How "much" data must UEA retain - about 4 cu metres! and 3 tonnes

Assumptions:
Most early records would have been on paper. Perhaps one sheet/month?
1000 stations (out of perhaps 5000)for 50 years to 1980s (i.e. the first record produced in the 1930s on average)
Making no allowance for dividers for filing or shelves etc. Just the paper:

50 years
12 months/y
1 A4 sheet/month
1000 Stations
5 cm/ream (measured)
500 sheets/ream
21 width A4
29.5 height A4

sheets total 600000
reams 1200
height 60 metres
volume 3.717 cu metres

Taking this a step further
using 80 gsm paper
total area 37170.00 sq metres
total weight 2.97 tonnes

I do rather wonder where McIntyre would have kept all that paper!

So to preserve raw data would take a storage space of a lot more than 4cu metres.
These sheets would have been transcribed into computer format, possibly with errors added and errors corrected so the first computer record is NOT the raw data.
If you had to move office and you thought that you would never go back to your 4 metres^3 of raw data because your computer data was correct. And you had admin complaining that there was not room for your tatty bits of paper,. And it needed sorting and indexing to be useful. I think binning it would be a sensible option.

And if you wanted raw data the NMCs (National Meteorological Centres) would still have a copy so nothing is lost

Now if someone comes along and demands that you provide the raw data. What do you give them - your modified computer data, or the raw data?
Well they asked for the raw so how much will that cost:
£1800 @ £1.5 per ream.
+time+photocopy cost

and how long will that take:

600000 sheets of perhaps dog-eared paper (would require manual feeding)
5 seconds per sheet
6.5 working hours per day
is about 128 days photocopying

Probably manageable but would the recipients be happy with your 4 cu metres and 3 tonnes of data???????????

It is also interesting that with all these £1000000s being paid to UEA for climate research that they JUST purchased a new scanner in 2008 for a project and they were going to use it to ILLEGALLY(?) scan a document to satisfy McIntyre:

. This email came to CRU last night.
From: Steve McIntyre [[1] mailto:stephen.mcintyre@utoronto.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 5:09 PM
To: [2]alan.xxxxxx@uea.ac.uk
Subject: Farmer et al 1989
Dear Sir, Can you please send me a pdf of the Farmer et al 1989, cited in Folland
andPArker 1995, which, in turn is cited in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Thanks,
Steve McIntyre...
CRU has just the one copy of this! We've just got a new scanner for a project, so someone here is going to try this out - and scan the ~150pp. I'm doing this as this is one of the project reports that I wished I'd written up. It's got all the bucket equations,

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A reply!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jeff Alberts
Posted Mar 14, 2010 at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Reply
Something a few grad students could knock out. What’s the big deal?