“In the case where multiple … records exist for a station in the given year, I assigned a blue dot if all records were fully calculated from existing averages, a red dot if at least one record was estimated, and no dot if none of the records could produce an estimate.“

Even if one of the multiple records at a location exists continuously without breaks, surely the station deserves a blue dot?

Tom Harris
tom.harris@sympatico.ca

Hmmm. Changes are a foot laddies. Also, GISS changed their monthly .txt output creating some minor annoyances for excell users of data. Adding text headers, adding additional headers
every 20 years… Silly boys. what a piece of code can add another peice of code can subtract

Off topic but of interest to the excell Wennies: Switch to Openoffice. you can extend it
with R!

Various organizations have collected temperature data from meteorological
organizations around the world. Some continue to do so. Some pass on
much of that data in more or less convenient manners. One such
organization is the US NCDC, a part of NOAA.

Among their collections of data is GHCN V2, a combination of previously
collected (i.e. mostly old) data from numerous sources, and relatively
recent data from some US locations, and some non-US locations that are
MCDW locations, i.e. many fewer locations than were among the collections
of old data. The apparent “drop” in the numbers of GHCN stations was
largely due to the large number of non-MCDW stations that were included
among the collections of old data.

See the paper:

Peterson, T.C., and R.S. Vose, 1997: An overview of the Global
Historical Climatology Network temperature database. Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society, 78 (12), 2837-2849. (PDF Version)

linked at:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php?name=temperature
for more information on GHCN V2 sources.

Non-US locations which are not MCDW locations are not included in the
GHCN process for gathering relatively recent data.

I did a quick comparison of the sites with historic data prior to 2006 at co2 science http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/data/ushcn/ushcn.jsp

and compared them to the current Giss set.

at c02 science you can look by state and record the latitudes. If I remember correctly all the sites in vermont save one or two which show some kind of warming actually show cooling . AT co2 science, the state of vermont has escaped all the controversy!
Then I looked over at the Giss data. It is impossible to find most of these sites: they have been eliminated. But the one or two which remain are the warming ones. One station, enosberg looks very different at Giss than at co2 science. most troubling.

perhaps stations which were not behaving have gotten the boot

Steve: Interesting. It used to say that the data would be available in July 2007. It’s hard not to think that the delays are related to their awareness that scrutiny of this release is likely to be more substantial than the prior release. Maybe they’ll even have proper documentation and technical reports accompanying the release.