US government passes the buck to Michigan State University but they won't give straight answers either.
University Relations officer, Mark Fellows of Michigan State University (MSU) gives an official response to questions I put originally to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) months ago about their "degraded" NOAA-16 satellite.
I had sought answers as to how deep and extensive was the data contamination from a broken sensor that led NOAA to remove a "degraded" global temperature satellite from service. I wished to know whether NOAA was going to actively root out all corrupted data and re-publish their numbers.
However, NOAA tossed that hot potato over to MSU who now advises they cannot make any representations on behalf of NOAA. Thus neither NOAA nor MSU will come clean on the true extent of satellite temperature data corruption and a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request is now becoming ever more necessary to move this issue forward.
Typical of U.S. satellites, and admitted to by Fellows and other authorities, the offending NOAA-16 data handling is automated and human operators do not routinely check the numbers. Respected climate scientist, Dr Roy Spencer advised me he knew of the fault in the satellites sensor in 2005 and he and other experts abandoned using its corrupted temperatures for climate modeling.
Following Spencers advice and before publishing my first Satellitegate article, I checked the NOAA-16 satellites AVHRR Subsystem Summary. What I found were numerous entries up to 2010 but nowhere any mention of sensor problems likely to cause data degradation. However, after publication of my articles, all entries from the NOAA-16 AVHRR Subsystem Summary from 2005 onwards were removed. Why?
Michigan State University Joins NOAA in Satellitegate Cover Up by John O'Sullivan, guest post at Climate Realists | Climate RealistsThe following notice was posted on the web site and all internal pages:
NOTICE (8/11/2010): Due to degradation of a satellite sensor used by this mapping product, some images have exhibited extreme high and low surface temperatures. Please disregard these images as anomalies. Future images will not include data from the degraded satellite and images caused by the faulty satellite sensor will be/have been removed from the image archive. [emphasis added]
In the 16 years that this service has been available, this is the first known instance of seriously degraded thermal data being delivered on the website. The CoastWatch team is currently evaluating whether other reprogramming changes are necessary to avoid such problems in the future.
I wonder if climate scientists use this data? I bet some do.