Are political considerations superseding scientific ones at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?When confronted with an obviously broken weather station that was reading way too hot, they replaced the faulty sensor — but refused to adjust the bad readings it had already taken. And when dealing with "the pause" in global surface temperatures that is in its 19th year, the agency threw away satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures, substituting questionable data that showed no pause.
The latest kerfuffle is local, not global, but happens to involve probably the most politically important weather station in the nation, the one at Washington's Reagan National Airport.
I'll take credit for this one. I casually noticed that the monthly average temperatures at National were departing from their 1981-2010 averages a couple of degrees relative to those at Dulles — in the warm direction.
Temperatures at National are almost always higher than those at Dulles, 19 miles away. That's because of the well-known urban warming effect, as well as an elevation difference of 300 feet. But the weather systems that determine monthly average temperature are, in general, far too large for there to be any significant difference in the departure from average at two stations as close together as Reagan and Dulles. Monthly data from recent decades bear this out — until, all at once, in January 2014 and every month thereafter, the departure from average at National was greater than that at Dulles.
The average monthly difference for January 2014 through July 2015 is 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit, which is huge when talking about things like record temperatures. For example, National's all-time record last May was only 0.2 degrees above the previous record.
Earlier this month, I sent my findings to Jason Samenow, a terrific forecaster who runs the Washington Post's weather blog, Capital Weather Gang. He and his crew verified what I found and...
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