Phil Jones has been working to get the original data released by the NSMs who obviously won’t have thrown anything out, so it’s no surprise or inconsistency. Poland refused IIRC.

Steve: Not exactly. What Jones had done was to merge different station records into one record without keeping track of when the splice took place. I’ve traced this in some Kenya data, but not posted on it. It’s like GISS dset1 without dset0. it’s not necessarily true that original NMSs have kept their data. Apparently some historical data is preserved at the Met Office, which fortunately and unlike CRU appears to honor the importance of archives.

Jones had plenty of resources at his disposal, but he chose to shut them out and keep his ball for himself.

Yes, sure, more resources would be appropriate. Maybe a dedicated institution. Write to your MP or congressman.

PaulM
Posted Jul 29, 2011 at 3:45 AM
….
Whether the data released is of interest remains to be seen. Maybe I am being dim, but it is still not clear to me whether this is raw or adjusted data.

This is precisely one of the reasons the newly data is of interest — we had no way of knowing until now what, if any, adjustments Jones made to the data, or if these made sense. We know from Willis’s 2007 FOI, or example, that “Columbus OH” is one of the CRU stations, and we can see from the coordinates that CRU uses the airport, CMH for Columbus Metropolitan Hanger, back when it was an airfield out in the country. This isn’t a USHCN station, but it’s been the official “Columbus” station since 1948, so the raw numbers would be easy to find. But CMH has grown in proportion to the aviation industry since 1948, and so has urbanized a lot relative to nearby USHCN stations. Now we can see whether and how CRU has taken this urbanization into account.

We might also be able to figure out what, if anything, CRU was using for “Columbus” before 1948. In 1900 there was no airfield at all, but the official “Columbus” temperatures were taken downtown on a sequence of different office building rooftops until the 1948 move to CMH. If CRU uses these, how does it account for the moves? Again, how does the end result compare to nearby USHCN stations? Only a few USHCN stations are ideally sited, but from the SurfaceStations project, we can see now see which are truly awful (Urbana) and which are reasonable to use (Anthony gives Wooster and Circleville low scores because of nearby buildings, but you could do a lot worse than these).

I don’t have time to do the above comparison in the near future, but if a few dozen CA readers (or even climatologists, heaven forbid) around the world did similar comparisons for the CRU stations in their own locality, we’d start to have an idea how valid or biased the global index is. Given that 8 of the 10 CRU stations in Ohio are urban airports, versus 0 out of 26 USHCN stations, I’ve suspected that a lot of the warming CRU shows since 1950 just reflects the growth of aviation since then.

(There 10 CRU stations in OH only if one counts Cincinnati as being in OH — as air travelers know, it’s really in KY!)

Whether the data released is of interest remains to be seen. Maybe I am being dim, but it is still not clear to me whether this is raw or adjusted data. The new CRU page seems to imply that it is the original data, despite CRU’s statement back in August 2009 that they lost or discarded the original data because it was so difficult to keep data in the 1980s. The Met office data is identical but for the insertion of a decimal point and their FAQ says that it is a mix of raw and ‘value-added’ adjusted data and they don’t know which has been adjusted.

Steve: I actually did want to look at the data at the time that I originally requested it. In other cases, where I’ve asked for data, I’ve looked at it closely and written on the data in detail. Unfortunately, in this case, I’m working on other things now, but hope to return to the topic at some time in the future.

Well, what good is a global index if you can’t get MO’s to supply the data? Someone has to make it work. That someone, here, was Phil Jones.

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

Given that this is an issue of global importance and perhaps of critical global importance, don’t you find it disturbing that the generation of a global index was done so caually. One researcher in his office with bits of paper.

Given that the IPCC has a mandate from the world governments on a crtical world issue, doesn’t this very casual organization give you pause.

snip – please refrain from this sort of extra editorializing

What good is a “global index” if no one but a small clique can verify it?

In these situations, sharing with other academics is always a grey area. No-one expected him to prepare the indices solo. But sending to PW was probably overstepping. He probably thought it would do no harm. He was wrong. People make mistakes. It doesn’t mean everything has to be thrown overboard.

As to tree-rings, I’ll follow your laudable policy of trying to stay on topic.

Steve: I didn’t expect you to change your policy of omerta. However, as usual, you fail to answer the question. The issue with Jones is not just sending it to Webster. I also asked about Jones sending the data to the US Department of Energy and publishing it on his website in 1996. Are those “grey” areas? Nick, you never answer a straight question. It makes discussions with you very annoying.