The Week That Was: March 5, 2016 – Brought to You by www.SEPP.org
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Atmospheric Data – Re-Analysis and Confirmation: An issue developed this week that illustrates the importance of proper re-analysis of data and independent confirmation. The issue regarding temperature trends in the middle troposphere was noticed by Anthony Watts, WUWT, discussed in several other posts, with an expanded discussion by Roy Spencer. Spencer and John Christy developed the method of measuring temperatures using data from satellites, for which they received significant recognition. Their findings are publicly posted monthly, with the data going back to December 1978. These data, known as the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) data are the most comprehensive estimates of global temperatures in existence. The group is funded by NOAA.
A private group, publicly and privately funded, is headed by Frank Wentz, with Carl Mears the chief scientist, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) provides the other well-known analysis. Some years ago, this group discovered that the UAH data, at that time, did not properly account for orbital decay of satellites, giving a cooling bias to the data. Once this bias became known and demonstrated, UAH adjusted for it. This is the way science works, correcting mistakes. Unfortunately, this incident led some global warming promoters to declare that the UAH data is discredited, which it is not.
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