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.
tB wrote,”yet has the hubris to ask us and scientists to believe it has reliably and accurately determined the USA temperature100 years ago to the tenth of a degree…”
the global warming/climate change/climate disruption meme will not succeed or fail, in the mind of the public where it matters to policy makers, based on 1/2 degC in some arcane database. It will fail or succeed in the public democtratic vote based on whether heating costs or cooling costs are skyrocketing. That is, it will be tested by reality.
And Because right now, it is failing, we hear the some green CAGW adherents advocating for Obama to become dictator to force anti-carbon policy prescriptions on an unaccepting public.
Mike T says:
June 29, 2014 at 8:14 pm
———————————
Thanks for that. I have challenged. I have asked where to submit the empirical evidence.
Should be fascinating. I wonder how he will try weaseling out of paying?
Regarding the Napolean quote. As a grizzled old 1SG told me…”If it were only incompetence, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.”
Phodges, you have that right. For the fancy homogenization equivalent, see Steriou and Katsoyiannis at the 2012 EGU. Their 163 global GHCN sample was 2/3 biased upwards, and the measured bias could account for up to half of all recently observed ‘global warming’
cjames says:
June 29, 2014 at 1:41 pm
Just did a little checking at NCDC Climate at a Glance site. I’d like to include the actual graphic in this post but I don’t know how so here is the URL: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/ You can plot the data for Michigan from 1895 to 2014. The trend is given as +0.2 degrees F per decade.
However, I have archived an older plot from 2010 (wish I could show it to you) ”
I say, –
There must be some way of getting the older data/plots out on line, anyone with any evidence has a moral duty to expose this fraud for what it is….FRAUD, this is a total corruption of science.
Konrad:
re your post at June 29, 2014 at 10:14 pm
There is no empirical evidence – none, zilch, nada – that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activity (i.e. anthropogenic global warming, AGW) have or are discernibly affecting global temperature.
Furthermore, the data of global average surface temperature (GASTA) often changes for each data set and this compounds the difficulty of obtaining any evidence of AGW. The importance of this is demonstrated by Santer’s failed attempt (in the 1990s) to claim he had detected a ‘fingerprint’ of AGW in global temperature data sets.
Richard
Wall Street Journal article on EPA: “Scientific journals in a variety of disciplines have moved toward data transparency. Ms. McCarthy sees this effort as a threat. Speaking before the National Academy of Sciences in late April, she defended her agency’s need to protect data “from those who are not qualified to analyze it.”
h/t to clipe for link.
https://www.google.ca/webhp?complete=0#complete=0&q=What+Is+the+EPA+Hiding+From+the+Public%3F+
And she, as head of EPA is presumably the ultimate, objective arbiter of who is “qualified” to see the sacrosanct data.
My God, these idiots are really trying to move us back to a situation like the middle ages when the church had a monopoly on knowledge. Yet another demonstration of the pseudo-religious zealotry all this has become.
The data does not need “protecting” from open access, since no matter how qualified the reader is they cannot change the data by reading it.
On the contrary, open access will PROTECT the data from improper and incompetent manipulation. That in truth is what she fears.
she defended her agency’s need to protect data “from those who are not qualified to analyze it.” …. and from those who are !
Greg Goodman dedi ki:
Haziran 30, 2014, 1:46 am
Cool, WP has just decided to talk to me Turkish.
“Bir Cevap Yazın ” indeed.
Greg Goodman dedi ki:
Haziran 30, 2014, 1:46 am
Cool, WP has just decided to talk to me Turkish.
“Bir Cevap Yazın ” indeed.
Yes, the whole of the other adjustments thread has dedi ki for ‘says’.
Damn warmists…
I compared trends in UAH v5.6 lower troposphere (LT) data for the contiguous USA (column marked ‘USA48’ here: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt ) to the NOAA cUSA data for the period 1979-2013, which is the 35 ‘whole years’ period over which they can be compared.
The trend in UAH’s ‘USA48’ LT is +0.23 C/decade.
The trend in NOAA’s USHCN is +0.27 C/dec.
So the total difference between the trends in NOAA surface data and UAH lower troposphere data for the contiguous US from 1979 to 2013 is exactly 0.04 C/dec. That’s probably smaller than the error margins involved. Is the UAH data set produced by ‘incompetents’ too?
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.
Which century are they living in? 20th? 19th?
DavidR:
At June 30, 2014 at 3:05 am you ask
No. Adjustments are made to USHCN each month. Therefore, the more months that pass the more ‘adjustments’ are made to past USHCN data. Wait some more years and the USHCN trend for 1979 to 2013 will be much larger than that of UAH.
The past is being altered by the present and the alterations increase because tomorrow will be another present!
Richard
This looks exactly like the IRS scandal (and others) where so many preposterous excuses & incidents pile-up that eventually any reasonable person has to conclude that it’s outright fra*d.
Ever attribute to Alice what cannot be explained by simple incompetence.
(That would be Alice in Wonderland, with the ‘drink me” bottle at hand)
July, 2014, the “climate” crisis finally ends, with the realization that the ability to adjust the temperature of the past, is also the ability to adjust the temperature of the future.
BTW, cheers and fortitude to ALL “skeptics”, whether or not you like each other, or squabble
from time to time.
“As I’ve always said, never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence.”
Quite.
However, bear this in mind also:
“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action”.
We are well past three times now.
I think you’re way too charitable when it comes to these Government institutions, Anthony. A pity you didn’t see fit to extend the same indulgence to Steven Goddard.
richardscourtney says: June 30, 2014 at 4:42 am
“The past is being altered by the present and the alterations increase because tomorrow will be another present!”
______________________
That remains to be seen Richard; but at present it’s fair to say that there’s no statistical difference between the warming trend recorded in the US NOAA surface data and that recorded in the UAH ‘USA48’ lower troposphere data between 1979 and 2013.
Yet only one of the two temperature producers whose ‘current’ data displays almost the same warming trend over the same time period and across the same region is being accused of incompetence. Surely if one data set is flawed the other must be too?
I wonder if anyone in USA has drawn this NOAA problem with adjustments and estimated readings to the attention of Senator James M. Inhofe. Surely he would be the best person in government to do something about this problem of ongoing adjustments. Lamar Smith could be another person to be contacted by a knowledgeable US resident preferably located in his own state. It is all very well we lament here, but the only people with the power to do anything important are US members of Congress. What is the US Government auditors doing? Under the thumb of The President and John Holdren?
DavidR:
You asked a question that I answered here.
At June 30, 2014 at 6:19 am you have replied by posing another question and asking
Nothing “remains to be seen” because it is a matter of documented fact that the US NOAA surface data is ‘adjusted’ each month and that the UAH data is not. The trends of the two data sets will diverge if they continue using their present methods.
I accused nobody of “incompetence”: being mistaken is not the same as being incompetent. My views are completely explained by this.
Two different methods provide the same result. This does not indicate that either, neither or both is flawed especially when they are indicating different things which are measured by different devices.
Richard
I don’t see what the problem is, this is just the natural turning of the climate science circle. They have to fit the reality of the past to the climate models so they may create the reality of the future. It’s logical.
Be thankful for the progress. They’ve tried fitting the models to the reality of the past, and look how that turned out. Now that they’ve rightfully gone in the other direction, the models will be automatically self-validating. Quite an improvement!
There has been a lot of talk about US temperatures – but are global temperatures subject to the same alteration/manipulation?
PMHinSC says:
June 29, 2014 at 7:30 pm
=======
Latitude says:
June 29, 2014 at 6:45 pm
“Do you guys realize what this means? It invalidated everyone’s work, it invalidates every climate computer program…”
========
Unless, of course, Zeke Hausfather is correct and it “doesn’t” make any difference. I think I’ll wait to see how this plays out before jumping to a conclusion that may be premature.
======
You have no idea what this is about, do you?
richardscourtney says: June 30, 2014 at 6:42 am
“Nothing “remains to be seen” because it is a matter of documented fact that the US NOAA surface data is ‘adjusted’ each month and that the UAH data is not. The trends of the two data sets will diverge if they continue using their present methods.”
________________________________
Your statement “The trends of the two data sets will diverge if they continue using their present methods” remains to be seen, in my opinion, since, as the subject of this post indicates, past temperatures are being changed upward as well as downward by the present process.
richardscourtney says:
“I accused nobody of “incompetence”: being mistaken is not the same as being incompetent.”
________________________________
My reference to the term ‘incompetence’ is not derived from anything you’ve said, but from the content of the above post, which states: “As I’ve always said, never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence.”
In my view, a suggestion of ‘incompetence’ on the part of NOAA is clearly implicit in that statement.
________________________________
richardscourtney says:
“Two different methods provide the same result. This does not indicate that either, neither or both is flawed especially when they are indicating different things which are measured by different devices.”
________________________________
It’s clear from the long term data that there is a close correlation between UAH satellite measurements of the lower troposphere and surface station temperatures; as one would expect, given that the LT and surface are closely coupled. In the case of the US region, between 1979 and 2013 the trend in the UAH lower troposphere data closely corresponds to the trend in the NOAA surface data. The fact that two independent temperature measurement processes have produced more or less the same long term warming trend would normally be regarded as evidence supporting this joint finding.
If the implication is that the warming *trend* identified in the NOAA surface data is the result of incompetence, then it follows that the very similar trend identified in the UAH data must also result from incompetence. However, if the ‘incompetence’ in question is just with respect to the monthly alteration of previous temperatures, rather than the overall finding of a fairly rapid warming trend in the US over the past 35 years, then that’s a different matter.
DavidR: “The trend in NOAA’s USHCN is +0.27 C/dec.” for 1979 to 2013
I did it by month. And I used tmax (which is what I’ve been working with)
Month / Raw Trend / TOB Trend / Final Trend
Jan / 0.42 / 0.51 / 0.67
Feb / 0.02 / 0.11 / 0.25
Mar / 0.16 / 0.26 / 0.42
Apr / 0 / 0.1 / 0.25
May / -0.03 / 0.05 / 0.19
Jun / -0.01 / 0.05 / 0.2
Jul / 0.03 / 0.08 / 0.22
Aug / 0.08 / 0.13 / 0.27
Sep / 0.12 / 0.18 / 0.33
Oct / -0.13 / -0.07 / 0.08
Nov / 0.24 / 0.3 / 0.47
Dec / -0.11 / -0.04 / 0.13
Ann 0.065 / 0.14 / 0.29
1998 to 2013
Month / Raw Trend / TOB Trend / Final Trend
Jan / -0.89 / -0.82 / -0.56
Feb / -1.81 / -1.73 / -1.5
Mar / 0.6 / 0.68 / 0.94
Apr / -0.36 / -0.27 / -0.05
May / -0.6 / -0.54 / -0.3
Jun / 0.43 / 0.47 / 0.73
Jul / 0 / 0.04 / 0.25
Aug / -0.33 / -0.29 / -0.1
Sep / -0.42 / -0.37 / -0.17
Oct / -0.73 / -0.68 / -0.44
Nov / -0.68 / -0.64 / -0.4
Dec / -1.1 / -1.05 / -0.78
Ann -0.49 / -0.43 / -0.2
Angech says:
June 29, 2014 at 4:19 pm
/////////////////
They have, in essence (whether they realise it or not), built in a positive feedback loop, the effect of which is to continually cool the past