Guest essay by Dr. Jennifer Marohasy
The hubris of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is on full display with its most recent remodelling of the historic temperature record for Darwin. The Bureau has further dramatically increased the rate of global warming at Darwin by further artificially lowering historic temperatures.
This begins by shortening the historical temperature record so that it begins just after the very hot years of the Federation drought. Then by changing the daily values: that is changing the observed measured temperatures to something else.
For example, on 1st January 1910 the maximum temperature recorded at the Darwin post office was 34.2 degrees Celsius.
A few years ago, the Bureau changed this to 33.8 degrees Celsius, cooling the recorded temperature by 0.4 degrees. In its most recent re-revision of Darwin’s climate history the temperature on this day has been further reduced, and is now just 32.8.
Environmental reporter for the Australian newspaper, Graham Lloyd, asked the Bureau why it had made such changes earlier in the week. A spokesperson is quoted in The Weekend Australian as follows:
“For the case of Darwin, a downward adjustment to older records is applied to account for differences between the older sites and the current site, and difference¬s between older thermometers and the current automated sensor.
“In other words, the adjustments estimate what historical temperatures would look like if they were recorded with today’s equipment at the current site.”
Yet this is a version of exactly the same reason given by the Bureau just six years ago for reducing the temperature on 1 January 1910 by ‘only’ 0.4 degrees.
Neither the equipment, nor the site has changed since ACORN-SAT Version 1 was published in 2012.
Yet another 1 degree has been shaven from the historical temperature record!
To be clear, the weather station has been at the airport since February 1941, and an automatic weather station was installed on 1 October 1990. A Stevenson screen was first installed at the post office site in 1894, and has always been used at the airport site.
So, why was the temperature dropped down by a further one degree for 1 January 1910 in the most recent revision – undertaken just a few months ago? There is no logical or reasonable explanation.
Apparently, at the Bureau, the future is certain and the past can be continually changed – history can be continually revised.
When the daily values are added-up, and compared between versions as annual mean maximum temperatures we see the magnitude of the change – and its effect on temperature trends.
The warming trend of 1.3 degrees C per 100 years in ACORN V1 has been changed to 1.8 degrees C per 100 years in Version 2. The annual average maximum temperature for 1942, as one example, has been reduced by 0.5 degrees.
In the maximum temperature record as actually measured at Darwin from 1895 to the present — and taking into consideration the move from the airport to the post office –- there is no warming trend in the Darwin temperature record. This is consistent with other locations in northern Australia with long high-quality records, for example Richmond in north western Queensland.
What the Bureau has done to the historical temperature record for Darwin is indefensible. The Bureau has artificially shortened and cooled Darwin’s climate history to make it consistent with the theory of human-caused global warming.
Published originally on Dr. Jennifer Marohasy’s website, republished here at her suggestion.
Willis Eschenbach has covered the issues with the Darwin climate station in the past here and here at WUWT. Worth a read.
I saw several comments in the above thread suggesting that there may have not have been a lot of care in how the early measurements were recorded and archived in Australia.
This is nonsense … myth. The Darwin record, as an example, was the responsibility of Charles Todd who was both astronomer and engineer. He was responsible for the building of the overland telegraphic line from Adelaide to Darwin that eventually connected Australia with the world. He was an obsessive ‘data collector’ and ‘data watcher’ and the measurements collected under his supervision are of very high quality – not just the early Darwin record.
We have some exceptionally high quality records for locations in Australia back to about 1890. A problem is that the measuring did not continue through the second half of last century. Also some of these records have not been digitised.
In vetting station records world-wide via sophisticated signal analysis tools, I found a surprising DECREASE in data quality in recent decades for virtually all continents. While some of this can be traced to ever-increasing deployment of automated systems and confusion about the relationship between the daily mid-range value and the actual mean, much of the devolution is due to data drop-out due to editing and to various ill-founded adjustments. Unlike rigorous sciences, which have made great strides forward in data treatment, “climate science” seems to have seriously regressed.
In the coming Federal election here in Australia , with a almost certain victory for the Labour Party, the ones who want 50 % renewable, one of the seats almost certain to go Labour is held by Greg Hunt, who for many years was the Minister for Climate Change.
It will be of interest as to where he, with his large taxpayers pension, ends up.
Probably on some Labour Government Board still pushing the Climate Change nonsense.
MJE
And Greg Hunt signed off on the Abbott Point terminal that Labor was against just before losing to the LNP in 2013. But you are right, he’s not bothered, he has a nice fully fat taxpayer funded pension and free travel for him and his partner for the rest of their natural lives.
Yes! Go Australia! The Lucky Country!
I don’t know if anyone else will find this interesting, but I downloaded all of the NOAA GHCN-Daily files — there’s a bit over a hundred thousand of them, in a Zip file — and ultimately picked out 313 GSN stations that had good data over the 1981-2010 period and generally throughout their lifetimes. They tended to favor North America, Russia, Australia, and Europe , with almost nothing from South America and Africa. I’m going to revisit that later on, but for now this will do.
I took the daily TMIN and TMAX readings separately, and averaged them for the month, and then averaged all of the months over the thirty-year period from 1981 to 2010 to get a baseline average for each month. After that, I got the averages for the rest of the months in the station’s records, and subtracted the baseline months to get anomalies. For the most part, each station provided enough good data to get anomaly measurements back to the early Fifties.
What I found, and found interesting, was that in 220 out of 313 stations, the warming trend of the TMIN measurements was greater than that of the TMAX. i suppose that implies the Urban Heat Island effect, but I was surprised it was so widespread, and such a big difference — over half a degree C at some stations over their lifetime.
I averaged all the stations for each year, and the effect was the same: the warming trend of TMAX was much less than that of the TMIN. in the overall global average of the stations, TMIN had surpassed TMAX by a half-degree C, and raised the global average by a quarter degree more than where it would have been if the two trends had been closer.
I’ll post a couple of charts I made, some in R and some in Excel, that will hopefully make what I said more understandable. As everyone says, at this point, , please quote my exact words so that we all know what we’re talking about — even if you think I don’t know what I’m talking about.
This tool allows you to chart GHCN data, both adjusted and unadjusted, from 1900 to 2014: https://tools.ceit.uq.edu.au/temperature/index.html
It also allows you to select for rural stations only and stations that are classified as rural nightlight. Rural and rural nightlight stations in the unadjusted data amount to 2,624 globally and collectively they show a warming trend of +0.8 C/century from 1900 to 2014. Unfortunately the tool only provides Tavg, but it’s a decent bet that a lot of that is due to Tmin. UHI can’t really account for that warming.
The article in the link below discusses the proposition that enhanced Tmin warming is the result of the daily cycle in the boundary-layer depth coupled with increased greenhouse forcing. It basically says that at night, because there is a much smaller volume of air to warm up, the extra energy added to the climate system from increased greenhouse forcing causes greater warming at night than during the day: https://phys.org/news/2016-03-nights-warmer-faster-days.html
The article reads like a “just-so” story, with an ad hoc mechanism dreamt up to explain an unpredicted behavior. It was always my impression that decreased cooling at night was the UHI signature — is this no longer true?
“The article reads like a “just-so” story, with an ad hoc mechanism dreamt up to explain an unpredicted behavior.”
Yes, and the problem with “talking” to naysayers.
Constant pleas to incredulity.
No, it’s just basic meteorology, that you could try to understand.
When surface air becomes decoupled from the atmosphere above via nocturnal cooling under a surface inversion. The energy retained as measured by T2m temp will be higher (much) than that experienced by one that is uncoupled. The DALR makes that so.
True, I’m not a meteorologist, my degree is in geology — but contrary to popular belief we can read numbers and do basic math. If 2/3 of a set of 313 stations show these inversions over a decades-long series , and an article is written proposing an explanation to said phenomenon, is it safe to presume this event was not predicted? Is the explanation then, that inversions are becoming so common that they are warming the entire globe?
In science, one is supposed to make predictions about future occurrences or findings based on the observations and relationships derived from those observations. When a new, unpredicted observation occurs, and an ad hoc explanation is created, it’s not adding to the predictive power of the model.
Two hundred twenty stations reported TMIN warming faster than TMAX. But 93 stations did not. Can anyone explain how CO2 causes this inversion effect at one site but not another? Can the AGW model explain this difference? Is this just another case of ignoring the data that doesn’t fit the model? If the Earth ON AVERAGE experiences something, then it’s like it happens everywhere, and the model doesn’t have to explain why it happened here, but not there. That’s really not very good science.
“Can anyone explain how CO2 causes this inversion effect at one site but not another? ”
Yes, a meteorologist can.
Me for instance.
No, you cant reduce climate to CO2 doing everything.
It doesn’t.
Geography has an enormous effect with local weather.
In a word “exposure” – to wind.
Places on sloping ground on hills/ground exposed to wind flow will experience few surface inversions.
Those places on more sheltered ground, most usually low ground, will – where katabatic drainage seeps to. In hollows, valleys FI.
BTW: this is one reason why the Sat tropospheric temp series (UAH, RSS etc) do not capture the warming of AGW.
James Schrumpf
The UHI signature is not expected to be present to any significant degree in rural and rural nightlight stations. Yet the nighttime warming in such locations is clear, even in the unadjusted GHCN data. Something else at these locations is causing the decreased cooling at night (or warming at night, if you will).
BOM are the worst for audacious fraud. Stokes no doubt doesn’t see an issue with fraud, only with criticisms that might not be accurate, but the actual data fraud, he leaves well alone, which is why I respect the likes of Stokes as much as I respect Smollet
The Australian climate zealots are at the forefront of historical revisionism.
Even “scientists” like Gerhis, have been caught bare faced lying, caught by their own emails in FOI
Of course the conversation deleted all comments on the article with Gergis, that pointed out the evidence she was lying in the article.
Apologies if it’s been mention before, but the changes made recently by the BoM to the Darwin record appear to be pretty consistent with the adjustments made to that record by the BEST team back in 2013: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/152446
Best also identified a huge ‘continuity break’ in the Darwin record, centered around 1940. This seems to coincide with the station move mentioned, which must have taken the thermometer from a warmer to a cooler location. Failure to adjust for this obvious change would render the trend in the data meaningless.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Stations/TAVG/Figures/152446-TAVG-Alignment.png
Annual Darwin data on the BEST site only runs to 2012, but from 1910 to 2012 the raw trend is -0.28C/century and the adjusted trend is +1.03C/century; a difference of 1.31C/century.
I would argue that you don’t “adjust for this obvious change” but that you stop the record at the break and give the station a new name and ID for records after the break. It’s not the same location after all; you said there was a station move. Who moves a station, from a place where it’s accrued a 100-year series of temperature measurements, to a new place that is noticeably cooler — or warmer — and “adjusts” for the change by changing the old data to match the new? The data has been made meaningless by the adjustment.
I think there were a few more ‘explosive’ events around Darwin, just after 1940…?
What temperatures would look like with today’s equipment at the current sites …..
Why is this an aim of the BOM?
Surely it would be more logical to leave old temperature observations as they were, then to adjust recent temperatures with different equipment, to look as they would in the past.
That way pays respect to the many conscientious observers who carried out duties to the best of their abilities, with the best instruments that were feasible, through all types of weather and circumstances.
Let us not throw them on a scrap heap of science, overtaken by the progress of minds imagining a different reality to suit an ideology.
It now seems that EVERY pre 1970 official Australian temperature has been BOM adjusted. Every one of many millions. Not one was correct. Geoff
Thanks Geoff for putting this so succinctly.
The Bureau of Misinformation does not respect the work of it’s own past employees in previous generations.
They prefer the mumbo jumbo of models and algorithms and homogenised data.
One day a real temperature reading might bite them on the bum
And it would be deserved !
Geoff Sherrington
It makes no difference to the overall trend whether you raise more recent temperatures affected by a move to a colder area or lower older temperatures recorded in a warmer area. You have to do one or the other in order to set the two records on a like-for-like basis.
It makes no difference to that station’s trend, but it’s going to artificially warm or cool that trend when compared to the baseline for getting an anomaly value. Anyway, didn’t you just say that the “adjustments” changed the trend from -0.28C/century to 1.03C/century?
Are the people who do things like this just completely ignorant of correct scientific practices, do they just not care, or are they actively trying to pull off a fraud?
It has to be one of the above, because there’s just no way a thinking person would take a weather station with a hundred-year record, move it a couple of miles away to a much cooler location, and then try to pretend that making some “adjustments” can make all of that change go away and it will be just like before , as though nothing happened.
It beggars the imagination.
DRW54,
That imaginative response, dogma laden, reveals little more than your low knowledge of what has been happening.
The story is ever so much more complicated than you seem to imagine. I can say this confidently, because I have been learning about BOM adjustments for the last 15 years, after an initial episode in 1982 showed how troublesome much climate work is for temperature records. Try to come up to steam with what really happens.
The present BOM method. like the global exercises, hold the present constant and adjust the past. My proposal is to hold the past constant and adjust the recent. You will likely get a vastly different outcome. Geoff.
“To be clear, the weather station has been at the airport since February 1941, and an automatic weather station was installed on 1 October 1990. A Stevenson screen was first installed at the post office site in 1894, and has always been used at the airport site.”
–
There would be a difference between the one at the post office which would have been 20 meters above sea level, with strong sea breezes coming up the nearby cliffs only 400 meters from the coastal edge in a small shantytown with dirt roads (1890’s -1941) , horses and buggy’s and the odd car late in the piece,
and one at the airport, bitumen now I think, not sure about the war years which has a number of international and national flights daily plus has housed our defence airforce planes , Mirages in the 1960’s and F/A18’s since 1984. It has always had a large runway surface area. It is much lower in elevation being barely 2 meters above sea level ( if that) and is situated at least 2 kilometres possibly 3 from the sea coast edge.
–
The difference between the temperatures at ground level at the 2 sites would easily/ obviously / sensibly be accounted for by the different locations, elevations, air streams and surrounding tarmac (or lack thereof at the post office).
–
Confusing matters is the fact that the change seems to have been initiated about a year before the bombing of Darwin February 14th 1942, the Post Office (famously destroyed in said bombing) and the airport, amazing the screen stayed intact? I wonder if the dates are wrong and the new screen was actually set up in 1942, not 1941, because the one at the Post Office was destroyed in the bombing.
–
Be that as it may the sad fact is that Darwin, as a temperature site, is entirely influenced by the effect of the surrounding sea temperature.
Thus it can vary by a degree depending on the fact that sea (ocean) temperature anomalies can vary locally by a degree over a year or a few years but the temperature anomalies must on a decadal or century coverage reflect and be tied to the average sea temperature.
Hence a shift up or down of a degree Centigrade is entirely possible for a year or a few years but not, normally, for decades and certainly not upwards by a degree plus over a century.
The BOM would certainly have lots of records for sea temperatures in the Darwin and Indonesian area.
These records cannot show a decadal or century shift upwards of sea temperature enough to cause a 1 degree C rise in the related coastal land temperature over that time period.*
(NB the sea temperature rise to cause a nearby 1 C land rise could be quite small in comparison but still should be clearly measurable.)
The BOM is presumably quite well aware of this, knows the altered figures are not physically feasible but still allows this portrayal to go ahead.
–
* If sea temps world wide or OHC if wishing to use a more often quoted measure did show such a rise the world would be 1.4C warmer over the same period with no missing heat QED.
Good comment.
The adjusters can often produce superficial reasons for what they have done, but it often just doesn’t pass the smell test of a properly inquiring scientific mind.
There have been some reviews of the BOM methods for adjustments in the version 1 of ACORN-SAT.
Those interested in some depth about the problem, in addition to the work of Dr Marohasy, can read my response to the final report of the Technical Advisory Forum, dated 29 Sept 2017. It has not been made public before.
Copies were sent to the Forum members, but no response was received from most members and a perfunctory one with no technical comment from the secretariat. I am happy to correspond with interested others on this. sherro1 at optusnet dot com dot au
http://www.geoffstuff.com/ghs_taf_acorn.docx
Geoff that link you provided does not work for me here in South Australia.
Is there an problem in the link ?
Billl
Ummmmm I gave up trying to open the link from my email application and instead tried from the actual post on the WUWT website.
So now I have it open on my screen.
But I cannot save it at all..For later reference or copy & paste to another document so as to get around the block on saving.
I don’t use WORD because of these kinds of stuff ups. Too dopey for words.
So.. what next Geoff ?
DRW54 linked to a graphic at BEST in an earlier post, which caused me to download BEST’s LATEST – Breakpoint Corrected.zip file, and in the natural course of things I got to the data.txt file, where I read this , which caught my eye.
That is wrong; it violates most of the rules for calculating uncertainty and significant digits in measurements. Don’t believe me though; here’s a page on it from The Penn State University chemistry department:
http://chemistry.bd.psu.edu/jircitano/sigfigs.html
Another page, from the Faraday School of Physics at the University of Toronto, gives these rules for the propagation of error and significant figures therein:
The correct result of the conversion, according to the accepted rules of error propagation and significant digits, would be:
sigmaZ = Z * sqrt((sigmaX/X) ^2 + (sigmaY/Y)^2)
sigmaZ = (40.5-32)* 5/9 * sqrt((0.05/40.5)^2 + (0/(9/5))^2)
sigmaZ = 4.7 * sqrt(0.0012 ^ 2)
sigmaZ = 4.7 * .0012
sigmaZ= 0.006
The final answer would be, according to the rules of error propagation and significant digits:
4.7 + – 0.006 , because 4.7 has only 1 significant digit to the right of the decimal place, so the uncertainty would as well.
The answer as given in the data.txt page is way too overprecise for the starting values. 40.5 has three significant digits, and is the only measurement. 32 and 5/9 are constants and have no uncertainty. 32 has two significant digits, and 5/9 when converted to a decimal can have no more than 2.
No matter how you look at it, or from where you learned to do physics measurements, you have to know that you can’t convert a number with one significant digit in the decimal’s place t a number with four. it’s just not done.
When will there be charges brought against such fraudsters?
A case can surely be brought that these people are raising their chances of getting grant funding (i.e., taxpayers’ hard-earned money) and, with a little will-to-win by the police, a case for financially motivated deception.
It wont be long now before we reach the 2C hand rail thingy through adjustments, perhaps someone cant wait for nature to get us there? Most people are too stupid to know the difference anyway.
Don’t worry folks, in 100 years, today will be much cooler than it is today.
Ya know, when you say it like that, it sounds bat shit crazy.