Lucia beat me to a post on this, so I’ll give her the honor here. Interesting thing though, the delay of Hadley may have provided a better data presentation. – Anthony
Guest Post by Lucia from The Blackboard
Guess what? The much anticipated Hadley monthly surface temperature anomalies are now available. I always use the NH+SH simple average.
Guess what else? According to this metric, the global surface temperature anomaly September 2009 cooled relative to August 2009 dropping from0.548C to 0.457C. In contrast, GISSTemp, NOAA/NCDC, UAH and RSS all reported distinctly warmer anomalies in September relative to August. This divergence is a pit surprising– though I’d have to plough through numbers to see if this sort of mismatch is unprecedented in the record.
One of the interesting happenings this month was Hadley’s decision to delay processing because they considered the some data they received to be obviously wrong. We don’t have details on precisely what was wrong about it, but I noticed large blanked out areas on their map:
Figure 1: Missing temperatures in Africa.
The blanked out areas do seem to be surrounded by warm regions. Maybe the computed value for September’s monthly average will rise when that region reports data Hadley trusts. In the meantime, Hadley’s September temperature is low relative to the other metrics.
Since we anticipate October temperature will be reported soon, and I suspect some revisions for September, I’ll just show the trends based on reported temperatures since both 2000 and 2001, and also compare them anomalies to the multi-model mean anomalies from the AR4 climate models driven by the A1B SRES.
Figure 2: Trends since 2000 and 2001As you can see, EL Nino has caused temperatures to rise; the anomalies for individual months values are currently approaching the mean value projected by the models. As El Nino warms further, the observations for individual months may finally catch and surpass the models, as the do from time to time. However, it’s going to take sustained warming for the trends since either 2001 or 2000 to catch up with the projections. Will it happen? We’ll wait and see.
I left this comment on Lucia’s thread, which I will repeat here:
Lucia, I don’t think this is anything out of the ordinary to have so may data holes. Look at GISS for September:
Link to original at GISS is here
The trend of missing stations in GHCN continues. It appears that Hadley actually has more stations than GISS. Maybe the delay was to allow more trickle in of late reporters. – Anthony
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At last. Maybe they are delaying “WARMEST EVER MONTH” for the numpties at Copenhagen?
Just as well their data has holes, as what remains is obvious crap. They show my area as +.5-+1 instead of the actual -1.5 we had. Take a look folks did they mess up your region too?
Odd that in a sea of red, three blue dots appear, looks like Svalbaard, Iceland and Faeroe Islands. Maybe also Franz Josef Land. And whatsupwith the big blue dot in the middle of ElNino 3.4, a tack? Contoured mixed with square shapes, this looks like a hastily done paintbrush object by an elementary school student.
Seriously, missing pixels indicative of satellite problems?
Well, it was so hot in Western Canada in September, I assumed the whole world was overheating. Guess not…
Will be interested to see what the errors Hadley cought.
More evidence as to how large and how fast the oceanic influences on global air temperatures really are.
Instead of attributing most or all of the late 20th Century warming to increased CO2 as was the case until recently the climatologists should now accept that the weighting of the effect attributed to CO2 is wrong.
Only then will we see serious attempts to disentangle oceanic effects from GHG effects (if any).
It’s clear as can be that the ocean induced varability is way bigger.
What’s the percentage of holes?
Was Canada really that hot in September? 8 deg C above average?
Central Europe was warm in September, some +2C which is realistic. We still did not beat warmest September from 30ties though.
Seems that regardless of what is going on out in the real world, the Democrats are determined to get a global warming bill out. A Senate panel has approved one: http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5A42WB20091105
“A key U.S. Senate environment committee approved a Democratic climate change bill on Thursday that would require industry to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 20 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.”
The sad thing is that companies are already looking at Asia for their manufacturing needs. It would seem that the US and other Western countries are determined to price themselves out of the market.
I can some what understand the missing African data, but for months now, most of Canada’s data has been missing from these monthly report, especially in the GISS data. I just can’t figure that out as the data is obviously as easy to get as the US data. I have yet to hear a good explanation to its absence.
Anthony–
I agree that GISS has large blankouts.
But I’m under the impression Hadley often comes out a bit later than GISS and this is a fair number of holes for Hadley. Maybe Hadley often comes out later because usually wait for more data? In any case, Hadley’s published numbers tend to not hop around too much during the next month’s revisions.
For what it’s worth, I approved of Hadley waiting until they trusted the underlying monthly values before publishing their own monthly product. That’s what agencies should do.
Given the mis-match temperature rises vs. falls from August to Sept, I’m more than normally curious what we will see when the agencies report October.
I guess the question would be; Is Hadley missing more reporting stations than what is normal for Hadley? Compared to August and Sept 2008. I don’t understand the mechanism for reporting from the stations. Are they phoned in, mailed in, or (what would seem more reasonable to me) is the data recorded via a WAN of some nature. In this day and age, it doesn’t seem logical to me to have delays in the reporting of temperatures, but then I’m ignorant of the reporting process. Delays during the “washing” process would seem more likely from my prospective.
Wondering Aloud (08:42:07) : “ …did they mess up your region too?”
Probably not. I don’t have the exact numbers but the charts here:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/climate/temp_graphs.php?stn=KYKM&submit=Change+Station&wfo=pdt
. . . suggest September was a bit warmer and October was a bit cooler — just looking. Yakima is the nearest place for which I can get this chart but is 50 miles away.
Blame Canada! And Africa and Russia.
@ur momisugly Wondering Aloud (08:42:07) : “Take a look folks did they mess up your region too?”
You have any local or regional data matched to the same 1951-1980 average? I’m in the Atlanta area on the border between a -0.2 to -0.5 block and a -0.5 to -1 block. I compared that to the NWS monthly report for Sep that showed a +0.1 departure from normal, but that report uses 1971 – 2000 as their “normal” range.
Wondering Aloud (08:42:07) :
Check out what was more likely the reality in your area using this nifty tool.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
For example, read how central Greenland is melting, not, (lead story here).
http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2009/09/melting-greenland-you-would-be-hard-put.html
Another example is Mauna Loa, which has dropped about 5 degrees over the 70’s, and has now been averaging around 70F, as opposed to it’s previous 75F. (again, select “all” in the drop-down menu to see that trend)
There are other locations that have allegedly gotten warmer, but most have some pretty bad data, or huge gaps in same.
What I see in the trends of mostly everywhere I’ve looked is that the last ten years are stable. In some years a location may have more hot days, which gives a higher average for the year, but the temp max and min remain unchanged, which I believe means that whatever extra heat was added (due to fewer clouds?) was quickly dissipated. (Note-I don’t see any cooling, either, though maybe it’s too early for that.)
Western Canada was roasting in September. In Saskatchewan we had no summer to speak of as it was cold and wet, but September was incredible with broken “hot” records in the prairies. August though, had broken cold records.
Clearly, there was a spike in the Meteorological VIX this summer 🙂
Speaking to friends and family throughout Western Canada, this was a very cool summer/fall (some say no summer at all). This really defies beleivability.
“This divergence is a pit surprising”
Typo. 🙂
Pingo (08:41:25) : “At last. Maybe they are delaying “WARMEST EVER MONTH” for the numpties at Copenhagen?”
Not to mention, “It was worse than we thought.”
From the perspective of our local area [SE Michigan], September was a wholly normal month with the mean temperature at 0.1°F above “normal.” http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2009/10/september-2009-weather.html [note the chart of temperatures for this area beginning Feb 2008]
The Met data seems to overstate the temperatures by 1-3° while the hole in the GISS map leave things open to question. However, if you look at the GISS map and extrapolate the coloring from the central U.S. to the N.E., a negligible variance from normal.
Perhaps the Met needs to “recalibrate.”
Meanwhile, October came in at 3.0°F below normal and the first week of November is running about 5°F below normal.
This is certainly anomalous.
Has anyone contacted Phil Jones to see what he’s got rid of?
QUOTE/ Pingo (08:41:25) : “At last. Maybe they are delaying “WARMEST EVER MONTH” for the numpties at Copenhagen?”
Not to mention, “It was worse than we thought.” /QUOTE
I’m sure it is much much worse than we thought, but I’m very disappointed no-one picked up on my use of numpty. The Coperhagen hordes will surely be similarly unannointed. Numpties is the perfect description.
Traveled across Canada from B.C. to Newfoundland over the summer. B.C. had hot temperatures and broke records but the rest of Canada was wondering what happened to summer. We were on Prince Edward Island in July and they had frost one night. I was told they have never had frost in July before.
In BC after a hot summer here is what happened in the middle of Oct.
“That’s what the Global News anchor called the extremely low temps experienced in the BC interior over the last two days. Payback after one of the best summers on record.
65 cold temperature records fell, mostly in the interior, as the strong arctic air mass pushed into Western Canada. Some of the records stood since the 1920’s and some fell by a whooping 8 to 10 C. More records are expected overnight into tomorrow.”
It was a record for the number of records broken.
Wow, Siberia had a very rare summer, and the world heard not a word about it.
Even rarer than a 1 in 10 year Summer in Alaska.
And Texas. Didn’t Texas roast this past Sept?
Ok. I got it. Just take the scale at the bottom and reverse it.
Red is the New Blue, and visa-versa.