What the BOM don’t say: it’s not the hottest year in Australia according to satellites

For forty years NASA satellites have been circling the Earth covering our landmass day and night. But yet again, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has released the obligatory “hottest ever year” media release without mentioning that it wasn’t the hottest year in the far more accurate satellite record of Australia, and that this new “record” depends entirely on adjustments and quite possibly on ignoring all the data recorded in the 1800s. Once again they miss the chance to remind Australians that it was almost certainly hotter for hundreds of years seven thousand years ago. Sea levels were higher then too.

They claim it’s the driest ever year, and maybe it was, but they don’t say that there is no trend in droughts and rainfall for the last 178 years.

So to help them out I’ve graphed UAH satellite temperature record which shows that last year was the 4th hottest year since 1979 when the UAH satellite data set begins.

Perhaps in 2020 the Australian Bureau of Meteorology will set their own record, and explain for the first time how and why they adjust their data continuously and post hoc. The Australian surface data is all changed with a mystical secret technique that cools historic thermometers in paddocks, warms them in cities, and can’t be explained to anyone outside the sacred BOM guild (see the marvel of homogenization). They also might explain why they insist on ignoring the superior satellite data and try to measure a vast continent with flawed surface stations placed next to airport tarmacs, car parks, asphalt, incinerators, skyscrapers, super highways, and basically in sites and that are often not compliant with the BOM’s own standards and using super fast electronic sensors in a way that is not WMO compliant either. Let’s not forget they also get data from boxes that are a quarter of the original size, that move all the time, and that many modern records are just meaningless electronic one second “moments” that could never have been recorded in 1910 (or even in 1980). With so many scientific bombs, the marvel is that 2019 wasn’t even “warmer”.

According to the BOM the year 1998 was +0.96 °C above the 1961-1990 average and last year was nearly 0.6 degrees warmer that that. But according to the NASA Satellites, this year was a tenth of a degree cooler than 1998. The gap between satellite measured 1998 and BOM measured 1998, as compared to their 2019 measurements, is now almost as large the entire warming trend for the last century.

UAH Satellite data

YEAR Australia ave temp Degrees C 1 2017 0.71 2 1998 0.70 3 2016 0.59 4 2019 0.58 5 2018 0.51

No doubt the honest scientists at the BOM will issue a correction to all their incomplete press releases any day now, unless of course, they are trying to scare more money out of Australian taxpayers, in which case they probably don’t want Australians to know how different the satellite measures are.

DATA: Update Jan 9th 2019 from http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt

UPDATE: Vishnu reminds us that Roy Spencer says a 0.6C difference between UAH and the BOM surface temperatures can occur in especially dry years during summer (though he found the opposite effect happens in winter, and we are discussing whole annual averages here). But both 1998 and 2019 were both very dry years, so we’d expect both years to diverge in the same direction which they do not.

Thanks especially to Geoff, with help from Ken, Ian, Ed, Chris, Warwick, Lance and Tony.

To find out the real history of the Australian climate start here:

Posts on Extreme weather, Heatwaves and Australian temperatures.

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