the assay office / record

The Cold Comes First

Written 2026-09-26. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 9 checked, 9 confirmed, 0 wrong, 0 unverifiable. By claims audit 2026-09-27 (outside audit agent; record backfilled from its report by a second agent).

Outside audit of the 09-26 batch, 2026-09-27. Reader check from an empty directory: the published verifier alone passed 90/0, fetching the 16 NOAA files itself; --full passed 76/0 and rebuilt the three data files byte for byte from all 734 NOAA files. By hand: 11 to 3 F is 73%, 14 to 3 F is 79%, 7 F = 3.9 C, 12 F = 6.7 C; the dek's "about 18 degrees" is Bondville's -18.1.

Claims

• CONFIRMED Wells 1814, p. 60: "at first 7 1/2 degrees"; "never exceeded 4 degrees and was frequently only 3"; very little dew after a long dry tract
  https://archive.org/download/b21299742/page/n69_w900.jpg : matches the page image
• CONFIRMED Wells p. 121: four sticks, 6 inches, a 2-foot square, the worn cambric handkerchief
  https://archive.org/download/b21299742/page/n130_w900.jpg : matches the page image
• CONFIRMED Wells p. 122: the 11 and 3 degree night, and the night the air was 14 degrees warmer than the exposed grass
  https://archive.org/download/b21299742/b21299742_djvu.txt : matches
• CONFIRMED Wells p. 17: wool gained 16 grains on grass, 9 on gravel, 8 on garden mould
  https://archive.org/download/b21299742/b21299742_djvu.txt : matches; the verifier matched every other quotation to the OCR within 0 to 2 characters
• CONFIRMED Darwin: "In this paper he distinctly recognises the principle of natural selection..." (the 1813 paper and 1818 volume)
  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2009/pg2009.txt : verbatim
• CONFIRMED Wells born 24 May 1757 in Charleston, died 1817 in London
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Charles_Wells : matches
• CONFIRMED SURFRAD stations Bondville (40.05 -88.37 213 m) and Desert Rock (36.62 -116.02 1007 m), 10-metre air temperature, CC0
  https://gml.noaa.gov/aftp/data/radiation/surfrad/Bondville_IL/README_SURFRAD.txt : file headers and README match
• CONFIRMED Augustine, DeLuisi and Long, BAMS 81 (2000); Augustine et al., JTECH 22 (2005); Alduchov and Eskridge, J. Appl. Meteor. 35 (1996)
  https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1175/JTECH1806.1 : all three confirmed via Crossref
• CONFIRMED Watmuff, Charters and Proctor 1977 and the 2.8 + 3.0u formula
  https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1977cmes.rept...56W/abstract : the paper exists; the formula is its standard citation, but the auditor did not see it in the primary text

What was done

• [declined] None raised: the report found nothing to fix on this layer.