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
While mostly flat the 925mb (to about 2,500 feet) layer has seen a rise over the last decade (slightly exceeding the 1950s)
Click for a larger image
850mb (to about 5,000 feet — underground in much of Colorado. Colorado’s mean altitude is 6,800 feet) trend is essentially flat, perhaps lower than the 1950s.
Click for a larger image
700mb (about 10,000 feet) down and flat.
Click for a larger image
600mb (under 15,000 feet or about the height of Colorado’s tallest peaks) Well down and flat.
Click for a larger image
500mb (about 18,000 feet) Same again.
Click for a larger image
400mb (under 25,000 feet) Falling.
Click for a larger image
300mb (30,000 feet or just above Mt. Everest) A little quirky but falling.
Click for a larger image
So, what do these time series tell us?
Secondly, the atmospheric region of most interest from a weather/climate perspective appears to be on a drying trend, contrary to that expected under the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis.
Simply eyeballing the time series suggests the 1977 Pacific phase shift is a much better fit with changes in trends than is the steady increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Bottom line is that the regions climate models are programmed to expect atmospheric moistening are not actually doing so, making either the models or the atmosphere wrong. None of the above time series leads to a plausible conclusion that we should anticipate any increase in weather activity.
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[…] See part2 of this post here Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)PerspectiveFiction atmospheres and […]
Well, our humidity is up considerably … it is raining (!!!!!) at my house in San Jose as I type this. Very odd for the end of June here. And it looks like there is a line of showers headed in from the ocean according to the local RADAR. The kids are glued to the windows. It might be the first time in their lives they have seen rain during Summer vacation.
I love weather.
The answer is clearly no. I’m guessing the down trends in the upper atmospher are a lot more important than the lower (diminshing returns of GHGs and all.
I’d also like to see how these trends compare with ENSO activity and PDO shift.
Thanks Anthony ans Barry, these time series are interesting and while not compelling evidence of falsification, do lead one further toward it.
Plotting these against UAH time series at these same pressures (and CO2 perhaps if we had these at various pressures/elevations) would be a start to building the case.
The question is, if we can’t seem to figure out how to take the temperature properly at the surface, do you really believe the specific humidity measurements from 600-300mb from the 1950s! There’s a reason why nobody has a solid trend of atmospheric water vapor, it is a tremendously difficult variable to measure for climatic purposes. Hopefully satellite measurements from things like COSMIC will help, but I don’t know that I trust any analysis based off of the reanalysis data.
I blame Al Gore.
I’ve been looking for this data for years basically. In my mind, it is the nail in the coffin for the +3.5C global warming sensitivity estimate.
It is no wonder than no climate researcher has published a paper using all of this data. I imagine they will try to take it down as soon as possible once it gets spread around a little so someone needs to save the data now.
We should start using the 1.0C to 1.5C temperature increase per doubling of CO2 as THE global warming estimate. This more closely matches the experience of the past century and the long-term historical climate estimates anyway. Sometime before 2100, we will have reached the 1.0C increase level and in the millenium following (if we don’t run out of oil and coal before then) we will reach the next doubling plateau and will have a 2.0C increase. Pretty minor implications in my mind.
crosspatch said:
I live in San Jose too, and you can usually win a bar bet around here by betting it will rain at least once during July [I know, it’s still June. Must be climate change, huh?] And a neighbor just told me it was raining heavy in Los Gatos a little while ago.
[…] Anthony Watts posts a followup post containing graphs showing rising specific humidity at the surface, and falling humidity at the […]
I thought that I read somewhere [perhaps an Australian newpaper article] that the US sent up the “Aqua” satellite in 2004 to measure the INCREASE in atmospheric water vapor as the CO2 levels go up. The preliminary results are that the CO2 is going up but the satellite is measuring a DECREASE in water vapor. [I believe that it said the “scientists” are trying to figure out if the satellite is faulty since it blows up all of the CO2 modeling.]
Where is the additional water coming from?
The answer is probably irrigation. There has been a huge increase in irrigation since WW2. 35% of the world’s crop lands are irrigated as well as large portions of many urban areas (eg Perth Australia).
All or almost all the water used for irrigation evapourates or transpires into water vapour. It would be an interesting exercise to correlate local temperature trends with the amount of nearby irrigation.
One thing that has been missing in this and related posts is just what wavelengths of light are around to be absorbed. http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Atmospheric_Transmission_png shows the transmission curves and the source radiation for both the sun and the Earth at various temperatures. It shows very nicely that the the 15 micron CO2 absorption band is the only important one.
I use the image and talk about it more at http://wermenh.com/climate/science.html
REPLY: It is not missing now. 😉
So, if the current cooling trend persists and deepens over the next fifty years, I wonder what the odds are that the slope of these lines will be reversed in fifty years, with a decreasing slope at 1000mb and an increasing slope at 300mb. An intersting and speculative thought…
Love that scroll button on the mouse; can move up and down through the graphs and see the changes over time and elevation.
[…] here is the actual specific humidity measured at the upper troposphere of 300hPa, curtosy of Anthony Watts. The AR4 Section 3.4 is breathtaking in its misrepresentation of the literature. It falsely […]
I’m guessing the down trends in the upper atmospher are a lot more important than the lower (diminshing returns of GHGs and all.
My understanding (via Aqua Sat) is more simple. Low level cloud cover increases albedo and leads to homeostasis. High level water vapor leads to warmer temperatures.
This would explain temperatures over the last decade.
Has anyone integrated the total water content of the atmosphere from this data? It would be interesting to know if there is a net increase, decrease, or if the water is just moving around.
Up in the first couple of plots with the spectra – is there any inclusion of clouds?
When you go from gas-phase ‘water vapor’ to liquid-phase ‘suspended droplets’ you get a dramatic shift in effective absorption spectra.
(I mean, just think about the visible spectra. High humidity – still transparent. Clouds – quite opaque.)
Can’t quite recall offhand if that’s strictly refraction or absorption, but regardless it should be dramatic.
The IPCC’s computer model projections depends on the assumption that relative humidity is constant while CO2 concentrations increase. Therefore, it is important to review the relative humidity trends.
The average annual relative humidity at the 300 mb altitude has declined by 21.5% from 1948 to 2007!
There have been a significant drop in relative humidity at all levels from 700 to 300 mb as shown here.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/GlobalRelativeHumidity300_700mb.jpg
This falsifies the climate models.
I prepared a discussion of this issue and the Miskolczi greenhouse effect theory here:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/The_Saturated_Greenhouse_Effect.htm
He shows that at a constant solar forcing, the current greenhouse effect is at its maximum value, so adding CO2 replaced water vapour to maintain a constant greenhouse effect.
Please review and provide feedback. Thanks.
My question looking at this as a reviewer would be: Since the lower atmosphere is seems to be on an upward trend since 1950, and it holds more water vapor than the higher continental land mass, what does the sum of the overall water vapor look like for the whole atmospheric column?
Remember, roughly 70%+ of the earth is at almost exactly 0 m altitude–the oceans. This would also be neglecting the amount of land that is <500 m altitude.
Also, parroting Anthony’s comment about ice shields: this lower amount of humidity at altitudes where glaciers form might correlate well with the loss of ice mass in (esp.) valley glaciers and mountain ice domes.
Re: Phillip_B
My guess would be increased sea surface temperature causing increased humidity. Compare the amount of the surface area of the earth irrigated (Wikipedia value = 3 x 10^6 sq km) to the amount of the ocean (I’m lazy: Wikipedia value for surface of ocean 360 x 10^6 sq km) and you get < 1% of the land that is irrigated relative to the surface area of water on earth.
But I certainly could understand a valid argument in the irrigation increase considering that most measurements are made on land.
I’m guessing the down trends in the upper atmospher are a lot more important than the lower (diminshing returns of GHGs and all.
They might be, if the changes were of the same magnitude. But they aren’t. You need to look at the scales. The range of the y-axis at 1000 mb is 0.45 gm/kg. At 300 mb it is 0.045 gm/kg. The increase at 1000 mb is almost ten times greater than the decrease at 300 mb.
In keeping with this piece on water vapor, there’s a new article in Icecap & Friends of Science about a paper by Ferenc M. Miskolczi. The summary is interesting {especially for the layperson:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/The_Saturated_Greenhouse_Effect.htm
For those interested in a copy of the actual {math laden} paper, I found many of the links to the PDF copy wouldn’t work until I tried the following:
http://www.met.hu/idojaras/IDOJARAS_vol111_No1_01.pdf
On icecap.us Ken Gregory summarizes the Miskolczi paper. If the ‘saturated greenhouse effect’ is correct, the IPCC paradigm collapses.
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If most of the atmosphere is losing H20, then cooling in the upper atmosphere is a certainty. I would have believed the AGW hoax if CO2 caused an increase in H2O. But if we are seeing a decrease in H20, then everything we know says global temps will cool.
Suprise suprise. Global temps have been cooling over the past decade
Not to mention what a weak Solar Cycle 24 will do
Drew, this is a what has changed over a particular timeframe to cause an effect question.
Most warming has occured over land and especially in Asia, where irrigation has seen the most dramatic growth.
I tried to find numbers on the amount water used in irrigation without success. I do know the amount of increase water vapour from irrigation is at least an order of magnitude bigger than CO2 emissions.