Siberia

No politics here. Personally, I’m so sick of politics and climategate, you wouldn’t believe it. I like numbers, science and math, not this constant idiocy. There is more of it to come though. People don’t realize, just how much shit you can pack into several thousand emails. – A thousand by topic, several by individual.

This post is the beginning of an investigation into the Siberian temperature data. Phil Jones personally took the time to kill two Siberia papers about CRU and the discrepency between thermometers and the primary ‘temperature’ dataset in publication. The CRU data may be exactly right, but the zeal with which these papers were killed, gives us a clue that there may be a problem. I’ve looked no further ahead than demonstrated here, so be warned we may prove Dr. Jones right.

First, this is the region in quesiton.

The Siberian station locations from the GHCN network are plotted below. These stations represent a small subgroup of the continent (and the planet). The region is from 50-65 latitude and 100-120 longitude as defined by Lars Kamél in his criticism of CRUtem. The paper was apparently blocked from publication through intense efforts by Phil Climategate Jones and only now the paper is presented at CA.

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Lars paper was simple and apparently used an incredibly small set of temperature stations, which if I were writing a paper would make me nervous. I’ve got no inside info though so we’ll see what we find together. The dots below indicate the 26 locations from which data exists in the GHCN network.

Figure 2: Siberian temperature station locatoins. It's a little hard to see but you're looking at Siberia a the top, Japan at the lower right and Mongolia in the lower center.

Well for the non-regulars, I prefer to look first at the original data in a project, before doing anything. In the case of climate temperatures, it means the non-homogenized raw…ish data. By the time we see it, there have been multiple, non-standard QC steps which correct for several factors including time of day, instrument type and other things. To be clear, this post looks only at the raw GHCN temp data, which I have anomalized to remove monthly seasonal temp variation. i,e, average all January’s, Feb’s…. and divide.

As a personal pet peeve, the time of day corrections to raw data are particularly contentious. This is a spot where trends of a few tenths of a degree trend over a century could be accidentally added very easily. Better documentation of adjustments and the reasoning is required in the primary metadata rather than in an obscure paper which may or may not exist. In this series of Siberia posts, we’ll ignore that detail. The raw anomaly data is shown below.

Ok, so above is all the GHCN data available for Siberia. There are a few stations with strong uptrends, some stations with very minimal uptrend and a few with a minimal downtrend.

The average of the stations is shown below. This average is not weighted by area, and this post is only a beginning. I still can’t help but point out that the 20th century warming is supposedly the fastest and most extreme event in thousands of years.

Now doctor Phil and CRU may yet be right. This doesn’t disprove a massive 4ish C per century trend, but by looking at the rawish data, it’s a really tough result to imagine.

For the 4C trend, see the big red area in the top center below.