CA CA reader Gary Wescom writes about more data quality problems with the Berkeley temperature study – see here. In a surprising number of records, the “seasonally adjusted” station data in the Berekely archive contains wildly incorrect data. Gary shows a number of cases, one of which, Longmont 2ESE, outside the nest of climate scientists […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Climate Audit 