I hear a lot of discussion among my climatologist friends as well as many other non-climate folk about the veracity of NOAA’s published global climate data set. Folks who don’t understand the types of data that are used in building the data set don’t understand all of the steps needed to make a homogeneous record, including dealing with different types of instrumentation over different time periods, different ways of collecting the data, and changing locations of records. NOAA works very carefully to consider all of these variations when they put together their global record. But that leaves them open to charges that they are somehow manipulating the data to get the record they want.
I will state for the record that I believe the NOAA scientists do the best possible job with an astounding array of observations to make a clean data set. But don’t take my word for it. Two articles this week discussed an independent effort to see if NOAA did the right thing with a recent data set that is included in the global temperature record–namely surface ocean temperatures. Early in the record they used mostly ship observations, and now they rely more on better instrumented buoys. Melding those two different types of data together required careful analysis of the two records. And their result? The independent scientists agreed that NOAA’s technique to combine the two data sets into one record was done correctly and responsibly.
An independent study confirms NOAA’s conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer from PRI
Factcheck: Mail on Sunday’s ‘astonishing evidence’ about global temperature rise from Carbon Brief
