The Skepticalscience critique raised a number of points, many of them already mentioned here. Some relate to the thesis of the paper, some to its technical quality.
What encourages me most is the last sentence.
” With said caveats carefully addressed and the conclusions amended if and where necessary, the paper has the potential to be a useful contribution to the climate science literature.”
It suggests that Mr Watts can better make his point by joining the game, rather than blogging from the stands.
[More to the point, it suggests that you should start your own blog rather than commenting critically at another person’s home on the internet. And Skeptical Science is the sole blog listed here as “Unreliable”. Search the archives to understand why. ~dbs, mod.]
@ur momisugly Jan
They tried to cram too much, awkwardly, into too short a headline so I’d concede that, but it’s such a minor point and you know it. You’re trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Ally E. in the original Press Release thread came up with what I thought was a better headline, for what it’s worth.
If you have substantive criticisms to make, by all means air those, but to claim the compressed wording of a blog headline was a central claim of the study seems a stretch.
(Note: I originally placed this comment under the wrong thread due to a Google Chrome “pagination” plugin that does not play nice with this website at all! My apologies to the moderator.)
“Tamino weights in:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/much-ado-about-nothing/
Self labelling title indeed…”
On a speed read seemed to be some ad-hominem bollocks followed by a proof by assertion, am I mistaken?
Ron Broberg says:
August 1, 2012 at 3:44 pm
The fact is that we can only guess at which stations that Watts’ has classified, what those classifications are, what methods were used to derive that classification, and if potential biases in his classification could be affecting outcomes. As long Anthony choses to withhold that information, the public review will be incomplete.
That’s right I could not agree more and as I said elsewhere:
I agree that Anthony Watts and crew should be held to the same incredibly tough standards that are required to be met by everyone else in the field of climate science.
So what does that give him before he has to cough up the code the data and all the details — twenty, thirty years? …and a half dozen FOIAs defended to the teeth? Just askin…. 😉
Or we could hang on a few days or weeks and let them deal with the other important issues that have been raised… Relax….
From reading most of the comments on TOBS, I don’t think the numbers in the Watts et al paper will be affected by adjusting for TOBS. I just don’t see it. I think it’s a wash – up or down, plus or minus. {Hey I may be a lay person, but I did have one full year of engineering courses at Penn State U. (JoePa was an assistant coach that year in 1961)}.
Bull. When you read my comments in context – instead of cherry picking as you did – it is quite clear I was talking about collecting the data links I presented.
All of the data is available. There is a complete discussion in the paper and in a separate “Methods” Powerpoint on the process, and data sets used are clearly identified in the paper. There is nothing to prevent you or anyone else from doing exactly the same study as done by Anthony and his group.
The Watts paper identifies the stations used – under Sec 2.2 Station Site Classification:
“We make use of the subset of USHCNv2 metadata from stations whose sites have been classified by Watts (2009), gathered by the volunteers of the surfacestations.org project using the USCRN site-selection classification scheme for temperature and humidity measurements (NOAA/NESDIS 2002), and originally developed by Leroy (1999)”
These stations are listed at http://www.surfacestations.org
The same station data was used in Falls(2011) – the data files for that are all avail – along with the code – here:
http://www.surfacestations.org/Fall_etal_2011/si/fall_etal_2011_SI.zip
The Watts paper also notes the original “site rating data” is included in the Falls(2011) data file.
They further identify they used the Fall(2011) stations, and then applied the Leroy(2010) standards to them:
“For the purpose of this study, the original site rating metadata from Fall et al (2011), also used in Muller (2012), was supplemented with further refinements and additional station surveys inclusive from June 15th, 2011 to July 1st, 2012, followed by application of the Leroy (2010) site survey rating system to both old and new surveys (Table 1)”
No need to guess … there is your answer as to the station data used – they used the same stations as Fall (2011) , which was derived from Watts(2009). The data for both are readily available.
The station classifications under Watts are a “result” – having the “results” befoire hand is irrelevant IMO – and introduces a potential bias – to any attempt at reproducing his results.
And no need to guess at “what methods were used to derive that classification” either … the Leroy(2010) standards are readily avail – I posted them and they are included in the papers References section. Leroy(2010) is supposed to be a “standard” – it should be uniformly applied by all.
Last – any “potential biases in his classification [that] could be affecting outcomes” are also irrelevant to an attempt to reproduce his results. If you use his data and follow his well described methods, applying the Leroy(2010) siting standards to the Fall(2011)/Watts(2009) stations you will obtain your own results.
Everything is available to reproduce Watts work. The results of any proper attempt to reproduce will either confirm Watts work or they will not – on both station classifications under Leroy(2010) and on the results he obtained. If they do not, then an analysis can be made of where the differences are.
Providing the answers in advance, in this case at least, offers nothing to the process
So it seems the current TOBs correction might be an upper limit on the correction but the real correction is somewhat less if it turns out that people really are people and not the automaton temperature reading takers that had been previously assumed. That puts it in perspective…
Brian H says:
August 1, 2012 at 9:44 am
Places with variable weather can throw min/max thermometer assumptions out the window. If a cold day is followed by an overnight (say, 2 a.m.) warm front moving through, the MIN will still show the cold day’s measurement, even though it might be much warmer by the following sunrise. IMO only continuous plots, with frequent data point recording, can get around this. And then the whole “MIN/MAX issue is almost moot, because now you have real integrated temperature plots and actual averages, not stupid medians, are available
==============================================================
Yes , I have seen plenty of times where in the arid zone where I live, that the temperature before 9am was 3+ degrees warmer than the previous day’s (particularly if it rained) Tmax .
In these cases the maximum for the day before that would have been recorded would have been too warm under the old Max/Min method being read and reset at 9AM.
So I am sceptical that morning observations always result in a “cool” bias and evening observations a “warm” bias. It really depends on the season and the locality.
Apparently Steve McIntyre doesn’t share your certainty.
From what I’ve recently gathered, American stations shifted from afternoon to morning measuring at some point. This is in general and by and large.
The thing is, shifting resetting the minimax thermometers to a cooler part of the day can result in more cold days being double-counted than prior to the shift. That would be a cooling bias.
By not removing the cooling bias with a TOBs adjustment, you present the homogenized measured results as cooler than the real, physical temperatures. And Watts et al. 2012’s primary conclusion is that real, physical temperatures have been cooler than we’ve been told.
So the TOBs adjustments are directly relevant, or so the argument goes.