Seeing this headline “Perth faces dry winter” – made me check BoM 3 month Outlook rainfall predictions again. They are as hopeless as ever – for month after month from November 2009 – the BoM has failed to predict the dominant wet over most of Australia.
Starting with the Outlook for summer (Dec-Feb) – the links below let you compare
the BoM prediction with real world rainfall. I am simply looking for the BoM to correctly predict the broad shape of the rain decile patterns – but I do not see that they are close to doing that over the past six months. If a private business was wrong this often – they would soon go broke.
Continue reading BoM rain predictions wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again
Category Archives: BoM Australia
Weather Bureau for Australia
#2 Shock-horror – climate skeptics spotted alive in Australian science academy
The Canberra Times today has another episode in this ongoing saga.
Members of the UK Royal Society are making similar waves (thanks to Marc Morano)
Rebel scientists force Royal Society to accept climate change scepticism
My earlier post.
Continue reading #2 Shock-horror – climate skeptics spotted alive in Australian science academy
Amazing Australian State Government action to deal with “climate change denialism”
Talk about running scared.
We hope many Victorian public servants will vote with their feet and enjoy their lunch hour normally on the 18th June 2010.
DSE is Dept of Sustainability and Environment I think. Pre our current fairy story world the Dept might have been more sensibly named Forests and Lands.
Two degrees C Urban Heat Island in small village of Barmedman, NSW, Australia
Driving from Canberra to West Wyalong last Sunday morning I tried out a temperature logger and recorded this signature from the centre of the village of Barmedman which is in flat country between Temora and West Wyalong – conditions were not windy.
Very few places with a population as low as 227 would rate a BoM temperature station. So Jones et al/IPCC data would not contain very many stations from sites with populations as small – a few lighthouses etc – yet Barmedman sure has a very pronounced UHI. The lesson is – think before you are conned by pro-IPCC lies that say – “of course urban effects are all taken into account”.
Huge BoM rain and temperature prediction failures
This Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) prediction for summer made on 24 November 2009 has turned out to be so exactly wrong in several aspects. You can see in the BoM Outlook archive It is not only the 24 November prediction that is so wrong – check out their maps of predicted rain percentages published on 21 December, 19 January and there is no learning going on. Check actual rain here, choose 3 months to see summer rain.
The temperature Outlook for summer was just as hopeless but I have not got the time to put all these maps up – you can check against maps you can make here – make maps for 3 months for max and min anomaly, they compare with the BoM max and min temperature prediction maps for summer.
I am at a loss to understand how a well funded org of professionals can repeatedly get these Outlooks so wrong. Obviously the models they use are not worth a cup full of warm spit.
Australia pays for better and deserves better.
Some essential history of IPCC global warming from 20 years ago.
Over at the matchless blog Wattsupwiththat:
Look for two comments by Mohib (21:33:01) on 1st Feb – I thought Mohib’s questions were important enough to try and explain the history .
Jones et al 1986 did indeed reject 38 stations from their Northern Hemisphere study. Note UHI not actually mentioned in the 1986 Table 1 – but no doubt covered under “non-climatic warming trends” – so a nuance there compounded by PDJ ref to “affected by urbanization” in the ClimateGate mails 1184779319.txt link at Watts.
Nth Hem Journal paper pdf downloadable here
TR022 Nth Hem documentation book partly online with 2 tables showing the breakdowns of their station numbers in each homogenization category.
38 stations UHI affected out of the thousands of NH cities is somewhat laughable and the paper should have been sent back by the editor or reviewers. But Jones could say that other UHI affected data were caught up in other checks of his and rejected for other reasons, eg. Category D maybe.
BTW Geoff Jenkins was one of the original 1990 IPCC authors and you might expect would know these things.
In the case of the Jones et al 1986 Southern Hemisphere Journal paper downloadable and TR027 book fully online.
Jones et al found only 3 (yes three) UHI affected stations to reject. Even more surreal than 38 – 3 out of what, 120 plus major cities in the Sth Hem.
So there are a few “nuances” to comprehend in the statements such as “On the one hand in 1986 he knows UHI affects the temperature..”.
IMHO Jones et al 1986 spoke and did less than the bare minimum required to be able to claim that they had adequately dealt with the UHI in global T data.
There was presumably some disquiet remaining in climate circles after the 1988 publication of Wood’s critique of Jones et al 1986. Otherwise, how do you explain the need for the Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature at al ?
In the 1990 Letter to Nature they compared purportedly rural series from 3 regions, Western USSR, Eastern China, Eastern Australia – with their grid point trends from those same regions and claimed to prove that negligible UHI effect remained in their grid point trends – a conclusion the IPCC and UKMO has quoted ever since.
In fact what happened IMHO (and I did share in a work checking what they did in Eastern Australia) – was that their Rural series contained significant UHI amplification in the trend – hence they were able to demonstrate tolerable agreement with their grid points trends which also carry UHI contamination.
So Mohib, when you say above; “But then in his 1990 paper he takes the position with Wang that UHI is not a factor in temperatures.” Can you see now that is not a fair summing up of the situation.
In fact Jones et al 1990 was purporting to demonstrate that Rural series had similar trends to his grid point series – ergo by their reasoning there can not be significant UHI effect in either. I hope that that explain it clearer.
Jones et al 1990 is now further unraveling helped along by Doug Keenans persistence and events revealed in Climategate emails. That all these prominent co-authors lent their names to the shoddy 1990 Letter to Nature is a classic case of IPCC science at work.
NASA GISS data does not back BoM hottest decade claim
The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has just updated their global temperature land station data to the end of 2009 – so we can make decadal anomaly maps to check on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) claim that the decade 2000 through 2009 was the hottest ever in Australia.
Eyeballing the area of the various colour ranges should give us an idea if GISS analysis agrees with the BoM. Here are my observations – and I am happy to have readers send in their opinions.
If you Read the rest of this entry, I have the global map for 2000-2009 including the colour scale.
1990-1999 map of decadal temperature anomalies compared to 1951-1980 – the GISS default
2000-2009 map of decadal temperature anomalies compared to 1951-1980 – the GISS default
[1] First the Brown warmest regions (1 to 2 degrees) are similar in area – I have not counted the pixels. I note that these are mainly in regions where temperature data would not be the greatest.
[2] Pale Brown areas (0.5 to 1 degrees) I think are larger in area on the 1990-1999 map.
[3] The 2000-2009 map has a much larger area which cooled (-0.2 to -0.5 degrees), the Pale Turquoise colour.
Weighing it all up, surely it is fair to say that at the very least, there is no ringing endorsement here for the BoM’s claim.
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I am asking – what is the BoM doing wasting our money making dubious lineball claims like this ?
At a time when there is so much more important real work to do.
For example better weather forecasting one to 2 months ahead.
Fixing the scandalous deterioration of the rainfall and temperature networks.
Continue reading NASA GISS data does not back BoM hottest decade claim
How can it serve the Australian national interest by having the BoM mislead us ?
On the night of the 11th-12 of Jan 2010 Melbourne sweated through an uncomfortably hot night. Just a couple of media refs will give you the gist but Google could find more no doubt. There is talk of Melbourne’s “..equal hottest night ever.” But I see no sign of balancing statements which should have refered to two facts.
[1] The record equal temperature was measured in the centre of the Melbourne urban heat island (UHI) which has grown at night by 2 degrees centigrade in the last 60 years.
[2] The BoM should have stated that there was little sign the hot night was a record breaker outside of Melbourne.
This BoM map shows the minimum temperature anomaly for the 12th Jan.
Click for the full Australian map.
You can make those maps here.
To test how widespread record breaking temperatures were that night I checked 11 sets of station data and found only one with a record high minimum on the 12th. Note my daily data is only updated to April 2007, so the true rankings might be even lower if there have been notably hot nights in the 32 months since then.
Continue reading How can it serve the Australian national interest by having the BoM mislead us ?
Evidence for a strong urbanization signal; 0.3 degrees C per decade in Canberra Airport temperature data 1997-2009
Canberra/Queanbeyan is a sprawling collection of suburbs population 300,000 plus – which extends over 30km north south and nearly 20km east west. Canberra was selected as the Australian Federal Capital early last century and urbanisation would have started after the “old” Parliament House started operating in the late 1920’s. The post WWII boom in Australia plus increasing migration accelerated the addition of new suburbs to Canberra, a process which continues to this day.
There are monthly maximum and minimum temperature data from the Airport starting March 1939 running complete to the present time. During 1996 the ACT Govt in conjunction with the BoM (Bureau of Meteorology) installed an air-monitoring station at Tuggeranong in Canberra southern suburbs where there are air quality issues.
As part of this instrumentation, temperature is recorded and the BoM publishes monthly mean max and mean min at this website, look for Site name: TUGGERANONG (ISABELLA PLAINS) AWS Site number: 70339 and you can download the data for yourself. Canberra Airport data is Site name: CANBERRA AIRPORT Site number: 70014, and I understand the BoM instruments are on the Fairbairn RAAF Base side of the airport, that is several hundred metres across the runways, NE of the main passenger terminal . See GoogleEarth map thanks to MartinH of Canberra
The difference between Canberra Airport and Tuggeranong is 0.3 degrees C per decade – a very significant indication of urban effects in the Canberra data. Remember too that the Tuggeranong data will have some UHI contamination too, so the true UHI at Canberra Airport could be in excess of 0.3 degrees C per decade.
This site shows how even small urban areas can be significantly affected by the UHI effect.
Continue reading Evidence for a strong urbanization signal; 0.3 degrees C per decade in Canberra Airport temperature data 1997-2009
Australian mean annual temperature reconstruction 1882-2009
After getting questions from people about the BoM claim that 2000-2009 was Australia’s hottest decade I have started updating my 1992 25 station series for Australian – time consuming with 50 other things to do.
Here is the result of an experiment to fit my 1993 25 station series to the Spencer and Christy lower troposphere satellite data for a block of lats-longs forming the Australian region.
(Sorry Tasmania is missed out. Not worth including all that ocean just to get the Apple Isle.)
For a larger chart and station list.
The BoM does not use pre-1910 data, I expect they would claim that Stevenson Screens were not in use before that date and the old open thermometer stands read warm. I think they are wrong about that – see my published paper.
The BoM published trend 1910-2009 uses “stroked and tweaked” data, which I also think is wrong.
My 25 station series would incorporate a small quota of urban warming from the town sites. Like all temperature time series, mine would get less reliable the older the data is – but I put this up as the best Australian series of its length.
Perhaps somebody knows of proxy records that cast light on late 19C warmth in Australia.