Guest Essay By Walter Dnes
There have been a number of posts on USHCN temperature adjustments, including 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. They have focused primarily on annual adjustments. Whilst looking into the USHCN adjustments, I noticed that each of the 12 months is adjusted differently. Here is a plot of average USHCN temperature adjustments, for each month plus the annual average, by year for 1970-2013:
Here is the full plot for 1872-2013.
The calculation of average monthly adjustment consists of:
- Calculating the total accumulated values of (final-temp – raw_temp) where the raw and final values of USHCN monthly temperatures were both non-missing
- Count the number of occurrences where the raw and final values of monthly temperatures were both non-missing
- Divide item 1 by item 2.
As you can see, there are marked differences in adjustments since 1970 for each month. To analyze in more detail, we need to look at some numbers. In the table below…
- The columns “2013” and “2014” list the average adjustment in Celsius degrees for the corresponding months in the years 2013 and 2014 (where available).
- “Slope” means the slope attributable to USHCN adjustments, in Celsius degrees per century, during the period from 1970 to 2013.
| Month | 2013 | 2014 | Slope |
| January | 0.1206 | 0.0991 | 1.432 |
| February | 0.1735 | 0.1687 | 1.519 |
| March | 0.1357 | 0.1313 | 1.455 |
| April | 0.0089 | 0.0101 | 1.281 |
| May | -0.0785 | -0.0828 | 0.955 |
| June | -0.0842 | -0.0856 | 0.775 |
| July | -0.0922 | -0.0881 | 0.676 |
| August | -0.1344 | 0.783 | |
| September | -0.1298 | 0.949 | |
| October | -0.0751 | 1.046 | |
| November | -0.0244 | 1.206 | |
| December | 0.0283 | 1.220 | |
| Annual | -0.0126 | 1.108 |
What are the implications of the USHCN adjustments?
- The talk about winters in the USA getting warmer may be an artifact of the adjustments. The adjustments for January/February/March are the highest of the 12 months. In 2013, they combined to average +0.1433 Celsius degree, while the overall annual adjustment for 2013 was -0.0126 Celsius degrees.
- This is a booby-trap for the unwary. When you see articles in February/March/April about HUGE upward adjustments by USHCN so far during the year, you’ll know why. By the following January, the adjustment will cover the entire calendar year and look more reasonable. Mind you, this is still over half a Celsius degree above the adjustments for the 1930s.
- Speaking of the 1930s, one wonders if this an attempt to disappear the heat waves and droughts of “The Dirty Thirties” in a manner similar to attempts to disappear the Medieval Warm Period. It’s hard to talk about “the hottest ever”, when there’s “inconvenient data” around, showing that the 1930s were hotter. The 2nd graph shows the adjustments from the 1870’s onwards. Compare 2013’s -0.0126 annual adjustment with annual adjustments for the 1930s…
- 1930 -0.5586
- 1931 -0.5628
- 1932 -0.5639
- 1933 -0.5770
- 1934 -0.5877
- 1935 -0.5851
- 1936 -0.5846
- 1937 -0.5907
- 1938 -0.5852
- 1939 -0.5810
Data Sources
USHCN monthly data is available on the web in the ftp directory ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ The specific files used for my analysis were…
- readme file (data formats and basic instructions): ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/readme.txt
- station metadata: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn-v2.5-stations.txt
- raw monthly mean temperature data: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.raw.tar.gz
- final monthly mean temperature data: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/ushcn.tavg.latest.FLs.52i.tar.gz
Odds and Ends
Interesting stuff I stumbled across whilst working on this article…
- Station USH00381310, i.e. “CAMDEN 3 W”, South Carolina has raw data for August 1853. The next piece of raw data for that station is August 1906. The first piece of any final data for any station is 1866. I wonder if the date is a typo.
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- There is some USHCN raw data for the years 1853, 1868, 1869, and 1871 onwards.
- There is USHCN final data from 1866 onwards
Wait a minute. Where does the USHCN final data for 1866, 1867, and 1870 come from, if there is no USHCN raw data for those years? A closer look shows that the small amount of data for those 3 years is all from station USH00303033 “FREDONIA”, New York. It’s located at 42.4497 -79.3120 which translates to 42° 26′ 59″ North 79° 18′ 43″ West. This is near the shore of Lake Erie, not that far from Canada. Let’s check what nearby Canadian data is available for that time span.
- Point your web browser to http://climate.weather.gc.ca/advanceSearch/searchHistoricData_e.html
- Select the “Search by Proximity” tab
- Select 200 in the “kilometres away from” menu
- Click on the “location coordinates:” radio button and enter latitude 42 26 59 and longitude 79 18 43
- Click on the “for years from” radio button, and select 1866 to 1870
- Click on the “Search” button.
The 2 closest sites are Simcoe at 90 km, and Hamilton at just over 100 km. There are another 6 sites within 165 km of Fredonia.
It sort of makes sense that the Fredonia data was created from these sites. I can’t think of any other semi-reasonable explanation. I’ll leave it to professional meteorologists like Anthony to comment on the validity of using data from sites located northwest of Lake Erie to generate estimated data for a site southeast of Lake Erie.
- “The Rise and Fall of USHCN Raw Data” is of interest, in that the less raw data available, the more estimation has to be done to fill out the data set. The theoretical full annual complement of data is 1218 stations with 12 months of data per year, meaning 1,218 * 12 = 14,616 station-months each year. The following graph shows the number of raw and final station-months in the USHCN data over the years. The graph ends at 2013.
- Plots of adjustments over period of record first alerted me to the fact that adjustments were 12 separate data sets, 1 for each month. I ran a script to crank out adjustment plots for all 1218 stations in USHCN, “to see what I could see”. The plot below is an example. Note the period from 1904 to 1911. The adjustments for all 8 of those years were…
- January -2.91 degrees each year
- February -2.94 or -2.95 degrees each year
- March -3.00 degrees each year
- April -3.03 degrees each year
- May -2.93 degrees each year
- June -2.84 degrees each year
- July -2.86 or -2.87 degrees each year
- August -2.87 or -2.88 degrees each year
- September -2.90 or -2.91 degrees each year
- October -2.88 or -2.89 degrees each year
- November -2.95 or -2.96 degrees each year
- December -2.94 or -2.95 degrees each year
Other portions of the data have their own stretches of the same adjustments 12 months apart.
Walter Dnes – Click the pic to view at source
Do not know why Steve Goddard did not pick him up on this.
But now it’s clear that since it didn’t give the result you want, you won’t accept it. So what will it take? Clearly it will take a dataset that matches your preconceived notions. And tha’s not science.
Try pulling that one on me and see what you get.
SonicsGuy August 24, 2014 at 7:18 pm
Thanks for the link. Lamb’s much quoted result is Figure 3. In the caption it says those data have been “adjusted,” and some of it is “opinion.”
Hardly sounds very scientific, does it?
No, unfortunately our understanding of Earth’s climate system is rudimentary and our historical record is laughably brief. Most historical reconstructions and measurement adjustments are as much art as science and should be looked at with jaundiced eyes. For reference:
“Hubert Horace Lamb (born Bedford 22 September 1913 – died Holt, Norfolk 28 June 1997) was an English climatologist who founded the Climatic Research Unit in 1972 in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.”
“Most of Lamb’s scientific life was spent at the Meteorological Office, UK, where he started as a Technical Officer by special merit promotion. As a Quaker, Lamb refused to work on the meteorology of gas spraying during World War II, and was transferred to the Irish Meteorological Service, then still closely associated with the UK Met Office.[2] On returning to the UK service after the war his responsibilities were in the fields of long range weather forecasting, world climatology and climate change. In this capacity he spent some years in Antarctica and in Malta and North Africa and became a Member of the WMO Working Group on Climate Fluctuations.
Lamb was one of the first to propose that climate could change within human experience, going against the orthodox view of the time that climate could be treated as constant for practical purposes.[1] He developed early theories about the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. He became known for his prediction of gradual global cooling and a coming glacial period (colloquially, an “ice age”), and he subsequently highlighted a more immediate future prospect of global warming.”
Lamb does appear to have been right that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer today, however that “future prospect of global warming” seems to have been a bust…
SonicsGuy August 24, 2014 at 7:27 pm Edit
I can easily imagine the howling that would take place here if the IPCC today offered up such a graph. I’m sure you can too.
Yes, we shouldn’t trust anything the IPCC generates, it is clearly an ineffective and biased organization…
All the above is useless handwaving (in my view). This is now criminal activity with criminal intent and is against the law (intentionally to alter government funded data). It about time Federal Law Enforcement agencies seize ALL temperature USCHN, NSCD ect., records/documents and impound the organization.
justthefactswuwt says:
“Yes, we shouldn’t trust anything the IPCC generates, it is clearly an ineffective and biased organization…”
Your biases are thunderous, and not intellectually honest.
Every adjustment should leave a permanent record of the before and after, and the steps inbetween and their justifications. Failing this, all adjustments need to be backed out and ignored.
SonicsGuy August 25, 2014 at 9:30 am
Your biases are thunderous, and not intellectually honest.
Intellectually honest? It was a statement of fact. Can you present any evidence that the IPCC is an effective and unbiased organization?…