One of the most shocking things about examining the GHCN data that goes into global climate models has been the inconsistency of the data. Not only is there loss of stations, but within each set of station data, there may be considerable loss of monthly data. This post asks – how bad is this? (answer – much worse than I thought – see the last graph).
Figure 1. Station data for Mactan, Philippines 2000-2009 (GISS unadjusted/combined data). Missing months are highlighted in yellow; seasonal averages and annual means derived (by GISS) with the inclusion of in-filled data due to missing months are coloured red. Only the Annual Mean from 2006 (27.87 degC) is derived from a full 12 monthly observations (Dec-Nov).
GISS stated methods and QC
The methods used by NASA GISS for the calculation of the global average temperature using the GIStemp programme can be found here
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