Met Office to review its temperature series

Dec 5, 2009
Bishop Hill in Climate: MetOffice, Climate: Surface

The news that the Met Office is going to review its global temperature series is welcome, although certain aspects to the Times' story are questionable.

For example, I would take issue with the Met Office's claim that they need to go to the national met offices to get permission to use the raw data. When CRU was questioned on their claims that the data was not distributable, it was subsequently found that there were only two (IIRC) of the raw series that had any sort of restrictions on reuse and that neither of these were significant in scope. The CRU has now taken down its page about these alleged restrictions, so this is harder to show, but much of the story can be seen on the pages of Climate Audit. It's fair to conclude that this is disinformation.

Other caveats also apply:

• Will the Met Office be examining the reliability of the individual weather stations in terms of maintenance, and consistency of the record? We know this is highly problematic, so to avoid addressing the issue would draw a great deal of criticism.
• What about the way the stations are selected? Will we see rational selection critieria, or will the Met Office leave themselves open to accusations of cherrypicking? 
• Will we see the code as well as the data?

The answers to these questions are critical and it may well be worth following them up with the Met Office. That of course presupposes that the planned review actually takes place. As the Times explains, Gordon Brown isn't keen that it should:

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

 

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).