The Blackboard

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is something of a charged subject on climate science blogs. Depending on who you ask, you might hear that it either accounts for the majority of modern warming or that it doesn’t exist at all. While it is undeniable (and fairly easily shown) that both the site characteristics and [...]

The “toy planet” discussion of the “basic” anomaly method in its most idealized form was such a hit, I’ve decided to discuss how the ‘bias’ method used in section (3) of Hansen and Lebedeff 1987 — the method actually used by GISTemp– might be affected by deal with “the march of the thermometers”. One [...]

Roy Spencer posted two versions of the UAH temperature of the lower troposphere! According to version 5.3, the temperature of the lower troposphere was 0.63C; according to version 5.2, it was 0.74C. Despite the fact that I my bet of 0.64 would have been closer to correct using the splendid new version 5.3, we [...]

This post builds on a simple spatial gridding model outlined here. As always, the latest source code can be found at http://drop.io/0yhqyon, and I welcome folks helping improve it.
If we are looking at the effect of adjustments and station quality, we should really be looking at maximum and minimum temperature data rather than mean data, [...]

Many in comments have suggested that some of the rebuttals to the claim that the march of the thermometers actually biases temperature anomalies reported by NOAA, GISSTemp and CRU may be unnecessary. How so, it’s possible no one has really made that claim. If so, the ‘rebuttals’ would be countering strawmen (i.e. arguments that [...]

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of AccuWeather. All opinions are 100% mine.
As many climate-blog addicts are aware, weather is not climate. While we are all busy arguing whether this years DC snowstorm was caused by climate change, those in DC were probably just thankful for online services like AccuWeather [...]

I have to admit I initially missed the whole “march of the thermometers results in overwhelming bias” and now I’m trying to put together a time-line. Mind you, I knew this meme was out there, but since there has never been any convincing evidence the march of the thermometers actually caused any large bias [...]

Inspired by Tamino’s recent efforts at producing a spatially-weighted analysis of temperatures from GHCN stations, I decided to make my own and “Open Source” it. While its currently written in STATA (the statistics software that I use for work), I’d be happy to work with anyone to port it to R or any other language [...]

My “spam” box has been filling lately, and the spam plugin has also been making lots of mistakes. To reduce spam, I’ve added a new plugin: Comment E-Mail Verification.
Supposedly, if you have previously posted comments, you will not notice anything. If you have not previously posted a comment, the plugin will send an email [...]

Zeke asked for a new thread for station drop out analyses.
In that thread, Zeke described a simple model to spatially grid and weight temperature data, and has asked for help improving it”
The latest source code is available here:
The folder name is Temp_Analysis v0.3.zip.
It should easily support importing either GHCN or USHCN data [...]