Big Questions over Data Integrity in Climate Research
For several years, some commentators who deal with historic temperature data in their daily work, such as Joe D’Aleo of ICECAP, have stated that warming trends suddenly appeared in areas in which there were no such trend previously, such as the state of Maine.
Until about 2011, the government published data showed no trend from 1900 to present. Suddenly, government published historic data showed a warming trend of about 3 degrees F. Tony Heller (who goes by Steve Goddard) has followed this issue, graphically showing that trends appeared in recently published historic data, where earlier historic data showed none.
Writing in Climate, Etc., the blog by Judith Curry, John Bates made several disturbing assertions regarding questionable data changes and archiving data at the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), now called the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
Bates is a meteorologist who spent his professional career at NOAA and the last 14 years at NCDC (now NCEI) as a Principal Scientist, where he served as a Supervisory Meteorologist until 2012.
“He was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs). He has held elected positions at the American Geophysical Union (AGU), including Member of the AGU Council and Member of the AGU Board. He has played a leadership role in data management for the AGU.”
The specific issue was the 2015 Karl, et al. study that claimed there was no pause in global warming. The study claimed that switching from mostly temperature measurements taken at the ship cooling water intake to mostly ocean buoy measurements at the surface introduced a cooling bias to sea surface temperature data. Others believe that, if anything, the switch would cause a warming bias to the data due to the thermal gradient in the oceans.
A 2013 review of studies for the prior shift from sea buckets to ship cooling water intake recognized that there may be large errors in both types of measurements. Intake temperatures tended to warmer than near-simultaneous bucket temperatures. For example:
“One of the most observation-rich bucket-intake comparisons ever conducted was that of James and Fox (1972). They analysed 13,876 pairs of near-simultaneous bucket and intake temperatures obtained aboard VOS ships between 1968 and 1970. Although of global distribution, reports were mainly from the North Atlantic and North Pacific shipping lanes. From a compilation of all observations, intake temperatures averaged 0.3 ◦ C warmer than bucket readings. Considerable spread was found in the individual differences with 68 {154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} falling within ± 0.9 ◦ C and the largest differences exceeding ± 2.5 ◦ C.”
The historic data is too vague to draw any firm conclusions. Adding ocean buoys to the mix does not resolve issues of measurement error and data integrity among the types of measurements.
More importantly, Bates asserts that Karl, et al. did not follow proper procedures for archiving data and published adjusted land surface-air data before an adjustment mechanism was fully tested. In so doing, it not only violated policy of NCEI; but also, it violated the policy of the publisher of the paper, Science, requiring data be properly archived for replication by other researchers. This adjustment mechanism may be a source of bias in land surface-air data showing warming trends where none had existed before.
If the assertions by Bates are correct, this is a serious issue. The data sets used by NCEI may be infected by introduced biases, intentional or not. These data sets provide a basis for those used by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City (NASA-GISS).
On February 5, British journalist David Rose reported comments by Bates in the Daily Mail causing a controversy that some groups tried to dismiss as petty. Writing in The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), David Whitehouse (he is not specifically identified as the author) asserts that the errors are significant.
It will be interesting to see how the new administration and Congress respond to these assertions.
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