Comments on: STOP PRESS: Wellington “altitude fix” was a lie – NIWA

By: Richard Treadgold

Richard Treadgold — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:02:38 +0000

I don’t remember whether Khandallah is much exposed, but the weather station is up by the Cable Car, by the Carter Observatory, and it’s very exposed. So perhaps it’s just a matter of your place being pretty sheltered?

By: joe

joe — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:44:38 +0000

in january 2009 my outdoor weather station in khandallah read one saturday afternoon 29.3c yet on onenews that night he figure was 17c?? what??? and today same goes, 25.6 in khandallah yet the metservice reads 16c?? when and where are wellingtons temperatures taken??

By: Barry Brill

Barry Brill — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:41:33 +0000

Back in 2007, NIWA Chief Scientist David Wratt entered into a discussion regarding Wellington temp adjustments on the Climate Audit blog run by Steve McIntyre – the famed Canadian breaker of hockey-sticks. Steve had pointed out in detail that international datasets by NASA, GHCN, showed Wellington temp records which were very different from NIWA.

Dr Wratt sprang to NIWA’s defence explaining “The [Kelburn] data set does not start until January 1928. Before this, the Wellington measurements were taken much closer to sea level”.

There followed many pages of erudite to-and-fro about dry adiabatic lapse-rates and the like, before Dr Wratt posted:

” Steve – Regarding your comment #92 on lapse rates: When one of my colleagues looked a few months ago at an overlap period between Wellington Airport and Kelburn, he found an average temperature difference of 0.79C. This works out at a lapse rate of 0.65C per hundred metres (averaged over the period he looked at) – about what I would expect given Wellington’s windy climate.

Regarding comment number 85 on waiting for some US top gun climatologists to analyse Australia and New Zealand data: We do actually have some top-gun climatologists of our own in this part of the world who have worked on this and published papers in the peer-reviewed literature. Over the coming year we (NIWA) are planning to do a careful update analysis on NZ climate variability and trends from the historical database, which we will submit for publication once we have put it through our own review processes”.

So, promises to “review” NZ historical climate trends have been around for a few years. But the days of NIWA’s top-gun climatologist publishing papers were over – within two years, he had been fired.

By: Rodney Hide

Rodney Hide — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:36:59 +0000

Unbelievable. NIWA’s head honchos mocked me in Minister Smith’s office explaining to me like I was an imbecile that of course adjustments had to be made because the Kelburn site was higher than the Thorndon site.

Minister Mapp now tells Parliament that no adjustment has been made for that reason.

And this is science??

There needs to be an independent inquiry into NIWA’s methods and practices.