Harold Ambler writes:
NOAA’s map of February temperatures across the United States got New England all wrong. It wasn’t “near normal,” at all, as the people of the region can well attest. Oh, and the data, too: Hartford, CT, as an example was actually 5.1 degrees below normal.
As the map above shows, NOAA seems to have struggled in creating a temperature map that accurately conveys what New Englanders recently experienced: a frigid February. Hartford was 5.1 degrees below normal for the month; Boston was 3.1 degrees below normal. Providence was 4 degrees below normal for the month. And yet all three locations fall within the “near normal” portion of NOAA’s map. What’s up with that?
How well did NOAA do representing February temperatures where you live?
Read more here:
NOAA map of February temperatures less than accurate
The drought in the West is probably mostly responsible for higher than normal temperatures in that region. When it doesn’t rain, i.e. when there’s no cloud cover, it’s warmer.
This was more like the winters I remember as a young’un here in Georgia – lost eight patient days in February and the power bill comes close to setting a personal record, yet we are “average”?
NWS records for Atlanta say the temp was 0.1 degree above average for February, and the U.S. Drought monitor shows no drought in Georgia.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/climate/
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home.aspx
EW3 says:
March 18, 2014 at 2:28 pm
Am about 25 miles west of Boston and been here about 20 years.
We may get one night where it gets below zero. This year about 10. This is easily the coldest winter evah. The graphic does not capture this at all.
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Woostah heah,
Not the snowiest, but very cold. Harbah didn’t freeze though, did about a 5 yeahs ago. (according to memory)
EW 3 can translate for everyone else.
The drought in the West is probably mostly responsible for higher than normal temperatures in that region. When it doesn’t rain, i.e. when there’s no cloud cover, it’s warmer.
“The West” is a very big place. There’s a drought in most of California, but it’s not nearly as severe as 1976-77 or 1923-24. In many places (WA, OR, ID, MT, the Dakotas, WY, most of CO, much of UT) it’s either over with, rapidly diminishing, or never happened. And the Colorado River Basin snowpack is above normal.
And the temperature increases in the “hot” areas of the west are, generally speaking, a lot less than the downside departures from normal in the Upper Great Lakes. This deeply disappoints the “usual suspects,” of course. But maybe not Obama’s “science advisor,” who began his career (such as it has been) by co-authoring a book with Paul Ehrlich in 1971 that warned of a new Ice Age.
Am about 25 miles west of Boston and been here about 20 years. We may get one night where it gets below zero. This year about 10. This is easily the coldest winter evah.
I lived in Boston from 1990 to 1996, and from 1998 to 2003. There were plenty of below-zero nights, and heavy snows. And, as you know, it gets a lot colder in Wistah. No need to play with numbers the way “they” do.
I just checked the average February departures for the locations of family members I have bookmarked on Accuweather. I know its not NOAA but its quick for me. Orange County California shows a departure of 0, the Albany area of New York was -4 degrees, northern Ohio is listed as -11 degrees and central Montana is listed as -13 degrees.
So according to the NOAA chart a 0 departure equals well above average, a -4 degree departure equals normal and a -11 and -13 degree departure equals below average. This agrees with alot of the previous comments.
I measure things for a living (a surveyor) and know the departures for those areas listed seem correct to me and not just for the cities but for the counties they live in. So either the Accuweather departures are total crap or NOAA’s chart is total crap and from what I have seen lately from NOAA I will say that their stuff is crap.
Hopefully every one will start listing the departures and not just what they think it felt like.
Where the archives to the older maps?
I think the new map is an abomination with it’s too pale blue and lack of numbers in the legend.
Look here at bug in the Climate At A Glance charts from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
Captured Image (In Facebook)
I took the February temps and shortened the interval from 1895-2014 to 1940-2014, thought something wasn’t right, further narrowed until 1995-2014 (above image). The “regression line” still slopes upwards at the same 0.3deg F / decade ! The fine print of the legend says that it is still the 1895-2014 trend even though I have 1995 in all three start date combos.
Maybe it is a bug… maybe it is a feature… but it is not science.
woodfortrees is a better product.
@Tony Cole, I cherish my anonymity, so all I’ll say is that I have a background in numbers and their analysis and use. To me, it is all about the numbers. This is what has ultimately led me to this site. I do my best to ignore any right-wing ax grinding I might occasionally find (ahem, Mr. Monckton), and focus entirely on the numbers.
I also have an accounting background, although (thank God) I have never actually been an accountant. But I am very big on the fundamental concept of honest accounting (yes, it exists), called “materiality.” Which, in my former occupation (I’m retired) translated into the avoidance of what I’d call “false precision.” You focus on what matters.
You seek to find reliable, comparable, honestly acquired and presented numbers. When it comes to analysis and presentation, the political appointees in American government will play games. But, to date, the actual numbers themselves are still reliable. Hence my focus on the data itself, filtered through the screen of materiality, with a recognition of fallible human nature. Until I am shown incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, I will assume good faith and diligence in the collection and tabulation of basic data. Which might not be accurate; there are often genuine challenges involved, but in most cases the errors are consistent, and that’s usually good enough for honest analysis.
This is far too long a way of suggesting that you go to the National Weather Service tabular data. I’ll (for the third time in this thread) give the link below. The NOAA graphic does NOT equate zero. A comparison of the map in the article on which we’re commenting, and the tabular data, will show you this. I do think that someone at NOAA has incorrectly (in their map) wound up equating “much above average” with “much below average,” but I’d need evidence of nefarious intent before imputing it.
Finally, there are certainly things I don’t know. I assume, maybe incorrectly, that the private services, i.e., Accuweather, get their data from NOAA. If they don’t, I’d love to know. I’d also be really interested in tabular databases of Accuweather historical numbers that can be compared to NOAA’s numbers. If NOAA is falsifying the data itself, then it’s truly all over, isn’t it?
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/climate/
Any flat map is automatically a spatial distortion. I don’t recognize that particular projection, but it is way too straight along the US/Canadian border to be an equal area projection. So New England is shown much larger than reality and stretching away from the cold.
Like statistics, map projections can be manipulated.
I think I figured out what they are up to. By using ranking instead of absolute deviation from the average, I think they make it harder for an area to reach “much below average” than to reach “much above average”. This would be so if (as I suspect) bitter cold excursions are more common in the winter than very warm excursions. That would make it require a larger deviation to crack that lower 10% in the rankings than to crack the upper 10%. Also it might require a larger deviation to reach the coldest third than to make the warmest third. I think this has been tested by some commenters, who have looked at the absolute deviations from the average that were enough to get an area labeled warm, vs. the deviations required to get an area labeled cold. It could be further tested by looking at the distribution of February temperatures for an area (say daily lows or daily average), and see if it has a fatter tail on the cold side than the warm side. At any rate, the map’s labels are incorrect, because they state that the map is showing an area’s extent of deviation from the average (“much colder than average” for example), when it is actually showing the area’s percentile ranking, which is not necessarily indicative of how far that area’s temperatures were from the mean. Oh well, probably an honest mistake — NOT.
I live in Kenosha county in Wisconsin.
For Feb 2014: the average high was 8.9 degrees F below normal and the average low was 11.1 degrees below normal.
Sucks to be me.
Re: Nick Stokes at 2:51 pm
It could have something to do with this. They changed to a new system on March 13.
Map of Max Temperature Anomaly, Div, Feb. 2014 (Image)
It give a different sense than the ranking map on the head post.
The above blockquote from 10:04 pm was from the AP via
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/19/obama-administration-unveils-climate-change-data-initiative/
At the bottom they say
The Ides of March in the Climate saga.
Well, NJ had it’s 35th coldest February out of 120 years of records with the average high temp being 4.5 F below the mean. You’d never know it from the map. Aside from that, the colors are incredibly misleading as the extremely light blue (below average) blends into the background while the “above average” looks like a massive amber alert.
I’m so tired of people referring to these clowns as scientists. This is marketing at it’s worst, including the silly voiceover “But wait! There’s more…”
@bryanwoodsmall at 9:58 pm
I agree. By using the Ranking method for the metric, the “Much Colder than Average” is not accurate. It is instead “Very Rarely This Cold”.
The Messaging is getting in the way of the science.
Old quote, “Good enough for Government work”$or as in the Hills of Kentucky, “Gooferment.”
It seems that it all comes down to a different baseline:
http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/noaa-map-of-february-temperatures-less-than-accurate/
See?
Nick Stokes says:
March 18, 2014 at 2:51 pm
It could have something to do with this. They changed to a new system on March 13.
Nick, why the hell do you come here to defend your friends and do it in such a stupid way. Of course it’s a new system. One that makes very cold look like normal. IT’S CHEATING, IT’S MISREPRESENTATION.
OR maybe you are not defending them but being careful not alienate yourself from the AGW team.
Oddly such approaches are not necessarily a bad thing from an AGW sceptics view point , that they come out with claims which widely differ from peoples actual experience means that in the end the people simply stop trusting them altogether. And once that feeds through the political process , and remember rule one of a politician is get elected with rule being stay elected , the political support the alarmist need simple drains away. So we should actual encourage such approaches and the madder the better. That is way Mann is such a ‘good ‘ spokes persons.
“Below average” gets a subtle light blue, practically the same value as “near average”, while “above average” is a dark yellow that jumps out of the page at you and shocks the eyes. I ask, why not a subtle yellow, practically the same value as “near average”?
Everyone forgets, they are not providing it as data, they are using it to sell AGW to the casual observer.
Phoenix, it was 81, or 4 degrees (F) above normal. I guess that is “Way above normal”
Of course, this is a 1996-2012 average. Data before 1996 is considered “unreliable”
My tomato plants are doing just fine, just started harvesting my early varieties. I expect to get a bumper crop this year.
A little data adjustment and bam, the 11 people in Baltimore that died from the cold this [average, though no one who lives here would ever call it that] winter are brought back to life. NOAA works miracles!
If this winter was average, we desperately need some global warming!
NOAA and the global warmists are to accurate reporting of the climate as the Union of Concerned Scientists were to accurate reporting of nuclear power safety in the United States. Expect a heavily distorted and inaccurate version of events under the cover of “science”.