The United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is:
"a high quality, moderate-sized data set of daily and monthly records of basic meteorological variables from over 1000 observing stations across the 48 contiguous United States. Daily data include observations of maximum and minimum temperature, precipitation amount, snowfall amount, and snow depth from 1062 stations; monthly data consist of monthly averaged maximum, minimum, and mean temperature and total monthly precipitation from 1221 stations."That sounds pretty good at first glance (the italicized emphasis on "high quality" is mine.) But notice the USHCN says nothing of the objective quality of their data. Additionally:
"The USHCN has been developed over the years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) to assist in the detection of regional climate change. Furthermore, it has been widely used in analyzing U.S. climate."Again, the italicized emphasis is mine.
An independent and enterprising project has been initiated to visit all 1221 of the stations contributing data in this network in order to assess the site conditions where these critical data are being gathered. Surprisingly, they have found only 11% of the stations are rated "best" to "good" and that 69% are "poor" or "worst" using NOAA and NCDC criteria. That means the vast majority of the recording sites are located within 10 meters of a heat source (air conditioner exhaust fans) or next to a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface. Really.
I am therefore led to the opinion that this data network is fundamentally biased and therefore useless, and at best, is simply measuring the impact of urbanization and the ensuing heat island effect. To describe it as "high quality" is misleading and disingenuous. To use it to decipher climate trends is downright laughable.
No wonder Al Gore doesn't want to debate climate science.
So, in your opinion what does the USHCN have to gain by skewing data to portray global warming? Continued funds to sustain their misleading work and employee struggling earth scientists in our down trodden economic times?
ReplyDeleteI did not proclaim the USHCN is intentionally "skewing data to portray global warming." I simply observed that a critical evaluation of the data that is provided by the network shows that it is of dubious quality, at best, and as a scientist I would not use it to make any reliable trend-based conclusions. Perhaps it is just business as usual for the staff involved in the work of compiling the data. Regardless, it's bad science. Period.
ReplyDeleteYou can judge the quality of the data set for yourself and make any conclusions that you want with regard to the motives of the people involved. I do think that a lot of the global warming hysteria is agenda driven by certain individuals and political factions, and to heck with objective science. I am not saying that is the case with the USHCN, but it does make me wonder about the degree of error analysis associated with their information (and other data sets from other agencies.)