Cooling The Past In Ireland
By Paul Homewood
Let’s take a closer look at the GHCN temperature record for Ireland.
I mentioned earlier that GHCN adjustments had added a false warming trend to the temperature record at the long running, high quality rural site at Valentia Observatory. It turns out that the situation is actually much worse.
Altogether, there are seven current temperature stations in Ireland, which are used by GHCN. Four of these are airport sites, and only three rural.
| Rural |
| Valentia |
| Belmullet |
| Malin Head |
| Urban |
| Cork Airport |
| Shannon Airport |
| Casement Airport |
| Dublin Airport |
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/v3.temperature.inv.txt
According to the GHCN database, four of these, including the rural sites at Valentia and Malin Head, have been artificially adjusted upwards. The remaining four sites are unchanged.
So we find that the GHCN record for the whole of Ireland is based heavily on airport/urban sites, with artificial warming adjustments added at four of the seven sites, including two of the three rural ones.
At none of the sites has any allowance been made for UHI, despite the rapid growth of the airports concerned.
The GHCN record for Ireland bears no resemblance to reality. The whole thing is a joke.
NOTE
According to GISS, who in turn source the data from GHCN, the Dublin station is at the airport. However, according to the Station Metadata Database, maintained by NOAA, the station (confirmed by the GHCN reference number) is at Phoenix Park in Dublin.
Meanwhile, the Irish Met Service have data for both sites!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Actually in Dublin temperatures have been going down for the past 34 years….at a rate of -0.0006 per annum since 1980. However, the rate of cooling is increasing significantly since that time.
Click to access henryspooltableNEWc.pdf
(see the 2nd table (Means) , the records were taken from http://www.tutiempo.net)
No comments yet?
Waiting?
Paul,
You keep saying that adjustments have added “a false warming trend” to the data. However, like the unadjusted data from Valentia, each of the other sites charted above also appear to have pre-existing warming trends. Adjustments may have increased the warming trends, but they didn’t introduce them.
Several Irish stations have breakpoints in the mid 60s or else start then. I wonder if the Irish Gov. or Met. service introduced a change in procedures or equipment?
Of course they have pre existing warming trends. I am saying that these have been added to ( as you describe it above).
I can’t see how I can make it any clearer.
It should always be up to national Met Offices to adjust their data when they know of specific changes, and I would be amazed if Ireland did not do so.
I do know, for instance, that they have done this in Iceland, right back to the 19thC, as their senior guy, Trausti Jonsson, is a friend and he has told me this, and sent me copies of the original hand typed reports to compare. It is the adjusted figures that are then fed into GHCN as their “raw” data. It may be a similar explanation why BEST have different “raw” data as theirs may be the original.
Interestingly, Trausti admitted to me that he now feels he was guilty in the past of “overadjusting”, by which he meant making adjustments where none were justified.
He also commented that it was dangerous to homogenise already adjusted/homogenised data.
However, in this case, the 1960’s “break” seems to be a genuine climatic event, the cold winter of 1962/3.
Hey that’s great work Paul! Interesting.
From memory I think that GHCN daily has metadata showing Phoenix Park but GHCN monthly has metadata showing Dublin Airport. The GHCN monthly data is that from Dublin Airport. I’m not sure about the GHCN daily data. I started to compare the data for GHCN daily with the Irish Met Office values for Phoenix Park and Dublin Airport a while back, but got distracted by something else and never returned to the task. It is not as straightforward a task as might be thought, as values later corrected by the Met Office may not make it on to GHCN, and there was not an immediate obvious correspondence between GHCN daily and either series. I’ll go back to finish checking some day, but for now that task has low priority.
The WMO regards 03969 as Dublin Airport, but it appears that this was also the WMO id previously for Phoenix Park, a station with a much longer history dating back to the 19th century. As GHCN monthly has data for “Dublin Airport” dating back to 1831 it is obvious that this early data comes from somewhere else, presumably Phoenix Park. GHCN v2 had a number of series for “Dublin Airport”: 1831-1991, two series 1961-1990, 1987-, now combined into one series in v3.
A great deal of GHCN data is probably like USHCN data, it has “Estimated” data covering many years, sometimes upt o 30 or 40 years.