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Snow again in Western Australia?
South West WA got snow at Easter this year, a remarkable event, and then snow a week ago with predictions of more — which maybe fell on July 5. Concerned that two or three* bouts of snow didn’t fit the narrative, the ABC and BOM suddenly found an interest in our historic weather archives:
Snow has been falling in Western Australia since records began
Australian snow is usually associated with the alpine region of the east coast, but the fluffy white stuff has been falling in Western Australia since records began in 1846.
It is estimated that Western Australia experiences an average 1.7 snow events annually This could be more as meteorologists do not have an observational system to record them The Bureau of Meteorology have said there could be another snow event this weekend at Bluff Knoll as a cold front approaches the south of WA
What the ABC never seem to report:
Heatwaves have been happening in Western Australia since records began 50 degrees? It’s occurred all over Australia and many times
125F in Geraldton. The Chronicle newspaper, Trove, Jan 11 1896
When it’s hot, it’s proof of a […]
Friday April 19th set more records than anyone realized. Not only was it the earliest recorded snowfall at Bluff Knoll and WA, but it was also the coldest ever April day in Albany and many other towns in south-west Western Australia. It may also be the largest single day temperature mystery I’ve ever seen in the official “raw” data.
Days like the 19th are extremely unusual in Western Australia — it’s a state that often doesn’t get any snow all year and when it does, the length of the entire snow season is measured in hours. So you might think the million-dollar-a-day Bureau of Meteorology would be paying extra attention. Instead it appears they have lost that day’s data in Albany, despite having two thermometers there to record it. One station is in the city itself and there’s an official “expert” ACORN station at the airport about 10km away.
Luckily Chris Gillham, unpaid volunteer, was watching the live half hour observations roll in at and saw that thermometers at the airport recorded a maximum of only 10.4°C at 11am that day, which he remarks is the lowest April maximum the BOM has ever recorded there. Strangely, the 10.4°C seems to […]
Remember when climate modelers told us fossil fuels cause longer snow seasons?
No neither do I.
Albany, snowboarding, earliest snow, WA, 2019. | ABC Facebook
It is the earliest recorded snow event in a calendar year in the state’s history. Statistically, we can tell how anomalous this is by the behaviour of the local wildlife – seen snowboarding in shorts on the driveway in Albany. (Even going across the road). It’s possible this is the longest snowboard ride in the state’s history too. Though technically it is hail-boarding.
See snowboarding in Albany Western Australia
For foreign readers, WA (Western Aust) doesn’t have a snow season. Last regular snow was probably circa 20,000BC.
The ABC reports:
BOM forecaster Matt Boterhoven said snow was an extremely rare occurrence in April.
“It’s exceptional. We’ve only recorded once, in the last 100 years, snow as early as this on top of the Stirling Ranges,” he said.
“It’s related to a very strong cold air mass moving over the south-west of the state, so when conditions get below freezing and there’s precipitation, snow can form on top of Stirling Ranges.”
Mr Boterhoven predicted further […]
Graham Lloyd and Jen Marohasy scorch through the BoMs latest revision of Darwin.
On the 1st of January 1910 the maximum temperature recorded at the Darwin post office was 34.2 degrees C, then it became 33.8 C, and now it was, is, 32.8 C. (What’s the past tense of something that is now, but wasn’t then? We don’t even have grammar for this.)
Extrapolate that adjustment trend: One degree of cooling in 6 years (since the last adjustment) becomes 16 degrees cooler in a century. Darwin won’t know what hot days were!
Look what they’ve done to history Mum
The Bureau of Meteorology has no interest in the hot pre-1910 era which just gets chopped. And even if they did include it, after they’ve adjusted it — it wouldn’t be hot anymore anyway. Remember the Federation Drought? No one else does either.
Temperature is whatever you want to make it.
Mean maximum annual temperatures as measured at the Darwin Post Office and airport shown with the new remodeled ACORN-SAT Version 2, which is the new official record for Australia.
“What the Bureau has done to the historical temperature record for Darwin is indefensible. ” –– Marohasy
[…]
More warming adjustments from ACORN2
Once again we find that the oldest thermometers were apparently reading artificially high even though many were newish in 1910 and placed in approved Stevenson screens.) This is also despite the additional urban warming effect of a population that grew 400% since then. What are the odds?!
Fortunately, gifted craftsmen, sorry scientists have uncovered the true readings from the old biased thermometers which they explain carefully in a 67 page impenetrable document.
Chris Gillham has soldiered through the new “ACORN 2” adjustments that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has o-so-quietly released and Australians are just waking up to find that our coldest mornings back in 1910 were even colder than anyone realized at the time. Graham Lloyd is reporting in The Australian how the second rewrite in six years increases the warming by 23% . (Where was the ABC announcement?)
The ACORN series of the Bureau of Meteorology includes 112 stations. Their report lists the warming trends per decade in Table 9. I converted that into the total warming since 1910 and graphed that below.
About one third of the warming of our mean temperature is due to man-made adjustments
Comparing AWAP (semi-raw) to the […]
…
Who knew? With intrepid dedication the Australian BoM has uncovered our hottest ever day, buried under erroneous calculations, hidden from view in High Quality expert data sets that were World Class til they weren’t. Strangely the BOM hasn’t issued a press release, even though their supercomputer-marketing team put out a Hottest Ever January media release within hours of January ending. It appears the BOM hasn’t even issued a press release to tell the world they’ve finished the third complete reanalysis of Australian temperature history.
Luckily for the BOM, which may have run out of bytes or letters of the alphabet, volunteers like Chris Gillham of the unofficial BoM audit team noticed that the BoM ACORN dataset has become ACORN2. So we’d like to tell the world. Once again, the genius at the BOM is able to retrospectively compensate for all the flawed sites and thermometers that kept reading too high. Incredibly, no one noticed for a hundred years.
As we launch ACORN2 let’s remember how proud the BOM were of ACORN1. This is from them back in 2017:
Bureau of Meteorology statement on temperature observations
01/08/2017
The Bureau of Meteorology holds the integrity of […]
Warwick Hughes (h/t Dave Brewer) points out that on Dec 20th the Australian Bureau of Meteorology predicted that the Townsville region had only a 1 in 3 chance of exceeding the average rainfall in January.
Australian Bureau of Meteorology, prediction, Jan 2019 rainfall.
…
How that turned out one month later:
Australian Bureau of Meteorology, January rainfall, 2019.
Or graphed as the rainfall anomaly rather than as the percentage of the mean:
….
Predicting rainfall in Australia is very difficult. The issue is not that the BoM gets it wrong — it’s that they pretend they can do it that matters. Why bother issuing one month forecasts?
Ten days out they were still hopelessly wrong
As Warwick Hughes notes they also predicted on Jan 17th that February in Townsville would only have a 45% chance of exceeding the average rainfall. The downpour started on Jan 27th.
Today, after one whole week in February, the area has already had over four times the normal rainfall for the whole month, but the BoM didn’t see that rain coming ten days in advance.
The fancy-pants detailed graphics are entirely misleading — like advertising that sells an ability the experts simply […]
It’s summer, so the BoM and ABC can’t help themselves.
Albany, Hottest Town in Australia
Last week Marble Bar “hit an all time record”. This week, it’s Alice Springs. But the Australian BOM still haven’t used their own fabulous World Class ACORN Temperature data to find the hottest day ever in Australia. They’re still telling people it was in Oodnadatta, on Jan 2nd in 1960, but even dumb deniers know that according to ACORN temperatures hit 51.2C in Albany in far south WA in 1933.
[Marble Bar Dec 28th, 2018] The high temperature occurred at 12:39 pm local time. At that stage, it appeared Marble Bar could crack 50 for the first time — and perhaps even threaten the all-time Australian record of 50.7 in Oodnadatta, South Australia.
Chris Gillham pointed this out the strange anomaly of the cool coastal town that was hotter than a million square kilometers of desert, but four years later the BOM still haven’t resolved the situation. The 51.2C temperature is still there in the data, but the Top Ten Highest Temperature Records remain exactly the same. Is Albany, or is it not, the true record holder? Or is it that the […]
It’s just not cricket. And in so many ways.
Shame to let a perfectly good dataset go to waste… Australian data comes from some of the longest stations running in the Southern Hemisphere; it could be useful. Instead we get more evidence here that the BOM’s magical and secret homogenization adjustments can take poor data and spread false signals into better data. Homogenisation errors are already visible in a site-by-site analysis, but this shows the problems may be so big they affect averages across the whole of Australia, and we can detect them with satellites.
Tom Quirk continues comparing the satellite record of Australia with the BOM surface version. Previously, he (and for the record, Ken Stewart in 2015) showed that some discrepancies are due to the effect of heavy rain or drought. But now he looks further and finds that not-so-coincidentally, the largest gaps and most “inexplicable” differences occur in the mid nineteen-nineties, the same years the BoM shifted from using old large Stevenson screens to electronic thermometers. Around the same time, the large screens were often also swapped for much smaller ones too — like double jeopardy for data. Oddly, spookily, the BOM makes many adjustments to data […]
A funny thing happens when you line up satellite and surface temperatures over Australia. A lot of the time they are very close, but some years the surface records from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) are cooler by a full half a degree than the UAH satellite readings. Before anyone yells “adjustments”, this appears to be a real difference of instruments, but solving this mystery turns up a rather major flaw in climate models.
Bill Kininmonth wondered if those cooler-BOM years were also wetter years when more rain fell. So Tom Quirk got the rainfall data and discovered that rainfall in Australia has a large effect on the temperatures recorded by the sensors five feet off the ground. This is what Bill Johnston has shown at individual stations. Damp soil around the Stevenson screens takes more heat to evaporate and keeps maximums lower. In this new work Quirk has looked at the effect right across the country and the years when the satellite estimates diverge from the ground thermometers are indeed the wetter years. Furthermore, it can take up to six months to dry out the ground after a major wet period and for the […]
Yet again, we have to ask: does the Bureau of Meteorology care about Australia’s long term climate trend? Are they even trying?
Bourke could be one of the top ten most influential temperature sites in the world, mostly by virtue of being miles from anywhere, and used to homogenize a large slab of the land mass of Australia. Bill Johnston documents how changes to the site create most of the temperature trend.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s fancy magical and secret homogenization protocol does not detect changes that obviously affect the temperature (like the clearing in the photo below). But sometimes the BoM make “corrections” because of site changes that don’t appear to have mattered. Is it conveniently selective or just inept?
The BoM don’t even document major site changes a lot of the time. Even iconic sites that affect huge areas are badly managed. Someone got the tractor and plough and cleared the vegetation. As usual, a citizen scientist, a volunteer, documents it (along with a suite of other site changes).
In the last ten years land was cleared around the thermometer. This denuded area has a lower humidity, and higher volatility of temperatures. The data from this thermometer […]
Australia’s oldest and most iconic site has changed dramatically, but major site changes are not even being recorded.
The way the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) treat this site says a lot about the unscientific, shoddy, biased standards it uses at sites everywhere. This was their headquarters. Experts walked past new walls, construction and highways, yet they didn’t record them? Beggars belief.
Just as Peter Ridd warns us that we can’t trust some marine and reef institutes, Bill Johnston is the whistle-blower warning us about the Bureau of Met. There is no law of science that says human institutes are infallible. When they run off the rails, how do we find out? Ridd issued a warning from the inside and ended up in the Federal Court. When people, like Bill write from the outside, the BoM waves the peer-review gatekeeper, and anonymous reviewers can easily shut that gate, and without any penalty.
The louvered thermometer house in front of the Observatory in 1864. (Courtesy of the State Library of NSW.)
Sydney Observatory is one of the longest running stations in the Southern Hemisphere, starting in 1859. It was Australia’s premier meteorology site and in the 1800’s it was known […]
This was Sydney before “Climate Change” hit — fifty degrees:
Jan, 12, 1939, The Northern Star
Penrith may have recorded 47.3C for at least one-second this week, but Windsor is only 23 km north-east of Penrith, and on January 13th, 1939, it recorded 122F or 50.5C with an old fashioned liquid thermometer, not a modern noisy electronic one.
Apparently, climate change makes our extreme heat less extreme.
Furthermore, this was not measured on a beer crate in someones back-yard, but on the historic Windsor Observatory which was built in 1863 by John Tebbutt F.R.A.S who had discovered The 1861 comet, and published many scientific reports in Astronomical Journals. His meteorological observations are published at Harvard in 1899 (among others). Tebbutt died in 1916, so it’s not clear what instrument the 122 F was recorded on in 1939, but a Stevenson Screen had been installed around 40 years earlier, and the measurement was made by Mr Keith Tebbutt, presumably his son.
Tebbutt’s portrait graced the back of our 100 dollar note from 1984 -1996.
See, Many Collapse in the Heat: Thursday Jan, 12, 1939, The Northern Star
Windsor Observatory | Photo: Winston M. Yang Wyp
All part of Greater […]
The BOM announced it was the hottest ever day in Sydney today, then realized it had it wrong, but not before headlines spread across the country. For a million dollars a day you’d think the BOM would check their own “high quality” database. A scientific agency would take great care before announcing “historic all time records”for a city of five million people. A shameless PR agency might see that sort of mistake as an advantage.
It’s careless, piled on rank neglect
Even if the day had been “a record”, the temperatures are often artificially inflated due to site changes, thermometer changes, and the one-second-record effect thanks to the introduction of electronic thermometers, all of which are a product of careless BOM management and analysis. And even over and above that, past temperatures have been adjusted or homogenised downwards — often years after they are recorded — and by secret methods that the BOM will not disclose. I’ll have more information soon on changes at Sydney Observatory, that the BOM don’t make any allowance for.
Looks like another one second record?
The BOM announced the record after Penrith hit 47.1 at 1:55pm, the BOM tweet wrongly claimed it had “broken the […]
It was all yellow: A warning was in place for the whole of Victoria.
Massive flooding forecast across “whole state”:
The Bureau of Meteorology has warned an “unprecedented” amount of rain is expected to fall in Victoria over a three-day period.
Asked to rate the storms out of 10, senior forecaster Mr Williams said: “I’ll take the punt and say it’s a 10 for Victoria.”
He said the most recent rain in a short period of time in Melbourne was 100-200 millimetres (in 2005 and 2011) and on both occasions: “it paralysed transport routes in the city.”
Get out your sandbags!
Events were cancelled, and the Premier of Victoria told people not to “have a big night on the town” in preparation.
The city was told to bunker down for an “absolutely massive” rainfall event over the weekend …
“Half the inhabitants of Melbourne have never ever seen anything like this,” the Bureau of Meteorology’s senior forecaster Scott Williams said on Thursday.
“It is an event that poses a threat to life.”
Not so much a flood of rain, but there was a flood of text messages:
[…]
Forced, dragged to comply, the BoM finally releases a little bit of side-by-side data so skeptics can start to compare old and new thermometers
Congratulations to Jennifer Marohasy. Her preliminary study on this new data is enough to show that the electronic thermometers are not equivalent to the older liquid-in-glass ones and temperatures measured in the same spot differ by as much as 0.3C. She’s now writing to Minister Josh Frydenberg that the consequences and questions raised by this are so serious that the BoM should not be announcing any new records. We need an audit!
It’s only temperature data — ?
Skeptics have been asking for comparison data between different types of thermometers for years to figure out just how much difference they make. The BoM mostly withholds that data, sometimes deletes it, and as a last resort follows the David Jones’ recommended method of dealing with unwanted questions — “snow the skeptics” (see Climategate). After all the blog posts, newspaper articles, and requests from the Minister, finally the BoM have helpfully sent the data for Mildura in the handy form of 4,000 scanned handwritten A8 forms.
Just like this one — how much fun can you have?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology collects one-second records and can turn them into newspaper headlines. In contrast, the UK averages its readings over one minute, and the US over five. Obviously longer averaging could slow the latter down in the PR stakes (if that was their aim).
Hypothetically old glass thermometers just wouldn’t be as good at generating headlines. They take a lot longer to respond to bursts of hot air, sometimes missing short heatwaves completely (the kind that last less than a minute). It’s potentially quite an unfair race to run the two different thermometers in the same competition. It all depends on the handicap applied to the faster electronic ones.
In 2015 Bill Johnston warned that the introduction of electronic sensors in the late 1990s was artificially warming the records and asked the Bureau for data from the two different kinds of instruments side by side. The Bureau said they throw that data away (as you would). Lately, Jen Marohasy asked the Bureau for the manufacturing specifications and the Bureau said it’s all fine, the electronic thermometers were ‘purpose-designed’ to the Bureau’s specifications. We just don’t know what those specifications are exactly. No documentation. No data. (Send […]
The scandals do count. The Australian articles has got Minister Frydenbergs attention. The extensive collection of blog posts and the IPA Climate Change book show there is a deep well of material to fuel more articles. We have barely begun. Congratulations to Jennifer Marohasy. At least we will get a few more answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask.
The head of the Bureau of Meteorology, Andrew Johnson, has been asked by Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg to release extensive temperature data from a weather station in Victoria after requests from an independent scientist.
Dr Johnson has also agreed to meet with Jennifer Marohasy, a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, to discuss the integrity of the bureau’s temperature measurements as she pushes ahead with calls for a parliamentary inquiry.
The story of the “one second” records is potent: How many “hottest ever records” have been created thanks to new electronic equipment?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology appears to have put in place a measurement system guaranteed to provide new record high and low temperatures,” she said in the letter.
Instead of the older-style mercury thermometers in which temperatures […]
The Greens are now asking for another $2.2billion to pay for the battery bandaid to fix a problem they and the leeching renewables industry created.
Adam Bandt is out today with the big new plan, apparently confused about what “load” means:
We don’t have a baseload problem, we have a peak load problem,” Mr Bandt said.
No matter how you look at this, it’s not a “load” problem. It’s an issue of supply.
We can count on the Greens to pour confusion on any problem:
“We need flexible generation and energy storage to manage the transition, not more coal.”
Four mistakes in one sentence. We have flexible generation – more than enough to cope with the current load curve. What we need is affordable electricity, which we used to have, and which coal supplies. What we don’t need is energy storage to manage an irrelevant transition that we never had to have in the first place. Let me say it again, electricity generators are for generating electricity, not for magical attempts to control the climate.
What Adam Bandt was trying to say:
“We The freeloading renewables industry needs flexible generation and energy storage to […]
With only a million dollars a day it’s hard for the BoM to keep up with their own stations. Luckily Bill Johnston has arrived to help out for free. The BoM announced that it was Canberra’s hottest ever day last week, but forgot to check whether the heat was due to the site moving three times, changes in thermometers and a wind profiler they installed themselves in 2010.
Normally the BoM would detect and correct for these sorts of things by using Homogenisation Magic (HM). That’s where they spot these effects by comparing a station with surrounding stations. However in this case HM missed all three site moves and the wind profiler. It looks like those might add up to 2.2°C of artificial warming. Nothing to worry about, but the hottest ever record will have to be shredded, and naturally, the BoM will need to issue a correction with at least as much fuss and coverage as the mistaken headlines. It’s only fair…
After the effect of rainfall is removed there are at least three site moves, a screen change, equipment change, and alterations to the surrounding area that may influence the site. These step changes align with documented […]
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