Climate scientists admit they need more reliable temperature measurements

Weather station [image credit: UK Met. Office]

Making so-called ‘adjustments’ to existing temperature data, followed in some cases by adjustments to the adjustments, was never going to be a credible scientific method.
H/T The GWPF

A group of prominent scientists are calling for a global network of advanced weather stations that don’t need to go through controversial data adjustments, and it’s vindication for global warming skeptics, writes Michael Bastasch.

Seventeen climate scientists co-authored a research article published in the International Journal of Climatology calling for a global climate station network modeled after the United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN) to use as a baseline for data quality.

“Already after 10 years, the USCRN has been used to validate United States annual surface air temperature anomalies as determined by homogenized standard network observations,” the scientists wrote.

The article, led by Maynooth University climatologist Peter Thorne, argued for a “suitably stable and metrologically well-characterized global land surface climate fiducial reference measurements network.”

For meteorologist Anthony Watts this is a big moment. Watts published research in 2015 that found scientists used “compromised” weather stations to make adjustments to U.S. temperature data that inflated the warming trend by as much as 50 percent.

“To me, this feels like vindication,” Watts wrote on his blog Watts Up With That. “For years, I’ve been pointing out just how bad the U.S. and global surface monitoring network has been.”

“We’ve seen stations that are on pavement, at airports collecting jet exhaust, and failing instruments reading high, and right next to the heat output of air conditioning systems,” wrote Watts.

Watts is a proponent of using the USCRN as a baseline for U.S. temperature measurements. USCRN is a network of 114 climate stations set up by NOAA to provide “high-quality” climate data that doesn’t need to be adjusted for “biases” in the temperature record.

Existing weather stations may have been around for decades, but they were set up to make daily temperature measurements that only needed to be accurate within a degree or two.

Stations weren’t set up to study long-term changes in average temperature, and many have changed instrumentation, location and their environment, all of which affect temperature readings.

Continued here.