Today I received an email that contained some startling revelations about the Weather Stations that were put in place on the DEW Line, a network of cold war era radar monitoring stations in Canada and Alaska, that have now been abandoned. It makes for interesting reading. The sender Robert J. Chouinard was stationed at one of these and responsible for the weather observations. I don’t doubt the accuracy of his report.

You see, in the early to mid 60’s, during the height of the cold war, I was stationed in the Canadian Arctic as a radar and communications technician on the Distant Early Warning Radar Line (DEW Line).  Besides our main objective of spotting Russian bombers coming over the pole to drop atomic bombs on North American cities, we were tasked with making weather observations and synoptically reporting to a data collection center somewhere down south.  This was well before satellites and maybe even before mainframe computers were employed for this task.  The synoptic reports were compiled by elves and analyzed by someone who was supposed to know what they were doing.  Their objective was to forecast the immediate weather which they didn’t do very well.  The whole process was considered a joke by everyone who was involved in the process but we had to play along with the charade. 

For numerous reasons many reports were fabricated.  No one imagined their fabrications would comprise a data set that would, in future years, be used to detect minor global warming trends and trigger a panic in the world.
 

Some of the reasons why the reports were fabricated:
1.  Their purpose was only to help with, what was considered, the futile efforts at weather forecasting, not studies on global warming.  (The significance of the difference between -55F and -45F was not appreciated.  Both temperatures would freeze your balls off.  So why split hairs?)
2.  Often, this activity interfered with our primary objective.  This was because of manning problems which would take a lot of explaining and which I will not go into.
3.  Some of the other reasons for fabricating reports:
(a.)  physical discomfort of leaving a warm environment and venturing out into the extreme weather conditions to read mercury thermometers located about 200 ft. from the living modules.
(b.) fear of frost bite, getting disoriented by limited visibility, or being mauled by marauding polar bears.  (Did you know that more Eskimos get killed from polar bears in Greenland than die of heart attack?  I have always been stoic about dying, but being mauled by a polar bear was my greatest nightmare.)
(c.)  plain old laziness.
          -
When you feed this tainted old data into computers for analysis, well GIGO.  I realize that the referenced study covered a later period but I doubt that the human element changed much.  What more can I say? 

Tough choice: get the temperature, get mauled, or stay safely indoors and make something up. Photo Courtesy Brian Jeffrey

Indeed, the human element has always been the weakest point of any of our temperature measurement systems, otherwise NCDC would not need FILNET to “fill in” missing data from stations by interpolating other data from nearby stations.

Missing data happens even when polar bears aren’t prowling between you and the thermometer. For example, look at this B91 form provided by the Marysville California observer (PDF format). Note all the missing days. Thanks to NCDC’s FILNET program, those missing days get made up into a complete data set much like the data on the DEW line did. With a “best guess” programmed into a data sorting and analysis program.

Fabricating or guessing data is usually met with serious repercussions in other fields, yet the current state of climate science seems to accept FILNET created data or data from remote outposts like these without question. My question is, if the human network is this unreliable, how do you know that the data from nearby stations your are interpolating from isn’t a product of “just plain laziness”?

I wonder how well the Russians did with their temperature data gathering in similar remote outposts?  Source and more pictures