Climate email mess hits Australia
 

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/cl...1204-kb39.html

LONDON: Australian weather records for an international database on climate
change were a "bloody mess", riddled with entry errors, duplication and
inaccuracies, leaked British computer files reveal.

The Herald found the criticism in a 247-page specialist programmer's log,
unearthed among the thousands of files hacked from East Anglia University, which
is at the centre of a climate change email scandal.

Labelled "HARRY-READ-ME", the log catalogues problems with the raw, historical
climate data sent from hundreds of meteorological stations around the world.

The Australian data comes in for particular criticism as the programmer
discovers World Meteorological Organisation codes are missing, station names
overlap and many co-ordinates are incorrect.

At one point the programmer writes about his attempts to make sense of the data.
"What a bloody mess," he concludes. In another case, 30 years of data is
attributed to a site at Cobar Airport but the frustrated programmer writes: "Now
looking at the dates. something bad has happened ... COBAR AIRPORT AWS
[automatic weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!"

In another he says: "Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian
data ... so many false references ... so many changes ... bewildering."

The log spans four years of work at the university's Climatic Research Unit, the
British keeper of global temperature records. The programmer rails that the
information has "no uniform integrity".

His criticisms relate solely to the construction of the database and do not
question the validity of historical temperature records or analyses that suggest
the impact of human activity on global warming trends.

"I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly
as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs
of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with
the same

station name and very similar co-ordinates. I know it could be old and new
stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There
truly is no end in sight."

Michael Coughlan, the head of the National Climate Centre at the Australian
Bureau of Meteorology, said it was difficult to comment without knowing the
source of the raw data. It was unlikely to have come directly from the bureau's
centre because unchecked, raw data was rarely requested for climate analysis.
The bureau had a network of more than 100 specially selected weather stations to
monitor climate change, and a century of records from them had been checked.

"We've put an enormous effort into developing a high-quality reliable climate
record for Australia and all that data is freely available," Dr Coughlan said.

But he said that if the British programmer had been using raw weather data,
which is sent around the world in real time for weather forecasting, it would
not be surprising that it contained errors. This raw data could have come from
countries other than Australia, and would have been difficult to correct without
access to information in Australia, such as the original field books.

"A computer programmer sitting in England won't have the resources to make those
corrections. I can understand their frustrations," Dr Coughlan said.

The programmer's log is one of the most read files worldwide since the email
archives were leaked. The log has been treated particularly sympathetically as
it reveals his blow-by-blow frustrations, which seemed to be unfolding as his
scientist colleagues, including the head of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil
Jones, appeared to discuss via email ways to avoid freedom-of-information
requests for raw data and to denigrate their critics.

Professor Jones, who has denied a conspiracy to manipulate global warming
statistics as "complete rubbish", has stood down from his post while the
university investigates the leaks.

The Herald attempted to contact Professor Jones and spoke to the computer
programmer we believe to be the author of the file. The programmer did not deny
his name but referred queries to the university's media unit. Professor Jones
has not responded.

RealClimate, a website run by climate scientists, confirms the log as the work
of a specialist charged with upgrading data.

"Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of
individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets, will
share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be," it says.

--
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