A few days ago I posted a story highlighting the drop in water vapor in the atmosphere which initially looked like the entire atmosphere due to a labeling issue by ESRL, but turned out to be only at the 300 millibar height and not up to 300mb as the ESRL graph was labeled.
Even so, that brought a lot of people into looking at and analyzing the issue further. Barry Hearn of the website junkscience.com brought to my attention a review of the various atmospheric levels contained in the ERSL database. I had planned to do this myself, but I’ve been traveling this week and didn’t have as much time as I normally would, so I’m pleased to present Barry’s writeup here for further consideration.
For some background into atmospheric absorption efficiency of common gases compared to the electromagnetic spectrum, this graph is valuable:
Note the CO2 peak at 15 microns is the only significant one, as the 2.7 and 4.3 micron CO2 peaks have little energy to absorb in that portion of the spectrum. But the H2O (water vapor) has many peaks from .8 to 8 microns, two that are fairly broad, and H2O begins absorbing almost continuously from 10 microns on up, making it overwhelmingly the major “greenhouse gas”.
Click for a larger image
Is the atmosphere holding more water vapor?
JunkScience.com
June, 2008
As followers of the enhanced greenhouse controversy are no doubt aware carbon dioxide cannot, unaided, drive catastrophic global warming — it simply lacks the physical properties.
In order to generate interesting outcomes climate modelers include impressive positive feedback from increasing atmospheric water vapor (marvelous magical multipliers, as we call them). By trivial warming of the atmosphere increased CO is supposed to facilitate an increase in the atmosphere’s capacity for the one truly significant greenhouse gas, water vapor, which then further heats the atmosphere, facilitating more water vapor and so on.
So, the obvious question is, is the atmosphere getting “wetter” and, if so, where?
Fortunately ESRL provides time series for various layers of the atmosphere:
Note that all graphics are confusingly labeled “up to 300mb only” but this refers to their maximum availability and not the current representation. Water vapor is given as specific, not relative humidity (grams water per kilogram of air) and is thus temperature independent for our purposes.
Firstly, there has been a moistening trend in the 1000mb (up to about 500 feet) layer.
Click for a larger image
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