Unfortunately, you are
area weighting based upon areas for which you do not have adequate information.
But remember, the existing products include a compensation to try and remove UHI, UHI only impacts our long term temperature results if the magnitude of the effect is growing, and each station's data still has to be added to the results for all other stations using
Area Weighted Averaging.
A breakdown of contributing ACORN stations
for area weighted mean minima and maxima, using a 5x5 degree cell grid since 1910, shows the percentage of the Australian continent with temperature data input by decade:
This Voronoi decomposition could also be used to construct (again
by area weighting) gridded temperature time series.
We did this by getting grid - cell temperature data and aggregating these into a global average using land -
area weights from our own research.
The BoM uses various measuring sticks and it seems the much vaunted ACORN network of grid
area weighted temperatures at 112 weather stations had an anomaly on 7 January that was 5.36 C above the 1961 - 90 climatological average of 34.64 C.
A simple averaging of all Australia's maxima to 35.1 C on 7 January 2013 can not be compared with the BoM's calculated record maximum because it is
not area weighted.
As explained in Part 1A and Part 1B, the 1200
km area weighting scheme used by GISTemp is based on the known and observed phenomena of Teleconnection; that climates are connected over surprisingly long distances.
And we still have to allow
for area weighting of data from such a site when averaged over the Earth's land surface.
McShane has emailed me previously (for explanations on
the area weighting we used, and the locations and use of the gcm data), so it is not as if he's shy.
There has been some reports that
the area weighting might not have been done corrected.
Having done these calculations, most readers would presume that
their area weighted average (deg C) would be the weighted average of -LSB-...]
The answer is simple, the temperature plot used by McKittrick is merely an unweighted average of all of the station data, whereas climatologists use
an area weighted average in order to avoid the bias that would otherwise be caused by the fact that there are many more stations in the industrialised north than elsewhere.
In Part 1B looked at how we DO calculate the temperature record, that is using the method outlined in part one and that
the area weighting scheme used by one record is based on empirical evidence.
While there is some difference in these numbers associated with ending the period in 1990 or 1999, the major discrepancies relate to tide guage selections, vertical land motion corrections,
area weighting and statistical analysis methods.
But the BoM has introduced a new, unpublished procedure that apparently calculates
area weighted means within states, then an area weighted mean across states based on their relative land areas.
I believe that the Ross issue is something that Ryan and Nic would have more expertise with than myself but again if you look at
the area weighted and our reconstruction, the similarities are quite evident.
If you take a look at
the area weighted link, you can see that some of the trends are more muted, but represent a very similar pattern to what our paper revealed — and IMO a very different one from your original.
Thus extra warmth of the warm year 1878 (strongly affected by the 1877/78 El Niño) in the Northern relative to the Southern Hemisphere in
the area weighted average (not shown) disappears when optimum averages are used.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the optimum averages are little different from
area weighted averages, but they are consistently warmer in the sparsely sampled Southern Hemisphere before 1940, often by more than one tenth of a degree.
It provides a structure to your response, with
each area weighted differently.