Price of electricity is rising, not sure about temperatures

The correct minimum temperature for Goulburn on 2 July, 2017 is -10.4 recorded at 6.30am at Goulburn Airport AWS… The Bureau's quality control system, designed to filter out spurious low or high values was set at -10 minimum for Goulburn which is why the record automatically adjusted.

Further attempts at clarification have been met with stonewalling. Though after three days the Bureau did insert the correct measurement of -10.4 degree Celsius into the CDO dataset, where -10.0 had previously been showing. Once upon a time, if a scientist perceived a possible error (e.g. equipment malfunction), they had the option of simply reporting no result. The idea of making up a number would have been abhorrent.

This automatic resetting will be facilitated with the move from liquid-in-glass thermometers (which must be read manually) to electronic thermistors in automatic weather stations as now operating at Goulburn.

The correction of actual measurements in ostensibly raw datasets is perhaps the insidious consequence of a process that began some twenty years ago. Back in 1996 Simon Torok and Neville Nicholls published the first homogenised dataset for Australia, building on the work of Phil Jones and others, who were already publishing global remodelled historical temperature reconstructions – as updates.