Is this ignorant, deliberate or just plain sloppy?
From Joannenova 26/2
Bourke: How 1km of land clearing can warm a million square miles
Yet again, we have to ask: do the Bureau of Meteorology care about Australia’s long term climate trend? Are they even trying?
Bourke could be one of the top ten most influential temperature sites in the world, mostly by virtue of being miles from anywhere, and used to homogenize a large slab of the land mass of Australia. Bill Johnston documents how changes to the site create most of the temperature trend.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s fancy magical and secret homogenization protocol does not detect changes that obviously affect the temperature (like the clearing in the photo below). But sometimes the BoM make “corrections” because of site changes that don’t appear to have mattered. Is it conveniently selective or just inept?
The BoM don’t even document major site changes a lot of the time. Even iconic sites that affect huge areas are badly managed. Someone got the tractor and plough and cleared the vegetation. As usual, a citizen scientist, a volunteer, documents it (along with a suite of other site changes).
In the last ten years land was cleared around the thermometer. This denuded area has a lower humidity, and higher volatility of temperatures. The data from this thermometer may be used to “correct” thermometers 1,400 km away.
Bourke Australia, Satellite view. “Back of Bourke”.
The town is the last outpost of civilization, so infamous it has it’s own cliche: “The back of Bourke”. If there was a perfect thermometer in Australia, this place would vie for the top spot with records going back to 1871, on the crossroads to nowhere and one of the last almost untouched towns –historic, but not urbanized enmasse. And it is an official ACORN site, considered one of the best quality records in Australia. Bourke is at the crossroads to Australia’s outback and is one of the last almost untouched towns –historic, but not urbanized enmasse.
But thanks to Bill Johnston, we now know that even out here the long hand of incompetence and bias has romped through the data. Again, Bill documents a site that has been watered, moved, gone electronic, had a new screen, shifted to the airport, and then just in the last few peak years — as climate change became “life or death” — someone cleared the ground all around it and no one at the BOM noticed.
In a Bermuda-triangly type mystery, the station went “electric” but instead of getting better data, for a few years the temperature was only recorded in whole rounded integers. (So much for the tenth of a degree of accuracy, eh?) Plus two or three weeks of data went missing each year, and the site failed performance checks twice.
The wonderbar Technical Advisory Forum set up to boost confidence in the expertise of the BoM didn’t investigate this in 2015. Being consistently irrelevant, they also didn’t investigate in 2016 or 2017 either. What looks like a whitewash, smells like a whitewash…
Likewise, two-rounds of expert peer-review fail to address such obvious problems in the Bureau’s homogenisation methods?
Bourke is so hot it was the place they sent trains to in 1896 to rescue people from a monster heatwave. Bourke is used to homogenise stations like Alice Springs which is 1,400km (860 miles) away. Does this little clearing “heat” a million square kilometers of records? It’s possible.
As usual, Johnston’s short post here is backed up by a longer PDF file which outlines his detailed years of research.
One Nation’s Senator Brian Burston is presenting this information and the paper to the Senate Estimates on Monday morning. Questions need to be answered.
How can BOM be so consistently mistake ridden?
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