More On Australia’s Bureau Of Meteorology Data Tampering
They include the original books from Sydney Observatory in 1867, a year when the city was transitioning from its penal origins into a bustling commercial hub.
The temperatures are recorded in Fahrenheit and in meticulous detail: dry bulb, wet bulb, maximum and minimum in the shade, mean, max in the sun, minimum on the grass, dew point, and on it goes.
But the minimum temperatures recorded in the Sydney Observatory books for August 1867 are not the same as Bureau of Meteorology’s official digital raw data for the same period. Far from it.
In fact, the minimum temperatures for that month in BOM’s raw digital data are exactly the same as the daily temperatures for the Sydney Observatory logbooks for 1907 – a gap of 40 years.
The raw data duplications are still visible on the BOM website. See the minimum data for 1867 at Sydney Observatory and compare it to 1907.
What are the odds of 31 days in a row of the exact same temperatures to a tenth of a degree?
How could August 1907 be an identical repeat of August 1867 to a tenth of a degree every single day?
Some readers will recognize Geoff Sherrington’s name because for years he was an integral part of the group of volunteer BOM auditors that published many examples of strange, dubious, misleading, or unbelievable things in the Australian BOM records.
I have a copy of the full report and will publish it if Sherrington and Berger give permission (possibly after editing).
Investigator Tom Berger, a former computer engineer and specialist in data-based deception analysis, said the bureau had “acknowledged a few trees but denied the existence of the forest”. He said the anomalies identified were so statistically unlikely they would be like winning the lottery every week for a year.
Mr. Berger argued that whatever effect the errors might have had on temperature trends, the presence of copied, duplicated and incomplete data had compromised the dataset to the point that it was no longer reliable for serious big-data analysis or machine learning.
“These are not subtle statistical anomalies; they are obvious patterns of human intervention that should have been flagged by any competent quality control system,” Mr. Berger said.
“This is not a transcription error by the same observer – it is a database‐level duplication that persisted through multiple generations of data management, across different computer systems, and through every version of the bureau’s quality control and homogenisation software.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what effect these errors have made on climate trends or seasonal analysis yet. But we do know that The BOM has not done even the basic checks on their own data to make sure it is accurate.
They tell us how important they are and how accurate everything is, but clearly, they are not behaving as though life on Earth depends on getting the answer right.
Last word goes to Lance Pidgeon
Eleven years ago he trawled manually, laboriously, through BOM Maps of central Australia from the World War I era and found places with no thermometers until 1940 repeated the same temperatures day after day and year after year from 1911- 1917.
He found the exact same squiggly temperature patterns “recorded” every year. So, we have known, and the BOM has known that there are issues with the data for a long time.
Long live citizen science.
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Header image: ANU
Among the many treasures held by the National Archives of Australia in Sydney are some of the nation’s oldest and most precious records of temperature and weather