We have discussed temperature measurement on this blog a number of times, focusing particularly on signal to noise ratio issues where errors and manual corrections in surface temperature records tend to be larger than the global warming signal we are trying to measure. Anthony Watt has an interesting post on human error as related to reporting of temperature numbers over a large part of the measurement network.
With NASA GISS admitting that missing minus signs contributed to the hot anomaly over Finland in March, and with the many METAR coding error events I’ve demonstrated on opposite sides of the globe, it seems reasonable to conclude that our METAR data from cold places might very well be systemically corrupted with instances of coding errors.
This particular type error must, to the extent it occur, introduce an exclusively warming bias to the affected data.
I wonder to what extent expectations (and desired outcomes) affects its detection and correction….
Finns don’t speak Russian, by the way…the headline combined with the text could lead one to think the Finnish results were missing the Russian minus.
Answering the question in the title: The russian word for “minus” is “минус”. It does start with “M”.