Friday, August 10, 2007

Blogger Finds Y2K Bug in NASA Climate Data By Michael Asher

An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action  (Source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies)

Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000. 
These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

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