Two years ago during the scorching summer of 2012, July 1936 lost its place on the leaderboard and July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the United States. Now, as if by magic, and according to NOAA’s own data, July 1936 is now the hottest month on record again. The past, present, and future all seems to be “adjustable” in NOAA’s world. See the examples below.
Josh has been busy again and writes at Bishop Hill with a new cartoon:
The temperature adjustments story has been brewing for weeks principally due to the many posts at ‘RealScience’ but taken up by others, for example, Paul Homewood, see here and here. Judith Curry has a great post about it here, as does Anthony here.
H/t to Real Science/Steven Goddard for suggesting including Toto. Cartoons by Josh
Bruce at Sunshine Hours has been doing some unthreading, er plotting, and at my request, prepared some USHCN maps of Kansas, first May’s high temperatures.
I’ve annotated the plot, to include “zombie” weather station that have been closed for years, but still show “estimated” data from NOAA. Those marked NRF are “no report found”…typically meaning NOAA hasn’t gotten the data from the observer yet, which is often mailed in on paper B91 forms. It is interesting to note how NOAA has been changing the data, in most cases adjusting it higher, though in a couple of cases, lower.
Bruce also plotted some other maps of Kansas, for July 1936, and for July 2012. Note how in July 1936 the Tmax temperature are almost all adjusted cooler, and in 2012, most all Tmax temperatures are adjusted warmer. Click images for larger versions.
Whatever happened to just using actual measured data? There is no justification for this.
And, NOAA can’t even keep their story straight about July 1936 temperatures. From a report I did in 2013:
NCDC’s SOTC July 2012:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/07
Screencap of the claim for CONUS Tavg temperature for July 2012 in the SOTC:
Note the 77.4°F value for July 1936. It is actually still in their SOTC for July 2012 today.
Now let’s look at some plots from NOAA’s Climate at a Glance. I just happened to have one from two years ago. It also says 77.4°F on the plot. The numbers match with the SOTC report. The annotations are mine.
Today, I ran the same plot again, and here is the NEW number for July 1936. The annotations are mine.
NOAA helpfully provided the data which I have saved as an Excel file, it has both 1936 and 2012 July data: NOAA_Tavg_Data_July_1895-2013 (.xlsx)
You can’t get any clearer proof of NOAA adjusting past temperatures.
This isn’t just some issue with gridding, or anomalies, or method, it is about NOAA not being able to present historical climate information of the United States accurately. In one report they give one number, and in another they give a different one with no explanation to the public as to why.
This is not acceptable. It is not being honest with the public. It is not scientific. It violates the Data Quality Act.
But wait, there’s more. In January 2013, I ran this story based on an article in the Wall Street Journal: July (2012) Was Hottest Month on Record
My story was: Does NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) keep two separate sets of climate books for the USA?
In that essay, I revised the WSJ graphic. At that time, it looked like this based on new numbers for July 2012 that I found from NOAA:
Now, with the new numbers in the Excel File above, output from NOAA, I had to revise it again. It looks like this now:
Now, once again, July 1936 is the hottest month in the US, even if by the slimmest of margins, all thanks to post-facto adjustments of temperature data by NOAA/NCDC.
I suggest that NOAA/NCDC have another one of those meetings like where they decided to keep long dead weather stations reporting as “zombies”, like I showed with Marysville, yesterday, and work on getting their story straight.
This constant change from year to year of what is or is not the hottest month on record for the USA is not only unprofessional and embarrassing for NOAA, it’s bullshit of the highest order. It can easily be solved by NOAA stopping the unsupportable practice of adjusting temperatures of the past so that the present looks different in context with the adjusted past and stop making data for weather stations that have long since closed.
NOAA has been accused by others of “fabricating” data, and while that is a strong word that I don’t like to use, it looks to be more and more accurate.
That said, I don’t believe this is case where somebody purposely has their hand on a control knob for temperature data, I think all of this is nothing more than artifacts of a convoluted methodology and typical bureaucratic blundering. As I’ve always said, never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence.
We already showed yesterday that NOAA can’t get their output data files correct, and we are waiting on a statement and a possible correction for that. But I think the problem is even larger than that, and will require an investigation from an unbiased outside source to get to the root of the problem.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
“You can’t get any clearer proof of NOAA adjusting past temperatures.”
cjames, NCDC switched to different methodology.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/transitioning-gridded-climate-divisional-dataset
The problem is endemic. Successive versions of NASA GISS have also cooled the past, even though their website uses Tokyo to show how the past should sometimes be warmed to compensate for UHI. Dr. Morohasy has documented the same for Australia BOM. HadCrut4.2 warms more than HadCrut 4.1 (provable by simple comparison of archived 4.1 to present 4.2. NIWA was sued over this issue in NewZealand.
If it was just NOAA, then it could probably be the usual government incompetence. But when NASA, CRU, BOM and NIWA all get caught out doing the same things ‘independently’, there are two possibilities. First, the fundamental homogenization algorithm logic is wrong (the Bob Dedekind hypothesis). But then why have none of these organizations spotted the flaw(s)? Confirmation bias? Second, malice at least in the form of willful blindness on top of confirmation bias. The growing pile of global evidence points strongly to the latter.
This is going to become an equivalent of AR4 Himalayan glaciers. And happening at the perfect time, an election year, for old ‘the science is settled’ Obama and Holdren.
I agree with Mark Stoval (@MarkStoval) says:
June 29, 2014 at 12:52 pm
When something like this has been going on so long… When the adjustments literally change a temperature drop to a temperature increase across the entire nation… When you see the changes occurring year after year after year, all moving the long term trend towards more warming in the present and cooler temperatures in the past.. When there is no credible and conceivable reason why the temperatures in 1930 need to be adjusted downwards conitnuosly through the 2000s… When the alarm has been raised (most prominently by Goddard, but also by Courtney above, and lots of others) yet no action has been taken…
… then it’s more likely to be explained by malice than incompetence. Perhaps not malice, but like a white lie, a deliberate deception intended for the greater good. They’ve been trying to create a clear upward trend in the temperature record and they’ve been successful. The fabricated data is displayed prominently in both academic papers and in the media.
Wow… 77degrees. If it got to 77 here in Florida, the residents would be putting on their winter coats.
Repeating an earlier statement of mine – the so called experts forgotten or deliberatly avoid all Theories of Science…..
Having taken a quick peak at the homogenization code (referenced here http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/) and having a little more familiarity with the data and now realizing they change the data daily:
“The raw database is routinely reconstructed using the latest version of GHCN-Daily, usually each day. The full period of record monthly values are re-homogenized whenever the raw database is re-constructed (usually once per day)”
And also realizing that estimating mostly just reinforces trends ….
It may not be anything nefarious. The data sucks. It is inadequate for climate. Math won’t help. But the BEST cult members and the AGW cult members think if they apply just the right amount of math they can turn crappy weather data into good climate data. And they are wrong.
Its a trap they’ve fallen into. And they can’t get out of it or don’t want to get out of it.
The data is crap for climate.
“stewart pid says:
June 29, 2014 at 12:44 pm
That knob needs numbers … and numbers that go to 11 ”
A “Christopher Guest” fan- I appreciated your “Spinal TaP” allusion.
CJames, D’Aleo posted the same thing yesterday for Maine. And someone else posted it for California (I think here back in April). It is endemic in the newest GHCN, nClimDiv, compared the previous version Drd964x. The switch was made near yearend 2013.
Re: Sunshinehours1
Yes. Isn’t it convenient that their new methodology increased the warming trend by 200 times? What is the correct warming trend?
Anthony
Expect a call from the BBC at any moment
I’m sending the link for this story to their Have You Got A Good Story link here
http://www.bbc.com/news/10725415
So, are there any senators etc. in the U.S.A that might want to use this information ?
Surely there is at least one ?
RE: richardscourtney says:
June 29, 2014 at 1:39 pm
I stand corrected. And thank you for standing for the Truth.
I should have written, “I’ve known about this bleeping (f-word, but not the 4 letter one; rhymes with “odd”) for seven bleeping years, and others even longer…”
Anthony, can I draw your attention to the Graphs that Zeke supplied of Global and US Surface Temperatures which supposedly shot down Steve G in flames. Graphs 7 & 9 on the “On ‘denying’ Hockey Sticks, USHCN data, and all that – part 2” Thread?
Are those graphs for real and reproducable, if they are then you can see in one pair of graphs what this is all about.
Do they bear any relationship to an MM Hockey Stick?
Do they bear any relationship to any other current graphs out there that is used for all sorts of Climate analysis?
Do they bear any relationship to slowly rising temperatures induced by a steady increase in CO2?
The answer to all 3 questions is NO!!!
If those graphs are for real then they blow the whole UN/IPCC narrative out of the water.
They cannot possibly let the poublic see those graphs after having the Hockey Stick rammed their throats for the last 15-20 years.
The Hockey Stick must be maintained by hook or by crook.
I believe there is no one single cause going on here and we are seeing an accumulation of various errors, assumptions, and processes. I seem to recall that sometimes, when a value is missing for a specific day (not a monthly value) an average is selected for that station for that same date across the entire record. A modern warming trend would tend to increase that average. So every month when the new data are produced, new averages are computed for the missing day. When you have a larger amount of missing data over time, we see this average playing a role of increasing weight.
Another problem seems to be in how they adjust for inflection points in data. A good recently publicized example is this one:
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/dont-miss-jennifer-marohasy-speaking-in-sydney-wednesday/
What appears to have happened here is that there was a step change in the data in 1980 or 1981. In response to that step change, they make a few assumptions. 1) they assume the data after the step change is more accurate than the data before. 2) they assume that the trend after the step change was occurring before that change. It seems not to dawn on them that trends can change. You can have 20 years of cooling and 20 years of warming. They appear to simply take the trend after the step and adjust all prior data to reflect that same trend even though it clearly did not exhibit any warming trend before the step change. Assuming newer data is more accurate than older data is bad enough, but assuming a recent trend trumps an older trend is just plain wrong. I believe Australia shares some of the same adjustment processes with NOAA but I do not know with certainty that it is true that they do.
When you start adding all of these things together, what you end up with is baloney. There is no reason to go back into the record and retroactively change a number unless previously missing data are discovered and the record is being made more complete. Using modern temperatures to influence past data is a recipe for disaster.
Hmmm – call me a cynic – but this sounds like a good way to bust the pause – quietly massage recent years down – then hey presto – pretty soon they’ll be able to say them temps are on the rise again. Sweet.
Correction, there IS a slight warming trend in the data prior to the Australian station inflection point but it seems to be exaggerated by the “adjustment” process.
So according to NOAA the whole of the USA is a near dustbowl (like 1936).
I flew back to the UK yesterday, from Atlanta GA, and I seem to remember that on friday there were lots of green trees and fields everywhere. Maybe it changed overnight after I left. Maybe the rest of the US is in the same place as it was in 1936 right now. But I would truly love to see the pictures comparing today to 78 years ago.
Anyone? Please?
cjames, I’m not sure there is a warming trend long long term. Or if there it is it is tiny.
For example, TMAX raw December (gridded on a 1×1 Lat/Long grid) 1895 to 2013
trend = .01C/decade,
Some of the months are just below 0, some are 0, some are slightly above like December.
TOBS increases the trend. Final Increases the trend.
But essentially the raw trend is dead flat since 1895.
Felflames says:
June 29, 2014 at 2:12 pm
Senator from Kansas’ southern neighbor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe
Any change to the raw data should be peer reviewed, documented and easily available (transparent). If better techniques come up, they can be easily implemented. If errors were made, one of the thousands scientists (from any field) can spot it, and test his ideas against the community of other scientists. That should be the case for any scientific endeavor, but is even more important in this case because of the policy implications.
“it’s bullshit of the highest order”.
Absolutely right. When we are told daily that “Sorry, the debate is over or in fact never existed in the first place; we know the world is warming and AGW is the culprit; now, let’s consider what new taxes and regulations can be introduced worldwide to crowbar the temps back down again”, damn straight it’s bullshit of the highest order.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the global temperature records, the basic fuel for this AGW machine, are just so much collateral damage in the fight by the climate change industry to win a political war.
We were told very very recently that May was the “hottest on Earth since records began”. Well, maybe it was in the imaginary world of adjusting new temps up and old ones down, but I very much doubt it in the real world, frankly.
What’s really sad about this is that if everything wasn’t so politically charged over the whole CO2 debate all this work by Anthony Watts could be seen as a nice contribution to process improvement for reporting present and historical weather data by the various government agencies, a heroic volunteer civic effort.
scf says: June 29, 2014 at 2:03 pm ” Perhaps not malice, but like a white lie, a deliberate deception intended for the greater good. ”
This hits the Nail right on the head, many of the warmists have openly come out and stated that the “Means Justify the Ends”.
Stealing, Lying, Fabricating, they have been caught doing it all, because they think it is necessary and justified.
And why to we need TOBS adjustments to automated stations?