That file demonstrates that the previous programmer and the rest of the people involved with the data collection had zero clue how to work with large data sets (assuming the raw data itself wasn't fudged). The programmer comments repeatedly about how the data is undocumented to the point of not even being able to determine what a good potion of it even is or where it was from, if it was raw sensor data or if it was somehow modified, and about undocumented code functions that modify bits and pieces of the data in odd ways that don't make any sense.
Even if these guys were conducting themselves in an ethical manner, their results would have to be tossed on their merits for a total lack of control of the data they were working with!
Here are some examples:
8. Had a hunt and found an identically-named temperature database file which did include normals lines at the start of every station. How handy - naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!! Re-ran anomdtb:
So.. we don't have the coefficients files (just .eps plots of something). But what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that's useless.. take the above example, the filenames in the _mon and _ann directories are identical, but the contents are not. And the only difference is that one directory is apparently 'monthly' and the other 'annual' - yet both contain monthly files.
..knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost.
22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project..
You can't imagine what this has cost me - to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance (which, er, they all are and always will be).
Emphasis mine.
Wow. You need to take your post and write it up as an article or blog post and publish it somewhere so the info can get circulating.
Excellent!