Re: global warming, program bug causes error in nasa calculations, 1998 no longer hottest year on record, 1934 is

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:29:44 -0700, carlos <besomiculo@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

What's all this then

http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html

1998 no longer the hottest year on record in USA
Here's a story of scientific investigation and discovery I'm proud to
have had a small part in.
Regular readers may remember that I posted about a climate station in
Detroit Lakes MN last week, surveyed by volunteer Don Kostuch, and
cross posted it to the website http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1828#comments
that had two air conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an
obvious cause and effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined
that the a/c units were moved off the roof of the radio station where
this station resides and moved them to the ground where the
temperature sensor is close by.

However, some folks on the blogosphere just went, well, a little
ballistic over that assertion. It was a good thing too, because their
very loud and somewhat uncivil complaints led to an examination of
this idea: if its not the a/c units, what then did cause the
temperature jump at that time?

Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to
investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results
that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS).

What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully
publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the
trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the
"corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing
the raw data and the processed data..

Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is
happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in
wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and
determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to
that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a
programming error."

He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error,
and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an
email to NASA GISS advising of the problem.

He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not
only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but
NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you
can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set
from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent
deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature
measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the
hottest year ever. 1934 is.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/index.php?p=454
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/index.php?p=199#comment-5256

read the intro to the first one

the www.climateaudit.org links don't respond
he seems to work whatever else....

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