Until you make the measurement, by whatever means, and record it somehow, you don't have any data. So at some point, prior to any filtering, calibrating etc, it is the ultimate raw data, thus "pristine". At which point it stops being pristine is obviously up for conjecture. As I said, you have to draw your baseline somewhere.

Would you not have at least three separate instruments so that you could apply different "laws" to the "raw" data to get either Boeing or Airbus type data?

When an observer watches the expansion of mercury up a glass tube, and compares it against a calibrated scale, is that pristine? Or when a thermocouple output is fed into a microchip, which measures the voltage and compares it to a lookup table, feeding the results to a display driver to show, is that pristine? What about when infra-red radiation falls on a sliver of silicon orbiting hundreds of kilometres in space, causing the electron charge to change in a quantifiable way across a tiny set of squares, which is then measured, digitised, compressed, transmitted and reassembled into a satellite picture on earth, is that pristine?

Part of ensuring good data is removing obviously incorrect values, if a digital weather thermometer was showing -255.0 degrees the obvious conclusion is that the thermometer has failed, and its output should be disregarded. The conspiracy theorist conclusion on seeing the removal of that data is that the Bureau of Meteorology is following the age-old three step plan - Step 1: Remove cold weather readings to create a false impression of a warming planet and prevent pilots from loading their aircraft to its full capacity, because they really, really don't like pilots. Step 2: ????? Step 3: Profit.

Complete with measurement errors and dropouts. Not to mention changes in sites, time of observation changes, UHI and errors in record keeping.

The satellite measurements are much worse. They don't measure any temperatures but have to infer it.

Someone needs to learn some very basic physics.

Nothing ultimate about raw data. It's just one step in the chain.

I agree, I was just correcting your error.

Fair enough Rick.
Perhaps you could explain who was responsible for the end of the last "ice age". Was that temperature rise caused by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble cooking too many brontosaurus burgers?

Bbbzbzbzbzbbzzbbzbz

According to this, since there wasn't anyone around that could record and analyse the warming for us, there is some conjecture.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-last-ice-age/
Unlocking the secrets to ending an Ice Age « RealClimate

I don't know why you are assuming that I would argue that climate change can only be anthropogenic.

It certainly wasn't billions of humans burning thousands of years worth of stored carbon.

They do have that ability already. You can correlate the measurements across distance and use statistical analysis to work out if a reading is anomalous.

...says RickNRoll

And there is your problem. Climate is not homogenous because weather is not homogenous. You cannot reduce all local weather records to a single point analysis. The weather experienced in Harrietville is ALWAYS totally different to Rutherglen even though they are both within 50nm of each other. You cannot take the temp record of Rutherglen and weight it's data using data from Bairnsdale in Gippsland. The weather experienced in Rutherglen is not the weather experienced in Cobar. Why adjust temperature records...hard data...to fit a hypothesis? Who decides what record is anomalous? ..and why it is anomalous?

No one person has the wherewithal to check the data produced by BOM. Doesn't it set alarm bells ringing when individual records are found to be corrupted? Doesn't it then suggest if one site is corrupted, are all sites corrupted? Can the data produced by BOM be ever trusted again?

.....and 1.5m of snow fall has been recorded this week on Mt Hotham. The same week a report was published stating snow fall will be more infrequent. Would we be better suited if there was a more thorough study on why Hadley Cells are still influencing southern latitudes when they should be blowing the crap out of Brisbane in time for the Ekka!...it isn't due to a trace gas!

That is the weather report. That is not climate.

If you do not understand how CO2 works as a 'greenhouse' gas in the atmosphere there is plenty of information out there. Just saying you don't understand how it works (with exclamation mark) doesn't mean the physics is wrong. You don't seem to appreciate the power of statistics either.

No one person has the wherewithal, but most data from the BoM will be checked by professional users, of which I was one for almost 50 years. Occasionally, errors or apparent anomalies will be found. When this happens, it is reported to the Bureau, and in my experience, a response is always received. The data is always checked. Sometimes it is found to be wrong, sometimes it is found to be correct, and sometimes the assessed quality of the data is altered (not all data is 'best' quality - sometimes you have to take what you can get) but overall the error rate is quite low. If you are so minded, there will be traceability in the data, right back to the calibrations that have been done through the life of the instrument, so I'm sure that a freedom of information request would get it for you.
Can the BoM's data be trusted? Sure, more than you can trust some coal-funded climate sceptic politician or conspiracy theorist.

Sure, if you want to pay three times as much. I personally think it's a great idea, but try selling it to the voters.

Why don't you give us a quick rundown on the physics, RickNRoll?
Make sure you include the fact that CO2 molecules are HEAVIER than air, and that the AGW theory assumes that increased atmospheric water vapour (not CO2) is responsible for the global warming.

Is CO2 ?well mixed?? ? A Few Things Ill Considered

CO2 is a forcing, it initiates the change. Water vapour is a feedback, it responds to the rise in temperature by making it rise even more.

https://www.yaleclimateconnections.o...or-feedback-2/

Jeez Rick please be careful! You are in great danger of forcing some of your opponents here to think or even do some reading before engaging their keyboard. If they did that this thread would just fizzle out.http://cdn.pprune.org/images/smilies/boohoo.gif

How would the data produced by the Goulburn AWOS be "found" to be erroneous or anomalous by "professional users"? Who, precisely, using what measuring equipment, precisely, made what measurements to make the finding, when precisely?

I get that if the AWOS temperature measurement reported in minus 104 degrees C, the inference may reasonably be drawn that the measurement is erroneous.

But who in BOM decides that minus 10.4 is erroneous or anomalous? What measuring equipment, precisely, was used to support that decision, and who used that equipment to make the measurements and when?

I'd make a wild guess that no one in BOM decides. I'd make a wild guess that BOM works like every other government department does these days: BOM's purchased some magic bean software that was promised to do the BOM's work for it. And that software has been programmed to pretend to do what used to be done through tedious manual checking by human professionals.

The computer has been programmed to say that any temperature below minus 10 at Goulburn is erroneos. No checking. The computer just says so because the person who wrote the program was told that anything below minus 10 at Goulburn is erroneous. And instead of acknowledging the flaws in the software, BOM has to pretend that there's something wrong with the measurements.