The Climate Conspiracy
January 4, 2010

Last night, in near freezing Louisiana temperatures, I was grilling some burgers on my Christmas present from my lovely fiance. As I saw the grill's thermometer read between 350 and 400'F it reminded me of this photo (courtesy of Anthony Watts, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., and SurfaceStations.org.)

It's a photo of a surface station in Hopkinsville, KY. See the white bird house looking thing hanging off the building? That's the thermometer. Notice that it comes off of a chimney of a brick house, it's just above a black asphalt driveway, that big white thing is an A/C compressor, and it's directly over a Weber grill.

The data from this thermometer becomes a part of the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) Station of Record for Hopkinsville, KY. Initially, this seems rather humorous. They are literally "cooking the books" at this station. But then it sinks in that this station data is being compiled in with the rest of the data from the country, and it is from these stations that we determine the change in temperature over time.

You may wonder if stations such as this one is unique. Sadly, it is not. All of the following graphics are available here.

The thermometer next to the trash burning barrel is probably my favorite. And again, this all seems hilarious, but we must realize that this data from these stations are being used to convince legislators to pass laws that will, literally, tax almost every thing that we do. Not so funny any more, is it?

Anthony Watts has released a PDF report titled "Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?" You can download it here. I will give a brief overview of his report, and then cover some additional items.

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These surface stations are supposed to be setup in accordance with guidelines given by the NOAA's Climate Reference Network (CRN). The guidelines are available to see here.

In 2007 a project was initiated by Watts to visually inspect and document the quality of the surface stations. So what did they find? Some of the stations that they found are pictured above. We can see the thermometers located next to asphalt parking lots, located next to air-conditioner exhausts, located on brick buildings, located next to BBQ pits, located next to trash burning barrels, located on rooftops and near sidewalks. All of which absorb and radiate heat. These all influence the thermometer to read higher than it would otherwise.

Let's look at the numbers.

There are 1,221 active climate-monitoring surface stations in the USA. Of those 1,221 stations, 948 have been evaluated by Watt's Surface Stations project. Of these 948, 90% have been found to be very poorly sited. Poorly sited means that they are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures. This means the overwhelming majority of stations in the USA have been reporting bad data. (Please note that the USA data is generally considered the best data in the world. Yikes!)

Here is a graphical breakdown of the sites and their quality rating as described by the NOAA CRN. (Note: This pie graphs scale is not quite right. The red that shows 8% for very bad sites is a little larger than the green that shows 8% for very good sites.)

As you can see, 90% of the surveyed surface stations have an error greater than or equal to 1.0 'C. This amount of error is greater than the amount of global warming we are supposed to have experienced from 1900-2000. Let me say that again: the amount of error is greater than the amount of warming we are supposed to have undergone in the last 100 years. The other 10% of the stations have been surveyed to show that they are capable of giving good data.

The next couple of graphics demonstrate the distribution of surface stations across the continental United States.

So, now we know that according to the NOAA CRN's guidelines, 90% of the surface stations in the USA are not capable of giving good data. They have errors greater than the amount of global warming we have supposedly experienced in the last one hundred years. It would be easy to assume that the other 10% give good data all the time.

Unfortunately that is not the case. Let's see why.

To collect surface station data site observers are given a card on which they are supposed to fill out the maximum and minimum temperatures each day. At the end of the month they are supposed to submit their card to National Climatic Data Center so that they can be compiled into the national database.

Well, what happens when the site observer doesn't work on a particular day? No readings occur. What happens when that observer is off because of a holiday? No readings occur. In fact, in Marysville, California, at Chico University Mr. Watts found that the temperature form for July 2007 had only 14 of 31 days completed. That is less than half a month's worth of data.

Missing data is not a rare phenomenon. Many sites have missing data. So even if a site is rated as capable of providing good data by the NOAA CRN, the data still must be read by someone. If that person is missing half the month, then you're not getting a significant quantity of good data.

So what happens when stations have missing data? From Watts' report: "[There exists] a data algorithm used by NCDC called FILNET, short for Fill Missing Original Data in the Network, that is used to “infill” missing data using interpolations of data from surrounding stations. After reading about it, I came to the conclusion that NCDC uses FILNET to create “missing” data where none was ever actually. measured."

From a government report on the matter:

Estimates for missing data are provided using a procedure similar to that used in SHAP [Station History Adjustment Program]. This adjustment uses the debiased data from the SHAP and fills in missing original data when needed (i.e. calculates estimated data) based on a “network” of the best correlated nearby stations. The FILNET program also completed the data adjustment process for stations that moved too often for SHAP to estimate the adjustments needed to debias the data.

Basically, if data is missing from a certain site then data is taken from near-by sites and adjusted to fit the missing data site. Wow.

So, we see that 90% of our stations are not capable of providing quality data, and then we see that sites which have missing data have data filled in from surrounding sites by the FILNET program. So even a site that is capable of producing good data, if data is not read for a day, could have bad data filled in for it by this FILNET program. This means that even the 10% of sites that are capable of providing good data are contaminated by the 90% of sites that have bad data.

So now that we see the quality of data from the stations is overwhelmingly poor, let's look a little more at the numbers and types of stations.

In April 1978 there were over 6,000 surface stations, and now we have dropped down to around 1,200. Of these stations, there are two main types. There are stations that are found in urban areas, which are more likely to be contaminated by local heat sources (see the photos above), and then there are stations in rural areas, which are less likely to be contaminated by local heat sources. Below is a great example of a well sited station in a rural location in Tucumcari, NM:

So, we know somewhere around 4,800 surface stations dropped out of monitoring temperatures. The vast majority of the stations that dropped out were rural stations. This is unfortunate because the rural stations are the ones that tend to give the most accurate data (because of less urban heat contamination.) Here is a graphic (courtesy of ICECAP) displaying the relative surface station dropout of rural vs urban locations.

Since the majority of stations that dropped out were rural ones, we can deduce that when the FILNET program is applied to stations that are missing data, data is more likely to come from urban (contaminated) locations than rural ones.

By now, I'm sure you're thinking "holy shit, can it get any worse?" Unfortunately it does.

After all the data is collected from the stations, and after missing station data is created by the FILNET program, adjustments are applied to “homogenize” the data (that is, data is compared to surrounding stations and adjusted accordingly) that impart an even larger false warming trend.

Below is an example of the "homogenized" data. The blue line is the "raw" (unaltered) data. The red line is the "homogenized" (altered) data. You can clearly see the data from 1880 has been altered to appear cooler in the beginning, and less cooler as time travels toward the present. This does two things: 1. it makes it appear the past was cooler, which makes our current warming look unique, and 2. it gives the data a steeper warming trend, which makes our current warming look more severe.

And lastly we can look at this graph released by the NOAA that demonstrates the differences between the raw and homogenized data sets. Note that this is a graph of differences, it shows the difference between the raw and homogenized data sets. Since this graph trends upwards, it means that the homogenized data sets have been reading (much) warmer than the raw data sets. It's funny how this curve is very similar to the curve we see showing a warming trend.

We see that NOAA’s adjustments to raw temperature data have generally been to increase, not decrease, recent temperatures. The net effect of NOAA’s adjustments is to increase the rise in temperature since 1900 by 0.5 'F.

So, after we consider all of these facts, let's answer our question of "how good is the quality of U.S. temperature data? The evidence overwhelmingly supports that is of poor quality. Do you think the U.S. temperature data should be used to write legislation?

Update:

How dare I forget this ClimateGate email:

From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones
Subject: LAND vs OCEAN
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:36:15 -0700


We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since
1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might
claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.

See attached note.

Comments?

Tom

Attachment Converted: “c:\eudora\attach\LANDvsOCEAN.doc”

You gotta love that they know they are feeding us shit.