Guest post by Samuel I. Outcalt, Professor Emeritus of Physical Geography, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Abstract: After noticing the strange time dependent behavior of the difference between the NOAA USHCN Average Annual Temperature data in the unadjusted RAW data. The RAW data was plotted for the 1965-2011 time period. The RAW data plot revealed the start and end of the Modern Warm Regime, which lasted from 1976 (the base of the “hockey stick”) until the onset of the 21st Century. The footprint of the regime in the area is validated by mean annual geothermal data from 3 boreholes along Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Background: The strange behavior of the NOAA difference between the NOAA USHCN average annual temperature [AAT] and the raw data [AATRAW] at Boulder, Colorado is presented as Figure 1.
Figure 1. The trace of the RAW and adjusted Average Annual Temperatures at Boulder, Colorado display sectors of high amplitude variation interlaced with long runs of uniform adjustments.
Previous investigations of the adjusted Boulder average annual temperature data indicated that the Modern Warm Regime was not viable on the integral trace of that record. This was considered unusual as inflections of major regime events are known to produce inflections and extreme values of the integral trace in serial data (Outcalt et.al.(1997)). The integral trace of the USHCN Average Annual temperature data is presented as Figure 2.
Figure 2. The Integral Trace of the Average Annual Temperature does not indicate the onset of the Modern Warming Regime.
In summary, the RAW and Adjusted Average Temperature [ATA] data over the record length 1898-2012 displays interlaced sequences of large amplitude and uniform adjustments rather than a pattern of smooth transitions and the Adjusted Data does not even hint at the wide spread 1976 climate regime change which is a major feature of global climate data (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. The integral traces of three global climate series all show major inflections near the 1976.
The missing 1976 onset of the Modern Warming might be present in the RAW data integral trace for the 1965-2011 time period if rather heavy handed adjustments to the AAT data had masked or attenuated the inflection.
The 1965-2011 ATTRAW Data: The 1965-2011 RAW data is displayed as Figure 4.
Figure 4. The RAW data for 1965-2011.
In Figure 4. The integral trace displays a minimum in 1979 near the 1976 global climate transition and a minimum a 1999 near the end of the Global Warming Regime. Further, the 5 year running mean and integral trace display downturns in 2005 and 2008. These results appear to support the hypothesis that heavy handed adjustment had masked or attenuated the signature of the beginning and end of the Period of Modern Warming in the USHCN ATT data.
It should be noted that the method if Hurst Rescaling introduced in an paper by Outcalt et.al.(1997) is exceedingly robust and has been used by Runnals and Oke (2006) to detect weather station site moves.
The method unfortunately also detects transitions introduced by data adjustment which seems be true in the case of the Boulder Annual Average Temperature [ AAT ] data.
A further indication of the footprint of the modern warming data can be found in the thermal profiles of mean annual temperatures derived from hourly observations at probes placed in at 1 m intervals in three 6 m boreholes along Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. The boreholes are approximately 39 miles northwest of the Boulder Weather Station at the Boulder Municipal Airport. These mean annual temperatures are extremely robust as they were derived from probes recording at an hourly interval for a calendar year (Janke (1911)). In addition, the annual mean temperatures were calculated at all the measurement levels by the author and dated using the thermal disturbance methods published by Terzaghi(1970). These data are presented as Figure 5.
Figure 5. The Trail Ridge Mean Annual Temperature Geothermal Profiles.
Using the inflection produced by the 1976 global regime transition at 6 meters in BH2 the overlying inflections dated at 9.3, 2.2 and 0.3 years BP. As the data were taken during a calendar year from the summer of 2010 to 2011 the inflections date from the turn of the century to 2011. The range of inflection dates may be artifacts introduced by local site effects (slope, exposure, winter snow cover, ground water migration etc..) as well as the assumption of the same apparent thermal diffusivity at all the sites.
Conclusions: The footprint of the Modern Warming Regime that was recovered in the RAW data from the Boulder Weather Station is the probable result of the heavy handed uncritical adjustment of the AAT data set. Hurst Rescaling is a powerful method for detecting regime transitions in climatic data. However, the method is also sensitive to uncorrected site moves and adjustment artifacts. The alteration of the Boulder RAW data set was so severe that it masked and attenuated both the onset and end of the Modern Warming Regime.
Another aspect of Hurst Rescaling is the difficulty of introducing false regime inflections into serial climate data. One must first alter the data integral and differentiate the integral to a synthetic data set. However, the differential would probably not remotely resemble the initial data. The perpetrator would then be faced with nearly infinite iterations to fine tune the data.
Acknowledgments:
The author is indebted to Dr. Jason Janke of a Metropolitan State College in Denver for giving him access to the rather unique borehole data from Trail Ridge Road.
References:
Janke, J (2011) personal communication.
Outcalt,S.I.,Hinkel,K.M.,Meyer,E . and Brazel,A.J.(1997) The application of Hurst rescaling to serial geophysical data. Geographical Analysis 29, 72-87.
Runnalls,K.E. and Oke,T.R.(2006) A technique to detect micro-climatic inhomogeneities in historical records of screen-level air temperature. Journal of Climate 19: 959-978.
Terzaghi,K (1970) Permafrost, J. Boston. Soc. Civil Eng. 39(1): 319-368
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Could someone please rewrite this so that it makes sense.
My grandmother (a big fan of Agatha Christie novels) taught me that liars often have to continue to lie to cover up their previous lies, much as Ms. Christie’s murderers often killed again to prevent discovery of their previous killings. In her novels, the third iteration was usually sufficient to reveal both the cover-up and the initial crime.
Regarding the detection process, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have remarked “What one man can devise, another can discover.”
Regarding the futility of mendacity, Sir Walter Scott wrote “Oh, what tangled webs we weave, When we first practice to deceive.”
Im sorry but this is not terribly coherent. Fig 5 is particularly confusing- how can one data point have both a date AND a depth associated with it? Is the probe moving 6m very slowly over 35 years? If someone can explain please do.
1976 was when catalytic converters were mandated in the USA in all new vehicles. Other factors contributed to the decline in aerosols, and hence decreased clouds and increased solar insolation around this time, but catalytic converters caused the ‘regime shift’.
How does ” 3 boreholes along…” relate to air tempurature?
Does this not cry out for an FOIA on adjustments, means, methods and rationale. Is it not a federal offense to falsify a document/record? If you are going to materially change a document for purported good and and proper purposes should not there be some Federal Register announcement and public response period?
“The footprint of the Modern Warming Regime that was recovered in the RAW data from the Boulder Weather Station is the probable result of the heavy handed uncritical adjustment of the AAT data set.”
I think this should read:
“The [lack of a distinctive] footprint of the Modern Warming Regime [that would otherwise be present] in the RAW data from the Boulder Weather Station is the probable result of the heavy handed uncritical adjustment of the AAT data set.”
That seems “consistent with” this.
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2009/11/non-linear-perspective-of-climate.html
Pity the poor students.
You just got to love professorial mumbo-jumbo
You could say:
Subsequent to the reliability of the transient depletion, an alternate mode was employed to comply with the issue of conveyance. Molecular actions substantially triggered the neural communications relevant to the motor functions. Choices were available and optimal iterations revealed a combination of processes resulting in the implementation of bovinal products.
Or, you could say:
I had a cheeseburger for lunch.
Big deal, when clear fraud has already been uncovered. See:
US Temperatures Have Been Falsely Adjusted According to the Level of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere
Since the usual chorus of commentors seems slow to react to this piece, I will observe that it almost always takes an “emeritus” professor with an apparent command of differential calculus to be willing to throw a stink bomb like this at anything to do with an official (adjusted) temperature record. Only those in or near retirement can risk going directly against the grain.
Would it be worth the effort to translate this post into English?
~G.K. Chesterton (“Illustrated London News,” April, 19 1930)
Works of GK Chesterton
A tough read but worth it
Claude Harvey,thats what I was thinking as I read. Professors left to their own devices lose contact. As transmit over receive approaches infinity, signal over noise approaches zero.
I’m only an accountant, and though familiar with some statistical analysis, I am by no means an expert. While reading this post, something jumped right out at me that sent off alarm bells. The author made several references to “adjusted data”. In fact, he used the phrase ” heavy handed uncritical adjustment of the AAT data set” in his conclusion. To me, adjustment of data without clear explanation of the scientific reasons for the adjustments, and without critical review of those adjustments by disinterested experts in the field studied, makes everything worthless, garbage in – garbage out.
I paid careful attention to this, but from the first sentence of the abstract (which isn’t a sentence as it has no verb) to the incoherent concluding paragraph, it made little or no sense. I have really no idea what the author is trying to tell me, or what point he is trying to make. Can someone summarise for me?
My guess is: Adjusting historical temperature records is evil. But how borehole temperature traces show this I cannot fathom!
Seems like we should run Hurst rescaling like a virus scan on all data before taking the trouble to work with it. On the other hand, a few boreholes in Colorado…
I’m a bit puzzled (or stupid) re figure 1 between the title of the chart and the legend. From the title, In my simpleton mode, I would understand that the trace simply represents the adjustments to the raw data. The ordinate gives negative to positive degrees F so it is therefore a chart of the number of degrees F that were either added or subtracted from the raw data? If so, shaping the post 1950s to 2000s data to a hockey stick is clear. However the most obvious feature of the chart at a glance, is the trimming down of the 1930s record highs which had stubbornly refused to be broken, until we got a look at emails in which GISS was chipping off a degree or so to make 1998 the all time high.
Some observations to add:
1) Given that one is constrained in making too obvious an adjustment to recent temperatures with everyone looking on (Oh I’m sure they have been agonizing over the present flat temp period we have been in for 17 years), the desired result of a hockey stick to be prominent must be largely done by adjusting the older part of the record downwards – and this is clear from the chart and your discussion that that is what was done.
2) Looking at the adjustments for 2000+, I see how cunningly provident they are. They have left themselves ~ 2 F leeway to add on to the record of future readings by simply leaving them almost unadjusted.
3) The effort to kill that pesky 1930s all time high (1936) results in the the most eye-catching part of the chart.
4) A forensic point: since one doesn’t know what the future records will show, the adjustments have to have been made in the recent past. There would have been no need for adjustments in 1950 – 1980 because the same record keepers were “aiming for” a new ice age. It did,however, warm up after 1979 and by the late 80s, AGW was being born. Indeed, the adjustments probably began after the El Nino high of 1998, when the hockey stick folks (and particularly Hansen) were waiting for a messianic new world record high. 1998 was too good to pass up! Now, with the usual suspects in a desperate state and all the hullaballoo over the 17 years of no warming, be on your guard for the last 2 F to be withdrawn from savings and some chiseling off of the earlier 2000s data. BTW, I think a complete forensic evaluation of the adjustments and even a prediction that the 2 F withdrawal will be made and the early 2000s record will be trimmed slightly …, perhaps this would be too cynical.
“The perpetrator would then be faced with nearly infinite iterations to fine tune the data.”
I think he is on to something here… if we can force them into infinite iterations they will never complete their work?
From the above comments, Its not just me, I read the posting and was feeling real stupid, so I read the comments hoping someone else had unpacked the meaning.
I think he might just have picked up on what “Steve Goddard” has been banging on about for years…….
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss/
I think in a academic way the post is trying to state that the NOAA temperatures don’t match local temperatures and are adjusted upwards. Oddly.
Please explain, what the ^@ur momisugly#(*^ is an “integral trace”?
john robertson says:
February 27, 2013 at 8:19 am
“From the above comments, Its not just me, I read the posting and was feeling real stupid, so I read the comments hoping someone else had unpacked the meaning.”
I have to agree with your comments. AS far i can understand it. They have screwed the data to make it look like something they wanted to see?