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>

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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
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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
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