Oops! NOAA Has Done It Again -- Manipulating Data -- June 11, 2015

The sad thing is that even my wife fell for this scam.

The Dickinson Press is reporting that NOAA, once again, is manipulating data:

Satellite images that circulated the Internet more than two years ago purported to show natural gas flares lighting up the Bakken Oil Patch as bright as a major metropolitan city were “highly processed,” “manipulated” and “inaccurate,” researchers at the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center said Wednesday.

Chris Zygarlicke, the EERC’s deputy associate director for research, said he took an interest in the images because the science involved aligns closely with his background. He said having driven through western North Dakota and the Oil Patch, he believed the images were inaccurately portraying the area.

“There’s no way that we’re lighting up the land like you see people talking about everywhere,” he said.

So, since late 2013, Zygarlicke and researchers from the EERC and UND’s aerospace department have used images gathered from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to determine what the Oil Patch truly looks like from space.

The UND study found the images that went viral on the Internet in January 2013 and were published across worldwide media -- including in publications such as National Geographic -- were actually a representation of heat sources, not light. 

I have to add a new tag: NOAA_Lies.