Climate Audit

A couple of prompt and favorable responses to inquiries for data from Parker 2006 and Nyberg et al 2007 (a recent article on hurricanes)

Parker 2006
I wrote Parker today inquiring about the sites used in Parker 2006 and for data for unarchived sites. He replied promptly as follows:

Here are the station lists. The “Word” document gives station details and the text documents specify sources.

Regarding the data from national sources, you can download Central England temperature from http://hadobs.metoffice.com/.

I attach also the data for Lerwick and Eskdalemuir, UK. In these files, Jan, Feb…Dec for a given year and day of the month runs along a row. Valuse are in tenths deg C with -999 = missing (generally denoting nonexistent days).

For the other national-source data you will need to apply to the people listed in the Acknowledgements of my 2006 J Climate paper. The Danish Met Service may charge a fee for the Greenland and Thorshavn data.

Regards

David Parker

I’ve uploaded the files to http://data.climateaudit.org/data/station/parker and interested parties can examine the lists. Given the policies of WMO and IPCC, it’s ridiculous that unarchived data should be used in these studies, although one cannot hold Parker to fault for this, other than for failing to criticize this practice as an author.

Nyberg et al 2007
Nyberg et al 2007 is an interesting article in Nature using proxies to study long-term lack of trend in hurricanes. I’ll talk about this article at some point. It uses four coral luminescence series which have not been archived and David Black’s percentage G bulloides series from Cariaco (in the last 2 years, Nature has published articles in which percent G bulloides, a proxy that I’ve discussed on a number of occasions in the past, has been used as a proxy for NH temperature, Asian precipitation and Atlantic hurricanes – a versatile proxy indeed.) I wrote to the second author, Bjorn Malmgren (not readily locating Nyberg’s email online) requesting that the coral luminescence data be archived at WDCP and received the following cordial reply (which he authorized me to print):

Dear Steve,

Many thanks for your letter. I do not have access to the luminiscence records myself, they are stored with the senior author of the Nature article, Johan Nyberg, a former Ph. D. student of mine. I will contact him immediately to ask him to send you the data directly or to send them to me after which I can forward them to you.

By the way, I am an avid reader of Climate Audit, so from me you receive a proper response. In fact, I download the articles to my cell phone and read them with great interest every day. Many thanks for so relentlessly contributing these articles to Climate Audit.

Kind regards, Bjorn

Within the next day, he confirmed that the data would be archived at WDCP and also sent me a text file with the data.

So not everyone is as obstinate as Jones, Mann, Bradley etc. BTW if I recall correctly, William Connolley or some such have taken the view that I like to complain about unavailability of data. I don’t. It’s a waste of my time and the obstruction is a waste of the author’s time. Rather than get annoyed about it, my practice, as you know, has been to publicize the obstruction at the blog. Sciencemag responded to this pressure when private emails got nowhere.

But I’d much rather write notes like this where a positive result is obtained. In the Nyberg case, the authors obviously had no objections to archiving data, they just hadn’t done it. It’s too bad that the lax refereeing at Nature doesn’t attend to these things, but that’s another story.