John A writes: After a brief search, I found the paper “Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts” This paper came to my attention via an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. It concerns a paper written by two experts on scientific forecasting where they perform an audit on Chapter 8 of WG1 in […]
Gavin Schmidt recently told Anthony Watts that worrying about station data quality was soooo last year. His position was a bit hard to follow but it seemed to be more or less as follows: that GISS didn’t use station data, but in the alternative, as defence lawyers like to say, if GISS did use station […]
Gavin Schmidt has told Anthony Watts that the problematic station data are not used in climate models and any suggestion to the contrary is, in realclimate terminology, “just plain wrong”. If station data is not used to validate climate models, then what is? His point seems to be that the climate models use gridded data. […]
Karl and Hansen have condemned poor USHCN metadata and, perhaps anticipating the need for something like surfacestations.org, gave a stunning endorsement to dramatically improving the collection and dissemination of photographs and other detailed site information for U.S. weather stations. In a statement, they said: Are we making the measurements, collecting the data, and making it […]
GISS does not provide a coherent archive of station data (such as is available at GHCN.) As reported before, Nicholas developed a technique for downloading station data within R. Downloading the entire data set (which takes a minute or so from GHCN on a highspeed network) is laborious but automatic. I did this in the […]
D’Arrigo, Wilson et al 2007 is an interesting article on the Divergence Problem, about which I plan to post from time to time. Since we’ve been discussing temperature data recently – with special discussions of GHCN data problems in Russia, China and Australia, I thought that it would be interesting to draw attention to an […]
In response to an inquiry to Scott Saleska, Dan Kirk-Davidoff, a prominent expert in the field, has sent the following suggestions: Soden and Held 2006, An Assessment of Climate Feedbacks in Coupled Ocean—Atmosphere Models, J. Climate 19:3354, DOI: 10.1175/JCLI3799.1 reviews the relative role of various feedbacks in the IPCC AR4 runs. Held and Soden, “Water […]
It’s pretty amazing to see how enthusiastic climate scientists have been in checking the information in Swindle as compared with their virtually complete acquiescence with Inconvenient Truth. I guess it depends whose ox is being gored. Since we’ve been looking at gridcell issues, I took a look at the temperature graphic in Swindle which has […]
OK, so I got interested in decoding the binary data sets at ftp://data.giss.nasa.gov/pub/gistemp/download/ as well. Wrote some Perl to slice and dice the data set into various series. I now have fully 1.6Gb less free hard drive space and I cannot figure out where my Sunday went 🙂 I’ll tidy up the various scripts and […]
GISS has a large collection of station data, both adjusted and unadjusted. Unlike many data archives, GISS do not permit you to either extract the entire data set from a single archive or from permanent individual files. You can obtain digital data for individual stations, but you have to go through a laborious process of […]
Climate Audit 