Well we all know how Monk dismisses various temperatures a "noise" yet not others....
Seems the BOM have been doing the same too.
Quote: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? I want the BOM to confirm or correct this. Despite knowing of this extraordinary, uncertain, situation, the Minister still has “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 I can add that David Stockwell spotted 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 °C. (You might think they can handle minus ten?)
Jen Marohasy claims that the BOM have made a fuss about replacing the faulty equipment, but all they had to do was take off the smart cards and leave the equipment alone:
All-the-while, the Minister has known that the problem is limited to the smart card readers.
To be clear, the problem is not with the equipment; all that needs to be done is for the smart card readers to be removed. So, after the automatic weather stations measure the correct temperature, this temperature can be brought forward firstly into the Daily Weather Observation sheet and subsequently into the CDO dataset.
Graham Lloyd has picked this up and adds more in The Australian in “Temperatures Plunge after BOM orders fix”. Jen Marohasy saw a -10.6C temperature disappear from the Thredbo recording last month, but now, after the BOM’s rushed fix, Thredbo has already reached -10.6C this week in the official record. The Bureau’s CEO, Andrew Johnson said they had replaced equipment that was “not fit for purpose”. Which begs the question that if thermometers were not fit to record cold temperatures, what purpose were they fit for? Politically correct thermometers? Thermometers to justify Renewable Energy Subsidies and ARC Grants?
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