Charting The Record Cold

2 Responses to Charting The Record Cold

1. conrad ziefle says:

   February 17, 2023 at 5:43 pm

   Tony,
   These are really good tools. Thanks for making them. I’ve been distracted and need to get back to playing with them. Just philosophically, I generally think adjusting raw data is bad policy, although it could be understandable in some cases. For instance, if you knew through some mechanism that a certain set of data from one device was off by a given amount, then one could appropriately change by that amount. You might wonder why, at some point, one didn’t correct that device, so it didn’t need to mathematically changed anymore. However, it is difficult to understand how one knows how much to correct masses of decades old data, when you don’t know all the factors involved (and even if you did) in each set. Even more difficult to understand is why one has to correct modern data, that is being taken under one’s own watch. Don’t they know how to fix their devices so that they are taking correct temperatures? It almost seems like that if they can’t take temperatures correctly today, then why would we trust them to correctly adjust temperatures of yesteryear? Maybe those old guys knew better how to collect accurate data after all.
   Even further, you have to wonder why one would change a set of data that is self-consistent, i.e. all the numbers center on a neutral mean, and have reasonable deviations around that going back over 100 years? Why change that set to make it depart radically from the old mean by sharply rising above it? It would be like sampling products on an assembly line and seeing that it all is within tolerance, and then lying about it, so that you could shut down the assembly line.
   Anyway, thanks of the software development. It would be nice to be able to turn this information into handbills that we can then staple to bulletin boards for others to stare at.

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2. edwardt says:

   February 23, 2023 at 3:00 am

   Anybody know where I can get the folder for the monthly raw and adjusted NOAA data? Or how I can accomplish collecting the monthly raw and adjusted data with the download listed above? I can generate the ghcn graph shown in the videos by running the python commends in linux, but I cannot obtain the monthly raw and adjusted data (which is what I am really looking for, for tmin, tmax, avg).

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