To see the month's GHCN coverage, patience is needed.

I often see on contrarian sites graphs, usually from NOAA, which are supposed to show how sparse is GHCN-M's coverage of land sites, as used by the major US temperature indices. The NOAA monthly reports usually show interpolated plots, but if you go to some legacy sites, you can get a plot like this:





It is a 5x5° grid, but it does look as if there are a lot of empty cells, particularly in Africa. But if you look at the fine print, it says that the map was made April 13. That is still fairly early in the month, but NOAA doesn't update. There is a lot of data still to come. Station coverage isn't ideal, but it isn't that bad.

I took issue with a similar graph from SPPI back in 2010. That was quite a high visibility usage (GISS this time). Fortunately GISS was providing updates, so I could show how using an early plot exaggerated the effect.

The issue of spread out arrival of data affects my posting of monthly TempLS results. I calculate a new monthly average temperature each night, for the current month. I post as soon as I can be reasonably confident, which generally means when the big countries have reported (China, Canada etc). I did comment around January that the temperatures were drifting by up to about 0.04°C after posting. I think that was a run of bad luck, but I have been a little more conservative, with stabler results. Anyway, I thought I should be more scientific about it, so I have been logging the arrival date of station data in GHCN-M.

So I'll show here an animation of the arrival of March 2018 data. The dates are when the station data first appears on the posted GHCN-M file. Click the bottom buttons to step through.

The colors go from red when new to a faded blue. The date is shown lower left.

The behaviour of the US is odd, and I'll look into it. About 500 stations post numbers in the last week of February. I presume these are interim numbers, but my logging didn't record changing values. Then another group of stations report mid April.

Otherwise much as expected. The big countries did mainly report by the 8th. A few medium ones, like South Africa, Mongolia, Iran and Sudan, were quite a lot later. But there is substantial improvement in overall coverage in the six weeks or so after April 1. Some of it is extra stations that arrive after a country's initial submission.

There certainly are parts of the world where more coverage would be useful, but it doesn't help to exaggerate the matter by showing incomplete sets. The good news from the TempLS experience is that, even with an early set, the average does not usually change much as the remaining data arrives. This supports the analysis here, for example, which suggests that far fewer stations, if reasonably distributed, can give a good estimate of the global integral.