AdjustmentGate–South America

By Paul Homewood

 

                                   Before                                                                                      After

First it was the Arctic, then Australia, now it’s "Invent The Incline” in South America. It seems GHCN have been up to their tricks again.

 

However, as I am accused of not showing adjustments that produce a cooling trend, I can report that I have actually found a couple; Jujuy in Argentina and this one in the town of Arica, Chile! Take a good look at it. These adjustments seem to be like Sheffield buses – you wait ages for one to come along, then have to wait even longer for the next one! (There is also the odd case of San Luis where GHCN have adjusted the 1940 temperature up, but also adjusted the 1939 down, effectively cancelling out – temperatures have also been adjusted downwards from 1945 to 1973).

 

 

Don’t get too excited though, because it appears GISS have forgotten to make their homogeneity adjustment for UHI for them, despite the fact they have populations of 124000 and 88000 respectively.(More on this later).

As usual, I have gone back to 1940 to compare the unadjusted and adjusted temperatures. (Temperatures for 2010 are the same in both versions). Appendix A shows the results for all GHCN stations with records back to 1940. Out of 37 stations, 14 have past temperatures adjusted down, 20 remain unaltered and only 3 are adjusted up, giving, as a crude average, an artificial warming trend of 0.27C. Add this to the adjustments in the Arctic and Australia of 0.70C and 0.30C respectively and a pattern seems to be building up.

Finally, I have listed populations and indicated which are airport sites. As you can see, there are only four rural sites, i.e. less than 10,000, and two of these are based at airports. Do these stations show a different trend to the rest and have the urban sites been adequately adjusted for their UHI effect? We’ll take a closer look at this tomorrow.

 

                                                                                     APPENDIX A

Station	Population x 1000	Airport?	Original Mean Temp 1940	GHCN Adjusted Mean Temp 1940	Adjustment
Salta	260	Y	16.98	15.88	-1.10
Santiago	148		20.26	20.26	NIL
Posadas	140	Y	20.86	20.86	NIL
La Rioja	67	Y	18.95	18.95	NIL
Catamarca	88	Y	19.40	19.40	NIL
Ceres	10	Y	18.22	18.22	NIL
San Juan	298	Y	16.63	16.63	NIL
Pilar	<10		16.76	16.76	NIL
Parana	160	Y	17.57	17.28	-0.29
Rio Cuarto	110		15.49	15.49	NIL
Jujuy	124	Y	17.92	18.22	0.30
Junin	42	Y	16.28	16.28	NIL
Rivadavia	<10		22.93	22.83	-0.10
Santa Rosa	52	Y	15.03	14.64	-0.39
Dolores	20	Y	14.80	14.80	NIL
Mar del Plata	407		13.46	13.36	-0.10
Bahia	321	Y	14.78	14.78	NIL
Bariloche	48	Y	8.84	8.24	-0.60
San Luis	71	Y	15.63	16.23	0.60
San Antonio	<10	Y	15.23	15.23	NIL
Esquel	15	Y	9.20	8.30	-0.90
Trelew	52	Y	13.53	13.53	NIL
Comodoro	97		12.78	12.78	NIL
Rio Gallegos	43	Y	6.68	6.68	NIL
Ushuaia	11	Y	5.79	5.79	NIL
La Paz	635		10.04	6.64	-3.40
Manaus	613		26.71	26.29	-0.42
Quixeramobin	<10		26.99	25.99	-1.00
Salvador	1496		24.93	24.93	NIL
Cuiaba	167		25.42	25.42	NIL
Sao Paulo	7034		18.26	18.26	NIL
Curitiba	844		17.00	17.00	NIL
Arica	88	Y	19.11	20.01	0.90
Pudahuel	3615	Y	14.55	13.75	-0.80
Punta Arenas	<10	Y	6.85	6.05	-0.80
Isla Juan	<10		15.51	14.91	-0.60
Asuncion	388	Y	23.88	22.48	-1.40
AVERAGE					-0.27

 

UPDATE

For the sake of completeness, I have added to the original list a few stations which don’t have complete records back to 1940.