Re: Was the ClimateGate Hacker Justified? Join the Debate!

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:56:03 EST, Wes Deviers said:

> I think he was referring to the idea that previously rural senors are becoming 
> urban without necessarily taking that into account when you look at the data.
>
> For instance, say you have 30 weather stations along the stretch of 81 between 
> Blacksburg and Roanoke that were put in place in the 1950s and have been
> continually monitored.  As Roanoke and the Blacksburg/Christiansburg Greater
> Metropolitan Area of Traffic Growth have expanded towards each other, the heat-
> island effect would have expanded with it.  So assume 10 of the 30 sensors have
> shown continuous temperature increases since 1950.  How much of that is due to 
> global warming, and how much of that is due to urban expansion?
>
> A climatologist at VT would take that into account in their localized studies.  
> Somebody at NOAA, viewing raw numbers in a text file, has no way to control for 
> that.  It's not that cities are hotter, is that the hot areas around cities
> expand with the cities, and national or international datasets cannot account
> for it.
>
> If just 5% of your weather data points from 1960 were rural but in 2009 are
> urban or suburban, how much does that skew the entire set?

Here's a nice thread about how they deal with this stuff.  And apparently,
the raw numbers *do* include a tag for this, so "somebody at NOAA" can do the
applicable controls. People start posting actual stuff around reply #5:

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=359423

Of course, it's exactly these sort of corrections to the data that have the
climate-change deniers jumping up and down yelling 'ZOMG! Cooked Data!', and
why many of the scientists advocated not releasing the raw uncorrected data.

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