This would look impressive, since it would be the first big gap over a last year’s high.

The higher elevation graphs are all current. At 14,000 ft, the 7/23 plot is shown, at .73 deg F warmer.

Not sure I have ever seen a mapping of upper atmosphere temperature changes related to volcanic output. Has anyone else seen that? And if the IR was stopped at the upper atmosphere, the lower atmosphere would cool? We have seen cooling before at the surface from significant events. Hmmm?

/Sorry for the usage – I was an econometrics major a long time ago, not a physical sciences major.

Which is reached by navigation (go to channel 5 600 mb and then go to “data as text”) from here

Thanks David. Very interesting. So did your climate scientist offer any ideas for the behaviour. Those are biggish swings – 0.4C or so. Cloud behaviour? Not on a global basis surely. Hmmm, Lunar effect?? Surely not. Hmmm. Keep those quatloos handy, I’ll work it out.

Leif, any ideas?

There is more detailed information, the this is the crux of the matter when attempting to use the AMSU-E graph for daily temps:

Yes I know about the issues to which you refer in your post. However I haven’t mentioned AMSU Ch 5 temperatures – not for a while anyway. I do though expect some increase in satellite tempearures over the coming months. Whether this current spike is part of the expected rise – I don’t know.

Bill Illis (08:20:02) : The glass of cold water isn’t as simple as it appears. Are you talking humid air or perfectly dry air? Water will condense on the container if it is a simple glass or metal container and cool the liquid faster than dry air. But eventually, both will warm the liquid.

Don’t you think the wall of the container will be warmed by condensation?

The daily data is here
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_ch05.r002.txt

Which is reached by navigation (go to channel 5 600 mb and then go to “data as text”) from here

http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/

First I averaged the data for each day of the year. The result shows how the channel 5 temperature varies, on average, over a year.

I then subtracted those daily averages from the actual 2008 and 2009 temperatures for the dates, creating an anomaly plot for 2008 and 2009.

It’s a simple spreadsheet operation.

The oscillatory behavior is found through much of the data and seems to be on a 30 to 50 day cycle, but there are stretches without clear oscillation and stretches where the periods are different from the 30 to 50 day norm.

I’d just like to be able to connect it to something in the atmosphere. I did send a copy of this type of plot to one of the satellite/climate scientists (won’t mention his name without permission) several months ago and he said it is real atmospheric behavior, not a satellite data artifact.

I agree completely. RSS and UAH trends match pretty well, both over the whole period 1979-2009, and since 1998. Difference are relatively small and are located primarily in early 1990s, as far as I know. RSS 1979-2009 trend is 0.15 deg C, UAH 0.13 and since 1998 both have negative trends RSS being somewhat larger. That tells you that probably those two sets are relatively reliable, in any event much more than any of ground-based data sets, plagued by myriad of problems, like UHI, poor siting, inhomogeneities etc.

Since day 221, 2002, the first complete year being 2003.

OK, here is the plot with UAH and RSS data since 2003

Your initial objection was that UAH official data are too cool particularly in May and June because of shift in methodology, and that you consider RSS data to be more plausible because of that. That means you think UAH has an artificial warming bias in the new data, that should be corrected. Does UAH has artificial cooling, as you imply now, or artificial warming since 2002 (or 2003), as you implied in your first comment?

You’re imagining things it’s not me who’s talking about cooling and warming biases, I just don’t think that their recent anomalies can be relied upon because of the change to AQUA. I didn’t say there’s a general cooling rather a systematic minimum in May/June.