Australian Meteorologists Caught Fudging Numbers

H. STERLING BURNETT September 19, 2014


Climate Change Weekly #139

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) was recently forced to admit it alters the temperatures recorded at almost all the official weather stations in Australia. The ABM came clean on its temperature fiddling largely because of the fierce scrutiny of Graham Lloyd, environment editor for The Australian and The Weekend Australian, who published a series of articles on the ABM’s number-fudging.

Using a process it calls homogenization, ABM has replaced actual temperature measurements with massaged numbers. ABM claims anomalies have arisen in both the historical data and current measurements due to a wide variety of factors unrelated to climate, such as differing types of instruments used, choices of calibration or enclosure and where it was located, and the closure of some stations and opening of others. The ABM argues such factors justify homogenization of the numbers.

Critics point out a much worse anomaly in the homegenization process: Almost all the alterations resulted in higher temperatures being reported for the present and lower numbers for the past--with the higher numbers being used to demonstrate a historical warming trend--than the numbers that were actually recorded. Downward homogenizations in recent years were rare. In some areas, downward temperature trends measured over time showed a significantly increased temperature trend after homogenization. The difference between actually measured temperatures and homogenized temperatures topped 4 degrees Celsius over certain periods at some measuring stations.

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