In the 1980s, John Christy and Roy Spencer revolutionized the measurement of temperature data through satellite measurement of oxygen radiance in the atmosphere. This accomplishment sidestepped the intractable problems of creating (what I’ll call) a “temperature reconstruction” from surface data known to be systemically contaminated (in unknown amounts) by urbanization, land use changes, station location […]
Several years ago, CA helped UCAR locate the lost civilization of Chile. UCAR was then receiving weather information from stations for which they were unable to determine latitude or longitude, including many mysterious stations in Chile. UCAR’s problem was complicated by the fact that it was receiving information from stations with locations unknown to them, […]
A couple of years ago, Matthew Menne of NOAA applied a form of changepoint algorithm in USHCN v2. While changepoint methods do exist in conventional statistics, Menne’s use of these methods to introduce thousands of breaks in noisy and somewhat contaminated data was novel. BEST’s slicing methodology, in effect, implements a variation of Menne’s methodology […]
A couple of years ago, Anthony observed a gross discontinuity at Lampasas TX arising from a change in station location. Let’s see how the Berkeley algorithm deals with this gross discontinuity.
In the 2007 analysis of the GISS dataset, Detroit Lakes was used as a test case. (See prior posts on this station here). I’ve revisited it in the BEST data set, comparing it to the older USHCN data that I have on hand from a few years ago. First, here is a simple plot of […]
BEST stated that one of their distinctive skills was their supposed ability to use short station histories. This seems to include station histories as short as a single data point. In the BEST station data, there are 130 singletons. An example is Cincinnati Whiteoak which has one record as shown below: # 137532 1 1970.125 […]
Here’s a major complaint about BEST now that I’ve looked at it more closely. If BEST wanted to make their work as widely available as possible, then they should have done their statistical programming in R so that it was available in a public language. And made their data available as organized R-objects. I’ve taken […]
I doubt that there are many people who’ve made as many presentations to NAS panels as they have to university seminars in climate departments. Since I’ve done one of each, I presently qualify. (My only invitation to make a presentation to a university climate department was to Georgia Tech in early 2008. I’ve made a […]
Rich Muller sent me the BEST papers about 10 days ago so that I would have an opportunity to look at them prior to their public release. Unfortunately, I’ve been very busy on other matters in the past week and wasn’t able to get to it right away and still haven’t had an opportunity to […]
Donna Laframboise’s book on IPCC has now been published. Available at Amazon or as pdf here for $5. The self-indulgent and petulant behavior of leaders in the climate community is one of the first things that impresses outsiders. Donna aptly uses the metaphor of a “spoiled child” to describe IPCC and the climate community. Her […]
Climate Audit 