Oct was 0.181 and Nov 2007 was 0.131.

There are 17 rural sites forthe Australian High Quality network. Two are far-distant islands, leaving 15. I have started to do some plotting of the daily raw data, max and min temps. I have not included metadata corrections and I have occasionally infilled a missing value with a value about consistent with surrounding. The infilling makes no significant difference to the result, it just makes my calculations faster.

I started with Broome, on the NW coast of Australia, mormal population about 15,000 and swelled by tourism. The weather station at the airport is surrounded by about 2 km of housing on most sides, but is on a small peninsula with sea on 3 sides. Lat -17.95, Long 122.22.

There follows a plot of the max and min temperatures from Jan 1940 to Dec 2006.

One does not need to run regressions to see that the maximum temperature annual averages (pink) have stayed about constant and the minimums (green) have decreased. Note that we have a blip upwards in 1998 also, as commonly elsewhere. I wonder why. There is a fairly constant 11 degrees centigrade between the annual max and the annual min.

The question is, “WHERE HAS ALL THE GLOBAL WARMING GONE?” Did Broome escape the omnipresent GHG warming because film celebrities like to stay there?

To be continued.

Steve, Thank you for the attention you are giving to Australia.

The 15 or so stations of the High Quality network in #19 were chosen, we assume, because of a lack of UHI. Their raw data are available but I lack the skill any more to process them.

A composite graph of these 15 relevant stations should have some resemblance to the shglfulihad of “Mann & Perfect Reconstruction” of Nov 28 or at least it should raise questions about the differences. Anyone wish to help with this simple task?

I am still confised whether the levelling of NH and SH temps since 1998 has been because of the increasing % use of rural sites. The test above would shed some more light on that confusion.

Early 2008 I made this KML file for use in Google Earth. Anyone with Google Earth can can download it and see where all the GISS stations used in 2006-2007 are located. There is a readme file along with it that contains a usage explanation.

I posted a link to it about 6 months ago, but that link no longer works.

Based on the information at that site, Ceduna, Learmonth, Longreach, Carnarvon, Meekatharra, Giles, Esperance were still 28,000.

Note sure what happened with that post. What I meant to say was that based on the information at that site, the respective populations for Ceduna, Learmonth, Longreach, Carnarvon, Meekatharra, Giles, Esperance were still <10,000 in 2006. They were classified as rural on that basis pre 1993 and it seems that category is still appropriate.

Thanks to Carl and Len’s links, I’ve confirmed that Bunbury (Western Australia) has a long temperature record going back to 1887, even though a post office, and power station served as station locations before the present site. However, it’s not part of the GISS data.

There are still distortions, but I’m not saying they are caused by your hard work.

The Antarctic peninsula sth of Patagonia shows an area of warming about the same size and intensity as the whole of Australia. I think there might be 2 data stations on the former, please correct me if I am wrong.

Re: James Lane (#22),

Too many desert locations. This has been reported before. More pronounced if you subtract urban Lord Howe Is and Macquarie Island from the set, as both are about 2,000 km from the nearest mainland Australia and are Australian by accident of history rather than geography.

Of the remaining 15 urban in Steve McIntyre (#19), only 3 (Broome, Gove and Esperance, all on the coast) receive significant annual rainfall. Which makes one wonder about the definition of a drought year in a desert. And stats distributions which have a cutoff of zero some years, not normal.

Regarding the urban locations that need UHI adjustment, about half are on the coast, which roughly means that a radius search for nearest neighbours will find only 50% of stations because half the search area is unpopulated sea.

It’s a problem. As soon as the BOM finds a nice rural site, people go to live there and it becomes urban before adequate years of records can be gathered. (Heard in a new shopping centre: “I’m sure this centre would be more popular if there were not so many people here.”)

Final problem. Who knows what GISS or NOAA or Hadley do with the data that comes from the Australian Bureau of Met? Nobody seems to want to tell.

Brilliant map work. Thank you.

Very nice work Bob. That is far superior to an equirectangular map (IMHO). I wish GISS would offer that as a turnkey option.