cc: Dian Seidel <dian.seidel@noaa.gov>, Tom Wigley <wigley@cgd.ucar.edu>, Karl Taylor <taylor13@llnl.gov>, Thomas R Karl <Thomas.R.Karl@noaa.gov>, John Lanzante <John.Lanzante@noaa.gov>, Carl Mears <mears@remss.com>, "David C. Bader" <bader2@llnl.gov>, "'Francis W. Zwiers'" <francis.zwiers@ec.gc.ca>, Frank Wentz <frank.wentz@remss.com>, Leopold Haimberger <leopold.haimberger@univie.ac.at>, Melissa Free <melissa.free@noaa.gov>, "Michael C. MacCracken" <mmaccrac@comcast.net>, Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>, Steve Sherwood <Steven.Sherwood@yale.edu>, Steve Klein <klein21@mail.llnl.gov>, 'Susan Solomon' <ssolomon@al.noaa.gov>, Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov>, "Hack, James J." <jhack@ornl.gov> date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:38:40 -0800 from: Ben Santer <santer1@llnl.gov> subject: IJoC and Figure 4 to: Peter Thorne <peter.thorne@metoffice.gov.uk> <x-flowed> Dear folks, Just a quick update. With the assistance of Tim Osborn, Phil Jones, and Dian, I've now come to a decision about the disposition of our response to Douglass et al. I've decided to submit to IJoC. I think this is a fair and reasonable course of action. The IJoC editor (and various IJoC editorial board members and Royal Meteorological Society members) now recognize that the Douglass et al. paper contains serious statistical flaws, and that its publication in IJoC reflects poorly on the IJoC and Royal Meteorological Society. From my perspective, IJoC should be given the opportunity to set the record straight. The editor of IJoC, Glenn McGregor, has agreed to treat our paper as an independent submission rather than as a comment on Douglass et al. This avoids the situation that I was afraid of - that our paper would be viewed as a comment, and Douglass et al. would have the "last word" in this exchange. In my opinion (based on many years of interaction with these guys), neither Douglass, Christy or Singer are capable of admitting that their paper contained serious scientific errors. Their "last word" would have been an attempt to obfuscate rather than illuminate. That would have been very unfortunate. If our contribution is published in IJoC, Douglass et al. will have the opportunity to comment on it, and we will have the right to reply. Ideally, any comment and reply should be published side-by-side in the same issue of IJoC. The other good news is that IJoC is prepared to handle our submission expeditiously. My target, therefore, is to finalize our submission by the end of next week. I hope to have a first draft to send you by no later than next Tuesday. Now on to the "Figure 4" issue. Thanks to many of you for very helpful discussions and advice. Here are some comments: 1) I think it is important to have a Figure 4. We need to provide information on structural uncertainties in radiosonde-based estimates of profiles of atmospheric temperature change. Douglass et al. did not accurately portray the full range of structural uncertainties. 2) I do not want our submission to detract from other publications dealing with recent progress in the development of sonde-based atmospheric temperature datasets. I am aware of at least four such publications which are "in the pipeline". 3) So here is my suggestion for a compromise. o If Leo is agreeable, I would like to show results from his three RAOBCORE versions (v1.2, v1.3, and v1.4) in Figure 4. I'd also like to include results from the RATPAC and HadAT datasets used by Douglass et al. This allows us to illustrate that Douglass et al. were highly selective in their choice of radiosonde data. They had access to results from all three versions of RAOBCORE, but chose to show results from v1.2 only - the version that provided the best support for their "models are inconsistent with observations" argument. o I suggest that we do NOT show the most recent radiosonde results from the Hadley Centre (described in the Titchner et al. paper) or from Steve Sherwood's group. This leaves more scope for a subsequent paper along the lines suggested by Leo, which would synthesize the results from the very latest sonde- and satellite-based temperature datasets, and compare these results with model-based estimates of atmospheric temperature change. I think that someone from the sonde community should take the lead on such a paper. 4) As Melissa has pointed out, Douglass et al. may argue that v1.2 was published at the time they wrote their paper, while v1.3 and v1.4 were unpublished (but submitted). I'm sure this is how Douglass et al. will actually respond. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that Douglass et al. should have at least mentioned the existence of the v1.3 and v1.4 results. Do these suggested courses of action (submission to IJoC and inclusion of a Figure 4 with RAOBCOREv1.2,v1.3,v1.4/RATPAC/HadAT data) sound reasonable to you? With best regards, Ben ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Benjamin D. Santer Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory P.O. Box 808, Mail Stop L-103 Livermore, CA 94550, U.S.A. Tel: (925) 422-2486 FAX: (925) 422-7675 email: santer1@llnl.gov ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- </x-flowed>