Sea ice book cooking. That is the next great frontier for auditing of climate “data.”

A blogger at the Atmoz website had castigated you for posting an outdated image of Antarctica. I submitted a response over there, but for some reason it did not get posted.

NEVERTHELESS…

If you visit the Earth Observatory website, you’ll notice the previous and updated image of Antarctica is respectively based on data provided by “Josefino Comiso, NASA-GSFC” and “Joey Comiso, GSFC” – likely one and the same person, and more than a “PR droid” (as suggested by the blogger).
At
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257 (which shows the outdated image):
NASA published:
“This image shows trends in skin temperatures—temperatures from roughly the top millimeter of the land or sea surface—not air temperatures. The data were collected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors that were flown on several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. The data come from the AVHRR’s thermal infrared channel—a portion of the light spectrum we can sense as heat but that human eyes cannot see. This image shows temperature trends for the icy continent from 1982 to 2004. Red indicates areas where temperatures generally increased during that period, and blue shows where temperatures predominantly decreased.”

At
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17838 (showing the updated image)
NASA updated by saying:
“Scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have been working for several years to create and refine a satellite map of long-term temperature change in Antarctica. This image illustrates long-term changes in yearly surface temperature in and around Antarctica between 1981 and 2007. (An earlier version of this map is pictured in a previous posting on the Earth Observatory.) Places where it warmed over time are red, places where it cooled are blue, and places where there was no change are white.

Making a long-term record out of data from different sensors is challenging because each sensor has its own quirks and may measure temperatures a bit differently. None of the sensors were in orbit at the same time, so scientists could not compare simultaneous observations from different sensors to make sure each was recording temperatures exactly the same. Instead, the team checked the satellite records against ground-based weather station data to inter-calibrate them and make the 26-year satellite record. The scientists estimate the level of uncertainty in the measurements is between 2-3 degrees Celsius.”

Given the stark difference in the imagery (and likely the data upon which they are based) over such a short term, I asked Atmoz whether we are experiencing an ARGO type deja vù by changes in sensor technology. Since Atmoz was beginning to look at ground station data, I also suggested a thorough review particularly for the years 2005-2007. Will you post the foregoing?

REPLY: Thanks for doing that, Atmoz’s new mission in life is findign ways to minimize what I have to say, so I’m not surprised. He failed to read the image caption though, or maybe he did but just didn’t care.

Thanks for those charts… dang, that’s some noisy data. Had to squint my eyes just to look at ‘em.

I’m thinking more in terms of 11-year solar cycles, where the solar inter-cycle transit minima would let in more cosmic rays. The result would be longer-period amplitude changes over time in the regular seasonal flux of the ozone hole.

That is, the seasonal flux of the ozone hole during solar minima would be greater (bigger hole) since GCR -> NOx effects would be bigger. During solar maxima the ozone hole would be smaller.

I do see in your charts (thank you) something of a 5-year period in seasonal flux during the 1960′s and 1970′s, that could match the max & min of the typical solar cycle. Dunno if an overlay of solar cycles would show anything.

(Hint… could you send me a link for a historically smoothed solar cycle graph , I can overlay them… I’m a bit busy working on my car today… ;-)

Best regards,

/lee

Yeh, I figure you have a day job & have to wade through lots of comments.

One other question. NPR did a bit about the Argo data not finding the warming anticipated by the climate models.

I was thinking …. the 1998 el Nino burped out a pile of heat & then the next year temperatures dropped almost the same amount in response. Could that be where all that errant heat went?

This makes me think. The warmist models might be half-right. Could it be that the el Nino / la Nina oscillations are gaining in amplitude. They’re modeling a more-stable system. Could that mean the warmists “natural variations” from Los Ninos are actually reflecting the system’s ability to shed the excess heat they can’t find right now?

Another aspect could be the upwelling of warm water going into the Arctic. Most of the year Arctic insolation is weak, meaning that the now-open waters have more emissivity outbound than insolation inbound, a 2:1 ratio.

The gist of this is that the oceans, being real big like they are, are functional heat exchange systems that can shed excess inbound heat from extra warming, making the time constant/heat latency shorter than modeled.

This would explain why we have ice ages but not heat ages. The oceans tend toward a thermal constant and big El Ninos or Arctic thaws will regulate the backlog by shoving the heat back out into space. The Antarctic fringes would thaw in a likewise manner, dumping heat out in the fall and spring before solar heating takes over.

This concept wouldn’t exculpate CO2 terribly well for those who’d like to otherwise, but that might explain the discrepancies that are inciting we skeptics and puzzling the warmists.

I’m also wondering what effect aerosol dimming would have on the surface in the ability of the seas to off-load the heat due to reduced evaporation, and hence, reduced evaporative cooling. I think it’d reduce evaporation in high-aerosol regions but would get offloaded as increased rain clouds elsewhere where surface dimming wasn’t as prevalent (the southern hemisphere?).

Eventually the heat piles up into a big el Nino like ’98. Makes me wonder if the 2000-2007 double set of PDO oscillations were unusual in any regard (amplitude, frequency).

V. Ramanathan, et al, in 2008 noted that the net heating effect of tropospheric brown clouds over the Pacific alone was about 40 percent. That’d reflect a fair amount of surface dimming as well, I reckon (don’t have my handy dandy quick climatology/oceanography data facts almanac handy… :-).

So the next question is whether that’d moderate direct surface heating since the brown clouds are actually net heat traps, or what that’d do for T-storm strength (although the N. Pacific is seeing unusually big winter T-storms from aerosol cloud seeding).

So, watt would this mean? Could the next big release of heat show up early, with heat-burps piling out as aerosol shading increases. Bigger amplitude, both ways, since all that heat leaving the system in one big belch makes for big coolth afterwards, tending toward a self-regulating state.

Is there any merit in this idea? What would the realclimate boys have to say about this?

Best regards,

/lee

http://www.junkscience.com/Ozone/plot9552.gif
http://www.junkscience.com/Ozone/plot35910.gif

The only real changes seem to be seasonal.

Did you see the study about GCRf & Polar heating? GFC creates stratospheric NOx that both causes ozone depletion & later aerosol heating in the lower troposphere.

If this is true then we would see higher NOx flux during Polar winters That’d then cause sPiked Springtime heating. This could be ob-servable, right now, due to.to.thiS extended solar ninimum.

Best regards

REPLY: No I have not seen it, I’ve been a bit distracted the last couple of days -Anthony

So now, the ozone whole wasn’t caused by CFC, it’s caused by global warming. Luckily we were wrong about CFCs because we now have a model for taking action to stop global warming and the ozone hole. ;)

I know you were joking, but all evidence shows that it was always there and always will be. There has been no net change since it was discovered in the 1950s.

I have a weak stomach so don’t visit RC often but I love the tough talk followed by “this bet ought to come with an escape clause”, i.e., a volcano or similar warmening calamity. Man up, please.

I recall (from wind current charts) that E. Asian soot drifts across the Bering & over Alaska / Yukon / NW Terr. It’s also seeding No. Pacific wintertime super-convective T-storms 100′s of Km across, unprecedented, with westerlies bringing these onshore in NW USA.

There are other sources of soot throughout the Arctic & Subarctic. Russian oil rigs in the Arctic & Siberia, for starters, but also shipping which uses tar-like crude that’s very sooty. As the Arctic corridors are opening up, shipping is exploiting it & dumping soot right on top of the fresh ice.

But honestly, your guess is as good as any at the moment, but hopefully there’ll be some REAL FIELD DATA handy by end of summer. Christian Sci. Mon. ran an article last month about an int’l team currently surveying the aerosol sources & effects. It’s a hot topic but the media are largely ignoring it.

One interesting point of conjecture is the heat exchange from the now ice-free surface waters. Over at the NYT’s “dot earth” blog, “paminator” wrote:

“…I disagree that sea ice is always a better insulator than open water. The thermal conductivities of void-free ice and water are similar, as are the thermal emissivities. However, air trapped in the ice or under the ice will greatly improve the insulation properties of the ice cover. A covering of snow will also greatly increase the thermal insulating properties of the sea ice cover. Either way, if you average the solar insolation over the year in the arctic, it is only a third of the thermal emission at the surface of open ocean water. An ice-free arctic ocean between November and February will remove vast amounts of heat energy from the Earth- until it freezes over with ice…”