A Pending American Temperaturegate

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Good Article...

From American Thinker, February 24, 2010

"We have been repeatedly told (perhaps "lectured" is a better word) the past twenty years that global warming is occurring. With Climategate and subsequent confessions and bailouts by scientists at the CRU, Penn State, Arizona State, IPCC, et al., we are learning that little to none of the factual content in their "peer reviewed" articles is true. The Medieval Warming Period did occur, and it was warmer than currently; the oceans are not going to flood the plains; and the Arctic Ocean may not be turning into a summer water park. Of course, the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has reported little of this news, and President Obama appears not to be well-informed. But now the global warming story grows more interesting because here in America, we may have our own little "gate." I will call it ATG, for "American Temperaturegate."

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) informs us, based on their "Adjusted Data" for the period from the last decade of the 19th century to 2006, that the temperature for the contiguous U.S. has increased at a rate of 0.69oC/century. NCDC arrives at this conclusion by massaging raw data from a set of meteorological stations located in the contiguous U.S. which they selected on the basis of a 2.5-degree latitude- and 3.5-degree-longitude grid.

The most-asked question, most recently by D'Aleo and Watts, is whether the NCDC's reported increase is correct. Perhaps the value is due to a dominant use (over-selection) of stations in urban locations or because of other issues, such as leaving out stations at higher altitudes for the more recent history and retaining them for the more distant past.

Here, one aspect is considered -- that of the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is tagged as UHIE.

We selected two sets of meteorological stations (48 each, with one station per each of the lower 48 states) from the NCDC master list. The stations in one set were at rural locations -- a rural set. The stations in the other set were at urban locations -- an urban set. The NCDC latitude and longitude station coordinates were used to "fly over" the locations on a computer, using a GPS map application to confirm the rural and urban characteristics. For each of the 96 stations, the NCDC's raw and adjusted temperature data were entered into a spreadsheet application and studied. The "raw" data are the annual average temperatures of the measured data. The "adjusted" data are the annual average temperatures the NCDC derived from the raw data by making a set of "corrective" assumptions for time of day, type of instrument, etc. and guessing the temperature at stations for missing data based on temperatures of other stations at the same latitude and/or region. For a more in-depth understanding of the NCDC protocols for converting raw data to adjusted data, click here. A summary of the findings is in the following table. The values in the table show that the NCDC's rate of increase of temperature, 0.69oC/century, is based on an over-selection of stations with urban locations.

Station Set oC/Century, 11-Year Average Based on the Use of
Raw Data
Adjusted Data

Rural (48)
0.11
0.58

Urban (48)
0.72
0.72

Rural + Urban (96)
0.47
0.65

The values in the table highlight four important considerations:

1) The rate of increase for rural locations, based on as-measured (raw) values, is small (if not, in effect, zero) at 0.11 oC/century.

2) There is definitely a UHIE in that the urban raw data has a rate of increase of 0.72oC/century. This tells us that man has caused warming in urban locations. This finding should not surprise anyone. On the other hand, because the rural value is 15% of the urban value, the UHIE has not caused warming in the rural locations, and it certainly has not caused a global sense of warming other than the aspect that the urban location values when averaged with the rural values produce an average increase which is larger than that of the rural alone.

3) The rural + urban value for the adjusted data, 0.65oC/century, is still less than the 0.69oC/century published by the NCDC. Thus, likely, there are more urban than rural sites used by the NCDC.

4) And this is the "Temperaturegate" aspect: The NCDC's massaging -- they call it "adjusting" -- has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11oC/century to an adjusted value of 0.58oC/century, and no change in the urban values. That is, the NCDC's treatment has forced the rural value to look more like that of the urban. This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the growth of the sizes of and activities within urban locations, unless deception is the goal.

The criticism this makes of the NCDC's treatment of historical data for the contiguous U.S. is the same as a recent Russian paper made of the HadCRUT treatment of historical temperature data for Russia.

Edward R. Long holds a Ph.D. in physics. He is a retired NASA scientist who is a consultant on radiation physics for space flight and on energy/climate in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Read more http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/a_pending_american_temperature.html
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'Archaic' Network Provides Data for Global Warming Theory

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From Fox News, March 02, 2010

American climate data that provides the basis for trillion-dollar global warming legislation is obtained by a 120-year-old weather system.

The Historical Climatology Network consists of volunteers who take daily surface temperature readings and send their reports in by snail mail to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Volunteers take readings at different times of day, round the temperatures to the nearest whole number, and mark the measurements on paper forms.

It is very kind of these volunteers to do this; they're expected to take measurements 365 days a year. But they aren't scientists, and their reports are sometimes a hodgepodge.

Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, has been cataloging problems in the 1,218 weather stations since 2007.

"When the network was put together in 1892, it was mercury thermometers and paper forms. Today it's still much the same," he said.

Requirements aren't very strict: Volunteers need decent vision in at least one eye and a small amount of training to qualify.

Expecting volunteers to be strict about collection of data several times a day 365 days a year in our current busy society is insane. As one would expect, some volunteers don't bother to collect data when they go on vacation or are sick. Watts told FoxNews.com that one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town. It's highly likely that most, if not all, do that type of thing.

"You've got this kind of a ragtag network that's reporting the numbers for our official climate readings," said Watts. He added that 90 percent of the stations violated governmental guidelines for location, and poor placement compromises data.
They are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, but many are close to heat sources, such as exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, and hot asphalt.

If numbers appear faulty or there are more than nine days missing from a month's tally, the whole month is thrown out. Then the Center uses a computer program to determine average temperatures at dozens of nearby stations to guess what the temperature might have been for the month at that station.

Further - the NCDC adjusts for biases caused by the time of day when measurements are taken, for differences between old and new equipment, and to account for flukes that might be caused by poor siting. As if...they can be sure that those bias adjustments are necessary (poor siting?) or that they are adjusting in the right direction...

The NCDC insists its adjusted numbers are an accurate representation of climatic reality, backed up by worldwide trends in air temperature, water temperature, glacier melt, plant flowering and other indicators of climate change.

The final, highly scientific and meticulously gathered numbers - no...wait... numbers that were initially altered by heat sources they were near, then rounded by volunteers, guessed at by the NCDC, then further adjusted to correct for "biases," including uneven times of day when measurements were taken -- ending up with a number that is 0.6 degrees warmer than raw data, which Watts believes is itself suspect...THESE numbers are then used by several top climate research centers, including the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - all three of which have been implicated in Climategate.

Watts says that even a single step — the rounding of the daily temperature — creates a margin of error about as large as the entire global warming trend scientists are hoping to confirm.

But the NCDC says not to worry, the volunteer system is only part of how they gather data. They make sure that the volunteer numbers fit the numbers they've gathered by other methods.

So..why bother with the volunteer system, then? It will probably become moot within a decade anyway.

Lawrimore told FoxNews.com that 5 percent of the historical network has already been automated. Further, a digitally run "Climate Reference Network" (CRN), a system of 114 stations, went fully online in 2008.

Carefully sited in fields around the country, the CRN automatically records daily climate data and transmits it at midnight local time, sending it by satellite directly to NCDC; eliminating snail-mail delay, rounding of numbers and human error.

But NCDC says it will continue to rely on volunteer readings to gather climate data on the local level. (Ummm...why?)

Actually, it sounds to me like the volunteer program exists only to give a good public relations appearance that the NCDC is collecting local data several times a day and cares about that data. The way it really sounds, with all their adjustments - yet a lack of real concern for how the data is gathered - is that the NCDC has decided what the temperature should be, and if it's not...well, then it needs adjusting. Keeping an archaic system justifies manipulating the data.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/02/archaic-weather-network-run-with-volunteers/?test=latestnews