Category Archives: Surface Record

Articles focussing on the reliability of the surface record

Waldo: South America

Waldo, Hansen’s ROW trend, is not in Africa nor in Antarctica. Is Waldo in South America?

Where's Waldo: Antarctica #2

If you’ve not read Where’s Waldo: Antarctica #1, please do so first.

Where's Waldo: Antarctica #1

Waldo (the ROW warm trend) is not in Africa (or the United States). Is Waldo in Antarctica? (For those of you who haven’t bought toys in 30 years, Where’s Waldo is a game.) Antarctica is about 8.9% of the world’s land surface (about 1.5 times the contiguous 48). There are 116 Antarctica sites in the […]

Waldo in Africa

Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen say that errors in the U.S. “don’t matter” because it is only 2% of the earth’s surface (about 6% of the land surface). This implies that the accuracy of measurements in other parts of the world can be relied on. In the U.S. the 1930s have a similar level to […]

Jesting with Adjusters

Hansen tells us that he won’t “joust with jesters”, as presumably he’s too busy adjusting to have time for jousting. We by contrast have lots of time to jest with adjusters.

Tucson Then and Now

In the discussion of my previous post, a reader posted a link to a fascinating picture of Tucson in 1923 – a picture complete with Stevenson screen in the foreground, if you can imagine, clearly visible on the right. Figure 1. Tucson c. 1923. From left to right: Agriculture Building, Old Main, and the Mines […]

Porto Velho and Londrina

Porto Velho and Londrina are two somewhat similar sized Brazilian cities (populations 335,000 and 500,000 respectively) which have remarkably different Hansen adjustments. One is adjusted up by 2 deg C and one is adjusted down by 2 deg C. It’s pretty strange to see.

Hansen and the Great White North

Here’s something interesting: I’ve collated the GISS raw(dset=1) and GISS adjusted (dset=2) versions and then calculated the range of adjustments. The largest positive adjustment was over 8 deg C and the largest negative adjustment is greater than -6 deg C. I separated out the stations that had no adjustments (max adjustments under 0.01 deg C […]

Notes on GISS Station Data

I’ve spent some time (an inordinate amount of time) trying to figure out why GISS uses some GHCN stations and not others. Doing so has required a lot of work on GISS data sets which are nastily organized and with many seemingly ad hoc inclusions, exclusions and sloppinesses. Does any of this matter to world […]

The HO-83 Hygro- thermometer

In the discussion of the Tucson weather station, Ben Herman of the U of Arizona observed that there were serious biases with the HO-83 hygrothermometer – introduced in the early 1990s – which was said to be a contributor to the uptick to Tucson values. Although USHCN has implemented adjustments to U.S. data to deal […]