Leopold in the Sky with Diamonds

May 27, 2008 – 7:45 AM

Radiosonde trends are back in the news. A few days ago, on May 24, 2008, Realclimate reviewed three recent papers: Lanzante and Free (J Clim 2008), Haimberger et al (J Clim 2008) and Sherwood et al 2008, adding a note with the even more recent Allen and Sherwood (2008.) Peter Thorne of Hadley Center stated of the Allen and Sherwood study:

The new study “provides … long-awaited experimental verification of model predictions,” Thorne wrote.

We discussed radiosonde data in connection with Douglass et al 2007, discussing in particular Gavin Schmidt’s purported excoriation of Douglass et al 2007, in which Schmidt took particular umbrage at Douglass et al use of Raobcore v1.2, a study published in April 2007, one month before the submission of Douglass et al 2007 in May 2007. We are used to climate scientists “moving on”, but the speed of decampment in this instance seems particularly rapid. Schmidt’s implication is that Haimberger had repudiated Raobcore v1.2 before it was even published (it is explicitly repudiated in Haimberger et al 2008); however, rather than criticizing Haimberger for his failure to withdraw his then still unpublished now repudiated results, he criticized Douglass et al for using the most recently published results (results that were a hoary one month of age at the time of the submission) rather than attempting to anticipate the results of future climate nomad migrations.

Overlooked in this particular exchange was exactly what prompted Haimberger’s rapid abandonment of the Raobcore v1.2 camp site. I thought that it would be interesting to examine the reasons for this abandonment and will do so today, as this is another interesting case of data adjustments by climate scientists – a topic not unfamiliar to CA readers. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Satellite and gridcell | Tagged , , , | Comments (112)

AR 4 Chapter 6 – "In Press" and "Accepted" Articles

May 25, 2008 – 7:31 PM

I examined the “In Press” and “Accepted” citations in IPCC AR4 Second Draft Chapter 6 to verify whether Wahl and Ammann 200x had received unusual and special treatment. It definitely did; it’s surprising how much so. There was also a very interesting tendency for IPCC Authors to bend the rules in their own favor. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in IPCC, Wahl and Ammann | Tagged | Comments (47)

Wahl and Ammann 2007 and IPCC Deadlines

May 25, 2008 – 1:48 PM

In a previous post, I’ve observed some oddities in connection with the dating of Wahl and Ammann 2007 and with Schneider’s obfuscation when asked to explain how an article supposedly accepted on March 1, 2006 could cite an article that had not even been submitted until August 2006. (BTW, I note that Journal of Climate uses the term “In final form” in its timelines, which, applied to the Wahl and Ammann case, would preclude any dates prior to August 2006, the date of submission of Ammann and Wahl 200x, which is cited in Wahl and Ammann 2007, and, more likely, preclude any dates prior to the June 2007 acceptance of Ammann and Wahl 200x – a date which appears to have triggered the actual acceptance of Wahl and Ammann 2007.)

Why would they go to this trouble? Why wouldn’t they just put the acceptance date for Wahl and Ammann 2007 as June 2007, concurrent with the acceptance date of Ammann and Wahl 2007, which unblocked the publication process?

To answer this, we need to look at the IPCC Publication Deadlines, where we shall see a compelling and incontrovertible link between Wahl and Ammann timelines and attempts to at least appear to meet IPCC publication deadlines. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Wahl and Ammann | Tagged , , | Comments (14)

The Dog That Didn't Bark

May 24, 2008 – 8:31 AM

This is the title of a famous Sherlock Holmes story and not intended as a slight to any individual.

Take a look at the Review Comments for AR4 Second Draft Chapter 6 online here.

While I was reviewing these comments, I noticed that there are no reported comments on chapter 6 from Caspar Ammann, one of the major participants in the paleoclimate debate. In the Chapter 6 Review Comments, there are many comments about his article, but none by him. In the IPCC roster., he is shown as a Contributing Editor but not a reviewer [Note – this has been modified in light of #7 below].

I’ve just gone through the exercise of searching all the First Draft and Second Draft Review Comments for any on-the-record comments by Ammann and found none. Perhaps the online Review Comments do not include comments by reviewers if they are Contributing Authors to another chapter. If anyone feels like perusing the Review Comments for examples, I’d be interested. This is a bit surprising in a way, since Susan Solomon’s review comments were submitted through the IPCC review process and are on the record, so why wouldn’t Caspar Ammann’s comments on chapter 6 also not be on the record?

Terminology from a then unsubmitted paper turns up in the Chapter Author replies to Review Comments. Compare the terminology in the answer to Review Comment 6-735 (which would have been final around Aug 4, 2006) to the language in Ammann and Wahl, which, as we recently learned, was submitted on August 22, 2006. Some language points track exactly and do not occur elsewhere in the literature. So there is no doubt that Ammann made written comments to the Chapter Authors of Chapter 6, but these are not on the record despite IPCC policy which states:

All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process and will be retained in an open archive in a location determined by the IPCC Secretariat on completion of the Report for a period of at least five years.

Update: Here is an amazing parallel between the Replies to Review Comments for chapter 6 and Ammann and Wahl 2007. The Reply to Review Comment 6-735 stated:

Rejected – the text is based on the authors’ interpretation of the current literature (and all papers cited are within current IPCC publication deadline rules). The text gives a balanced view.

Please note the following –
The MM05d benchmarking method is based on an entirely different analytical framework than that used by MBH98.

MBH used the standard method in climatology of making a random time series based on the low-order AR characteristics of the target time series during the calibration period. here the N. Hemisphere mean. This random process is repeated in Monte Carlo fashion and its skill in replicating the actual target time series is evaluated according to any measure of merit in which the investigator is interested.

MM’s method instead uses the full order AR characteristics of one of the proxies used in the reconstruction to create pseudoproxies in a Monte Carlo framework. These are then input into the reconstruction algorithm along with white noise pseudoproxies for all the n-1 remaining proxies. This is, in theory a statistically meaningful procedure, which asks what kind of apparent skill is available in the reconstruction simply from one proxy’s noise. However this procedure is not general and would need to be repeated for each proxy set to be examined. Also, it would need the subjective choice of which single proxy should be modelled according to its red noise characteristics each time.

Finally, it does not take into account that some of the verifications seen as “skillful” are associated with very poor/exceedingly poor calibrations, which would be rejected on first principles in real world reconstruction applications. This consideration indicates that the 0.51 threshold cited by MM is actually, at least somewhat, overstated.

I defy anyone to show me any support for these comments in peer reviewed literature as at August 4, 2006. But here are some quotes from Ammann and Wahl 2007:

Standard practice in climatology uses the red-noise persistence of the target series (here hemispheric temperature) in the calibration period to establish a null-model threshold for reconstruction skill in the independent verification period, which is the methodology used by MBH in a Monte Carlo framework to establish a verification RE threshold of zero at the >99% significance level.

Rather than examining a null model based on hemispheric temperatures, MM05a,c report a Monte Carlo RE threshold analysis that employs random red-noise series modeled on the persistence structure present in the proxy data (note, noise here is meant in the sense of the ‘signal’ itself, rather than as an addition to the signal). … RE performance thresholds established using this proxy-based approach have the disadvantage of not being uniformly applicable; rather, they need to be established individually for each proxy network.

Furthermore, the MM05c proxy-based threshold analysis only evaluates the verification-period RE scores, ignoring the associated calibration-period performance. However, any successful real-world verification should always be based on the presumption that the associated calibration has been meaningful as well …

Interestingly, the first paragraph cited above caught my eye in Ammann and Wahl and I asked him for a supporting reference, justifying this argument. To which, Ammann, a federal employee, answered:

why would I even bother answering your questions, isn’t that just lost time?


Update Jan 2010: This particular mystery was resolved by the Climategate Letters, which contain off-the-record correspondence between Wahl and Briffa.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in General, Wahl and Ammann | Tagged , , , | Comments (26)

When Was Wahl and Ammann 2007 "Accepted"?

May 23, 2008 – 1:56 PM

Last summer, on Aug 28, 2007, I wrote a post observing that Wahl and Ammann 2007, although being cited in IPCC AR4, had still not appeared in print. I think that it was then the only article cited in IPCC AR4 chapter 6 in that situation. In that post, I observed that it seemed anomalous that UCAR stated that this article had been “accepted for publication” on February 28, 2006, but, as of Aug 28, 2007, Climatic Change had still not published the aticle, even though many articles that had been submitted and accepted much later had appeared in print. Indeed, a different article by the same two authors, covering much of the same ground, had just been published online on Aug 24, 2007, stating that it had been accepted on June 13, 2007, more than a year after the supposed “acceptance” of Wahl and Ammann 2007. The timeline for this article also stated that it had been received on August 22, 2000, an obvious improbability.

David Pannell, an Australian academic and journal editor, observed the improbability of the chronology claimed at the UCAR website and suggested that I investigate.

The authors’ claimed chronology for the original paper does not add up. Looking at the journal, all of the recently published papers were accepted in 2007. As a journal editor myself, it is not plausible that one article would be kept aside for later publication, other than perhaps by an issue or two to get it into a particular special issue. I interpret that the claim by the authors “February 28, 2006″ Accepted for Publication” is false in some way. But if it is false, where did all those dates (in review, revised, etc.) come from? Could they really make up a series of dates like that? If they are not made up, then what has happened?

Steve, if I were you, I would ask the editor what has happened to the paper.

I didn’t investigate at the time, but did so recently with some curious results and a puzzle still unexplained. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Wahl and Ammann | Tagged , , | Comments (88)

GISS Estimation Case Study

May 22, 2008 – 4:50 PM

In my post The Accidental Tourist I discussed the relationship between the Russian Meteo daily temperature record for Kurgan and two of the GHCN records for that same weather station. One surprise I learned was that GHCN discarded an entire month’s worth of data when a single data point was suspect. Doing so left GISS estimating the missing month in order to calculate an annual average.

The daily records from Meteo provide an opportunity to test the accuracy of the GISS estimation algorithm. They also give an indication as to how readily data is dropped from the record, and perhaps a little bit of hope that the accuracy of the historical record can be improved.

In the referenced post I noted that the “GISS.0” record for Kurgan was derived from the Meteo record’s “Mid” values. Furthermore, I had found that there were eleven months in the Meteo record with a single suspect daily record that caused the entire month to be dropped from the GISS.0 record. For this particular effort I started by focusing on those eleven months.

In order to compare the GISS.0 estimate with the actual Meteo record, I needed to be able to do two things. Continue reading →

By goirish | Posted in General | Comments (23)

Ohio State Presentation

May 22, 2008 – 10:44 AM

I’ve posted my Ohio State presentation online – 11 MB. I’ve done a little extra work and integrated the PPT pictures with the script and provided most of the references in a bibliography. There’s quite a lot of material, but I hit my time point (an hour) quite accurately. (A reader compressed this to 1 MB here and the rendering is OK for some purposes but is imperfect.)

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in General | Comments (79)

Adjustments in the News

May 21, 2008 – 1:06 PM

We discuss adjustments a lot on this blog. Today there’s a remarkable example and brewing scandal involving first a computer error in which Moody’s incorrectly graded certain debt obligations. The real story comes after the problem was identified – as it is alleged that Moody’s altered its models to avoid having to fully undress its error in public.

On May 21, 2008, Bloomberg reports:

May 21 (Bloomberg) — Moody’s Investors Service said it’s conducting “a thorough review” of whether a computer error was responsible for assigning Aaa ratings to debt securities that later fell in value.

Some senior staff at Moody’s were aware in early 2007 that constant proportion debt obligations, funds that used borrowed money to bet on credit-default swaps, should have been ranked four levels lower, the Financial Times said, citing internal Moody’s documents. Moody’s altered some assumptions to avoid having to assign lower grades after it corrected the error, the paper said.

I wonder whether they used principal components or multiple inverse regression.

A financial blogger acidly observes:

The implications of that last paragraph are absolutely insane. “Some senior staff at Moody’s were aware in EARLY 2007 that CPDOs rated Aaa the previous year should have been ranked as many as FOUR LEVELS LOWER, the FT reported today, citing internal Moody’s documents. The firm ADJUSTED SOME ASSUMPTIONS TO AVOID having to assign lower grades, the paper said.”

First they make a mistake they shouldn’t have made. I mean, where were the checks and balances? Where were the reviews? Second, they then take that honest mistake and go criminal with it. Just brilliant. Amazing really.

Moody’s didn’t mention anything about not jousting with jesters.

Another financial blogger comments:

However, the implication that Moody’s had to fudge the numbers in order to come up with AAA on these deals but S&P came up with AAA with a “correct” model is something I for one am having a hard time with

.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in General | Tagged , | Comments (29)

The Accidental Tourist

May 20, 2008 – 4:44 PM

Occasionally I will take a trip after much careful planning and preparation, only to find myself going off into uncharted territory soon after embarking on my adventure. That is what happened to me recently when I started to take a fresh look at worldwide station coverage. Where I ended up and what I found when I got there was incredibly surprising.

It all began last week when GISS released their global mean summary for April, 2008. Following this release I went to view their global maps to get an idea as to where the “hot” and “cold” spots were last month. I viewed the data using both a 1200km and a 250km smoothing radius. Doing so helped me gauge the station coverage and the extent the 1200km smoothing algorithm estimates temperatures over the vast unsampled swaths of the planet.

It occurred to me that it would be interesting to compare April 2008 with April 1978 using a 250km smoothing radius. I was looking for “holes” in 2008 station coverage not present in 1978. I selected 1978 for two reasons. One was that the worldwide station coverage was near its peak that year. The second reason was that 1978 fell in the 1951-1980 30-year base period for calculating anomalies.

My thought was to identify multiple stations within a hole that were still reporting data today but were not being captured by GHCN. I wanted to see if the data from those stations supported the anomaly estimated by the 1200km smoothing. The 250km smoothed plots would be ideal for visually identifying holes. Here are the plots for April 1978 and April 2008:

April 1978 anomalies

April 2008 anomaly

There were lots of holes to choose from: Russia, China, Australia, Canada, Africa, and South America. I decided to start with Russia as I already knew where to look for recent temperature data from “discontinued” GHCN sites: meteo.ru. But first, I had to locate some stations to examine.

Looking at the April 2008 plot, the hole to the northeast of the Caspian Sea seemed like a good place to start. I went this time to the station data page at GISS and simply clicked my mouse on the map to the northeast of the Caspian Sea. GISS gave me a list of stations – sorted by increasing distance from where I clicked. At the top of the list was Kurgan, so I decided to go there first.

Wikipedia says Kurgan “is the administrative center of Kurgan Oblast, Russia; one of the oldest cities in Siberia.” The view from Google Earth indicates it is pretty remote as well, but apparently has a population of 310,000 (according to the GISS data page).

GHCN records for Kurgan extend from November 1893 to April 1990. These are actually comprised of three scribal records: (0) November 1893 to December 1989, (1) May 1929 to December 1989, (2) January 1931 to April 1990. Because I grabbed the data from the GISS website I will refer to the records as GISS.0, GISS.1, and GISS.2 respectively. Remember, however, that GISS takes the data from GHCN.

I was hoping that the Meteo record for Kurgan would match one of the three GISS records. What I had forgotten was that the Meteo records were of daily readings rather than monthly averages. This meant I was going to have to calculate monthly averages for Meteo before I compared it with the GISS records. It is at this point my journey took an unexpected turn. Continue reading →

By goirish | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (53)

Gistemp Compilation

May 19, 2008 – 8:55 AM

At Steve Mosher’s request, a thread for the revived effort to compile Gistemp.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in General | Comments (20)