Too late: Bureau of Met buys time with another “major revision” of data that was “best quality” five years ago

Breaking news: Bureau of Meteorology to revamp temperature records, Graham Lloyd reports in The Australian.

We’ve seen this all three times before. As soon as skeptics expose enough scandals in The Australian the BOM has to run and hide behind a “major revision”, a panel, or a review. It’s their pass-out-of-class to not answer questions. It’s too late, I have no expectation that this will achieve anything other than being the excuse de jour for the BOM to keep operating as a PR machine rather than a scientific agency.

In the first round back in February 2011, we worked with Cory Bernardi to request a formal audit of the BOM. They had lauded their “High Quality” or HQ dataset, but suddenly it was not good enough and needed revising. In March 2012 the BOM released an entirely new version called ACORN. The formal audit request was thus “neutralized”, but the new set was as bad as the old set. By July 2012, for free, skeptics analyzed and advised the bureau of a string of pathetic flaws, including that the bureau had “created” nearly a thousand days where minimum temperatures were higher than the maxes, the “hottest day ever recorded in […]