MIRROR POSTING of Climate Audit Article on Yamal a “Divergence” problem

MIRROR POSTING of Climate Audit Article on Yamal a “Divergence” problem

Via Watt Up With That, September 28, 2009

Note this a mirrored posting of Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit post. The Climate Audit Server is getting heavy traffic and is slow to load – here is the article exactly as he wrote it yesterday. -Anthony

Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem

by Steve McIntyre on September 27th, 2009

The second image below is, in my opinion, one of the most disquieting images ever presented at Climate Audit.

Two posts ago, I observed that the number of cores used in the most recent portion of the Yamal archive at CRU was implausibly low. There were only 10 cores in 1990 versus 65 cores in 1990 in the Polar Urals archive and 110 cores in the Avam-Taymir archive. These cores were picked from a larger population – measurements from the larger population remain unavailable.

One post ago, I observed that Briffa had supplemented the Taymir data set (which had a pronounced 20th century divergence problem) not just with the Sidorova et al 2007 data from Avam referenced in Briffa et al 2008, but with a Schweingruber data set from Balschaya Kamenka (russ124w), also located over 400 km from Taymir.

Given this precedent, I examined the ITRDB data set for potential measurement data from Yamal that could be used to supplement the obviously deficient recent portion of the CRU archive (along the lines of Brifffa’s supplementing the Taymir data set.) Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002 describe the Yamal location as follows:

Read the rest here