Homogenization of temperature data makes Capetown South Africa have a warmer climate record

Watts Up With That?

Playing around with my hometown data, I was horrified when I found what NASA had done to it.  Even producing GISTEMP Ver 2 was counterfactual.

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Guest essay by Philip Lloyd

The raw data that is fed to NASA in order to develop the global temperature series is subjected to “homogenization” to ensure that it does not suffer from such things as the changes in the method of measuring the mean temperature, or changes in readings because of changes in location. However, while the process is supposed to be supported by metadata – i.e. the homogenizers are supposed to provide the basis for any modification of the raw data.

For example, the raw data for my home city, Cape Town, goes back to 1880:

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http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_141688160000_0_0/station.txt

The warmest years were in the 1930’s, as they were in many other parts of the globe. There was then a fairly steep decline into the…

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