BOM had “smart cards” to filter out coldest temperatures: Full audit needed ASAP

The story changes: first it was quality control, then equipment failure, now a smart card?

Jennifer Marohasy reports that the thermometers are working fine, but a smart card has been added to some to filter out “spurious cold” readings:

In particular, the Minister [Josh Frydenberg] was told that while the Goulburn weather station accurately measured the local temperature as minus 10.4 at 6.30 am on Sunday 2 July, a smart card reader prevented this value from being recorded as the daily minimum on the Daily Weather Observations page.

Apparently, the smart cards don’t filter out the spurious hot readings — on the hot side, all noise is good?

Despite knowing of this extraordinary situation, the Minister still had “full confidence” in the Bureau of Meteorology. A month ago, the BOM said the temperature clipping was a deliberate “quality control measure”, but then changed that to “equipment failure”. This week, Bill Kininmonth pointed out that the same equipment worked in Antarctica (where it gets to minus 50C). And now David Stockwell has pointed out the data sheet for an Automatic Weather Station thermometer installed at Nerriga. It claims that particular resistance thermometer has a range from -200 to +600 […]