Over on Climate Audit, Jean S points out a curious anomaly in the March GISS Temperature data for Finland.

Maybe that’s where all of Trenberth’s “missing heat” went. Note the deep red anomaly is in a sea of blue that surrounds it.

Jean writes of the data:

GISS station values are even more spectacular, the warmest March on record is set in every Finnish station GISS is following. For instance, according to GISS, the mean March temperature in Sodankylä (61402836000) was a remarkable +1.5 °C beating the old record (-2.2 °C) from 1920 by 3.7 °C! Well, according to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, March 2010 was colder than usual all over Finland, especially in the northern part. For instance, the mean temperature in Sodankylä was -10.3 °C, which is almost three degrees below the base period 1971-2000 average (-7.5 °C). So the GISS March value for Sodankylä is off by amazing 11.8 °C!

Even more curious, when you look at the NASA data from another division. NASA’s Earth Observations (NEO) The GISS Finlandic Temperature anomaly disappears!

Here are the satellite derived daytime and nighttime temperature anomalies for the world. Just like what the Finnish Meteorological Institute says, Finland was well below normal.

Here’s the daytime temperature anomaly:

Here’s the nighttime temperature anomaly:

The whole of Finland remains a cool blue in both images. So we have NASA NEO saying Finland is “below normal” and we have the Finnish Meteorological Institute saying below normal, but GISS shows a hotspot.

Gosh, who to believe?

I have a working theory as to why this happened, look for an update to this post if I’m able to confirm it – Anthony

UPDATE: GISS has posted a correction on their website which reads –

2010-04-15: The data shown between 4/13 and 4/15 were based on data downloaded on 4/12 and included some station reports from Finland in which the minus sign may have been dropped. NOAA updated GHCN on 4/13 by removing those data and we updated our displays today. The March 2010 global mean temperature was affected by about 2/100 of a degree Celsius, well below the margin of error (about 15/100 of a degree for monthly global means).

Back in January, I was working on a minus sign issue in data, and GISS making mention of this confirms it to be a real problem. I’ll have more later today. -A

UPDATE2: A commenter calls this “fraud” – folks please don’t go there. See below and wait for my next post. – A

Hockeystickler

2010/04/17 at 10:33am

even if Giss accidentally dropped the minus sign, -1.5 (C) would still be 8.8 degrees warmer than the -10.3 figure from the Finnish Meteorological Institute. there is only one word for this – fraud.

REPLY: Actually, it’s not fraud, but common human error. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll demonstrate how this happens. GISS is a consumer of GHCN data, compiled by NOAA, and while their quality control may be nonexistent or slipshod, it’s not fraud that they plotted this erroneously transmitted data. – Anthony

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