Rossby Energy
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Weather Temperature Anomaly Detection Platform

Which weather stations can you still trust?

We check US weather stations for readings that quietly drift away from their neighbours. One drifting station skews every temperature figure built on it, from demand forecasts to hedges.

See what we foundHow it works

Real output from one completed run over a single state. Built on public NOAA station records, not a live feed.

Stations checked
31

Every station in the state

Example state
Wisconsin

One state, shown end to end

History reviewed
10 years

Per station

What we measure
Daily temp

Average temperature each day

How a run works

From station comparisons to a ranked shortlist

Pick the strongest peers for every station

Each station is matched against the stations whose temperature moves most closely with its own, and the strongest of those matches become its peer group. That way a high desert station is judged against other high desert stations rather than against a state-wide average, so ordinary regional weather is never mistaken for a fault.

Hover a station or a row to compare. Select a station to see its 5 closest matches.
In rangeInvestigateBrighter, thicker line = closer match

Station positions are approximate.

1.00
0.95 · looserstricter · 1.00

21 of 465 station pairs

Closest pairs first

  • Wautoma ↔ Wisconsin Rapids1.0060 km
  • Wautoma ↔ Oshkosh1.0060 km
  • Wisconsin Rapids ↔ Wausau1.0070 km
  • Wisconsin Rapids ↔ Necedah1.0040 km
  • Wisconsin Rapids ↔ Marshfield1.0040 km
  • Fond du Lac ↔ Oshkosh1.0020 km
  • Kenosha ↔ Racine1.0020 km
  • Antigo ↔ Merrill1.0050 km
  • Antigo ↔ Wausau1.0050 km
  • Merrill ↔ Wausau1.0030 km
  • Merrill ↔ Taylor CO1.0050 km
  • Prairie du Chien ↔ Boscobel1.0040 km
  • Madison ↔ Lone Rock1.0070 km
  • Milwaukee ↔ Racine1.0020 km
  • Wausau ↔ Taylor CO1.0060 km
  • Wausau ↔ Marshfield1.0050 km
  • Green Bay ↔ Oshkosh1.0070 km
  • La Crosse ↔ Necedah1.0090 km
  • Lone Rock ↔ Boscobel1.0040 km
  • Necedah ↔ Marshfield1.0070 km
  • Taylor CO ↔ Marshfield1.0050 km

Close does not mean alike. La Crosse and Oshkosh score 0.99 while sitting about 220 km apart, so each station’s peers are chosen by how its temperature behaves, not by how near it is.

How closely each pair of stations tracks the other, where 1.00 would mean they move in perfect lockstep. Across all 465 pairs of the 31 stations the loosest is 0.95 and the closest 1.00. Only the closest matches become a station’s peer group, so every station is judged against places that share its weather rather than against a state-wide average. Distances are approximate, measured between the positions on the map.

Data noteExact similarity figures from the analysis, for every pair of the 31 stations. Station positions come from NOAA's public station records and are shown approximately.

Build an anomaly score from the daily gaps

Every day the station's reading is compared with what its peers recorded, and those gaps are added up as a running total. Ordinary scatter cancels itself out, while a station that leans the same way month after month climbs steadily. The highest point the curve reaches is that station's anomaly score.

Hover either pane. The top curve is the running score; the stems below are the month-to-month rise that built it.

Running score · Stevens Point

04,0008,00012,00016,000Running scoreReview from 5,000Peak 12,643.05reported as the score

Month-to-month rise · what added to the score

Running warm of its peersRunning cold — stayed at zeroIn range0 – 5,000Investigate5,000+

Stevens Point sat below 5,000 for 27 of 64 months, then crossed in Apr 2023 and stayed there. After the crossing the typical monthly rise on this trace is 213, against 176 before it — the same lean, accumulating faster. It never ran cold of its peers, so that side of the score stayed at zero. The peak of 12,643.05 is exact; months in between are read off the chart.

Data noteThe 12,643.05 high is exact. Months on either side are close estimates read off the project's own chart.

Rank the stations by anomaly score

Every station's peak score goes into one table, highest first. There is nothing left to interpret: the station at the top is the one to review before it feeds another forecast.

Rank 1 of 8

Stevens Point Muni AP

Anomaly score

12,643.05

Flagged spells

1

Drift

Investigate

In range 0 – 5,000Investigate 5,000+Review from 5,000

The 8 highest scores from the run, drawn on the project’s scale out to 15,000. 1 of 8 sit past 5,000, the point where a station is pulled from a forecast until it is checked. Stevens Point is furthest past that line at 12,643.05. Hover or tap any row for its score.

Data noteExact high scores from the analysis, for the eight stations with the highest totals.

How it works

Every station is judged against its peers

A hot week is usually just a hot week, and comparing a station with a long-run average would flag the whole state at once. The question worth asking is narrower: is this one station pulling away from the stations that normally move with it? That pattern is what shows up both when a region really is shifting and when a sensor is quietly failing.

  1. 01

    Pair each station with its peers

    A station is only compared with others whose temperatures normally rise and fall alongside it. That way the yardstick comes from places that genuinely share the same weather.

  2. 02

    Measure the gap every day

    Each day we ask how far the station sat from what its peers recorded. On a normal day that gap is small and swings either side of zero.

  3. 03

    Add the small gaps up

    One odd day means nothing. So we keep a running total that only grows when a station leans the same direction day after day. Slow drift builds a big total long before any single reading looks wrong.

  4. 04

    Report the highest point reached

    The peak of that running total is the station's anomaly score. In this run 1 of the 8 highest scores sat past 5,000, the point where we would pull a station out of a forecast until it is checked.

What the score means

Less drift — station agrees with its peersMore drift — station is pulling away
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