From Jennifer Marohasy’s Weblog
By Jennifer Marohasy
Just a few years in the past, I reported that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology modified a minimal temperature on the official Goulburn climate station from a really chilly minus 10.4C to a cold minus 10.0C on Sunday 2nd July 2017. After we protested, the Bureau eliminated the worth altogether, and no worth was recorded within the official archive because the minimal for that day for Goulburn. After we protested some extra, what I incorrectly assumed was the actual worth of minus 10.4 was inserted into the net database. I now remorse that worth having been recorded within the official archive, as a result of I now understand it to be a fraud.
Then two weeks later, on Sunday sixteenth July 2017, I caught the Bureau doing the identical factor on the Thredbo climate station in Australia’s snow fields – altering, then deleting, a really chilly temperature.
I now know the temperature archive for Thredbo for July 2017 can also be a lie – the truth is it’s a lie proper again to Could 2007 when an MSI1 card was put in limiting the temperature that might be recorded to minus 10.
For greater than a decade, many climate stations throughout the Australian mainland and in Tasmania had limits set on how chilly temperatures might be recorded. The archived knowledge is what a few of my buddies now name Seinfeld knowledge: once you see -10.0 or -10.4 within the Bureau archive or a clean throughout winter at any of the chilly climate station, effectively the proper worth might effectively have been -13.2 which is the temperature recorded at Thredbo on twenty eighth August 2018, the winter after Lance and I had the chilly day restrict of minus 10.0 lifted.
Graham Lloyd first reported the story in The Australian newspaper, with {a photograph} of Lance Pidgeon and I making the entrance web page, on 1st August 2017. That very same night I used to be on Sky TV with Alan Jones and finally an inner ‘Evaluation of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Computerized Climate Stations’ was referred to as. A report by the identical title was issued in September 2017, fastidiously worded, and so implying, all the things was fantastic: that the Bureau was faithfully recording temperatures from its 695 Computerized Climate Stations unfold throughout the land mass of Australia.
Nothing might be farther from the reality.
The Bureau operates an error susceptible community of automated climate stations (AWS) which have by no means met Worldwide Organisation for Standardization 17025 or ISO 9001 necessities, nor does the Bureau function its community of automated climate stations in accordance with World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) suggestions.
I’ve been discussing these points with my good friend and electronics’ specialist Lance Pidgeon over the past couple of weeks, and he has written a listing of ten myths in regards to the Bureau’s automated climate system. I plan to element these on this new collection about legacy electronics on the Bureau.
Lance will quote extensively from e-mail exchanges printed as a part of Freedom of Data doc 30/6150 that features e-mail exchanges between members of the committee appointed to assessment the operations of the Computerized Climate Stations following the botched recording from Goulburn and Thredbo again in July 2017. The emails between senior Bureau workers and technicians from the New Zealand MetService are public due to a Freedom of Data request initiated by former Institute of Public Affairs colleague, Evan Mulholland. Regardless of the percentages, Evan endured with this FOI request, with the related documentation now public.
In a key e-mail, Bruce Hartley the Techniques Engineering Supervisor on the New Zealand Met Service explains:
The tools wasn’t defective. The acquisition specification required operation all the way down to -10 ˚C, so the phrases should be fastidiously written.
Bruce Hartley is referring to the necessity to fastidiously phrase the ultimate report ‘Evaluation of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Computerized Climate Stations’ as a result of most of what the Bureau had communicated to the Australian public about temperatures as recorded at Goulburn and Thredbo to that time limit was an enormous lie.
I exploit the phrase ‘lie’ intentionally, and maybe as George from Seinfeld used it when he infamously suggested Jerry: Simply keep in mind, it’s not a lie, should you consider it.
I’ve come to grasp that Bureau workers, particularly the director Andrew Johnson, spend a variety of time making an attempt to persuade themselves that even when they will’t forecast the climate, they’ve a system that may reliably file temperatures and that the subsequence want for homogenisation, isn’t proof of additional fudging – even whether it is.
It will change into extra apparent as Lance explains the electronics, the main focus of future posts on this collection. There are at the very least 9 myths to observe.
Fable 1. The Bureau doesn’t set limits on how low a chilly temperature could be measured.
The Bureau had set a restrict of minus 10 Celsius throughout its Australian automated climate station (AWS) community together with at areas more likely to file temperatures under this worth. We all know from web page 53 of the Bureau’s fastidiously worded inner assessment, Evaluation of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Computerized Climate Stations, that this restrict was in place at Thredbo for some 10 years from Could 2007 till July 2017 and at Goulburn Airport from November 2002 till July 2017.
On web page 4 of the identical doc the Bureau acknowledges lifting these limits for the areas of Tuggeranong, Mount Baw Baw, Butlers Gorge and Fingal in October 2017 by eradicating the MSI1 card which had a selected tools configuration that created the synthetic restrict of variously minus 10.0C and minus 10.4C.
The Bureau is but to clarify how lengthy the minus 10.0C/10.4C limits was in place at these areas.
It’s also but to guarantee the Australian public that it has eliminated the MSI1 card that created the restrict from the remainder of the community.
To be clear, the unique ‘full vary’ design specification of the Almos MSI1, as per Technical Report A2671 was -10 to +55.
As Bruce Hartley of the New Zealand Metservice defined to the Bureau in 2017:
The tools wasn’t defective. The acquisition specification required operation all the way down to -10 ˚C, so the phrases should be fastidiously written.
To be clear, temperatures could have reached a lot decrease than minus 10.4C at Goulburn on 2nd July 2017 and at Thredbo on sixteenth July 2017. We’ll by no means know as a result of the MSI1 playing cards restricted recording of temperatures to 10.0C/10.4C.
It’s the case that after the boundaries have been lifted ‘temperatures plunged’ at Thredbo, to cite from an article by Graham Lloyd printed in The Australian on August 4, 2017:
Recorded temperatures on the Bureau of Meteorology’s Thredbo Prime automated climate station have dropped under -10C prior to now week, after motion was taken to make the ability ‘match for goal’.
A file of the Thredbo Prime station for 3am on Wednesday exhibits a temperature studying of -10.6C. This compares with the BoM’s month-to-month highlights for June and July, each displaying a low of -9.6C.
The BoM stated it had taken quick motion to interchange the Thredbo station after issues have been raised that very low temperatures weren’t making it onto the official file. Controversy has dogged the bureau’s automated climate station community since Goulburn man Lance Pigeon noticed a -10.4C studying on the BoM’s web site on July 2 mechanically regulate to -10C, then disappear.
Later unbiased monitoring of the Thredbo Prime station by scientist Jennifer Marohasy confirmed a recording of -10.6C vanish from the file.
BoM initially claimed the changes have been a part of its high quality management procedures. However bureau chief government Andrew Johnson later instructed Atmosphere Minister Josh Frydenberg that investigations had discovered numerous chilly climate stations weren’t “match for goal” and would get replaced.
The BoM has admitted that, along with Goulburn and Thredbo Prime, stations at Tuggeranong within the ACT, Butlers Gorge and Fingal in Tasmania and Mount Baw Baw in Victoria would get replaced.
It angers me that we’ll by no means understand how chilly it actually acquired at Goulburn on the morning of Sunday 2nd July 2017 or at Thredbo on morning of Sunday sixteenth July 2017 as a result of the Bureau did certainly have limits set on how chilly temperatures might be recorded. That data is misplaced eternally.
Actually, the Bureau continues to function a legacy system of outdated electronics and computing software program developed within the Nineties with inherent biases, that largely hype most temperatures. This mixed with setting a chilly restrict of minus 10.0/10.4C implies that college researchers counting on Bureau knowledge have been in a position to declare that ‘file scorching days at the moment are 12 occasions extra possible in Australia than days of record-breaking chilly’ – Peter Hannam from the Sydney Morning Herald quoting Sophie Lewis and Andrew King from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Local weather System Science. This suits the human-caused world warming narrative that may be a dependable supply of funding for teachers, disaster tales for mainstream media, and authorities subsidies that prop-up renewable power industries.
If the temperature recording system on the Bureau was overhauled, all of this may be put in danger.
Dependable temperature data would possible present solely a modest enhance in temperatures from the Sixties and that a lot of the file scorching days occurred throughout the first half of the 20 th century. Moreover, there could be no decline in chilly days.
And till the Bureau reopens the Charlotte Move climate station which holds the file of minus 23.0C for the bottom every day minimal temperature ever recorded in Australia, set on 29 June 1994, the probabilities of a brand new file minimal chilly day are decreased. The Charlotte Move climate station was closed on thirty first March 2015. The Bureau would by no means shut any of its scorching climate stations, like Oodnadatta or Onslow. But it surely does have an aversion to new chilly day data. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is a shame.
It’s all extremely unhappy for these of us who care in regards to the integrity of Australia’s historic temperate knowledge and for precisely assessing local weather variability and alter.
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The function picture contains Lance Pidgeon and I on the Goulburn Airport on the morning of the thirty first July 2017.
Ultimately I get to debate Goulburn and Thredbo on this interview with Alan Jones:
