By David Mason-Jones
Upon finding a 13-year gap in its data for an important weather station in Queensland, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology homogenised data from 10 other locations to fill-in the missing years. One of these places was more than 400km away and another almost 2.5 degrees of latitude further South.
Is the resulting data credible? No, is the conclusion reached in a research Report by Australian scientist, Dr. Bill Johnston.
When the US Army Air Force (USAAF) closed its heavy bomber transit base at Charleville at the end of the Second World War the aerodrome reverted to civilian status. The base had been a link in the ferry route delivering aircraft from factories in the US to the war zone.
The whereabouts of any weather observations taken by the Americans is unknown and history is somewhat vague about the dates and times but a 13-year slice of data for Charleville airport from 1943 to 1956 has apparently gone missing.
From as early as July 1940 as the possibility of war with Japan grew, and then when the Pacific War actually broke out, the urgency of the situation resulted in a period when weather observations at Charleville were marked by multiple site relocations, instrument changes and changes in organisational responsibly. After the war there also followed a period of turbulence in the management of aerodromes with the Royal Australian Air Force handing over control to Civil Aviation authorities.
Around 30 years ago as global warming worry grew, so did the demand for accurate temperature data from the past. But this created a problem for the Bureau: How to create a continuous and reliable temperature record at Charleville for the missing raw data?
The solution was simple – make it up. Fill in the 13-year gap with your best guess, create some numbers and fill in the blank spaces. In essence, this is what happened. But to be fair to the Bureau, it wasn’t just a totally whimsical pure guess. On the face of it, it was more sophisticated and used homogenisation.
As Dr. Johnston’s research Report shows in detail, there are severe limits to the usefulness of homogenisation in this instance.
Using aerial photographs and archived maps and plans, Johnston thoroughly investigated the Charleville airport weather station and the way homogenisation was carried out. The Report, backed with tables of data and graphs of weather data from the ten stations used in the homogenisation process, is briefly summarised at http://www.bomwatch.com.au/bureau-of-meterology/charleville-queensland/ At the end of the brief summary a link is available to a PDF of the full Report, complete with tables of data. It is a long, detailed and thorough Report covering many factors and is well worth the investment in time needed to fully understand it.
Homogenisation of temperatures is where you take temperature data from ‘nearby’ weather stations and then estimate what the numbers may have been in the middle. As Johnston points out, this can introduce problems in data analysis because it assumes the nearby weather stations are close enough to make a valid comparison. It also assumes that there are no embedded errors in the other stations’ data which can corrupt the process. In addition, it assumes there are no sudden step changes in the data from the other stations that are not related to climate.
In the case of the stations used to homogenise Charleville the distances are enormous and the data from the other locations contains embedded errors and step changes which can then become homogenised into the Charleville temperature reconstruction.
A glaring problem with homogenisation at Charleville involves the word ‘nearby’. ‘Nearby’ as it applies to Charleville is not just another town or weather station ten or twenty kilometres away. The ‘nearby’ stations are hundreds of kilometres away.
The Report lists distances as: Mungindi – 390 km away. By way of comparison, the distance between London and Paris is 344 km. Would it be statistically sound to homogenise daily temperature readings in Paris by reference to what the temperature was that day in London? It is also notable that Mungindi is 2.46 degrees of latitude South from Charleville.
The others are: Blackall – 234 km distant: Bollon Post Office – 216 km: Injune – 238 km: Longreach – 238 km: Cunnamulla – 192 km: Collarenebri – 414 km: Surat – 291 km: Tambo – 196 km and Mitchell – 171 km.
Please consider whether the use of these distant stations is valid to establish a highly accurate baseline of maximum temperature to identify a slowly rising temperature trend.
With the distances involved, and with the other problems with metadata at the ten ‘nearby’ sites, it may be implausible to rely on the 13 years of infilled data at Charleville to identify the fine degrees of temperature trend needed as evidence of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming at Charleville.
David Mason-Jones is a freelance journalist of many years’ experience. www.journalist.com.au or publisher@bomwatch.com.au
Dr Bill Johnston is a former NSW Department of Natural Resources senior research scientist and former weather observer. www.bomwatch.com.au or scientist@bomwatch.com.au
To read a summary of Dr. Johnston’s paper go to http://www.bomwatch.com.au/bureau-of-meterology/charleville-queensland/ click on the link at the end of the summary to access the full paper.
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Sure there may be some doubts about accuracy, but if the resulting picture helps to milk taxpayers for funds to control the weather what’s the harm? Honesty and ethics are overrated luxuries we can’t afford in a world of government parasites and socialist ideologues. 1984 here we come!
And when all is said and done, what do they come up with? :- A trend of 0.007C per year which seems to cry out to be homogenised.
And yet Big Brother and the ‘Ministry of Truth’ expect, – no demands, that we are to consider this to be catastrophic.
It doesn’t seem to get mentioned that the Charleville Post Office about a km west of the airport was an official recording station from about 1875 to 1959
This is from
http://donaitkin.com/the-bureau-defends-the-methodology-of-its-meteorology/
and ought to be the station number for Charleville Post Office Met Station
“IX Site Name Lat Lon Start End Years PC AWS distance
892 48013 BOURKE POST OFFICE -30.0917 145.9358 1871-04-01 1996-08-01 124.3 98 N 0.000000
895 48030 COBAR POST OFFICE -31.5000 145.8000 1881-02-01 1965-12-01 78.2 91 N 84.842921
926 52026 WALGETT COUNCIL DEPOT -30.0236 148.1218 1878-08-01 1993-06-01 113.7 97 N 113.668073
877 46037 TIBOOBURRA POST OFFICE -29.4345 142.0098 1910-01-01 2014-02-01 103.8 96 N 208.378032
867 44022 CHARLEVILLE POST OFFICE -26.4025 146.2381 1889-05-01 1953-09-01 64.3 98 N 222.073017 “
Also there might be more here than meets the eye – was the met station an Australian operation? Reason I ask is that I know for sure that Selwyn Everist got the introduction to mulga country that he later expanded as Qld Government Botanist while on the met station staff there.
It’s after 10.30 here in OZ and although it’s a beautiful day in Paradise, I’ve not been in a hurry to get going.
Thanks to David for making the post, WUWT for publishing it and to all who have commented.
Charleville was a transit base for heavy bombers en route to various campaigns in the Pacific during WW-II not an operations base. Although originally used by QANTAS, runways were strengthened and lengthened then handed over to the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), with support provided by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The USAAF also operated from Cairns, Townsville and Rockhampton aerodromes. The other ‘top-secret’ heavy bomber base, which was operated by the RAAF, was Corunna Downs near Marble Bar in Western Australia.
Although the point of the post about Charleville is that BoM scientists invented a slab of data, another important point is that by accident or design, the particular period from 1943 to 1956 corresponded with one of the driest and probably the warmest period in the history of central Queensland. Droughts always get cumulatively worse and many places experienced relentless drought from the 1920s to around 1947.
The original Charleville Aeradio office, generator building, control tower, operations center and QANTAS hanger were still visible across the Highway from the town racecourse in a 1965 aerial photograph. The new Flight Services building near the current terminal, which has since been demolished, as well as the new met-enclosure are also visible while the original met-enclosure (and cloud-base searchlight) identified in a 1954 AP seemed to be still operating. The Bureau must have known where the original site was. After all, they paid blokes to observe the weather every day and nothing happened that was not signed-off by the regional office in Brisbane and Head Office in Melbourne. Records therefore must exist.
While archived maps and plans don’t lie it is clear once again, that Bureau scientists are not averse to bending the truth and the data to suit the agenda.
The tragedy is that our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who sells himself as an honest bloke, is headed-off to Glasgow to rub-shoulders with the raving mob armed with a pack of lies. Blah, blah, blah about Australia being headed to the cooker; climate change imperiling the Great Barrier Reef; that dams will never fill again and that we will all be saved by the hydrogen-hub industry being peddled by Andrew Forest.
The grand-band will be there probably including other un-notables like Prince Charles, Malcolm Turnbull and possibly Tim Flannery’s Climate Council’s Will Steffan, Lesley Hughes ….
The pointy-end of all the blah, blah blah rests at the feet of the Director of the Bureau of Meteorology Dr Andrew Johnson who allows or even requires his scientists to change the data to support warming that does not exist.
However, irrespective of homogenization none of the Bureau’s weather station datasets are useful for detecting trend or change in the climate. Of the more than 400 datasets that I’ve analysed using independent statistical methods such that I used for Charleville, none show unequivocal warming.
Prime Minister, Scott Morrison should stay home and investigate the Bureau.
Cheers,
Bill Johnston
Well done, Dr. Johnson! 🙂
Inquiring minds want to know…..
Why does bdgwx bring Paul Homewood into this?
Q: Is b-x a professional troll….got his targets mixed up?
Heh.
Yikes. That’s a really good question. The author is listed as David Mason-Jones. I have no idea where I got Paul Homewood. I don’t even know who that is.
-sigh-
Treatment of missing data is an active field of statistical research.
A web search of “statistical analysis missing data” brigs up a few gems, unfortunately largely regarding survey responses.
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/48/4/1294/5382162 seems a reasonable overview in the medical field.
Naive interpolation (which is what “homogenisation” appears to be) isn’t in the list.
OC –>
I perused the study info and picked this out.
This would be “long station records” in climate research. In essence it says “short records” need not be used because:
Yet it goes on to say:
This pretty much defines using “short records” in temperature analysis and indicates that doing so may (will) give biased results. This is why the emphasis on fabricating data in order to connect short records together rather than simply discarding the records as normal scientific practice would dictate.
The study also defines another case where missing data is random.
13 years of missing data doesn’t seem like missing temperature data at random! This means records missing this much data should simply be treated as two short records, yet the study begins with the following caveat when you include these in the analysis.
Perfect description of Global Average Temperature. Especially when you consider how much area of the globe is not even measured.
A question. This is a current photo of the Wirrabara Forest weather station in South Australia-
https://imgur.com/Z9YmAgW
Now for a long time the weather data were the preserve of SA Forestry from 1879 which is currently in the process of takeover by Parks and Wildlife. But here’s some info on the station-
Wirrabara Forest Climate Statistics (willyweather.com.au)
I’m not sure weather the BoM are monitoring it now but why the disappearance of the Stevenson Screen for what looks some modern digital equipment and when did that occur?
Anyone know what that digital equipment is and what it’s measuring although it appears a new manual rain gauge (near the brief case) added to the older one is to a standard BoM one that’s 0.3M above ground (hence the concrete mound it sits on?)
Yes that long concrete slab with bund wall alongside it is a total curiosity as it seemed to be made of old hand made concrete with local aggregates and I can’t fathom what it ever would have been used for. It’s never had any fixings in it and no drain of any kind as you can see by some water laying in it. Anyway it’s not something you’d want alongside a Stevenson Screen but nevertheless the data going back to 1879 would have been useful.
I’m not sure how this comment relates to the post about the weather station at Charleville in Queensland. The station you have shown in the image is a long, long way from the one under discussion in Queensland. Lrt’s stay focussed on the Chaleville case.
You’re right but see my post re Adelaide weather station (Oct 14 at 10:26) and I I’m interested in Wirrabara Forest due to it’s similar longevity minus UHI like Adelaide. I understand the BoM has taken it over according to NPWS ranger but he did say earlier data needed collating. These are some of the longest temp records in the Southern Hemisphere remember so they’re important.
They’re still collecting weather data minus that obvious Stevenson Screen that was there because here’s an accumulative annual rainfall graph from 1 Jan 1879 to 16 Oct 2021 choosing ‘All Time’ and ‘Accumulative Rainfall’ and ‘Yearly Values’-
Wirrabara Forest Climate Statistics (willyweather.com.au)
If you were looking for some evidence of climate change with annual rainfall at Wirrabara Forest you’d be disappointed with what’s essentially a straight line graph.
In what will be a future that I will not live to see, the false claims of warming while a grand solar minimum brings cold and famine will be seen as one of the most ironic events in human history. Tulip bulbs and foolishness will be as nothing.
The yanks have excellent data. They also have an excellent data sharing policy. A FOIA to the US military, whom is likely to have all the data for as long as they were there….
Might result in success and annoy the crap out of both BOM and NOAA (or if you will, climate.nasa.gov)
Oddgeir