Yamal and temperature

A recurring topic at ClimateAudit has been the use of tree ring data from the Yamal peninsula in Russia. Steve Mcintyre, the author of ClimateAudit, maintains that data from that area have been used selectively by researchers at the CRU to support the idea of a 'hockey stick' . At the RealClimate blog Gavin Schmidt claims that the results by the CRU were obtained after selection of samples following rigorous analysis of the data.

The Yamal peninsula is at around 71N 71 E. Below I plot data from two sites near to Yamal. One, Salehard, is 200 km south of the Peninsula and the other Ostrov Dickson is 200 km to the north east. The data were downloaded from the ClimateExplorer web site. There are few missing months in the data and I replaced them by the average of  same calander month for the preceding and following year except for 2011 where I used the average of the temperature for appropriate calendar months.



As can be seen the observed data show no sign of a hockey stick. Both sites show a maximum in the 1940s, a minimum in the 1970s and and an increase since then -  similar to the global temperature trend. One site, Ostrov-Dickson, does have a slight upturn this centruy but temperatures are still below those of the 1940s.

This comment was originally posted in the morning of 1 May 2012. It was modified during the course of day with the addition of the data for Ostrov Dickson.