Monday, April 19, 2010

It's the warmest winter ever ...

... in Finland, according to NASA. Their GISS database reports that March temperatures in Finland are the highest ever seen:
GISS station values are even more spectacular, the warmest March on record is set in every Finnish station GISS is following. For instance, according to GISS, the mean March temperature in Sodankylä (61402836000) was a remarkable +1.5 °C beating the old record (-2.2 °C) from 1920 by 3.7 °C!
The NASA temperature map shows a hotspot over Finland, where the thermostat has been cranked up to 11 (circled for your convenience):


Hold the presses, call Al Gore! Except there's one teensy tinsy problem: people in Finland are freezing:
Well, according to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, March 2010 was colder than usual all over Finland, especially in the northern part. For instance, the mean temperature in Sodankylä was -10.3 °C, which is almost three degrees below the base period 1971-2000 average (-7.5 °C). So the GISS March value for Sodankylä is off by amazing 11.8 °C!
It seems that they mislaid some minus signs in the data somewhere. Long time readers will remember the last time that NASA was wildly wrong in reporting "record high" temperatures. I guess that this is the time to ask that why, if we can put a man on the moon, can we not get a quality controlled climate database?

Or how about this: what's the difference between weather and climate?

Weather: What NASA reports.

Climate: What's actually happening.

I'm here all week. Remember to tip your waiters ...

5 comments:

  1. Yes, please remember to tip your waiters - they are most likely grossly underemployed these days.

    Hey, perhaps we -er- they could be retasked to work on verifying and cleaning up all that data...?

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  2. The question remains: why is the United State's Space Administration tracking Finland's temperatures, whether or not they are doing it correctly? Is Finland paying us for it?

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  3. Scotaku, someone needs to check it.

    Bluesun, people send their data to NASA for inclusion in the data set. I expect that in this case, it's the Finnish Weather Bureau.

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  4. They must be getting a bargain price for this level of accuracy.

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  5. "Or how about this: what's the difference between weather and climate?"

    A little more seriously, weather is what we're having now and next week; climate is what we've been having the last few decades and what we'll be having the next few.

    It logically follows that while we cannot predict weather with any reasonable accuracy, we know for certain what the climate will be 100 years from now. Unless we repent, change our ways, and give all our money to the Carbon Police.

    You may have seen the news about Mongolia: the worst winter in living memory - here's one news story of many:

    Struggling to survive Mongolia's freezing winter

    I wonder how many temperature data points from there will be added to the climate database.

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