Aussie weather data "discarded or misused" by Met Office

More errors?

Another diligent blogger spots yet more “minor” errors in the Met Office data:

A science blogger has uncovered a catalogue of errors in Met Office records that form a central part of the scientific evidence for global warming.

The mistakes, which led to the data from a large number of weather stations being discarded or misused, had been overlooked by professional scientists and were only discovered when the Met Office’s Hadley Centre made data publicly available in December after the “climategate” e-mail row.

Although the errors do not alter the bigger picture on climate change, they have been seized upon as a further sign that scientific institutions have not been sufficiently transparent. “It makes you wonder how many other problems there are in the data,” said John Graham-Cumming, the programmer who spotted the mistakes. “The whole idea of doing science without releasing your data is quite worrying.

…

After trying to reproduce figures shown in scientific publications and on the Met Office website, Dr Graham-Cumming identified a number of problems with the way measurements from Australian weather stations were being averaged. He found that data from seven stations were being accidentally discarded. Data from a further 112 Australian stations, 28 per cent of the total, were not being fully included in calculations of year-on-year temperature differences.

“I’m not a climate sceptic, I think it’s pretty sure that the world is warming up, but this does show why the raw data and not just the results should be available,” said Dr Graham-Cumming.

During the checking procedure Met Office officials discovered further problems with US temperature calculations. They realised that 121 of the US stations did not have unique identifier codes, meaning that data for these stations was either being overwritten or assigned to the wrong location.

Hardly instils a feeling of confidence. Especially when we’re about to spend trillions of dollars “tackling climate change” based on this data…

Read it here.