Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By Rog Tallbloke
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

Ilya Usoskin vs Leif Svalgaard : Oulu Neutron Monitor data quality

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 7:33

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Ilya Usoskin says:

November 20, 2012 at 8:40 am

I have been pointed to this discussion by someone who got surprised by Leif Svalgaard’s claims on the drifts in Oulu NM data. I am the PI of the Oulu NM and am quite surprised that this issue, including direct cliams of my misqualification, are discussed here without contacting me first!
Oulu NM is regularly checked for the stabiity of electronics and counters and is regarded by experts as one of the most stable station of the world network. No aging is observed. Moroever, as Leif claims, Oulu is counting MORE cosmic ray than Thule, but this cannot be due to aging, unless this is aging of Thule. Aging can lead only to decreasing count rate!
Comparing Oulu to mid- and low-latitude stations is incorrect as the modulation during the cycle 23-24 is known to be more energy dependent than before. Moreover, Oulu data is totally consistent with most of the high-latitude stations (Apatity, McMurdo, Kerguelen, Terre-Adelia etc. – seehttp://www.nmdb.eu/nest/search.php ), except only two – Thule and even greater difference with the South Pole, the latter both showing a decreasing trend, absent in other stations. Moreover, McMurdo being counting even more than Oulu during the last years.
Thus, I consider Leif’s comments ungrounded and offensive as publicly discussed behind my back. I advice everyone to ask experts first if you think some data are wrong, not just claiming the data wrong because they don’t support someone’s idea.
Please don’t reply to me here, I am not reading this forum. If you have any questions, write to me directly (contact info is at http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/ ).

Sincerely yours,
Ilya Usoskin

lsvalgaard says:

November 20, 2012 at 12:33 pm

Olavi says:
November 20, 2012 at 11:57 am
I’ll think Leif should clean his face and ask apology. Leif who is the one that makes cherrypiking? Seems that Ilya is bit angry.
It is not a good idea to argue with angry people. There are only a handful of stations with very long records. The longest one is Climax. In this plot, I normalize several long-running stations to have the same mean as Climax [so they can be compared]:http://www.leif.org/research/Cosmic%20Ray%20Count%20for%20Different%20Stations-Oulu.png
Then I divide Oulu’s counts by the mean of all the other stations and plot them as the triangles. It is clear to me that there is an upward drift in the triangles and that Oulu therefore is not representative for the overall cosmic ray intensity [whatever the reason for the drift, be it instrumental or not] measured at the surface of the Earth [which is presumably what some people think has effect on climate]. BTW, one does not need permission to analyze data that is publically available.
It is possible that Oulu has seen more of the low-energy cosmic rays than other stations at mid-latitudes, but since the climate is supposed to be influenced by the high-energy cosmic rays, that possibility seems irrelevant.
It is instructive to use the site that Ilya linked to:http://www.nmdb.eu/nest/search.php to see for yourself what the variations at several stations have been.