NOAA Reinstates July 1936 As The Hottest Month On Record

[Jonger]

Older TOBS makes sense, but the adjustments have continued into recent times... That's an issue for me. 

[forkyfork]

There will always be anomalies in the positive and negative direction. However, positive anomalies on a global scale are outnumbering negative anomalies by a massive margin. I don't doubt you have seen a reduction in heat because there's nothing in AGW that says that can't happen.

Do you think maybe the heat of the 30s in combination with the poorer farming practices at the time allowed for a greater rate of heat intrusion into your area? I don't know much about upper Midwest climate, I'm just wondering what could have been the cause.

poor farming practices were a significant contribution to the dust bowl and all the dried out dark soil made it easier for solar energy to heat the lower atmosphere

[tamarack]

 

Citation needed, please.

 

There is not much difference between adjusted temperatures and the unadjusted ones. They both pretty much follow the same trajectory.

 

 

The adjustments appear to be 0.1C or less, but it's interesting that up thru the mid 1950s the adjustments were essentially always downward, and from about 1980 on the adjustments have almost all been upward. I'm guessing there's solid scientific backing for those trends, but on the surface it sure looks suspicious.

[ORH_wxman]

Older TOBS makes sense, but the adjustments have continued into recent times... That's an issue for me. 

 

 

A lot of stations have gone to 7am over the years...so any lagging stations that do that will introduce a cold bias once they do. 7am reset time will double count an exceptionally cold morning. Just like the previous stations that reset at 4 or 5 pm would double count an exceptionally hot afternoon...though admittedly there weren't as many of those stations, but they were more common back in the first half of the 20th century, so that introduced a warm bias. The recent TOBs adjustments do look slightly high when compared to the Menne et al paper...but not too drastic.

 

If you want to nitpick an adjustment, then the one to nitpick is probably the "Station History Adjustment Procedure". This is an adjustment to try to account for the change in location of a station...but it introduces tons of variables such as UHI, elevation changes, and proximity to coastline, water, and/or land features. This type of adjustment is one that should really just be discarded because we have way more than enough stations that haven't changed location to accurately calculate mean temperature. We really only need about 100 stations in the U.S. to get a pretty darned accurate temperature...but we have thousands. It is an uneccessary attempt to gain more precision when none is needed and probably introduces more subjective tweaking than you would like. When a station changes location, they should really just treat it as a new station, rather than trying to splice it together with all sorts of attempted adjustments.

 

The new USCRN dataset has 114 stations in the contiguous US, but it has only been up for like 9 years. These stations were placed in pristine siting locations where little land change is expected over the next several decades...so they will be a good source of uncontaminated data going forward, but they don't help us with the past.

[bluewave]

Too bad the new paper is behind a paywall.

 

 

Vose, Russell S., and Coauthors, 2014: Improved Historical Temperature and Precipitation Time Series for U.S. Climate Divisions. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 53, 1232–1251.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-13-0248.1

 

Improved Historical Temperature and Precipitation Time Series for U.S. Climate Divisions

Russell S. Vose, Scott Applequist, Mike Squires, Imke Durre, Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams Jr.,Chris Fenimore, Karin Gleason, and Derek Arndt

NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina

 

Abstract

This paper describes an improved edition of the climate division dataset for the conterminous United States (i.e., version 2). The first improvement is to the input data, which now include additional station networks, quality assurance reviews, and temperature bias adjustments. The second improvement is to the suite of climatic elements, which now includes both maximum and minimum temperatures. The third improvement is to the computational approach, which now employs climatologically aided interpolation to address topographic and network variability. Version 2 exhibits substantial differences from version 1 over the period 1895–2012. For example, divisional averages in version 2 tend to be cooler and wetter, particularly in mountainous areas of the western United States. Division-level trends in temperature and precipitation display greater spatial consistency in version 2. National-scale temperature trends in version 2 are comparable to those in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network whereas version 1 exhibits less warming as a result of historical changes in observing practices. Divisional errors in version 2 are likely less than 0.5°C for temperature and 20 mm for precipitation at the start of the record, falling rapidly thereafter. Overall, these results indicate that version 2 can supersede version 1 in both operational climate monitoring and applied climatic research.

 

 

 

[LocoAko]

Thanks for keeping a level head, Will.

 

Seconded. 

[Jonger]

poor farming practices were a significant contribution to the dust bowl and all the dried out dark soil made it easier for solar energy to heat the lower atmosphere

 

I have also heard that clearing forest is a negative feedback, the soil is lighter than the green it replaced.

 

So the poor farming practices in the US resulted in a worldwide temp spike.

 

I hesitantly post this, considering how manipulated it is.

 

[tacoman25]

poor farming practices were a significant contribution to the dust bowl and all the dried out dark soil made it easier for solar energy to heat the lower atmosphere

 

Wouldn't all the dust have also made it harder though?

[tacoman25]

I have also heard that clearing forest is a negative feedback, the soil is lighter than the green it replaced.

 

 

I'm pretty sure that clearing forest tends to allow higher day time temps, and lower night time temps. Greater spread overall.

[blizzard1024]

You're a meteorologist, not a climatologist, remember that. There's a difference. You wouldn't go to a gynecologist if you were giving birth, you'd go to an obstetrician. Just because they both deal with a woman's reproductive system doesn't make them the same.

 

When I was in school, all the meteorology students that couldn't hack the mathematics and physics went into climatology..... so I guess you have a point.

[Mallow]

When I was in school, all the meteorology students that couldn't hack the mathematics and physics went into climatology..... so I guess you have a point.

 

You've pretty much exhibited every fallacy in the book in this thread...

 

Glad to know you feel so superior to climate scientists, though. >_<

[The_Global_Warmer]

Most METs are very skeptical because we know how complicated the real atmosphere is as we are tasked with short term predictions. If you are a MET and not skeptical I question your understanding of the atmosphere.

More like they are afraid of the crazy deniers and dramatic backlash that comes with it.

I can tell you there are dozens of you guys and gals with Red tags that won't participitate here because of the repercussions over the rest of the forum and dealing with the crap you are spewing.

Jobs on the line if climatologists don't FRADULENTLY manipulate data within the NCDC?

How are other professionals expose to deal with that?

It's like talking to folks who think vaccines cause autism or The Bush administratration set up 9-11.

You are beyond reason. And only you and the people who believe these things like you don't see that.

Engaging in irrational unreasonable people is a death trap.

Which is why red taggers won't engage you giving you the perception that they are in cahoots with you.

[The_Global_Warmer]

 

 

So you can't show evidence that there is actually a "charade" because the people perpetrating the charade would prevent any evidence from being produced?

 

Sounds like you got a start on a great conspiracy theory. Perhaps if you weave in some JFK assisination angles and some aliens you can have a real winner among the tin foil hat crowd.

 

Wait... didn't you just say they wouldn't publish any evidence? Sounds like your consipiracy theory already has holes in it.

Perhaps you could spend a little time researching what the changes that were made are, and why they were done. ORH_wxman has given you a couple places to start. Here's another place to look:

 

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/

 

Where in that procedure do you think they made a mistake? Why? What would you have done differently? How would you account for changes to the test equipment over time? How would you adjust from Time of Observation changes? How would you account for human error? Or does none of that actually affect the raw data?

 

If you're really skeptical, and not just being contrarian for the sake of it, then you will research these questions and come to your own conclusions.

 

We are still waiting?  And we will wait as long as it takes blizzard.

 

I look forward to your analysis and subsequent publication outing the NCDC.

[blizzard1024]

We are still waiting?  And we will wait as long as it takes blizzard.

 

I look forward to your analysis and subsequent publication outing the NCDC.

 

Basically you have so many problems in the various observation sites, observation location changes, changes in equipment, TOB, data stations dropping out, changing land use albeit vegetation or pavement that the surface record is rife with uncertainties. They have tried their best to reconcile this but when the entire trend in the U.S dataset is because of adjustments it just is not convincing. In any event, the U.S land surface is small relative to the globe.  Steven Goddard, Anthony Watts and others have torn apart the USHCN convincingly so I would refer you to their work. I am not going to re-invent the wheel on this.  

[blizzard1024]

More like they are afraid of the crazy deniers and dramatic backlash that comes with it.

I can tell you there are dozens of you guys and gals with Red tags that won't participitate here because of the repercussions over the rest of the forum and dealing with the crap you are spewing.

Jobs on the line if climatologists don't FRADULENTLY manipulate data within the NCDC?

How are other professionals expose to deal with that?

It's like talking to folks who think vaccines cause autism or The Bush administratration set up 9-11.

You are beyond reason. And only you and the people who believe these things like you don't see that.

Engaging in irrational unreasonable people is a death trap.

Which is why red taggers won't engage you giving you the perception that they are in cahoots with you.

 

If you speak out that you don't believe in CAGW you could lose your job where I work. I believe that some modest warming is possible but we don't have a full understanding of how the atmosphere will react when we add an extra 1% of external radiative forcing to the GH effect from doubling CO2. That 1% is supposed to kick off a bunch of feedbacks that will wreck the climate. The science is settled on this they say. Many METS stay away from this forum probably because it is full of global warming fanatics (although there are some cooler heads here and there).

[ORH_wxman]

Basically you have so many problems in the various observation sites, observation location changes, changes in equipment, TOB, data stations dropping out, changing land use albeit vegetation or pavement that the surface record is rife with uncertainties. They have tried their best to reconcile this but when the entire trend in the U.S dataset is because of adjustments it just is not convincing. In any event, the U.S land surface is small relative to the globe.  Steven Goddard, Anthony Watts and others have torn apart the USHCN convincingly so I would refer you to their work. I am not going to re-invent the wheel on this.  

 

 

Goddard's analysis ridddled with errors...it is essentially useless as scientific evidence.

 

Watts is in the process of writing a paper for the USHCN dataset and how their adjustments are incorrect....while he may eventually succeed in publishing the paper, it won;t change the trend that much. His original draft didn't even include TOBs in it...which is a signifcant portion of the necessary adjustments.

 

The trends that you can nitpick legitamately such as "Station History Adjustment Procedure" do not alter the trend all that much. Perhaps 10-20% as I said before. Statistically significant? Yes. A game-changer? I don't think so.

[blizzard1024]

You've pretty much exhibited every fallacy in the book in this thread...

 

Glad to know you feel so superior to climate scientists, though. >_<

 

That is the truth when I was in school back in the 80s and early 90s. Just because you can do math and physics does not mean you are a superior person to others. Where did you get that from?  And, in fact, most climatologists today are actually PhDs in mathematics or applied physics.

[Snow_Miser]

Many times when some skeptics say the adjustments are flawed, they just show a picture of the adjustments themselves, and because they are overall in the positive direction, they claim fraud based off of this. But every adjustment is necessary to the surface record. As Will said, TOBS is an incredibly important adjustment. But some skeptics go nuts because of the "hockey stick" like shape to the adjustment. They cannot support why each and every individual adjustment is flawed, but claim that the net adjustments are flawed. It makes zero sense. 

[The_Global_Warmer]

You are making these claims you have to back them up. 

 

You can believe whatever you want.  But you are calling NCDC employees, scientists who have worked hard frauds, you claimed they didn't publish their adjustments and were taken to task on it.

 

I have no reason to doubt them.

 

I once let myself get compromised over Roy Spencer making quite the downward adjustment IIRC in 2013 on UAH because it coincided with a period of warming over I dunno like 6 months+. 

 

I ended up being wrong and personally apologizing to Dr. Spencer. 

 

What you are doing goes way beyond that.  You are not willing to even have a discussion about this. 

 

If you were serious you would have come in this thread after doing your research and tried to prove why NCDC employees are committing fraud to keep their jobs.

 

On top of that this thread is about the NCDC making an adjustment that moves July of 2012 down below 1936.  The opposite adjustment of what the Watts and Co always cry about. 

 

And the OP took a shot at them as if there wasn't enough publicity.

 

All this hoopla over a record that will be broken multiple times before 2100.

 

On top of that there are a whole lot of other physical evidence of AGW then tinkering with the temperature data to get it right no less. 

 

Go ask the Chinese govt why they are handing out hundreds of millions now to study the Tibet glaciers?

 

The Dalia Lama himself and his people have been talking about the sudden changes there since the late 1990s the same abrupt land ice loss changes that have continued to increase everywhere.

 

Go to Alaska and ask the gold miners/diggers about the gold rush from the ever rapidly receding glaciers.

 

What exactly is being done about AGW world wide?  What economies are being destroyed?

 

Is it a bad thing for humans to use clean energy?  What is the problem here?  Where is this crazy fear coming from? 

 

It's so funny to me that pretty much all mets take saving lives seriously.  They go on tv and interrupt football games and NASCAR races locally every year many times a year for hours on end to save lives and of course since 99 percent of the metro didn't get severe level weather people b**ch and whine.  Only when folks die is when they shut up.  But yet don't even give credit that these mets still saved lives even tho people died.

 

There are thousands of climate scientists in the field in near unanimous agreement of these dangers because they want to save lives and you do is trash them and call them frauds.

 

So what's the problem?

 

And where are all these global warming fanatics?  If you count me that is one.  Even tho I am certainly not one and I rarely speak about anything but real time tracking.

 

It's a faucet of strawman coming out of you.  But why?  Who is your beef with? 

 

In this case it was the NCDC you were asked to back it up and you refuse or can't, same difference. 

 

What is wrong with scientists saying certain CAGW scenarios are possible? 

 

It may be a remote of a chance as a meteor or comet destroying Earth.  But you don't see a loud small group of folks denying that chance and wanting any spending on sky tracking and preventive deterrents.

 

A threat to humanity is a threat no matter how remote.  People don't have a political or personal agenda against the Earth being ruined by a hurling rock in space.

 

But they do with this topic.  They blame one thing after another and in the end nothing has changed because of climatology on a large scale and nothing bad.

[Snow_Miser]

GHCN and CRUTEM4 is validated when independent studies use other indicators of temperature to conclude that the thermometer record is robust. Such as temperature proxies, sea ice, and sea level pressure change.

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL054271/abstract

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50425/abstract

[FloridaJohn]

Basically you have so many problems in the various observation sites, observation location changes, changes in equipment, TOB, data stations dropping out, changing land use albeit vegetation or pavement that the surface record is rife with uncertainties. They have tried their best to reconcile this but when the entire trend in the U.S dataset is because of adjustments it just is not convincing. In any event, the U.S land surface is small relative to the globe. Steven Goddard, Anthony Watts and others have torn apart the USHCN convincingly so I would refer you to their work. I am not going to re-invent the wheel on this.

It sounds like what you are saying is that the temperature record is so inaccurate that it can't be trusted to be used for any purposes. Is that your position?

So when the local weatherman says it will be warmer tomorrow than I should basically ignore that? If the temperature record is that wrong, then there is no other solution. Why do you suppose we keep track of the temperature if the record is so bad? Wouldn't it be better to just completely ignore temperature for forecasts or other purposes?

[blizzard1024]

It sounds like what you are saying is that the temperature record is so inaccurate that it can't be trusted to be used for any purposes. Is that your position?

So when the local weatherman says it will be warmer tomorrow than I should basically ignore that? If the temperature record is that wrong, then there is no other solution. Why do you suppose we keep track of the temperature if the record is so bad? Wouldn't it be better to just completely ignore temperature for forecasts or other purposes?

 

Its good enough for day to day weather, not good enough for long term climate IMO. Geez, that was a dumb question.  

[FloridaJohn]

Its good enough for day to day weather, not good enough for long term climate IMO. Geez, that was a dumb question.

What makes it useful for day-to-day weather?

If I write down those temperatures why does the value of the data decrease?

What is the temporal resolution of the temperature data? In other words, how long until it is no longer useful? 1 hour? 1 day? 1 month? 1 year?

I am trying to understand your reasoning here, so please forgive my dumb questions.

[Jonger]

What makes it useful for day-to-day weather?

If I write down those temperatures why does the value of the data decrease?

What is the temporal resolution of the temperature data? In other words, how long until it is no longer useful? 1 hour? 1 day? 1 month? 1 year?

I am trying to understand your reasoning here, so please forgive my dumb questions.

No one on either side of the debate has an issue with actual raw temps, it's adjusted temps that are controversial. As the years go on, older temps are adjusted downward and more recent temps are adjusted upward. I don't know what led to this recent change, but the overall pattern has been to cool the past and warm the present.

[michsnowfreak]

There will always be anomalies in the positive and negative direction. However, positive anomalies on a global scale are outnumbering negative anomalies by a massive margin. I don't doubt you have seen a reduction in heat because there's nothing in AGW that says that can't happen.

Do you think maybe the heat of the 30s in combination with the poorer farming practices at the time allowed for a greater rate of heat intrusion into your area? I don't know much about upper Midwest climate, I'm just wondering what could have been the cause.

Thats why I was careful to point out I was only referring to local weather.

 

I have no explanation for what made the '30s what they were....obviously the dustbowl played a roll (drought west of here was a breeding ground for searing heatwaves) but locally...most of our worst heatwaves are from yesteryear.

[ORH_wxman]

Thats why I was careful to point out I was only referring to local weather.

 

I have no explanation for what made the '30s what they were....obviously the dustbowl played a roll (drought west of here was a breeding ground for searing heatwaves) but locally...most of our worst heatwaves are from yesteryear.

 

 

That is true for most of the CONUS in general. Though your region has certainly not seen the uptick recently that some other areas have...particularly the western U.S. Most of the firts half of the 20th century was higher than present for anomalous heat events there:

 

[Mallow]

When I was in school, all the meteorology students that couldn't hack the mathematics and physics went into climatology..... so I guess you have a point.

 

 

That is the truth when I was in school back in the 80s and early 90s. Just because you can do math and physics does not mean you are a superior person to others. Where did you get that from?  And, in fact, most climatologists today are actually PhDs in mathematics or applied physics.

 

So then... what was the point of your original statement (quoted above)?

[StudentOfClimatology]

poor farming practices were a significant contribution to the dust bowl and all the dried out dark soil made it easier for solar energy to heat the lower atmosphere

That's disputable. You need a mechanism adequately explaining how poor farming practices led to reduced rainfall. All else being equal, evaporating more water at the surface will increase the dewpoint, hence instability.

There is no consensus in the peer reviewed literature re: farming practices and the dust bowl. I happen to think they're unrelated.

[sokolow]

Basically you have so many problems in the various observation sites, observation location changes, changes in equipment, TOB, data stations dropping out, changing land use albeit vegetation or pavement that the surface record is rife with uncertainties. They have tried their best to reconcile this but when the entire trend in the U.S dataset is because of adjustments it just is not convincing. In any event, the U.S land surface is small relative to the globe. Steven Goddard, Anthony Watts and others have torn apart the USHCN convincingly so I would refer you to their work. I am not going to re-invent the wheel on this.

Was just reading about the FORALPS historical research, reconstruction, and data quality project and I thought it was really neat. Austria's ZAMG is the oldest waether service in the world and some of the longest instrumental records but, from the Habsburgs forward has had a shall we say troubled history. Their met archives got shipped to Germany and were promptly burned entirely in an Allied air raid, so they're running a multinational historical project -- digging through libraries, monastaries, and attics to piece together the observational records & station metadata from all kinds of documentary sources, so they can build better adjustment matrices:

[sokolow]

After the Anschluss the ZAMG staff got hugely disrupted through call-ups and reassignment while at the same time a large number of stations got moved to rural or periurban airfield sites for the convenience of military aviation:

The move pops up as a prominent discontunuity in mean minimum daily temps, as much as 2C in some locations; iirc one of them was from Salzburg city center to a pine coppice -- UHI in reverse!

Thats why 1940 stands out as a big tick in the homogenizations, especially for mean daily min; in the mean air temps graph you can see another ca. 1972: thats a servicewide TOBS change, which was well planned in advance and well documented.

Neat stuff IMO. Figures from Auer et. al AUSTRIAN LONG-TERM CLIMATE 1767-2000 - ZAMG

http://www.zamg.ac.at/docs/wir_ueber_uns/cv/boehm_reinhard/2001-Auer-etal-OEBMG-aloclim.pdf

the pics autoscale for me; if they're too large let me know and i'll spoiler them