NOAA/NCDC incapable of Honesty.

Prize winning photo from a volcanic eruption, superb.

Once again we witness the obvious manipulation of the facts as we once again see how vacant and unreliable NOAA/NCDC, under Hansen, has become. They have set up a superior system to detect the variation in the weather but they prefer to use the questionable and debunked old weather system which has been demonstrated to be unreliable and grossly inaccurate.

They prefer to list the highest temp from this old system as it suits their Global Warming theories the best. WUWT has done the sums and come up with an article that once again demonstrates what a farce the NOAA/NCDC has become. They are now a laughable entity not to be trusted to give even a guess at the temperature as they apparently are incapable of telling the truth. Time to either close it down or remove management. It has become a white elephant of the CAGW Hansen mentality and obvious warmistas political viewpoint.

An ‘incovenient result’ – July 2012 not a record breaker according to data from the new NOAA/NCDC U.S. Climate Reference Network

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Anthony Watts

I decided to do myself something that so far NOAA has refused to do: give a CONUS average temperature for the United States from the new ‘state of the art’ United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN). After spending millions of dollars to put in this new network from 2002 to 2008, they are still giving us data from the old one when they report a U.S. national average temperature. As readers may recall, I have demonstrated that old COOP/USHCN network used to monitor U.S. climate is a mishmash of urban, semi-urban, rural, airport and non-airport stations, some of which are sited precariously in observers backyards, parking lots, near air conditioner vents, airport tarmac, and in urban heat islands. This is backed up by the 2011 GAO report spurred by my work.
Here is today’s press release from NOAA, “State of the Climate” for July 2012 where they say:

The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during July was 77.6°F, 3.3°F above the 20th century average, marking the hottest July and the hottest month on record for the nation. The previous warmest July for the nation was July 1936 when the average U.S. temperature was 77.4°F. The warm July temperatures contributed to a record-warm first seven months of the year and the warmest 12-month period the nation has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1895.

OK, that average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during July is easy to replicate and calculate using NOAA’s USCRN network of stations, shown below:

Map of the 114 climate stations in the USCRN, note the even distribution.

In case you aren’t familiar with his network and why it exists, let me cite NOAA/NCDC’s reasoning for its creation. From the USCRN overview page:

The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) consists of 114 stations developed, deployed, managed, and maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the continental United States for the express purpose of detecting the national signal of climate change. The vision of the USCRN program is to maintain a sustainable high-quality climate observation network that 50 years from now can with the highest degree of confidence answer the question: How has the climate of the nation changed over the past 50 years? These stations were designed with climate science in mind. Three independent measurements of temperature and precipitation are made at each station, insuring continuity of record and maintenance of well-calibrated and highly accurate observations. The stations are placed in pristine environments expected to be free of development for many decades. Stations are monitored and maintained to high standards, and are calibrated on an annual basis. In addition to temperature and precipitation, these stations also measure solar radiation, surface skin temperature, and surface winds, and are being expanded to include triplicate measurements of soil moisture and soil temperature at five depths, as well as atmospheric relative humidity. Experimental stations have been located in Alaska since 2002 and Hawaii since 2005, providing network experience in polar and tropical regions. Deployment of a complete 29 station USCRN network into Alaska began in 2009. This project is managed by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and operated in partnership with NOAA’s Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division.

So clearly, USCRN is an official effort, sanctioned, endorsed, and accepted by NOAA, and is of the highest quality possible. Here is what a typical USCRN station looks like:

USCRN Station at the Stroud Water Research Center, Avondale, PA

A few other points about the USCRN:

• Temperature is measured with triple redundant air aspirated sensors (Platinum Resistance Thermometers) and averaged between all three sensors. The air aspirated shield exposure system is the best available.
• Temperature is measured continuoisly and logged every 5 minutes, ensuring a true capture of Tmax/Tmin
• All stations were sited per Leroy 1999 siting specs, and are Class 1 or Class 2 stations by that siting standard. (see section 2.2.1 here of the USCRN handbook PDF)
• The data goes through quality control, to ensure an errant sensor hasn’t biased the values, but is otherwise unchanged.
• No stations are near any cities, nor have local biases of any kind that I have observed in any of my visits to them.
• Unlike the COOP/USHCN network where they fought me tooth and nail, NOAA provided station photographs up front to prove the “pristine” nature of the siting environment.
• All data is transmitted digitally via satellite uplink direct from the station.

So this means that:

1. There are no observer or transcription errors to correct.
2. There is no time of observation bias, nor need for correction of it.
3. There is no broad scale missing data, requiring filling in data from potentially bad surrounding stations. (FILNET)
4. There are no needs for bias adjustments for equipment types since all equipment is identical.
5. There are no need for urbanization adjustments, since all stations are rural and well sited.
6. There are no regular sensor errors due to air aspiration and triple redundant lab grade sensors. Any errors detected in one sensor are identified and managed by two others, ensuring quality data.
7. Due to the near perfect geospatial distribution of stations in the USA, there isn’t a need for gridding to get a national average temperature.

Knowing this, I wondered why NOAA has never offered a CONUS monthly temperature from this new network. So, I decided that I’d calculate one myself.
The procedure for a CONUS monthly average temperature from USCRN:

1. Download each station data set from here: USCRN Quality Controlled Datasets.
2. Exclude stations that are part of the USHCN-M (modernized USHCN) or USRCRN-Lite stations which are not part of the 114 station USCRN master set.
3. Exclude stations that are not part of the CONUS (HI and AK)
4. Load all July USCRN 114 station data into an Excel Spreadsheet, available here: CRN_CONUS_stations_July2012_V1.2
5. Note stations that have missing monthly totals data. Three in July 2012, Elgin, AZ, (4 missing days) Avondale, PA,(5 missing days) McClellanville, SC, (7 missing days) and  set their data aside to be dealt with separately.
6. Do sums and calculate CONUS averages for the Tmax, Tmin, Tavg and Tmean data provided for each station.
7. Do a separate calculation to see how much difference the stations with missing/partial data make for the entire CONUS.

Here are the results:

USA Monthly Mean for July 2012:   75.72°F 
(111 stations)
USA Monthly Average for July 2012:   75.51°F 
(111 stations)
USA Monthly Mean for July 2012:   75.74°F 
(114 stations, 3 w/ partial missing data, difference  0.02)
USA Monthly Average for July 2012:   75.55°F 
(114 stations, 3 w/ partial missing data, difference  0.04)

============================

Comparison to NOAA’s announcement today:

Using the old network, NOAA says the USA Average Temperature for July 2012 is: 77.6°F
Using the NOAA USCRN data, the USA Average Temperature for July 2012 is: 75.5°F
The difference between the old problematic network and new USCRN is 2.1°F cooler.

This puts July 2012, according to the best official climate monitoring network in the USA at 1.9°F below the  77.4°F July 1936 USA average temperature in the NOAA press release today, not a record by any measure. Dr. Roy Spencer suggested earlier today that he didn’t think so either, saying:

So, all things considered (including unresolved issues about urban heat island effects and other large corrections made to the USHCN data), I would say July was unusually warm. But the long-term integrity of the USHCN dataset depends upon so many uncertain factors, I would say it’s a stretch to to call July 2012 a “record”.

This result also strongly suggests, that a well sited network of stations, as the USCRN is designed from inception to be, is totally free of the errors, biases, adjustments, siting issues, equipment issues, and UHI effects that plague the older COOP USHCN network that is a mishmash of problems that the new USCRN was designed to solve.
It suggests Watts et al 2012 is on the right track when it comes to pointing out the temperature measurement differences between stations with and without such problems.
NOAA never mentions this new pristine USCRN network in any press releases on climate records or trends, nor do they calculate and display a CONUS value for it. Now we know why. The new “pristine” data it produces is just way too cool for them.
Look for a regular monthly feature using the USCRN data at WUWT.

How AGW Scientists Manipulate the Results.

Here is a fine example on what happen when temps are played around with. The different adjustments manipulates the graph to suit whoever is fiddling with the stats. Steve McIntyre has done a sterling job in exposing the crooks, the false savants and Snake Oil Salespeople, showing through practical applications including calculations, exactly how, when and where the Global Warming Soothsayers have erred or cheated or played with the result just to show how hysterical we are supposed to be about a planet weather system that appears to be almost self correcting.

Will we fry in our beds tonight or be BBQd next week ? It just ain't gonna happen and meanwhile our food and power goes up while those lunatics play paranioa and guess who pays the bill for their inane stupidity, lies, misinformation and thievery.

Gridding from CRN1-2

COMPARISONS
First here is a comparison of my calculation using CRN1-2 data to NOAA results from 1890-2007. (I re-iterate for the N-th time that analyses on U.S. data are not representative of the ROW.) NOAA has values to Aug 2007 and I’ve estimated the last 4 months as the same as the corresponding 2006 months for now. NOAA has run warmer by about 0.2 deg for the past decade and was about 0.1 deg C cooler in the 1930s.

Second here is a comparison of CRN1-2 data to GISS pre-Y2K results. As you see the GISS with the Y2K error was running warm by about the same as NOAA – which may be one reason why they didn’t spot the error. GISS runs a bit warmer than NOAA in the early and mid portions of the graph due to their greater efforts to do an urban adjustment.

Third, here is a comparison of CRN1-2 data to GISS post-Y2K results (but not including the September change from SHAP to FILNET, which seems much too opportunistic.) Relative to CRN1-2, GISS tends to warm the cool periods (1960s, 1900s) and to cool the warm periods (1930s), reducing the size of the mid-20th century cooling. For the U.S., as noted before, by using the trends from “unlit” stations to establish trends – in a context where there are a lot of decent rural stations with long records – the GISS methodology for USHCN stations seems more appropriate than the NOAA (and probably the CRU methods). Unfortunately, this method is not used in the ROW, where there is nothing equivalent to the USHCN.

Finally, here is a reconciliation to John V’s annual results sent ot me yesterday. His 2006 results run much colder than the ones that I calculate- which is presumably an artifact of the 3 months stub period that he used in his calculation. So the anomaly with his 2006 results can be traced definitely to this (which shows up a “cool” difference in the graph below.)

So what does my calculation using CRN1-2 data look like: see below, which includes a 2007 estimate (using the 2006 difference between the CRN1-2 and NOAA to estimate 2007 CRN1-2 from the YTD NOAA results.) In this calculation, the warmest year remains 1934 by a margin of nearly 0.2 (enough to be “statistically significant” according to things that GISS has said, then 1921, then 1998, then 2006 in fourth place. Values since 1998 have been at uninterrupted high levels. Looking at the graph, it’s definitely noticeable – but is it the sort of change that’s inconsistent with the sort of stochastic behavior in the early part of the series – hard to tell here. If you cut the series off in 1997, you certainly wouldn’t have noticed anything odd about the 1990s. You can sort of see in retrospect why MBH98-99 were so excited about how warm 1998 and in such a rush to include it in their article. The main verification issues right now is why the ROW history is so different from the US – is it climatic or nonclimatic? And can one tell?

Global Warming: The Farce. Temperature Stations Wrong.

Follow the distortions, the lies, the mis-information and the people involved.

It does not matter how big the lies are or how many people are involved in the fraud. The truth will eventually out those who have maliciously and intendedly deceived the public and they should be facing charges for their deliberate deceptions.

There is now no excuse for the "Global Warming" hysteria to even exist, for anyone to utter those same lies and exaggerations, as they have been for so long. It is now way too embarrassing for anyone to utter the AGW lies as it will single them out as being part of that conspiracy as well as being part of the team that was solely interested in filling their pockets with taxpayer's loot, under false pretenses. They should be roundly ashamed and bought to justice. The entire saga is a total and complete disgrace to all involved.

New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Anthony Watts

 

PRESS RELEASE – U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments.

Chico, CA July 29^th, 2012 – 12 PM PDT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A comparison and summary of trends is shown from the paper. Acceptably placed thermometers away from common urban influences read much cooler nationwide:

A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.
The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.
Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years of work by Anthony Watts and the many volunteers and contributors to the SurfaceStations project started in 2007.