Air Temperature Measurement Today: Siting And Equipment Matter ... Who'd A Thunk It?

An innocuous start to today's blockbuster press release:

PRESS RELEASE | Watts Up With That?: "A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments."

... yields this summary chart for you geeks:

Go read the paper and especially the Powerpoint. You can think of the chart I created just above as a summary of the Powerpoint.

The way I would describe the summary chart I have created here is that it shows that over the historical range of the datasets being examined by the paper, the better the siting and measurement equipment, the lower the amount of USHCN warming that can be supported.

The datapoint for "Rural MMTS, No Airports" (0.032 DegC / decade) is particularly damning as it is the best data available -- though it's also one of the smallest sample sets so it cannot be over-relied upon at this time (the very fact of it's relatively small size being somewhat damning in and of itself). But it should be noted that all of the "Compliant" data subset values line up very much in the ordinal relationship that common-sense site analysis would predict.

It's also interesting that the "Non-Compliant" data results also yield a very similar gross ordinal relationship.

And it doesn't matter what raw data subset you feed the NOAA process, the answer is always +0.3 (+3%/-0%) DegC / decade.

But perhaps strangest of all, the micro-zoomed detailed ordinal relationship of the NOAA results nearly match the paper's ordinal set relationships for "Compliant" data except for the "Rural, No Airports" value.  Hmm -- what are the odds of that?...

(NOTE: I'm having some fun with this this chart -- don't let it distract you from the first chart which is the one truly meant to summarize actual results of the paper.)

Luckily, we're assured that the NOAA process is a completely apolitical result -- and also certainly not based on scientism in any way...

UPDATE: A commenter to the press release post on WUWT reminds us:

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell.