From UAH – Global Temperature Report: January 2013

Where are the error margins, where are the instrument calibration data? What a load of garbage – +/-0.4 Deg C is just NOISE!

based on anecdotal evidence, I have to strongly disagree. According to the graphic provided, southern Ontario, where I live, was one of the warmer spots. I have built a backyard ice rink every winter for the last 6 years. This was the first January in which temperatures were so consistently cold, I was able to literally spray on the water from one end to the other, and by the time I reached the end of the rink, the starting point was frozen solid, allowing me to apply multiple layers of ice in a single flooding. I’ve been loving how cold this January has been. And while we did get two very warm thaws, this has not been out of the ordinary, as I have experienced several January thaws every year. This was the first year in which I was able to build up enough thickness that the thaws didn’t result in the rink needing to be shut down for days afterwards. What are the chances they’re adjusting the data before releasing?

We had 3 straight weeks of under -2C in January…. this is Easten Oregon. I know it was
warmer in the Eastern US, but not every where.. something’s not quite right here…

Something tells me there is going to be a lot more to this anomally. I can’t wait. Here in Tucson, we hit 15 degrees F, I believe on January 23rd, which the last time that happened was 2 years ago. We have had a cold January once again similar to 2010. Anecdotal yes, but sometimes anedotes are right.

The best skeptical position on these numbers is not to attack those who put them together but to put the numbers in perspective. No one knows what physical processes the numbers measure and it is the physical processes that are important and that should interest us. This point is clear in many comments. For example, some have attempted to explain the numbers as the result of unusual moisture moving up the US west coast to Alaska. But there is no science that ties these numbers to well understood physical processes. The important point for skeptics to hold dear is that these numbers are not the reality but one measure of something that remains poorly understood.
Discussing the numbers and the methods used to assemble them is important. Our best guesses about the underlying physical processes are important. Solving the various puzzles that the numbers present is important. All of it is very interesting. However, until there are vast improvements in the physical science there will be no clear connection between the numbers and reality.

caleb,
lower troposphere is around 14000 feet altitude, at 600 mbar.
The surface appears to have lost heat to the lower troposphere. No controdiction to low anomalies in surface data.

We had a fairly warm January in Greece, and the southern warm winds are continuing into February so my anecdotal evidence agrees with the plot.
Anyway, what is the fuss? One hot month does not eliminate the fact that for the last fifteen years temperatures have plateaued, which also this plot shows.
What goes up must come down :), so we had some blue, and are now at red. We should take bets on how soon it will oscillate to blue again.

Ho hum – temperature goes up – must be the data thats wrong, temperature goes down, mini-ice age coming.
Thats the danger of cherry-picking.
The UAH plot shows an oscillation of period about 3 to 4 years superimposed on a gradual rise in temperatures.
The negative anomalies at the troughs of the oscillation largely fade away through the 1990s and since then almost every month is in positive territory cf the 1981-2010 climatic mean.
It would be interesting to see the plot reconstructed taking solar forcing variations and then the Pacific oscillation out as I would expect then the trend line to be much smoother – those 2 look to be the main short term forcing factors (in the absence of major volcanic eruptions).
The plot also exposes very well the fallacy of picking 1998 to try and show that warming has stopped or that long term cooling has set in.
The 13 month running mean plot also shows up the 3 to 4 year period well and suggests we are on a warming trend towards a peak this year or next. Then if the oscillation continues we should see a few years of cooling again.
Whats important is the long term trend ie decadal and longer and that remains consistent with a warming world.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/02/uah-global-temperature-update-for-january-2012-0-51-deg-c/

Has anyone yet mentioned that the big jump between December and January in UAH is mirrored by an equally large jump in RSS?
If UAH is wrong, then so is RSS.

I really don’t understand the random complaints about this, or the sudden hostility toward UAH. The data is the data, and one point does not make a trend. While this was a large jump for one month it’s hardly extraordinary, and it hasn’t taken us above previous recorded levels.
We did have a brief El Nino last year. could this be a delayed effect from that? I seem to remember that such effects are usually delayed by a few months. If so then it should drop back down fairly quickly just as ENSO did.
Anyway, I’d hate to see WUWT posters start acting like climate alarmist, trumpeting anything that confirms their beliefs and shouting down any contrary data.

Hmmm. Curious. December 2012 and January 2013 were both above the 30-year average but Northern Hemisphere snow cover was at a record high extent in December 2012 and January 2013 was the sixth-highest snow cover extent on record since 1967. And considering what we read every day about record cold and snowfall in Asia, Russia, Alaska, and various other parts of the world, how can we reconcile these apparently discordant data?

@ GabrielHBay says:
February 7, 2013 at 12:08 am
To those who suggest that its all just typical sceptic screaming because the data is way up: that is not the point! The problem, for me at any rate, is the apparent disconnect between the data and what seems to have been happening on the ground.
Not to worry. Have a look at the world anomaly. The large differences come at the region of the poles and the regions that are very cold anyway, and those are the ones that bias the average. The north pole during the winter is around and less than -60C the south pole is in the summer around and below -30C. The map shows “hot” excesses of 2.5C and 1.5 C in large swaths of the north, where really animals and people would never notice the difference, but the average is biased by this. If the excess were in large swaths of the oceans I would worry.
What has been happening is that circulations have moved cold air from the north to large areas , where the temperature fall is diluted, and brought warmer air to the poles where the temperature increase is enhanced because of the smaller region.
The whole concept of anomalies is skewed and useless scientifically, imo. Even the idea that an average world land temperature taken at 2meters height has a real meaning when averaged is strange for a physicist, let alone anomalies.

I gave such a (very, very general – it’s a fact – but I think: a lot of explaining) comment on the attack on J. Christy, R. Spencer and WUWT (in Things Break):
Proponents of the theory of AGW, as usual, simplify. Skeptics have very different views on warming – this is not a group of people with identical views!
For example, me completely does not bother the current warming (even a “satellite”) to be a skeptic.
Why?
For example, is why:
Lockwood (2010): “… the current grand maximum has already lasted for an unusually long time …”
Steinhilber and Beer (2011): “The 9300-year long composite of solar activity shows that during the past six decades the Sun has been in a state of high solar activity compared to the entire period of 9300 years.”
(http://bulletin.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/122/11-12/1981) Helama (2010):
“Thus, the warmer and cooler paleotemperatures during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age were better explained by solar variations on a millennial rather than bimillennial scale. The observed variations may have occurred in association with internal climate amplification […] (likely, thermohaline circulation and El Niño–Southern Oscillation activity). THE NEAR-CENTENNIAL DELAY in climate in responding to sunspots indicates that the Sun’s influence on climate arising from the current episode of high sunspot numbers may not yet have manifested itself fully in climate trends.”
(http://www.wsl.ch/info/mitarbeitende//frank/publications_EN/Raspopov_etal_PPP_2008.pdf) Raspopov ( 2008, coauthors: Esper, Frank et al.):
“An appreciable delay in the climate response to the solar signal can occur (up to 150 years). In addition, the sign of the climate response can DIFFER FROM THE SOLAR SIGNAL SIGN. The climate response to long-term solar activity variations (from 10s to 1000s years) manifests itself in different climatic parameters, such as temperature, precipitation and atmospheric and oceanic circulation.”
(http://www.springerlink.com/content/g589501544320529/) Swingedouw (2010): “We argue that this lag is due, in the model, to a northward shift of the tropical atmospheric convection in the Pacific Ocean, which is maximum more than four decades after the solar forcing increase.”
“Changes in wind stress, notably due to the NAO, modify the barotropic streamfunction in the Atlantic 50 years after solar variations.”
(http://www.clim-past.net/7/339/2011/cp-7-339-2011.pdf) Varma (2011):
“Since the reduction in TSI is only 0.15%, the global cooling effect is small and ADDITIONAL FEEDBACKS are required to induce a significant change in the westerlies.”
“… we propose that THE ROLE OF THE SUN in modifying Southern Hemisphere tropospheric circulation patterns has probably been UNDERESTIMATED in model simulations of past climate change.”
(http://www.leif.org/EOS/2010JC006264.pdf) Sejrup (2010):
“The observed ocean temperature response is LARGER than expected based on simple thermodynamic considerations, indicating that there is dynamical response of the high‐latitude ocean to the Sun. […]”
(http://lpc2e.cnrs-orleans.fr/~ddwit/soleil/DdW_solar_forcing_CRGeo2009.pdf) Dudok de Wit (2009):
“… the main mechanisms by which the Sun affects the Earth are not the most immediate ones in terms of energetic criteria.”
“- feedback mechanisms are not sufficiently well understood and positive feedback may be much stronger than expected …”
“According to the IPCC, over the last century, this impact has most likely been small as compared to anthropogenic effects. There are several important working fronts as far as the Sun–Earth connection is concerned. Most GCM whose development started in the lower atmosphere still largely IGNORE the upper part of the atmosphere on which solar variability has the LARGEST IMPACT.”
(http://www.mendeley.com/research/cyclic-variation-solar-forcing-holocene-climate-alaskan-subarctic/) Hu (2003):
“Our results imply that SMALL VARIATIONS IN SOLAR IRRADIANCE induced PRONOUNCED cyclic changes in northern high-latitude environments. They also provide evidence that centennial-scale SHIFTS in the Holocene climate were similar between the subpolar regions of the North Atlantic and North Pacific, possibly because of SUN-OCEAN-CLIMATE LINKAGES.”
(http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.927/abstract) Turney (2005):
“The cycles, however, ARE NOT COHERENT WITH CHANGES IN SOLAR ACTIVITY (both being on the same absolute timescale), indicating that Holocene North Atlantic climate variability at the millennial and centennial scale IS NOT DRIVEN BY A LINEAR RESPONSE to changes in solar activity.”
… and I could do this for a long time …
I hope that Professor J. Haigh, who ignored the work cited above in his paper from 2011 (https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/climatechange/Public/pdfs/Briefing%20Papers/Solar%20Influences%20on%20Climate.pdf) in the new IPCC report will take into account these.
(http://geoinfo.amu.edu.pl/sgp/LA/LA07/LA7_19.pdf) Wojciechowski (2008 – I’m sorry, but only abstract and figure captions are in English) notes that the current transgression of the sea is perfectly inscribed in the cycles: millennial and bimillennial. If that is a cycle of Hallstatt was crucial for climate change, the current [natural] warming should take up to about 2250 AD …

Other than polar/subpolar regions, the rest of the earth looks pretty much near average.

Is there any reason why January 2013 temperature anomalies are so symmetrical in North and South hemisphere? I haven’t done any extensive research but it looks like the hemispheres were somehow communicating. The only way I can think of is ENSO.