Anthony Watt's Surface Stations Project has analysed about 600 stations now, roughly half of the 1221 USHCN climate network.
If you remember, the goal of this project was to rank these stations according to new CRN siting guidelines, and then re-plot the historical temperature graphs with information from those stations that did not come up to snuff removed from the dataset. His hypothesis was that, once this was done, the temperature rise noted in the GISSTEMP data would largely disappear, an artifact of warming caused by microsite issues at the poorly sited stations.
Well, 50% of existing stations is a more than large enough sample to crunch numbers from. Why hasn't Anthony made an attempt, or farmed it out to his cohorts at Climate Audit?
Well, here's one hypothesis: Anthony already knows the answer that such an analysis would produce, and he doesn't like it.
And he knows the answer because such an analysis was already attempted back when about 400 stations were listed in the Surface Stations database. It was performed by one JohnV, a Climate Audit regular. His conclusion:
I think these plots speak for themselves, but here are my conclusions:- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN12 (the good stations)- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN5 (the bad stations)- On the 20yr trend, CRN12 shows a larger warming trend CRN5 in recent years.
To be honest, this is starting to look like a great validation of GISTEMP.
And here's another hypothesis: once the GISSTEMP data is analysed and, once again, validated, the jig will be up for Anthony. "Denier Confirms Global Warming!" is not a headline he is prepared to see.
Hence the endless delay, the tut-tutting over "poorly sited stations". Anthony is ragging the puck while all the time denying the existence of the hockey stick.