Sea Ice Data Tampering At DMI?

Not a lot of people know that our headline for today (apart from the terminating question mark) has been shamelessly plagiarised from Paul Homewood’s latest Arctic article. This will give you a flavour of Paul’s purple prose:

Electroverse have uncovered some blatant data tampering by DMI:

“It would appear that the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) may have taken a leaf out of NASA’s ‘data-fudging 101‘.

Sometime between late-Nov and early-Dec this year, the DMI’s Arctic Sea Ice Volume chart experienced a mysterious ‘vanishing’ of ice — this is revealed by a direct comparison of the Nov 18th and the Dec 8th charts below.”

I am able to corroborate their findings. In September I took this screenshot of DMI sea ice thickness. Note that the black line for this year was close to the 2018 line, and above 2017 for Sep 20th:

But the new version shows this year well below those two years:

There is no other way to describe this than blatant fraud. The changes do not appear to have been even documented, and the old data is not archived, being simply “replaced”. These should surely be very basic scientific requirements.

Neither does there appear to have been any public announcement by DMI about the fact or the justifications for what amounts to a significant change.

What this episode means is that DMI can no longer be trusted to produce honest, reliable data. It also raises the question of whether similar tampering has been carried out in previous years, without anybody being aware. After all, it is only by pure accident that it has been spotted this time.

Even fewer people know that my helpful explanatory comment is currently invisible to Paul’s band of merry (mostly) men:

Should anyone contrive to click on the invisible link this what they would see just below the DMI’s recent Tweet:

Quite predictably Tony Heller has also jumped on the self same bandwagon, claiming in an article entitled “Rapidly Disappearing Arctic Ice” that:

On December 4, DMI showed Arctic sea ice volume above the 2004-2013 average:

Quite predictably, the data disappeared for three days, and now that it has returned, DMI has massively reduced the amount of sea ice in the Arctic. Much of the thick ice off the coast of Siberia has disappeared:

Presumably their data tampering has freed the Russian ships trapped in the ice.

In normal circumstances I would of course point out the error of his ways to Tony via Twitter. However:

Here is the DMI’s explanation for the recent change in their Arctic sea ice thickness/volume visualisations, as shown on their “Polar Portal” web site:

New graphics December 7, 2021

We have improved the DMI operational ocean and sea-ice model HYCOM-CICE with higher horizontal resolution and updated HYCOM and CICE code. In particular, the sea ice code has been greatly improved with meltponds, sea-ice salinity, improved thermodynamics and much more. The freshwater discharge from Greenland has also been greatly improved using freshwater product from GEUS, which especially improves the coastal ocean currents and thus the ice transport nearshore Greenland. The model has been running continuously since September 1990. Therefore, we have by December 07, 2021 updated the graphics of sea-ice thickness and volume using the new and improved data on Polarportal and ocean.dmi.dk.

The improved model setup has led to higher variability as well as less abrupt melting during the melt season, which gives a shift of approximately half a month for the time of minimum ice volume. The trend between the years is almost unchanged. Thereby, a year with a large sea-ice volume in the old setup also has a large volume in the new setup, and similar for years with low sea-ice volume.

I always thought that “skeptical” folk didn’t much care for the output of “climate models” but I guess I must have been mistaken?

[Edit – December 13th]

Needless to say my comment at NALOPKT is still invisible this evening. However credit where credit is due. Tony Heller has at least not censored my comments on his blog. Earlier today Watts Up With That referred to both the Heller and Homewood DMIGate2 articles. Do you suppose the following helpful comment of mine will ever see the light of day at WUWT?

Watch this space for more #DMIGate2 news as and when we receive it!

6 thoughts on “Sea Ice Data Tampering At DMI?

  1. It will come as no surprise to regular readers that my helpful comment at NALOPKT is still being trampled underfoot on Paul’s cutting room floor.

    However our auld acquaintance Willis Eschenbach has belatedly ridden to the rescue by quoting DMI’s explanation above for the benefit of Paul’s loyal band of merry (mostly) men. Willis then adds for good measure:

    However, the final sentence seems to be untrue for 2021 …

    which to his credit reveals less conspiracy ideation than the majority of the (currently) 45 other comments.

  2. This morning (UTC) there are now 50 comments under the NALOPKT DMIGate2 article. Mine is not amongst them. Euan Mearns suggests:

    Paul, I’ve not read all the comments. The allegation is that the Danes have cooked the 2021 data. Jan 1 in 2021 was 17 on 18 Nov. This became 15 on 8 Dec. The way to test / expose the allegation is to merge the equivalent 2020 graph with the 2021 graph. If the data have been cooked then there will be an offset between these two data vintages. The alternative is that some rolling data adjustment algorithm brings them in line – still not proper science but a stage removed from cooking the data. Maybe this adjustment happens every year? But in a world where the adjustment bureau rules, we can have no certainty.

    Nobody, least of all Euan, seem to have implemented his suggestion.

    This seems to sum things up quite succinctly?

  3. Thanks for this info. And thanks for explaining it to us!
    It is always rewarding coming here, even if we diasagree on some interpretations, because you always have a look at the data.
    Cheers, have great holidays !

  4. In some “Shock News!” from the cryodenialosphere my comment at WUWT has belatedly seen the light of day:

    Any and all additional “thumbs up” at the actual WUWT gratefully received!

    No such shocks from NALOPKT however, and Tony Heller and his band of merry (mostly) men are studiously ignoring my assorted comments.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 8 MB. You can upload: image. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop files here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.