Hansen Shocks – Adjusts Antarctica Rothera Station Record…Changes Warming Trend To Cooling!

That’s not a misprint. This is what reader Ed Caryl has discovered in his following essay. I’m as shocked as you Ed.
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Temperatures at the Larson Ice Shelf – Rothera Station
By Ed Caryl

This is a follow-up on the “It’s The Claim “Antarctica Is Warming” That Is Disintegrating – And Not Much Else” story.

The closest research station to the often-discussed Larson Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is Rothera Station on Adelaide Island. This is on the west side of the peninsula, 200 kilometers from the center of the ice shelf. The Rothera Station does not have a long history, despite the GISS temperature record that goes back to 1946. The history below comes from the British Antarctic Survey web site.

From 1955 to 1960 the UK maintained a survey station on Horseshoe Island on the east side of Marguerite Bay. In 1957 two surveyors John Rothera and Peter Gibbs crossed the frozen sea ice and explored the area now known as Rothera Point.

From 1961 to 1977 UK activity in the area was conducted from Adelaide Island Station located at the southern tip of the island. For many years this proved a good base from which to undertake further survey of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Rothera Station was established in 1975 to replace Adelaide Island Station where the glacier ski-way had deteriorated rendering the operation of ski equipped aircraft hazardous. There was a phased construction programme so that by 1980 the station provided accommodation, electrical power generation, vehicle workshops, scientific offices and a store for travel equipment.

From Rothera’s inception to the 1991–1992 austral summer season, BAS Twin Otter aircraft used a glacier ski-way 300m above the station on the Wormald Ice Piedmont. During that summer a gravel runway and hangar facility was commissioned bringing a more reliable air operation and the possibility of a passenger aircraft link from outside the continent. Up to this time everyone coming to Rothera had to depart from the Falkland Islands by ship.”

According to the above, the station temperature data in the GISS record must have come from at least four different locations. These are not moves down the street; these are moves to quite different locations many tens of kilometers apart on different islands or parts of Adelaide Island. The exposures to wind, the ice, and the open sea must have been quite different at each. At each location, the stations also had a development history. Each grew in size from the establishment date to the day it was abandoned for the next. This can be seen in the temperature records, especially the last three. See Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Last year’s GISS record for Rothera station broken into segments by location.

Figure 1 is the GISS record that I downloaded last year while researching researching A Wind In Antarctica. To answer Pierre’s question on Hansen fudging the numbers, the current GISS record was downloaded. Imagine my surprise (Figure 2 below).

The records have been changed to remove…the warming trend!

Figure 2, the dark blue is the current GISS record for Rothera Station.

During the last year, each of those Rothera Station locations has been “homogenized”, and the warming trend has now largely disappeared. The ESA needs to review their findings of 2.5° C warming. Perhaps those 49 NASA ex-employees have already made a difference. With each GHCN and GISS update, the warming on the Antarctic Peninsula seems to be disappearing. Now we need to watch for further “corrections”.

 

15 responses to “Hansen Shocks – Adjusts Antarctica Rothera Station Record…Changes Warming Trend To Cooling!”

  1. Jimbo

    The cold, hard reality must have bit him after his recent visit to Antarctica. 😉

  2. Paul Matthews

    One thing I have only recently learnt is that the adjustments applied to station data by GHCN (which in turn are used by Hansen for GISSTEMP) are constantly changing.
    Here is a table of the adjusted temperature for Rothera in January 1948, at the different times I downloaded the data file from GHCN. The first column is the download date. First two are same date but switch from v3.0 to v3.1.

    20111105 1948TAVG 2.61
    20111105 1948TAVG 2.19
    20120117 1948TAVG 2.39
    20120123 1948TAVG 2.39
    20120311 1948TAVG 3.05
    20120402 1948TAVG 3.08
    20120411 1948TAVG 2.74

    You can see that sometime between Jan and March this year they decided to add about 0.7 to Rothera 1948, making the warming there much less.
    The data currently at GISS matches the GHCN data for 3/11 or 4/02.
    So I predict that if you look at GISS again in a few weeks time you will see that the past has been cooled by about 0.3 so the warming at Rothera will increase again.

    What is driving this frequent adjustment of the adjustments is not clear. Paul Homewood (notalotofpeopleknowthat) may do a post on this soon.

    1. Ed Caryl

      We don’t know where the “Rothera” station was in 1948, and we don’t know what the temperature was. So they are free to make it up!

  3. DirkH

    ESA more alarmist than Hansen. That’s a first. That gives an attaboy from Pachauri.

  4. Brian G Valentine

    “Perhaps those 49 NASA ex-employees have already made a difference.”

    That will be the day I die. Hansen has no regard for anybody excepting himself and the extreme of extreme alarmists – who ordinary people would identify as “nihilists.”

    Hansen’s methodology has been to identify meaningless “isotherms” that progressivly north or south from the Equator. My guess is he will identify these “isotherms” across the Antarctic continent that will show the continental ice is all disintegrating anyway.

  5. DirkH

    Maybe Hansen has spared Rothera for some future warming – when he ramps it up, it’ll light up a million square kilometers in bright red!

  6. DirkH

    O/T The otherwise useless ftd – financial Times Deutschland – has a list of critters threatened by the German renewables madness.
    http://www.ftd.de/wissen/natur/:opfer-des-atomausstiegs-die-tierischen-feinde-der-energiewende/70015189.html

    Interesting:
    -Bees lose orientation amongst solar panels due to the reflexions. Problem when mounting gazillions of panels amidst agricultural areas.
    -The marten (Marder) just *LOVES* to gnaw on cables. FUN for all wannabe solar profiteer homeowners… whew! I didn’t think of that. No, I don’t have PV.
    But I know that a string of PV modules reaches a DC voltage of 700 V or more.

    Curiously, the list omits raptors and storks. Maybe the media have already given up on them.

    1. Brian G Valentine

      Your sense of proportion is all wrong, Losing some bee colonies to solar panel emissivities or a few hundred thousand storks or cranes to wind turbines is NOTHING compared with their certain extinction to about 10-40 ppmv addtional CO2 in the air.

      (For a genuine understanding of CO2 in the air and “who puts it there” watch the “Salby on CO2 vs temp” video linked from this site. Leaves on speechless.)

      1. DirkH

        “…is NOTHING compared with their certain extinction to about 10-40 ppmv addtional CO2 in the air. ”
        Reminds me of this interesting consideration:
        Surviving Climate Change by migrating
        meters… or even millimeters…
        http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/jun/14jun2011a4.html

        1. Brian G Valentine

          “predicted by state-of-the-art climate models”

          Well, who could argue with that.

          Makes one wonder how species could possibly evolve to where they are now.

          If humans had been around I suppose it would have never happened

          I once had sort of a contest with some friend of mine, to produce the “nitwit climate comment of the week.”

          It was so awful I couldn’t look at it anymore.

          1. DirkH

            One has to have a certain penchant for idiocy.

            I do.

  7. Casper

    I’d rather say sh* happens at work, sometimes 😉

  8. Paul Matthews

    OK, that predicted change in GISS data has happened already.

    Last week the GISS temp for Rothera in Jan 1948 was 3.1. This week, it’s 2.7.
    If you plot your graphs again now you’ll see a difference.
    Numbers have been changed by about 0.3-0.4 before 1971.

  9. Ed Caryl

    If GISS and GHCN are changing the data for Rothera 7 or 8 times in six months, what are they doing to the rest of the database? What possible justification do they have? Don’t they know that people are watching? This alone proves that their data is useless for drawing ANY conclusions concerning temperature anywhere on the planet.
    /rant off

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