The Icelandic Saga Continues
By Paul Homewood
Just to recap, we have learnt that GISS temperatures for Iceland and Greenland have been artificially adjusted, with the result that current temperatures appear much warmer than when compared with the warm period during the 1940’s. Temperature data for Reykjavik from the Iceland Met Office confirmed that this adjustment was wholly artificial and resulted in a net warming of about a half a degree centigrade since 1940 and that the actual mean temperatures in the last decade are about a degree less than GISS show.
I also have data from the Iceland Met Office for two other stations, Stykkisholmur and Akureyri and these show the same pattern of adjustments as the graphs below illustrate.
In both cases the temperatures from 1940 to 1964 have been adjusted downwards, and as with Reykjavik the overall effect is to create about a half a degree of warming.
On further investigation, it appears that the adjustments have actually been carried out by GHCN, whose figures GISS use. The changes seem to have taken place when they issued a revised version, 3.1, of their database in November 2011. The GHCN website gives access to all their stations and shows both adjusted and unadjusted data. Examination of these records confirms that, out of eight stations in Iceland, seven have had such artificial warming applied, e.g
The top right hand graph (red) is the unadjusted version, middle one is adjusted, and the bottom one graphs the adjustment (blue is minus, red plus).
Evidence is already building up that these adjustments are not limited to only Iceland. Similar adjustments have already been found in Greenland, Ireland and Scotland.
This issue raises several points of concern :-
1) These are palpably not “one-off” adjustments, which might be justified for station location changes or other local reasons. Have they been made as a result of a deliberate decision by GHCN, or are they the result of an error or a faulty piece of software?
2) If the result of error, what does this tell us about the quality control procedures at GHCN and GISS?
3) How many other similar adjustments have been made previously that have not been spotted? Would these have been uncovered without the attention of independent observers?
4) If GHCN believe the adjustments are justified, why have they not published their results and reasons for discussion, before issuing the revision? According to their CHANGELOG “GHCNMv3.1.0 is released with several minor corrections and a reworking of internal arrays for more efficient operations.” No mention of large scale temperature adjustments!
5) What assurance do we have that more changes of this sort won’t be made in future?
Trackbacks
- all the warming…artificially adjusted | pindanpost
- Another GISS miss, this time in Iceland | Watts Up With That?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
You have a touch of mangled code at: “Examination of these records”
Remove the “http://” after the “href” so it goes more like this:
Examination of these records
Sorted, thanks.
Dear NASA, NOAA, et al: Why so coy? We all know that 1946 was at least 40°K cooler than 2007. They really were that bad at reading thermometers back then, you know.
They are jealous of the EPA, who in their arrogance feel they never have to explain themselves. With that kind of model, just like the EPA they can alter or fabricate just what they need to progress their agenda.
It is clear to me that these adjustments are deliberate and intentionally designed to promote the AGW agenda. It is criminal and the perpertrators get away with it because most people and government officials are scientifically illiterate and/or are on same page with their agenda promotion even at the expense of corrupting science. Another corrupting fator and incentive is that so much research monies are afforded any “scientific” study that explores the conswquences of AGW or how bad it supposedly is. No monies are afforded competing research that might disprove the AGW climate models. So, these dudes want to do more that feed their families and drive 15 year old carsto the university. The entire field of climatestudy has been corrupted.
You ask a bunch of questions. Have you bothered to sent a mail to GISS or GHCN to ask them? After all, those are the people most likely to know.
Yes, I’ve emailed GHCN and got a standard reply that they will look into it. That was 3 days ago – nothing since then.
It’s sad when the only way the climategate scientists can show drastic warming is by rigging the numbers. Again. Only this time they didn’t have time to “lose”, “Throw away”, or “Misplace” the data.
@Thomas
“You ask a bunch of questions. Have you bothered to sent a mail to GISS or GHCN to ask them? After all, those are the people most likely to know…”
As well as asking GISS, is it also worth asking the original weather stations if they know why their data has been ‘adjusted’, and if they stand by this modification?
I have got the actual numbers from the Iceland Met Office, which don’t reflect these adjustments.
@Paul Homewood
“I have got the actual numbers from the Iceland Met Office, which don’t reflect these adjustments…”
I would guess that the Iceland Met Office might be interested in asking why their data has been ‘adjusted’, then? I know that GHCN can simply say “It’s part of our methodology”, but if the director of the IMO gets an impression that his organisation might be implicated in a fraud I would hope that he might issue some kind of public statement to cover his back.
Such a statement would bring the adjustment issue into the public gaze…
Their Met Office was not aware of these adjustments, but are now! They have now asked GHCN what’s going on, but have made clear to me that they do not accept the adjustments and have no intention of altering their records.
@Paul Homewood
“..Their Met Office was not aware of these adjustments, but are now!..”
Good. Now we need someone to chase this through the technical press, someone else to chase this through the ‘political’ pressure groups around GISS via the newspapers, and a third party to look at all the other ‘adjustments’ for other country’s Met Offices and compare them to the real data.
I am sure the readership of WUWT will provide….
No. What you need to do is read the manual. Have you actually read any of the GHCN documentation for their adjustment process?
Yes. The adjustments are supposed to isolate “non-climatic” factors such as station location changes.
These adjustment factors appear in 7 out of 8 Iceland stations, and most Greenland ones, so clearly don’t relate to individual station issues. Also the Iceland Met are emphatic that the new GHCN figures do not reflect the true temperature record.
A bit late on this thread but I too want to get at how GISS, GHCN and other US agencies are able to corrupt the real records in the name of “adjustments” or “corrections”. Some time (soon?) this blatant manipulation must be exposed, and as others have suggested many other records need to be checked. This is a marathon task, demanding loads of expertise and time, and I doubt that any of the “amateurs” – i.e. those lacking government funding – would be able to undertake it. Fluency in R would be essential – and I don’t have it, which I regret, but having been retired for 28 years am too old to undertake such a self-educational task. :-((
You don’t need R. Excel works just fine.