Where Did We Get This?

This post is mostly just for fun. I have several previous posts about investigators and data curators being clueless about where their temperature data were recorded, and it's always humorous. I was a data manager and one of my first tasks was precisely identifying data collection locations in order to make meaningful comparisons and determine meaningful trends. I have irregularly followed NOAAs metadata development, and to it's credit, NOAA is trying to get it right in their metadata database (HOMR), but one wonders how hard because there are still some glaring mistakes (e.g., here and here). The latter post shows some information from Berkeley Earth that troubled me, so I decided to take a closer look at what they had pertinent to the long term weather station at the Payette National Forest's New Meadows Ranger Station. The laughs follow.

 

The BEST web site lists two temperature monitoring stations with similar names "NEW MEADOWS RANGER STN" (ID #40690) and "NEW-MEADOWS-RS" (ID #40717). Associated metadata indicates that the first was obtained from several well known archives, including GHCN and USHCN; the latter lists only "Hadley Centre Data Release", which I could not find, even using the provided hadcru ID (756096). Data collection for BEST ID 40690 continues through 2013, whereas BEST ID 40717 ends in 2013*. Below are screen captures from the BEST site.

ID #40690: 

ID #40717:

In addition, the data from these archives (where they overlap) are obviously different (although they nearly overlap in the 1960s-1980s):

It's pretty obvious that the data from ID #40690 are probably the expected data, because they nearly overlap with the data from NOAAs GHCN archive. I haven't plotted this here, and the NOAA data change when they rerun the homogenization algorithm and the methods differ anyway. But the question is, where was either BEST data set collected? I plotted the locations specified by the Latitude-Longitude information on the above screen captures, along with the current location of the GHCN New Meadows Ranger Station site:
What is pretty obvious, is that BEST didn't know where the station was and didn't bother to investigate. And yet, some people still seem to think that they know what will happen with the climate and are among the leading climate scientists and data analysts.

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* USHCN has data into 2026 for this station, whereas GHCN stops in 2017. This is useful information when climate alarmists insist that only GHCN should be used because USHCN is "deprecated" (there are other reasons as well, but out side the scope of this post).