User:Soap/Climate data essay

There is currently no reliable source for climate data either online or offline;[1] every site that I can find has at least some extremely suspect data. Examples below. If some of this data seems believable to you, note that in some cases the data is only off by 3 or 4°F, so it may not seem suspect ... but while it's reasonably common to find one station reporting a few degrees above or below its surroundings on a given day due to random fluctuations, it will never persist on every single day and become part of the station's climatology.

How does this happen? There are many ways. For example, clearly flawed data such as 140F in Alaska may be omitted from the list of daily record highs but still used to calculate the normals.

  1. ^ (or on paper)