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Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

What is "Berkeley's data quality process"? I've not heard of that. Thanks!

The implication is that Berkeley is "correcting" the temperature record in Bucharest to show rising temperatures over time even though the raw data don't show an overall increase. I'll let someone with more expertise comment on what the rationale behind Berkeley's process actually is.

I implied no such thing! I posted the raw data for the longest record Bucharest station that I could find, and included the adjusted data before someone could accuse me of hiding things.

Here it is on the Berkeley site. Raw data is the top graph, quality controlled (their term!) is the bottom graph.

http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/157726

If you want to find out their method, I'd recommend the following links:

http://berkeleyearth.org/about-data-set/

http://berkeleyearth.org/papers/

And please be more careful about accusations of climate change denialism. You could get people fired with that sort of thing.

Thank you for the links - I appreciate it!

Two stations close by report an increased temperature in the past 50 years: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/157729 http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/19998

In all three cases, the data in their DB ends in 2013.

Look at their longitude and latitude. Those two are on the edges of Bucharest (which is why the one that you linked was set up in the 1950s, and the other in the 1970s). The longstanding temperature station is in the center of the city.

I think that what you are most likely seeing is the urban heat island effect rather than any incorrect measurements on the part of any of these stations. Areas undergoing urban expansion get hotter as they are built up.

The 2013 cutoff may be a limitation of the Berkeley data in general.

Sorry for the accusation - I was quite confused looking at the graphs.

Nah, the raw data shows the same thing. Look at the green line of "long-term trend" on the raw data picture.

Ah, I see a slight increase there. Thanks for pointing it out. I'd love to know more what was behind the "empirical breaks", especially the most recent one - they're applying almost a -1 degree Celsius correction currently.

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