NCDC: 'our algorithm is working as designed'

In a statement to Polifact today, NCDC made the following statement:

“… our algorithm is working as designed”

One wonders though, about these sorts of things that have been found wrong in their data file for USHCN, which is represented to the public as “high quality”.

Here are few other things that worked as designed:

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940):

Early NASA Rockets (1950’s-60’s):

The Titanic (1912): On 14 April, the RMS Titanic, described by its builders as practically unsinkable, sinks after hitting an iceberg.

The de Havilland Comet (1952): Twenty-one of these commercial airliners were built.The Comet was involved in 26 hull-loss accidents, including 13 fatal crashes which resulted in 426 fatalities. After the conclusive evidence revealed in the inquiry that metal fatigue concentrated at the corners of the aircraft’s windows had caused the crashes, all aircraft were redesigned with rounded windows.

Mariner 1 (1962): The first US spacecraft dispatched to Venus drifts badly off course because of an error in its guidance system. The error is a small one — a wrong punctuation character (a hyphen) in a single line of code — but the course deviation is large. Mariner 1 ends up in the Atlantic Ocean after being destroyed by a range safety officer. It has been called “The most expensive hyphen in history”

The Mars Climate Orbiter (1998)

The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed into the surface of the planet, because its orbit was too low.

The primary cause of this discrepancy was that one piece of ground software produced results in an “English system” unit, while a second system that used those results expected them to be in metric units. Software that calculated the total impulse produced by thruster firings calculated results in pound-seconds. The trajectory calculation used these results to correct the predicted position of the spacecraft for the effects of thruster firings. This software expected its inputs to be in newton-seconds.

The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed.

The NCDC Climate at a Glance plotter for the public (2014):

While being told that “all is well” and and that “our algorithm is working as designed”, it is easy to discover that if one tries to plot the temperature data for any city in the United States like Dallas Texas for example you get plots for high temperature, low temperature, and average temperature that are identical:

Try it yourself:

Go here:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/

Change settings to go to a statewide time series, pick a city, and what it does is and it gives you data where the min temp, avg temp and max temp that are the same. It is unknown if it is even the right data for the city.

h/t to WUWT readers Wyo_skeptic, Gary T., and Dr. Roy Spencer