I looked at a number of Finnish weather stations in the GISTEMP database, and many of them suffer from step changes like the one below and/or data gaps, so I don’t put much stock in the claim as being anything more than an observational artifact that they have not dealt with effectively.
See also my peer reviewed paper on the claim of extra heat related deaths due to “global warming” in nearby Stockholm:
A good example of a step change artifact in the temperature record is in Tromo:
One wonders if the authors simply used all the weather stations in Finland without regard to their data quality. I don’t have time today to evaluate it all but perhaps readers will have a go, since the PDF is available as open source, which is a credit to the authors.
PRESS RELEASE: According to a recent University of Eastern Finland and Finnish Meteorological Institute study, the rise in the temperature has been especially fast over the past 40 years, with the temperature rising by more than 0.2 degrees per decade. “The biggest temperature rise has coincided with November, December and January. Temperatures have also risen faster than the annual average in the spring months, i.e., March, April and May. In the summer months, however, the temperature rise has not been as significant,” says Professor Ari Laaksonen of the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. As a result of the temperature rising, lakes in Finland get their ice cover later than before, and the ice cover also melts away earlier in the spring. Although the temperature rise in the actual growth season has been moderate, observations of Finnish trees beginning to blossom earlier than before have been made.
Temperature has risen in leaps
The annual average temperature has risen in two phases, the first being from the beginning of the observation period to the late 1930s, and the second from the late 1960s to present. Since the 1960s, the temperature has risen faster than ever before, with the rise varying between 0.2 and 0.4 degrees per decade. Between the late 1930s and late 1960s, the temperature remained nearly steady. “The stop in the temperature rise can be explained by several factors, including long-term changes in solar activity and post-World War II growth of human-derived aerosols in the atmosphere. When looking at recent years’ observations from Finland, it seems that the temperature rising is not slowing down,” University of Eastern Finland researcher Santtu Mikkonen explains.
The temperature time series was created by averaging the data produced by all Finnish weather stations across the country. Furthermore, as the Finnish weather station network wasn’t comprehensive nation-wide in the early years, data obtained from measurement stations in Finland’s neighbouring countries was also used.
Finland is located between the Atlantic Ocean and the continental Eurasia, which causes great variability in the country’s weather. In the time series of the average temperature, this is visible in the form of strong noise, which makes it very challenging to detect statistically significant trends. The temperature time series for Finland was analysed by using a dynamic regression model. The method allows the division of the time series into sections indicating mean changes, i.e. trends, periodic variation, observation inter-dependence and noise. The method makes it possible to take into consideration the seasonal changes typical of Nordic conditions, as well as significant annual variation.
###
S. Mikkonen, M. Laine, H. M. Mäkelä, H. Gregow, H. Tuomenvirta, M. Lahtinen, A. Laaksonen Trends in the average temperature in Finland, 1847’2013
Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, Online First, 17 Dec 2014
DOI: 10.1007/s00477-014-0992-2 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00477-014-0992-2
Full PDF: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/96/art%253A10.1007%252Fs00477-014-0992-2.pdf?auth66=1419294105_93e936f512a2c987460f69cc3712d3ad&ext=.pdf
A Late 20th Century European Climate Shift: Fingerprint of Regional Brightening?
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=33658#.VJj29f8DAs
At least there is same kind of graph from Finnish Meteorological Institute:
http://ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/vuositilastot
It is from Helsinki-Kaisaniemi, not Helsinki-Seutula, but anyhow there is step somwhere 1988-9. I suppose data here is direct from Finnish database.
I myself live now about 25 from Seutula airport but was not here at 1989.
I think it is possible that the temperature step is real and not an artifact.
I’m from Finland. I do remember my childhood winters when there was always snow. These days we don’t get as reliable snow on the coast any more. So yes, there is a change. However, it’s impossible to tell the reason as Finnish weather is very unpredictable.
If we have southern winds, we have a warm winter with little or no snow. If we get eastern or nothern winds, we have a cold winter. Our winter temperatures do depend a lot on the weather. It’s not like our -15C winters have become -13C winters thanks to CO2. It’s more like 0C or -15C. Nobody knows if we’ll have -20C or 0C in a few weeks.
Last winter was warm with practically no snow. The two winters before those we had bitter colds and a lot of snow. Trying to find a AGW signal from this mess is pointless. But as the Finnish Met Institute has its own Climate Change Department, of course they are wasting time trying to find that signal.
“… wasting time” spending YOUR hard earned money… .
Thanks for sharing, Vieras. You may have noticed (if you have read WUWT very often) that most comments go unacknowledged… even some of the finest. Just wanted you to know that yours was read and appreciated. And so will be your comments in the future…. even if no one says so!
#(:))
Keep on commenting and (yawn) have a good Tuesday… I will… in about 6 hours….,
Janice
Thank you Janice. The only good thing of that study is that over 2C increase. That sends us right over the famous CAGW limit. So Finland will supposedly now be in huge trouble and receive billions worth of Climate Aid. Yay!
As Vieras says, it has become more “unpredictable”. The cold and stable winters are gone, except for some years. No doubt about that. The main reason for the sudden anomaly starting in the nineties is change in wind pattern and pressure position. Long lasting high pressures are more seldom over Scandinavia+Finland nowadays. With normal winter temperatures no global warming…
There’s nothing like that in the Berkeley Earth dataset. Here’s Helsinki …
w.
On that page BEST gives the trend of raw monthly anomalies as 3.33 C/Cen.
Any idea how was that trend calculated? Based on the previous 20 years? 30 years? 100 years? Just eyeballing the chart, there was about a 1 C change from 1940-2010.
Is that .33 repeating? I seem to have heard it before.
(Sorry. Bad joke.)
It seems that those FMI pages are also in english, so it makes things a bit strange:The pages are different in english, so if You want to see temperature history, it can only be tracked down in finnish.I think that I retract that “basically honest” thing…So :Ilmatieteen laitos – Ilmasto (climate) – Vuositilastot (temperature history) – Sodankylä , Helsinki .That shows the trick they used.
This is the page, just scroll down to the chart “Vuosikeskilämpötilat Helsingissä ja Sodankylässä”
http://ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/vuositilastot
Annual variation in Finland is great. The list of warmest years in Sodankylä, Lapland, still shows 1938 as the warmest year since 1900….by a margin of 0.8 degrees C compared to the runner-up year 2011.
That aside, the trend seems to be that winter arrives later and spring starts earlier. You can notice it clearly.
Btw, someone in the comments mentioned that we Finns should be worried about sea level rise. Well, due to glacial isostatic adjustment, Finland elevation goes up 3-8 mm/year. Lucky us 🙂
OK, now it seems that FMI is perhaps changing those Finnish pages too as I have reminded people in Finnish media about them, so enjoy while it lasts…That red line is Helsinki with it’s UHI and the blue is Sodankylä.Below them is the rain chart.”Vuosisademäärä” is “yearly rain”.
There is nothing strange here, actually in late 1930´s warming trend was even more aggressive than now days. Here is graph of North European weather stations showing moving slope of 30 year trend:
Average temperature in Finland has risen by more than two degrees.
And not a moment too soon. Damned cold last time I was there.
Actually there was a ~2C step-change at several Fenno-Scandinavian stations in the early 1920s IIRC. Backward causation in time?
Merry Christmas everyone from the Land of Under where my broad beans are later than they have ever been (bean?). Fortunately the French beans in the greenhouse are doing well 🙂
Roha, you are right!
Actually at 1860’s 7 % of Finnish population died becauce of cold weather.
In 1940 Couple thosand Ukraine (Russian)soldiers froze to death at Raatteentie near Kajaani city.
In 1987 we had extremely cold winter here in Finland causing extreme problems to infrastructure.
So, yes. Climate is OK now… but it seems that we are going back to cold phase again 🙁
Yes ,the Finnish FMI states that the temperature has risen over 2 degrees C in 166 years.In plain English.While finnish language pages show that the temperature has not risen for about 80 years.So ,what can we figure out of that…?
Many people have figured this sort of stuff out years ago, Timo. thanks for your example.
In “Original Temperatures Sweden and Norway”
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/original-temperatures-sweden-and-norway-280.php
Also Northern Finland is represented in “area 1 and 2”:
Here area B1 incl stations from North Finland:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/AORIT/Sweden/19.gif
Certainly not 2 K warming.
And then RUTI Scandinavia that shows Finland directly using GHCN v2 raw and Nordklim:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti/europe/scandinavia.php
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/ARUTI/Europe/Scandinavia/fig20.jpg
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/ARUTI/Europe/Scandinavia/fig21.jpg
Southern Finland perhaps with slightly more warming than Northern Finland, but again, certainly NOT 2 K.
But does that include the non adjusted – adjusted data? If not, Nick and Mosh would call it rubbish.
Raw data for Helsinki temperatures between 1829-2014 is available here: http://www.findikaattori.fi/en/table/66.
To my understanding the data before 1950’s is from Helsinki Kaisaniemi (city centrum) and data after that is from Helsinki Seutula (airport), but I’m not sure about that.
We can see that for each of the season the warmest years are as follows:
– Winter 1925
– Spring: 1921
– Summer: 2011
– Autumn: 1967
Helsinki back to 1829. A warming trend of 0.82C per century or 1.51C over the 184 years.
Looks to be warmer in the pre-WWII years than today (with a distinct downspike during the war). There is also a station called Torneo or Tornio Finland which is the main border crossing to Sweden and has temperatures back to 1801. The early part of the 1800’s was colder.
http://s24.postimg.org/6ztf70ql1/Helsinki_Temperatures_1829.png
One can also see the adjustments done to Helsinki raw temperatures in the GHCN/NCDC database. They have added 0.75C worth of warming to the Raw data.
http://s15.postimg.org/eaftwef97/Helsinki_GHCN_NCDC_Adjustments.gif
And, oh the irony:FMI’s pages in english, the page “Observations” there is a picture of a weather station.It is the Kumpula station, near FMI’s offices.Also near are all of those University buildings, parking lots and a barren rock hill, so it has heat sources all around it.Those fools picked the one of the worst examples of all Finnish weather stations, but who knows how bad the all others actually are.
The Director General of FMI is Petteri Taalas.He is also a WWF guy, and his comments are straight from Sceptical Science and Open Mind.Naturally he has selected his cronies well…So ,as it seems to be a worldwide propblem. our meteorological institute too is run by warmist a%&holes that feed the media with disinformation and propaganda.But we Finns have that Sisu thing:I will never give up.I will be a thorn in their side.There are more of us every day.
Timo Churchill Kuusela!
Oh, yes, indeed!
And TRUTH IS WINNING! #(:))
I see the same rise as all the European datasets I have looked at. A 1°C rise in 1988. Why?
It’s the world-wide conspiracy. You haven’t heard about it?
As Kelvin says, there is a definite sharp rise in most Europena datasets in the late 1980’s.
At the same time, in the UK, there is a sharp rise in sunshine hours, which has been associated with much reduced air pollution.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/12/21/has-increased-sunshine-caused-uk-warming-in-late-20thc/
It is often claimed that the drop in NHG temps after the war was due to aerosols, but this is nonsense because air pollution has been around since the mid 19thC.
Yes, I just commented on your sunshine hour post here on WUWT that the 1988 change is real and seen all over Europe, and – as I show with a link in that post – most clearly seen as a step change up in precipitation in Norway. Here in Norway, this is touted as proof that the weather gets “wilder” with “climate change”. Of course they don’t mention that the change virtually happened in only one year, not over time.
There’s no need to look extensively for wrong data – the change was real. Now if only some real climate scientists could work on describing and explaining this highly interesting change instead of the AGW tribe trying to explain it away with their overly simplistic CO2 theories.
One “real climate scientist,” Bob Tisdale is:
{There is much more good information in Tisdale’s book and in the publications of many other real (as in DATA-based) scientists — the below is just a sample of what you will find.}
“The North Atlantic has an additional mode of natural variability called the AMO (Atlantic
Multidecadal Oscillation). I’ve mentioned it a few times already. As a result of the
Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, for the period of November, 1981 to July, 2013 (the
satellite era of sea surface temperature data), North Atlantic sea surface temperatures
warmed almost 3 times faster than the global oceans. (See Figure 7-13.)”
Climate Models Fail, p. 232, Bob Tisdale (2013 e book)
Step change in 1988 was a very real climate shift in Scandinavia at least.
Finland sits in the border of oceanic and continental climate zones. Slight change
in Atlantic SST (+ve AMO) and mild winter’s results. When AMO in long term goes
negative, continental (Siberian) climate reclaims its territory and the opposite happens.
Funny thing, none of the Finnish climate “scientists” have ever mentioned AMO. None.
The US is not the world, but Finland surely is. Finnish people must be glad to have some global warming in a cooling world. Happy Christmas people in Finland, where temperatures are expected to be plumetting to minus 15 degrees Celsius. http://www.satakunnankansa.fi/Satakunta/1194949534628/artikkeli/liukasta+riittaa+liiaksi+asti+tuisku+palaa+aattona.html
And yet paradoxically, many Finns flock to places like Majorca, Canary Islands and Thailand during the most affected months. Sometimes even during the summer. Would things like this have something to do with it? http://yle.fi/uutiset/helsinki_still_copes_with_last_winters_snow/5429556
Refer to Steven Goddard has covered this extensively. See his before after GISS manipulations. LOL
I went to Finland in the winter. One would assume that anyone living there would pray for an average warming of 2C!
Don;t know of the validity of the numbers or conclusion of this report, it seems data is all over the place and there are plenty of contradictions and concerns.
Regardless, I don’t think anyone in Finland is turning in their wool sweaters or mittens any time soon.
Here’s what I have for annual temp data for the stations in a that 1 x 1 degree cell
9999 is an average of all measurements.
9999 47.75009467 33.63057858
[Reformatted column data with html code ‘pre’ .mod]
These are the averages of data from the NCDC GSoD data set.
I had a look at the satellite global gridded RSS Lower Troposphere temperature anomalies. I masked just the grid cells that were best covering Finland and averaged them. I used the data from 1980 through 2013 The graph was very similar to the authors’ findings. There appeared to be a defined step change up at about 1989. as in the Helsinki and other data. So, it seems this step up phenomena is not just confined to surface data, but is present in the satellite data as well.
When the AMO switches to “cold” then this “study” will put on ice. Like some scotch drinkers do…I prefer warm … so I can taste the finest qualities. MMmmmm….back to being merry…
I’m still working on it but I noticed something strange about maximum temperatures in remote regions of Australia. There is a step up around 2000.
http://postimg.org/image/liwsrzmqr/
I don’t have the plot on me but I selected a half dozen sites in rural NSW and took the monthly mean maximums, did a moving 12 month mean for all stations together. There is a very unnatural step up around 2000.
Finland used to be dominated by industrial cellulose plants whose stench was everywhere in the 1960’s . From the 1990’s the use of the Internet had led to a steady decline in the celluiose industry and paper making which has removed a lot of particulates from the air. Present Finland is a lot cleaner and sunnier. Some of the increase in temperature could be caused by this change in particles in the air, as well as the decline of noxious smog producing industry in adjoining Russia to the east, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Northern Hemisphere temperatures are very Closely linked to El Nino / La nina events in the Pacific Ocean:
The 1988 Climate Shift was direct cause of Major El Nino in 1986…
You are dreaming. There was no climate shift in 1988, just an ordinary El Nino. It is the one Hansen thinks is the tip of a rising temperature curve, which it isn’t. It is just one of five El Nino peaks of equal height in the eighties and nineties observable in satellite records. They cover the temperature platform from 1979 to early 1997, which is when the super El Nino begins to grow. Do not look for this in ground-based temperature curves because they show a fake warming there. There is no warming, just ENSO in this temperature stretch.