McMurdo and Scott Base

I’ve spent a pile of hours looking at the most basic aspects of the data for the antarctic. I’ve discovered nothing earth shattering which is often the way of science, however I have discovered several interesting tidbits. One which caught me this morning is the subject of tonights post, the difference between Scott and McMurdo stations.

With over 1000 residents in the summer a harbor, 3 airfields and 100 bildings McMurdo is the largest science station in the Antarctic established around 1956. Scott base is almost only 3 miles from McMurdo established around 1958 Here is a picture from wikipedia of McMurdo.

This is an image of Scott Base only 3 miles away.

The reason I bring them up is their coordinates.

latitude -77.9, longitude 166.7

There are two values because they have the same lat and lon to a tenth of a degree.

Here are the temperature trends.

The anomalies are so exact that they are nearly impossible to separate visually the 50 year temp trends are nearly flat and nothing is visually apparent. It was while I was plotting trend after trend of the surface stations this morning, I took the time to subtract them, after all they have exactly the same coordinates.

The above plot was inspired by the antarctic plots in R originally done at CA. By rerunning the code with different paramters I ran into several plots of antarctic surface stations with two adjacent stations having opposing trends. In this case, I had to check the data because in the plot it appeared as a large blue circle with a nearly as large red circle in the center. Of course I suspected my own code first, but it turns out I wasn’t to blame, the plot actually seems to be correct. I fit the blue line to the difference in the plot above, This graph indicates that Scott has drifted upward in relation to McMurdo in a “linearish” fashon for about 10 years. I have no idea what would cause two stations only 3 miles apart to experience a gradual continuous variation in trend over a ten year time period.

After looking at the original trends, the data is nearly exact, I tried to find a google map of the surfacestations as Anthony Watts does but there was nothing I could locate.

Ok, this is absolutely frustrating. I can’t for the life of me figure out this alleged science, where are the demands for better instruments????? How can we spend trillions of dollars ‘correcting’ our energy systems and not spend a few hundred million fixing the temp stations to find out if our idea’s were reasonable. Where are the liberals screaming for better data? Why can’t reasonably intelligent open minded individuals figure it out?

Why do the scientists involved refuse and block tough questions to their own websites? Every day they push me further.

Sorry, it’s too much to absorb sometimes.