By Jennifer Marohasy
A few years ago, I report that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology changed the minimum temperature at the official Goulburn weather station from very cold minus 10.4 degrees Celsius to minus 10 degrees Celsius on Sunday 2 July 2017. After our objections , the Bureau has completely removed this value, and no value recorded in the official archives is the bare minimum for that day for Goulburn. After further objections, what I assumed was wrong was that the actual value of negative 10.4 was included in the online database. Now I regret that that value was recorded in the official archive, because now I know it was a fraud.
Two weeks later, on Sunday, July 16, 2017, I caught up doing the same thing at the Thredbo weather station in Australia’s snowfields – changing, then clearing, very cold temperatures.
Now I know the temperature archive for Thredbo for July 2017 is also a lie – in fact it is a lie from May 2007 when MSI1 cards were set to limit the temperatures that could be written again negative 10.
For more than a decade, many weather stations across mainland Australia and in Tasmania have set limits on how cold temperatures can be recorded. The data stored is what some of my friends now call Seinfeld data: when you see -10.0 or -10.4 in the Bureau archives or a winter void at any station any cold weather, the correct value could be -13.2. is the temperature recorded in Thredbo on August 28, 2018, the winter after Lance and I lifted the cold day limit of minus 10.0.
Graham Lloyd first reported the story in The Australian, with a picture of Lance Pidgeon and me on the front page, August 1, 2017. That evening I was on Sky TV with Alan Jones and finally an internal ‘Evaluation of Bureau of Meteorology Automated Weather Stations’ called. A report of the same name was issued in September 2017, carefully worded and implied that everything was fine: that the Bureau was faithfully recording temperatures from their 695 Automated Weather Stations across the globe. throughout mainland Australia.
Nothing could be better than the truth.
The Bureau operates a network of error-prone automated weather stations (AWS) that have never met the requirements of the International Organization for Standardization 17025 or ISO 9001, nor operate a network of stations. automatically according to the recommendations of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
I’ve been discussing these issues with my friend and electronics expert Lance Pidgeon for the past few weeks, and he’s written a list of ten myths about the Bureau’s automated weather system. I plan to detail these in this new series on legacy electronics at the Bureau.
Lance will quote extensively from email exchanges published as part of Freedom of Information Document 30/6150 includes email exchanges between members of a committee appointed to review Automatic Weather Station operations following a breakdown of recordings from Goulburn and Thredbo in July 2017. Emails between senior staff Department officials and technicians from MetService New Zealand were made public because of a Freedom of Information Request initiated by former Public Relations Institute colleague Evan Mulholland. Despite the difficulties, Evan persisted with this FOI request, with the relevant documents now publicly available.
In a key email, Bruce Hartley, Systems Engineering Manager at Met Service New Zealand explains:
The device is not faulty. Purchase specifications require operation down to -10 ˚C, so words need to be written carefully.
Bruce Hartley is referring to the need for careful wording in his final report ‘Evaluation of Automated Weather Stations by the Bureau of Meteorology’ because most of what the Bureau has informed the Australian public about temperatures as recorded at Goulburn and Thredbo at the time was a big lie.
I use the word ‘lie’ intentionally, and perhaps as George from Seinfeld used it when he infamously advised Jerry: Just remember, it’s not a lie, if you believe it. there.
I understand that Bureau employees, especially director Andrew Johnson, have spent a lot of time convincing themselves that even if they can’t forecast the weather, they still have a system that can record reliably temperature and that the next thing to homogenize, is not proof of subsequent tampering – even if it is.
This will become clearer as Lance explains electronics, the focus of future posts in this series. There are at least 9 myths to follow.
Myth 1. The Bureau does not set a limit on how low temperatures can be measured.
The Bureau has placed a minus 10 degrees Celsius limit on Australia’s network of automated weather stations (AWS), including locations likely to record temperatures below this value. We know from page 53 of the Bureau’s carefully worded internal review, Review of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Automated Weather Stationthat this limit was in place at Thredbo for approximately 10 years from May 2007 to July 2017 and at Goulburn Airport from November 2002 to July 2017.
On page 4 of the same document, the Bureau admitted to lifting these restrictions on Tuggeranong, Mount Baw Baw, Butlers Gorge, and Fingal locations in October 2017 by removing MSI1 cards with device specific configurations. can create an artificial limit of minus 10.0 different C and minus 10.4C.
The bureau has yet to explain how long the negative 10.0C/10.4C limit has been in place at those locations.
It also has not yet assured the Australian public that it has removed the limited-generating MSI1 card from the rest of the network.
Just to be clear, the original ‘full’ design specs of the Almos MSI1, according to Technical Report A2671 are -10 to +55.
As Bruce Hartley of New Zealand Metservice explained to the Bureau in 2017:
The device is not faulty. Purchase specifications require operation down to -10 ˚C, so words need to be written carefully.
Just to be clear, temperatures could have been much lower than minus 10.4 degrees Celsius at Goulburn on July 2, 2017 and at Thredbo on July 16, 2017. We’ll never know because of the tag. MSI1 limits temperature recording to 10 degrees Celsius / 0.4 degrees Celsius.
Such was the case that after the limits were lifted, ‘temperatures dropped’ at Thredbo, citing a published article by Graham Lloyd in Australia on August 4, 2017:
Temperatures recorded at the Bureau of Meteorology’s automated weather station Thredbo Top have dipped below -10C over the past week, after action was taken to make the facility ‘fit for purpose’.
The Thredbo Top station’s log at 3 a.m. Wednesday showed a temperature of -10.6C. This compares with the BoM monthly highlights for June and July, both showing lows of -9.6C.
The BoM said it took immediate action to replace the Thredbo station after concerns that very low temperatures were not included in the official records. Controversy has raged within the bureau’s network of automated weather stations since Goulburn’s man, Lance Pigeon, saw a -10.4C result on the BoM’s website on July 2 automatically correcting to – 10C, then disappear.
Scientist Jennifer Marohasy, who independently monitors the Thredbo Top station, then shows the -10.6C record disappearing from the record.
Management initially said these adjustments were part of the quality control process. But office chief executive Andrew Johnson later told Environment Secretary Josh Frydenberg that investigations had found several cold-weather stations were not “fit for purpose” and would be replaced.
The BoM has acknowledged that, in addition to Goulburn and Thredbo Top, stations at Tuggeranong in the ACT, Butlers Gorge and Fingal in Tasmania and Mount Baw Baw in Victoria will be replaced.
I am angry that we will never know how cold it really is in Goulburn on the morning of Sunday, July 2, 2017 or in Thredbo on the morning of Sunday, July 16, 2017 because the Bureau actually set out Limits on cold levels can be recorded. That information is lost forever.
In fact, the Bureau continues to operate an old system of outdated electronic and computer software developed in the 1990s with inherent biases, which is mainly inflate the maximum temperature. This combined with setting the cold limit of minus 10.0/10.4C means university researchers based on Bureau data have been able to claim that ‘record hot days are now likely. 12 times more likely to happen in Australia than on record cold days’ – Peter Hannam from the Sydney Morning Herald citing Sophie Lewis and Andrew King from the ARC Center of Excellence for Climate System Science. This is consistent with stories of human-caused global warming, trusted sources of funding for academics, disaster stories for mainstream media, and grants. government to support the renewable energy sector.
If the temperature recording system at the Bureau is overhauled, all of this will be at risk.
Reliable temperature records can show only a slight increase in temperatures since the 1960s, and most of the record hot days occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, there will be no deterioration in cold days.
And until the Bureau reopens the Charlotte Pass weather station, which holds the record minus 23.0C for the lowest daily minimum temperature ever recorded in Australia, set on June 29, 1994, the possibility occurs a new record minimum cold day will decrease. The Charlotte Pass Weather Station closed on March 31, 2015. The Bureau will never close any of their hot weather stations, like Oodnadatta or Onslow. But it has an aversion to new cold day records. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is a disgrace.
It’s all incredibly sad for those of us who care about the integrity of Australia’s historical climate data and to an accurate assessment of climate variability and change.
*****
Featured images include Lance Pidgeon and I at Goulburn Airport on the morning of July 31, 2017.
I can finally discuss Goulburn and Thredbo in this interview with Alan Jones:
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