Guest post by Willis Eschenbach
Bob Tisdale has discussed a variety of issues with the hemispheric and basis-by-basin Levitus summary of the ARGO data in his excellent post here on WUWT. I wanted to take a larger look at at the global ocean data, to provide it with some context. After following a variety of blind paths and dry holes, I arrived at Figure 1. This shows the Levitus data, along with several datasets for both the sea surface temperature (SST) and the land surface air temperatures.
Figure 1. Three land surface air temperature datasets, three ocean surface temperature datasets, and two measures of the deeper ocean. Datasets from KNMI, except the Levitus ocean data. Levitus data have been converted from ocean heat content values to temperature values.
Unfortunately, we only have pentadal (5-year centered average) data for the deeper ocean layer from 1955, no annual data for the deeper layer is available before 2005. So I have shown the other data as pentadal averages as well, so that they can be compared directly. Now, I have no profound conclusions from this, but there are some curiosities about these results.
The most obvious oddity involves the sea surface temperature data. Two of the datasets, the ERSST and the HadISST, are quite similar, but are offset over much of their length by an amount that varies in an odd stepwise fashion. In particular, they diverge significantly in the period 1997-2001. They have the same small peaks and valleys, but the land is going up while the sea temperature is dropping. Figure 2 shows this in more detail:
Figure 2. Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from three different sources. The vertical axis scale is different from Figure 1.
On the other hand, Figure 2 also shows that the ICOADS dataset runs almost exactly in parallel with the HadISST data up until 1997, when it shifts gears and goes up to agree with the ERSST dataset.
I have absolutely no idea what happened in 1997, or in earlier periods, which allowed the three datasets to vary so much. Always more questions than answers.
The next oddity involves the changes in the land and ocean surface temperatures. Figure 3 is like Figure 1 but leaves out the sub-surface temperatures:
Figure 3. Three land surface air temperature and three ocean surface temperature datasets.
The oddity here is two-fold: what happened around 1977 or so, and what happened around 2002 or so? From 1977 on, after twenty years with no significant land or sea temperature change, both land and sea temperatures start to rise. In addition, the land temperature rises much more rapidly than the SST. Then around 1998, SSTs start to level off, and they peak in 2002 and start to fall. The land temperatures start falling shortly thereafter. Why, on all counts?
Now, I don’t know the answer to these questions either. However, in this modern world there’s a term called a “WAG”, which means a wild-assed guess. However, scientists don’t provide those. Instead, there is a refined version called a “SWAG”, or a scientific wild-assed guess.
So here’s my SWAG about what we’re seeing here. I think at least some of this is the effect of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO.
The PDO is a large-scale reorganization of the flow of the North Pacific Ocean. I think that, like other large-scale patterns such as the El Nino/La Nina alterations, these all function to regulate the temperature. It is obvious that one of the two major patterns (positive or negative PDO) must be more efficient than the other one at cooling the planet. The transfer of heat via the oceans from the equator to the poles is one of the two major pathways by which the tropics moves heat (the other is via the atmosphere). One of the two PDO states must be better at cooling the planet.
I hypothesize that this alteration between PDO states is one of the ways by which the planet maintains such a regular temperature. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to support that hypothesis using observational data.
A final oddity is the decoupling of the land temperatures from the ocean temperatures. Figure 4 shows a longer version of the same data, this time extending back to the 1870’s:
Figure 4. Long-term land air temperature and sea surface temperature records, expressed as an anomaly around the 1900-1980 average.
The oddity to me in Figure 4 is that since about 1974, the land temperatures have been rising much faster than the sea surface temperatures. The SST records and the land temperature records run quite close to each other up until about 1975 or so, but after that land temperatures have been rising much more quickly, while the sea surface temperatures (and to a greater extent the sub-surface temperatures) have not followed suit.
Once again, I’m out of explanations for the decoupling of the temperatures. Clearly it’s not CO2. Urban heat islands? Aerosols reducing the clouds over the land? I have no idea. All suggestions welcome. That’s the beauty of settled science, there are always unexplained questions to
Best regards to everyone,
w.
THE DATA
Levitus provides two different global pentadal datasets. One covers the layer from 0 to 700 m depth, and the other covers a thicker layer, from 0 to 2000 m depth. I wanted to see what was happening in the “missing link”, which is the data covering the deeper layer, from 700m to 2000m depth.
The good news is that since we are dealing in oceanic heat content, the heat content of the lower layer is simply the difference between the two datasets.
My spreadsheet with the results is here.
Does the difference between land and ocean after the 70s perhaps involve the ‘adjustments’ made to land station data about which much controversy yet rages?
I’ve been convinced for years that the PDO is indeed the key. And it’s so poorly understood!
“Unfortunately, I have no idea how to support that hypothesis using observational data.”
You’d never make a good Climatologist….
Need to add the satellite post 1979 data as well
CRU, HAD, GISS, and Best.. take with a grain of salt. Highly manipulated ex-data
“The SST records and the land temperature records run quite close to each other up until about 1975 or so, but after that land temperatures have been rising much more quickly, while the sea surface temperatures (and to a greater extent the sub-surface temperatures) have not followed suit”.
I think it has much to do with the different amounts of energy (differential heat inertia?) it takes to heat land and water. It takes a lot of energy to heat water, and much less to heat land.
I think you will find that generally, during cold periods, land temperatures decouples from ocean temperatures downwards, as in around 1880 in Figure 4, and during warm periods it decouples from the ocean upwards, as after the 1970s in Figure 1.
Afternoon sea breezes are a good illustration, where winds increase in the afternoon towards the land because the water takes longer to heat up than the land. There is also an opposite effect at many places at night when winds blow offshore, as well as often also in many places in winter-when offshore breezes are more common. I used to watch these effects growing up on Sydney Harbour (where I also note there is virtually/no change in high water level over the last 30 years). Katabatic breezes from mountains are the same thing, they blow down at night and up during the day.
Because seabreezes are by definition, only where the land meets the sea, this shouldn’t really show up in regional wind or temperature trends. Sea breezes die off only a few kilometres inland.
All this could have been pointed out to the IPCC, if any of them had done some simple observations whilst growing up near the sea, rather than panicking over warming temperatures since the 1970s, from delayed effects of high solar activity during the 20th century.
ps, Nothing odd about the Land temps coinciding in figure 4, its called “collusion”
Anyone care to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a five-year centered mean to compare the above data?
Ian Bryce
Willis, it may be a good idea to look at the temperatures for small towns, medium sized towns, and large cities as Goodridge did for California, and Warwick Hughes for Australia. It may also be a good idea to separate the maximums from the minimums.
Regards,
Ian Bryce
Hmmm anomaly graphs. Maybe its the changing base we measure it all from (hey, does this mean we are actually cooling!!?)
Our global temperature is often depicted as an ‘anomaly’ ie +0.7 C …. so much above or below the mean global temperature.
But, the accepted ‘mean global temperature’ has apparently changed with time:
1988: 15.4°C
Der Spiegel, based on data from NASA.
http://wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/image/show.html?did=13529172&aref=image036/2006/05/15/cq-sp198802801580159.pdf&thumb=false
1990: 15.5°C
James Hansen and 5 other leading scientists claimed the global mean surface temperature was 15.5°C. Also Prof. Christian Schönwiese claimed the same in his book “Klima im Wandel“, pages 73, 74 and 136. 15.5°C is also the figure given by a 1992 German government report, based on satellite data.
1999 14.6°C
Global and Hemispheric Temperature Anomalies – Land and Marine Instrumental Records Jones Parker Osborn and Briffa http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/jonescru/jones.html
2004: 14.5°C
Professors Hans Schellnhuber and Stefan Rahmstorf in their book: “Der Klimawandel”, 1st edition, 2006, p 37, based on surface station data from the Hadley Center.
2007: 14.5°C
The IPCC WG1 AR4 (pg 6 of bmbf.de/pub/IPCC2007.pdf)
2010: 14.5°C
Professors Schellnhuber and Rahmstorf in their book: Der Klimawandel, 7th edition, 2012, pg 37 based on surface station data.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/jonescru/jones.html
2012 14.0 °C
Press Release No. 943 World Meteorological Society Globally-averaged temperatures in 2011 were estimated to be 0.40° Centigrade above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14°C. http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_943_en.html
2013 Wikipedia: 14.0°C
Absolute temperatures for the Earth’s average surface temperature have been derived, with a best estimate of roughly 14 °C (57.2 °F).[11] However, the correct temperature could easily be anywhere between 13.3 and 14.4°C (56 and 58 °F) and uncertainty increases at smaller (non-global)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record
http://notrickszone.com/2013/04/21/coming-ice-age-according-to-leading-experts-global-mean-temperature-has-dropped-1c-since-1990/
The decoherence of the land and sea surface temperature data sets is quite interesting. I wonder, might it have something to do with the source of heating? I would guess that it’s a lot easier for a warm ocean to heat a cold atmosphere (one heat reservoir, after all, is massively larger than the other) than for a warm atmosphere to heat a cold ocean (where direct thermal transfer has a minute effect, and heating must rely on a decrease in convection of heat away from the ocean, with impinging visible light pumping most of the extra energy in to the water). Might it be, then, that during the first half of the 20th century the ocean was the entity that was warming and that was driving the rise in atmospheric temperatures, while in the latter half it’s the atmosphere that’s been the initial receiver of extra heat?
…’Course, that doesn’t explain the sharp drop in land temperatures at the very beginning of the record, but on the other hand that might be either a result of the 1883 eruption of Krakatau or simply of BEST’s huge error bars that far back in the reconstruction.
Barclay E MacDonald says:
May 5, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Anyone care to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a five-year centered mean to compare the above data?
Is what I have plotted below what you mean? It is interesting that when each month is plotted, there is a huge spike in 1998, but with the mean of 60, there is actually a small dip in 1998 and slightly higher areas on either side; in other words, we get a completely different picture.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/plot/rss/from:1980/mean:60
Willis: I’m surprised you missed one very fundamental difference between the land-based record since 1970, and the sea-temperatures since 1970: CO2 itself IS a part of the increase in land temperature change because of albedo: greater plant growth earlier in the season over larger land areas WILL darken the plant, and that lower albdeo WILL tend to heat up the air masses flowing over the land. Look at desert (rocky) land thermometers? have they gone up as much a wetter, more plant-friendly areas? If EVERY plant on the face of the planet is growing 15 to 27% faster, greener, higher, taller, wider and more brushy, is not less solar energy reflecting back from previous light-colored rocks, dirt, and grassland?
On the other hand, sea-growing plants are also benefiting from higher CO2 levels sicne the mid50’s and 60’s, but they will not change the sea “color” and albedo. Hence, little change in sea temperatures.
Dr Spencer has said all of the measured temperature change could be explained by a 2% change in cloud coverage worldwide? could not a 1% darker land albedo be equally influential?
What limits reported temperature rise? Being directly constrained in divergence from satellite-measured temperature rise is not particularly the answer, as those CRU/BEST land temperature plots claiming around 1 degree Celsius temperature rise since the late 1970s already differ vastly from more independent satellite data (even for likewise land and not the whole planet) showing under half that in temperature rise since then.*
* For example: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss-land/from:1979/mean:12
While moderating daring during times like the 2010 winter or this spring, overall they have been getting away with that divergence quite successfully, down to only a small minority of people even noticing the difference, despite it being huge in context.
Nor is vast contradiction to data published before the global warming ideological-political movement much of a limit. Especially if quantitatively reading the scales on the graphs, the plots at the top of this article are grossly different from, for instance:
data in a 1976 National Geographic:
http://img240.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=40530_DSCN1557_nat_geog_1976_1200x900_122_75lo.JPG
temperature history towards the bottom of this (click to enlarge):
http://s7.postimage.org/69qd0llcr/intermediate.gif
So a curious question is why hasn’t temperature change in the ocean data been adjusted to be multiple times higher too? The answer might be that, when the public has been told about great harm supposed to result upon multiple degrees Celsius global temperature rise, a claim of being most of the way there already would be too blatantly contradictory.
Tell the average person in the general public that a certain subpart of the world rose in temperature by a degree or two, and that person isn’t likely to look up other data sources to discover the claim to be wrong. Yet that doesn’t mean even the average person could be gotten to simultaneously believe in terrible harm at, for instance, a point of 2 degrees Celsius global temperature rise while meanwhile believing global temperature rose by most of that over the past 3 decades.
Of the portion of the public which believes in primarily-manmade global warming, a majority of them believe such is likely to destroy human civilization within a century (as seen in polls, since, while around 23% of all U.S. voters believed that in a 2009 poll,** the 23% is a bit more half of the percentage who believe in predominately AGW). Maintaining beliefs like that, the fruit of much labor by media outlets and by activists flocking to institutions superficially labeled as for environmental study, is partially mistake-tolerant but still requires a little care in management to not too overstate claims too soon. To take an extreme example, for instance, it wouldn’t work to just suddenly say global temperatures already rose by 5 degrees in the past decade.
** http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/23_fear_global_warming_will_end_world_soon
Hi Willis,
Once again some very nice work with a humility that is rare in science these days.
I was asking myself about possible jet-stream relationships that would shift weather patterns north/south… and cause temperature readings to swing… so I examined US agricultural output at:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/agricultural-productivity-in-the-us.aspx#28247
Table 4 (Crop output- if you add your own “Total for All States” column in a pivot table) shows a period of flattened output starting around 1980-1990… but it does not look that exciting.
Then I went off on a tanget … agricultural energy use… when you look at Table 14, (Energy Input) there is a significant drop starting around 1980, but then a gradual rise from 1986 through 2004… so these might be associated with total economic output for the country… if CO2 is “to blame” then we should see a sharp spike in temperatures related to energy use for this major industry… but again, not that exciting…
Russ
A land surface temperature of the order of half a degree due to land-use change and associated changes in hydrology does not seem impossible. These changes have been big enough to render other explanations highly uncertain.
Clearly it’s not … Aerosols reducing the clouds over the land?
Reduced aerosol seeded clouds would, by increasing solar insolation, increase land surface temperatures faster than SSTs, because water has a much greater thermal capacity than air. That is, the same increase in solar insolation would increase air temperatures by much more than water temperatures.
The twentieth century experienced two periods of warming – about 1910 to 1940 and about 1975 to 2000 or so. Each warming episode involved about 0.5K at similar rates, and each coincided with polarity changes in the PDO index.
Monckton (among many) has argued that the similarity of the two events suggests a similar cause, and that both must be fundamentally natural rather than human-CO2-caused because CO2 did not seriously change until WWII and post-war development.
Figure 4 [above] shows a much steeper rise in BEST and CRUTEM air temps where both deviate strongly from sea temps in about 1990.
Given past behavior, I’m inclined to infer the deviation reflects biases in the adjustments of both BEST and CRUTEM datasets (partly due to changes in numbers/distributions of reporting stations alone, not necessarily malice).
It is hard/impossible to believe that air temps could increase faster than ocean heat content on decadal scales.
thingodonta says:
May 5, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Because seabreezes are by definition, only where the land meets the sea, this shouldn’t really show up in regional wind or temperature trends. Sea breezes die off only a few kilometres inland.
How far sea breezes penetrate inland depends on the ocean land temperature differential over time. In many areas during summer, the land is warmer than the ocean for most of the 24 hours, and sea breezes will penetrate many hundreds of kilometers inland, and are called monsoons.
Land/ocean temperature differentials can produce global scale effects. Winter cold in Siberia contributes to the strength of the Australian summer monsoon.
Yes, thank you Werner. I was thinking about 1998 and the effect of smoothing on that and similar, possible, outliers, and how such smoothing might affect our ability to accurately discern relationships between the different data sets that are influenced by different cycles or different lag times. No clever insights, just trying to better understand.
Werner Brozek says:
Barclay E MacDonald says:
May 5, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Anyone care to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a five-year centered mean to compare the above data?
Is what I have plotted below what you mean? It is interesting that when each month is plotted, there is a huge spike in 1998, but with the mean of 60, there is actually a small dip in 1998 and slightly higher areas on either side; in other words, we get a completely different picture.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/plot/rss/from:1980/mean:60
========
THANK YOU Werner.
This is something I’ve been pointing out for years. These damned running mean “smoothers” that everyone is to keen on cause serious, unintended distortions of the data.
Just look at all the distortions by running mean filter in the following plot of some randomly created synthetic data: inverted peaks like the one you pointed out above (1940), peaks bent left and right (1958), even a whole series of oscillations getting turned upside down ( circa 1970 )
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=351v6a1&s=5
I understand Willis’ reason for using them here in order to compare like with like but you then end up discussing artefacts of the filtering instead of the data ( as if the data did not have enough problems itself ).
The actual change in N. Pacific happened in 1974/75 but seems like 77 here due to the filtering.
In view of the above it would probably have been better if Willis had used his usual gaussian filter for everything except the first plot where he included OHC data that was only available as “pentads”.
Adding a triple running mean, with a base period of 30 months instead of 60, to Werner’s plot.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/plot/rss/from:1980/mean:60/plot/rss/from:1980/mean:30/mean:22/mean:17
The key to this filter is to shorten the running mean by a factor of 1.3371 at each step to eliminated the negative lobes in a straight running mean. This has a decent frequency response similar to a gaussian.
It is interesting to note that much of the variation in the running mean is actually upside down !!
Willis
I noticed something interesting related to this in the form of sea level rise.
Check this out for the latest sea level rise from the university of Colorado.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2013_rel3/sl_ns_global.png
Now look very closely at the previous version.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/files/2013_rel2/sl_ns_global.png
The subtle difference is that the range of variation of the red line, representing the TOPEX data now has considerably less uncertainty.
Anything you know about?
Ah, this is from the Colorado folks…
2013 Release 3 (2013-04-20):
Added Jason-2/OSTM GDR cycles 168-169.
Reprocessed TOPEX cycles 104 and 292 which were marked missing in previous releases.
Fixed bug that misapplied tide model correction to TOPEX cycles. Result is reduction of corrected SSH variance during TOPEX.
Willis: “Once again, I’m out of explanations for the decoupling of the temperatures. ”
The idea that they decouple after a certain point may be spurious to a degree.
The two are aligned here simply by definition of 1900-1980 reference average for calculating ‘anomalies’ which _defines_ them as both being around zero in that period. Looking closer, air temperatures are more volatile in 50s and 60s as well. BEST shows a lot more variation pre 1900 too.
Where the oddity may actually be, is in the period where SST and air temps show the _similar_ variability rather than where they differ.
It gets a little hidden in your figure 3 but ICOADS has more variability in the pre-WWII data than the more processed data sets.
One of my main points in looking at Hadley “bias corrections” to SST (that are largely incorporated in other SST datasets) what that the adjustments remove much of the variability from the climate data:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2/
This is definitely a good point your raise but the divergence may be a bit different to the way you are reading it.
Maybe plotting rate of change of each would make it clearer what is happening. (Without running mean, of course).
Been looking at Arctic sea ice volume. Can only find a modelled chart at Wikipedia. From this it seems annual ice melt by volume is pretty consistent and amounts to more than 270,000 cubic kilometres of water at just above freezing gets returned to the world’s oceans every year. Haven’t looked at annual Antarctic melt but guess it will be similar. Would that be enough COLD water into the oceans to have any impact?
Yes the relationship between land and sea surface temperatures is an interesting one.
If you plot out the difference between the two, it looks like this:
http://oi52.tinypic.com/24v5umd.jpg
or this:
http://oi55.tinypic.com/5slmw.jpg
Me said: “Maybe plotting rate of change of each would make it clearer what is happening. ”
Me did: http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=219
As far as we may wish to accept BEST project (which I’m not sure I do in terms of removal of UHI) we may use it to look at the short term variability of land temps. Here I have halved the land temp variation, which makes it roughly comparable to SST variation.
As I suggested above it is the period 1945-1975 that would appear to show an ‘oddity’ of reduced variability. So Willis has drawn attention to something worth looking at but I think this shows that the odd period is just before 1975 not after it.
stacase, what you have done shows the difference is very much like the variations in the long term data sets. This is effectively the same thing as my plot showing land temps being roughly double the SST data.
What this again emphasises is the strongly cycle pattern in the data.
The ‘linear trend’ is of course a totally invalid model to fit to such data and is typically misleading since as usual if goes from trough to peak. Compare to my “warming cosine” plot:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=209
second thoughts on stacase: http://oi55.tinypic.com/5slmw.jpg
This is interesting, the periodicity here is significantly longer, at about 100 years, than the usual circa 60 years attributed to SST.
I hypothesize that this ………. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to support that hypothesis using observational data.
Hi Willis
Most of the time, Dr. S. would say all the time, I hit head on the same brick wall, but on one occasion he did say:
If correlation is really good, one can live with an as yet undiscovered mechanism
A final oddity is the decoupling of the land temperatures from the ocean temperatures.
The two data sets, SST and land are both coincident at about 1985. From there they diverge and I would think that this perhaps coincides with three factors;
(1) the wholesale removal of many countryside temperature stations from the data set,
(2) the many unexplained manipulations of the data sets, and,
(3) last but perhaps not least, the decline in solar activity. The effects of which can be seen at 2007 when the solar cycle hit its regular low point, but thereafter failed to climb to its regular high, only getting to a plateau about half the normal height. Judging by the plot of SST it would seem that the ongoing high in the solar cycle is not sufficient to maintain SST and it continues to decline.
Perhaps the rarely shown temperatures from that newer network of US temperature stations should be spliced onto the data instead of the manipulated datasets. Is it CONUS ?
Isn’t satellite data also likely a better measure than all those questionable manipulated data sets ?
Could it be that what we are seeing is the Heat leaving the planet.
First the warmth goes in to the Oceans and Land and thus to the Atmosphere.
Then as the planet cools the warmth leaves the Oceans and Land but temporarily increases the temperature of the Atmosphere as it is leaving. This would explain why the Satellite lower atmospheric data has not matched the drops in thermometer values.
As the losses continue and the insolation also continues to reduce the Atmosphere is no longer getting so much heat being lost by the Oceans and Land so is now following the temperature drops, but it will gather much more momentum as this happens, quickly overtaking the Land and Oceans as they cool more slowly.
Philip Bradley says:
“Land/ocean temperature differentials can produce global scale effects. Winter cold in Siberia contributes to the strength of the Australian summer monsoon.”
Yeah good point, I was speaking from experience in eastern Australia.
But my point holds, I think the land and oceans are heating /cooling differently due to the same sort of effect, that is why the land has warmed faster since the 1970s, and I think its mostly due to the sun, which showed higher output in the late 20th century.
GeologyJim says: “It is hard/impossible to believe that air temps could increase faster than ocean heat content on decadal scales.”
That land temps change more is known on an annual scale. The centre of continents have more extreme summer and winter swings than coastal areas. eg Central Austraila and german winters.
There will be a limit to how much land can stray from oceans in actual temperature but since all we are looking at here is a few tenths of a degree, the actual local temperatures are unlikely to be breaking any physical laws and leading a life of their own unrelated to SST.
As I noted above, the impression of a divergence after 1975 is simply a result of converting both temperature records to “anomalies” from the 1900-1980 averages.
All we are really seeing here is a greater volatility in land temps right across the record. NOT some oddity after 1975.
As I showed by looking at rate of change, if there is an ‘oddity’ it is between 1945 and 1975 when air temps were varying less than the prior and later periods:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=219
“SWAG” also can mean both “Sensible Wild Ass Guess” and “Stupid Wild Ass Guess.” Many is the idea which starts out as the former and, under examination, turns out to be the latter.
Someone who worked with Churchill during world war two stated he had a hundred ideas a day, and three were good ones.
The problem with the peer review of Climate Science is that they refuse to be “disagreeable” towards each others ideas, and therefore go forward with the 97 bad ideas.
RACookPE1978 says:
May 5, 2013 at 8:56 pm
Dr Spencer has said all of the measured temperature change could be explained by a 2% change in cloud coverage worldwide? could not a 1% darker land albedo be equally influential?
——————————————————————————————————
Probably not, because clouds’ albedo works over water, too, but a change in the albedo of land-based plants takes place in 30 percent of planet Earth’s surface, which is covered by land, only – minus the permanently plant-free areas in Antarctica, Greenland, mountainous regeions and totally plant-life-free desers, of course.
Thus, I rather suppose that it would take over 20 percent of change in plant-induced, land-based albedo to at least equal a 2-percent change in cloud-based, worldwide albedo.
“I hypothesize that this alteration between PDO states is one of the ways by which the planet maintains such a regular temperature. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to support that hypothesis using observational data.”
———————————————–
Silly Goose, this is climastrology so what you don’t know you can just make up and then make them prove the findings of your research and your lack of proof wrong.
cn
Willis, I see your quandry and suggest you ask one Michael Mann who will happily apply lashings of fudge to sweeten this for you.
Fame, riches and a book tour await.
Thanks, but since you did this – “So I have shown the other data as pentadal averages as well” – we cannot comment on the anamoly as it may simply be an artifact of data processing. Can you show all the data and THEN your 5 years charts, please?
Hi Willis: Sometimes it’s best to look at differences.
In the following graph, I’ve subtracted the average of the two sea surface temperature datasets (HADISST & ERSST.v3b) from the average of the two land surface temperature datasets (BEST & CRUTEM4). From about 1940 to about 1970, land surface temperatures cooled faster than sea surface temperatures, and after, land surface temperatures warmed more quickly. http://i43.tinypic.com/6zrji9.jpg
Also, we can also see that land surface temperatures warmed faster than sea surface temperatures earlier in the term.
The reason why? Consider Compo and Sardeshmukh (2009): “Oceanic influences on recent continental warming”:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/gilbert.p.compo/CompoSardeshmukh2007a.pdf
The abstract reads:
“Evidence is presented that the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) over land. Atmospheric model simulations of the last half-century with prescribed observed ocean temperature changes, but without prescribed GHG changes, account for most of the land warming. The oceanic influence has occurred through hydrodynamic-radiative teleconnections, primarily by moistening and warming the air over land and increasing the downward longwave radiation at the surface. The oceans may themselves have warmed from a combination of natural and anthropogenic influences.”
Now sea surface temperatures: ICOADS is the source dataset for both HADISST and ERSST.v3b, with an exception: HADISST also includes satellite-based data starting in 1982. Both HADISST and ERSST.v3b are infilled. The difference between the two datasets as far as I know is that the data is reinserted in HADISST after their EOF analyses, but with ERSST.v3b, it’s not. Why do they diverge when they do? Dunno for sure. For the divergence in the late 1990s between HADISST and the others, it’s very possible that the satellite-based HADISST is picking up the cooling of the sea surface temperature in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere (where ICOADS sampling is very poor).
With respect to the divergence between the datasets in 1977 in your Figure 2, the appearance of the timing of that divergence MAY simply be a result of how you presented the data, with the data zeroed at 1957.
Last, with respect to the PDO, as we can see in my above graph of the differences between SST and LSAT, the land surface air temperatures started to warm faster than sea surface temperatures about 1970, not 1977. If anything, the 1976/77 Pacific Climate Shift (where the sea surface temperatures of the entire East Pacific shifted up about 0.2 deg C) would have contributed to the divergence, assuming land surface air temperatures are exaggerating the shift in the sea surface temperatures. But I definitely would not attribute it to the PDO.
That’s my 2 cents.
Regards.
I found Markx point fascinating. If the “mean global temperature” has been consistently reduced since 1988 then no wonder the anomalies so beloved to climatologists show continued global warming. Can anyone explain why “mean global temperature” has been reduced or were all the earlier documents to which Markx has referred erroneous?
A thought came to mind. Do you have ocean flow data for these periods at depth? Do the temp buoys give a location each time they send a signal. And is that location for each buoy tracked in the data. It seems to me that the transfer of heat could be tracked over time and overlaid on global temps land/sea. Of course even if you find a relationship one must then find the cause of the changes to the ocean currents. If the ocean temp triggers ocean flow then you may have found a self regulating system. I am no expert on any of this but it sure would be interesting to see flow data.
markx says: “Hmmm anomaly graphs. Maybe its the changing base we measure it all from (hey, does this mean we are actually cooling!!?)”
And maybe it’s not the changing base. Global surface temperatures are warming regardless of the base period used. Your links simply show different approximations of global surface temperatures. Those approximations can vary depending on the sea surface temperature or land surface air temperature dataset that’s employed and on the assumptions made by those making the approximations.
But just in case you’re concerned that surface temperatures in anomaly form only show warming, I’ve plotted land surface air temperatures and sea surface temperatures in absolute form for you. The land surface air temperature dataset (GHCN-CAMS) is the only surface temperature dataset presented in absolute temperatures:
http://i39.tinypic.com/209t8b6.jpg
And ERSST.v3b and HADISST are also presented in absolute form. Here’s HADISST:
http://i41.tinypic.com/i5w5me.jpg
Global temperatures have warmed.
Regards
Solomon Green says: “I found Markx point fascinating.”
Refer to my reply above.
Frank Baginski says: “A thought came to mind. Do you have ocean flow data for these periods at depth? Do the temp buoys give a location each time they send a signal.”
Hi Frank. I assume your comment refers to ARGO floats. Yes, they give locations each time they bob to the surface and relay data–every 10 days I believe. But they’ve only been in place globally since 2003/2004. There have been other buoys in place since the early 1990s but they’re moored in place. Those are the TOA project buoys along the equatorial Pacific:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/
They’ve expanded those buoys to the tropical Indian and tropical Atlantic as well.
The other in situ measurements in recent decades are primarily from ship inlets (cooling inlets for the engines). Before that, the measurements are from buckets tossed over the sides of ships. The sailors then hauled the buckets back on board and placed thermometers in them. (sarc on) High tech stuff. (sarc off.)
Satellites have been used since the early 1980s, but only two datasets use them: HADISST and Reynolds OI.v2 SST.
Regards
stacase says: “Yes the relationship between land and sea surface temperatures is an interesting one. If you plot out the difference between the two, it looks like this:
http://oi52.tinypic.com/24v5umd.jpg
or this:
http://oi55.tinypic.com/5slmw.jpg”
In your second graph, I believe you’re showing the difference between the ICOADS sea surface temperature data and the combined land+sea surface temperature anomaly data from GISS.
Regards
J Martin says: “The two data sets, SST and land are both coincident at about 1985…”
Refer to the difference between land surface air temperature anomalies and sea surface temperature anomalies:
http://i43.tinypic.com/6zrji9.jpg
Barclay E MacDonald says: “Anyone care to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a five-year centered mean to compare the above data?”
5-year running means have been used by the climate science community for decades to suppress ENSO variations.
You can get the annual average temperature anomalies for the 0-700 metre and 0-2000 metre ocean from 1955 to 2012 here from the NODC. I just noticed they expanded this page a few weeks ago so it might be new. Top section is annual.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/basin_avt_data.html
“Once again, I’m out of explanations for the decoupling of the temperatures. Clearly it’s not CO2. Urban heat islands? Aerosols reducing the clouds over the land? I have no idea. All suggestions welcome. ”
I was thinking about the early 80’s and the arctic ice extent and what could be causes changes in the post-80’s.
The late 70’s and early-80’s were the time of the “‘acid rain’ is destroying Europe’s forests”. What was done was to use scrubbers to get rid of SO2 and particulates, the former using lime and the latter using electrostatic precipitation, and also using taller chimney’s.
I wonder if we have not been selecting for smaller particulates, which are highly hydrophobic and unable to take up charge. Prior to the use of electrostatic precipitation these small uncharged particulates would have aggregated in the flue. However, if these are placed on ice we get a smear of heat absorbing particles that float on wet ice, but are not solubilized, meaning that they have a long arctic half-life.
As Europe dashed for gas, the levels of these particulates began to fall and we are observing they mobilization via summer melting and dilution in the oceans.
Bob Tisdale says:
May 6, 2013 at 5:29 am
Thanks Bob. I was looking at the two plots you provided and noticed that there is about a 9 deg C difference between the spatially-averaged land and ocean temperatures. I didn’t realize there was that big a difference.
Also, can you located comparable absolute temperature data from the computer models?? Those all appear to be in anomaly form. Thanks.
Bob Tisdale says: May 6, 2013 at 5:43 am The other in situ measurements in recent decades are primarily from ship inlets (cooling inlets for the engines). Before that, the measurements are from buckets tossed over the sides of ships. The sailors then hauled the buckets back on board and placed thermometers in them.
Hi Bob – don’t forget the XBTs used from the mid 60s….. (someone pulled me up on this one previously!)
From Wikipedia, Expendable Bathythermograph:
The expendable bathythermograph, or XBT, is a device for obtaining a record of temperature as a function of depth from a moving ship.
Thank you Bob Tisdale for your comments. I hope you see the need to know the details of the ocean currents. If we do not know the changes in the currents then we do not really know the transfer rate of heat or cooling from the tropics to the poles. Small changes in currents supply massive flows of heat. This is obvious from the density of water. Maybe I read this wrong, but it seems from fig one that the ocean peaked first. Is this drop in sea temp around 2005 due to mixing? If so then a self regulating system seems to have kicked in around 2005. I have no answers just questions.
If the heat content of the ocean is the big gorilla in the room and all we can see are the surface currents in detail then we are losing the big picture. Anyway, just my opinion.
Bob Tisdale says: May 6, 2013 at 5:29 am
But just in case you’re concerned that surface temperatures in anomaly form only show warming, I’ve plotted land surface air temperatures and sea surface temperatures in absolute form for you. The land surface air temperature dataset (GHCN-CAMS) is the only surface temperature dataset presented in absolute temperatures:
http://i39.tinypic.com/209t8b6.jpg
And ERSST.v3b and HADISST are also presented in absolute form. Here’s HADISST:
http://i41.tinypic.com/i5w5me.jpg
Global temperatures have warmed.
Thanks Bob for all the detail …. I do accept that global temperatures are likely rising in recent decades – receding arctic ice perhaps being a significant indicator – it was a bit tongue in cheek, but I think it does go to show this ‘exact science’ ain’t quite as precise or settled as some would have it.
markx,
I think they should have stuck with the 15 C.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-elusive-global-surface-temperature.html
Then that is just me.
Willis, I believe there is more than one explanation for the departures of land and sea temps.
#1: thingodonta says:
May 5, 2013 at 7:46 pm
“I think you will find that generally, during cold periods, land temperatures decouples from ocean temperatures downwards, as in around 1880 in Figure 4, and during warm periods it decouples from the ocean upwards, as after the 1970s in Figure 1.”
#2 The Thumbtack theory. Remember Hansen jiggered the record to reduce the pesky 1936 record highs to be below the 1998 high temp. Stick a thumbtack into the land-based temp traces at 1945 and swivel clockwise, perhaps half way toward the SST traces. It will be closer to reality.
The oddity to me in Figure 4 is that since about 1974,
=========
This was the start of the Arab Oil Embargo. Fuel and petroleum products shot up in price. This drove up temperatures.
Boat owners will better recognize that this marked the start of the “pox”. Blistering of fiberglass hulls left in sea water year round. Before the 1970’s, none of the boats had the pox. After, almost every manufacturer is plagued with the problem. To this day it remains unsolved.
This also marked the end of solar dimming. Before the 70’s every year prior, water evaporated slower and slower from a pan left in the sun. After, this process was reversed.
This also marked the start of the Clean Air Act in the US and in general in industrialized nations around the world.
However, nothing significant happened with CO2 production around this time.
Caleb says:
May 6, 2013 at 3:24 am
The problem with the peer review of Climate Science is that they refuse to be “disagreeable” towards each others ideas, and therefore go forward with the 97 bad ideas.
=========
Team Peer review in Climate Science serves the same function as “secret societies”. To promote its own members from within. So for example, members of a secret society, once they gain employment in a company will promote each other, and hold back anyone else in the company, until they gain sufficient power to shape the policies and practices of the company and drain the assets for the benefit of the society and the detriment of shareholders. In effect the secret society becomes a parasite feeding off the assets of the shareholders of the company. In the context of climate science, the Team is a parasite feeding off the assets of the taxpayers.
‘Greg Goodman says:
May 6, 2013 at 12:02 am
Me said: “Maybe plotting rate of change of each would make it clearer what is happening. ”
Me did: http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=219”
you can also plot on an annual basis the change in land temps divided by the change in ocean temps.
‘Once again, I’m out of explanations for the decoupling of the temperatures. Clearly it’s not CO2. Urban heat islands? Aerosols reducing the clouds over the land? I have no idea. All suggestions welcome. ”
might look at UAH data.
Willis, I have noted several times in recent posts that there is no such thing as global or regional climates, only zonal as per the Köppen-Geiger classification that reflects the impacts of heat and precipitation on land areas, and changes in the boundaries of such zones as the climates change. The consequences of this insight have been well stated by Marcel Leroux :
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202005/NoGlobalWarm.pdf
‘One perverse aspect of the scenario put forth by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their media hitmen, is to make believe that climate behaves in the same fashion everywhere, over the whole surface of the Earth, and especially, that it is largely warming throughout, their mantra being: the climate is heating up.
Yet, they know very well that there is not one ‘global’ climate, but a large variety of climates, depending on latitude, geographic conditions, and atmospheric dynamics. Therefore, the climatic differences are considerable between Montreal and Lyon, situated about 45 degrees North Latitude, and between New York and Naples at around 40 degrees N.
For similar reasons, it is foolish to say—or believe—that the climate is heating up everywhere: Some regions are getting warmer, but others are just assuredly cooling down. For example, in the vast atmospheric domain of the North Atlantic, in which we include the area lying between the Rocky Mountains and Western Europe, the American Northeast is getting colder, at the same time that the northwestern Atlantic is heating up. MPA preferentially passes first over Canada, then over the United States, and spreads finally into the North Atlantic. In the course of its progress toward the east, and toward the south, the MPA encounters and lifts the less-cold, or warmer air (because it is lighter), and forces it to flow back toward the north (to fill the void left by its passing), forming an unstable cyclonic circulation which generates our precipitation. This air, which moves back toward the pole, brings warmth with it. Its most usual trajectory is found to be toward the east of the Atlantic, that is to say, Western Europe (cf. M. Leroux, 2001, Dunod).’
These local cooling areas are referred to in the ClimateGateII emails and confirmed by Motl and BEST analyses as well as that of Tony Brown. Not only do 30% of the temperature trends show long term cooling and differences by latitude but Verity Jones and Brown have found that they show zonal cyclical trends:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/20/note-to-tamino-cherries-are-not-the-only-fruit/#more-47806
You Willis have been a leading light in outlining the role of convective evaporation from oceans in limiting temperature change and in heat transfer to other zones, such that it is well known that switches in ENSO between El Nino and La Nina influence droughts in SE USA as well as having a teleconnection to AMO/NAO – that in turn influence surface temperatures in Europe, NE USA and as far as the Sahara. Similarly the PDO/NPO influences surface temperatures in SE Asia and the NW USA. It has also been shown by Clive Best that temperature trends depend on water content of soils and water vapour in the atmosphere and so are zonal.
http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=3597
Within the USA, NCDC data also shows that the temperature trends are regional as well as zonal:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/05/ncdc-data-shows-that-the-contiguous-usa-has-not-warmed-in-the-past-decade-summers-are-cooler-winters-are-getting-colder/#more-50527
These data show differences between coastal, interior and interior at altitude/ latitude that are in line with the analyses of Frank Lasner with his Ruti project on how ocean temperatures influence those on land. The failure of BEST and others to find a UHI effect is, IMO, because they are looking at the wrong factors – as Pielke Sr says they should look at land roughness and surface water capacity that affect convective cooling and especially Tmin. These can be as strong in rural areas as in urban ones due to changes in land use, cropping or cycles in precipitation. That is probably why warming and cooling stations are so intermixed in the SE USA.
Data presented at Columbia University show distinct zonal differences in the patterns of ocean temperature anomalies by latitude: Arctic, NH Mid, Tropical, SH Mid and Antarctic ocean areas http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/zonalT.pdf
And these fit with zonal differences that show up in UAH temperature anomalies:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/04/uah-global-temperature-down-significantly/#more-85587
These zonal differences are reflected in differing warming/cooling patterns in ocean basins
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/11/is-ocean-heat-content-data-all-its-stacked-up-to-be/#more-81892
And the disparity in heat content in the oceans of the SH and NH:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/18/tisdale-on-ocean-heat-content-anomalies/#more-47656
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/03/ocean-heat-content-0-to-2000-meters-why-arent-northern-hemisphere-oceans-warming-during-the-argo-era/#more-85514
Finally, though the above is only a selection of data confirming zonal trends, we have Capt Dallas looking at thermal inertia and zonal heat flux in oceans and the effect on SSTs and showing that small changes in heat content in the Pacific are amplified in the Atlantic:
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.fi/search?updated-min=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2014-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=46
The point I want to make is that given the above – that climate is zonal, linked to ocean basins operating at differing cycles and with teleconnections between zones, and that the heat flux in these basins reflect lunar (Saros) and planetary-solar cycles expressed through changes in solar activity that affect ozone heating in the stratosphere, hence the speed and direction of trade winds and so convection, cloud cover, type and place as well as precipitation etc – why does anyone think that analyzing the climate on a global basis from a data soup of zonal temperatures, proxies, heat flux, TSI, precipitation etc can have any value in determining the causes of climate change, and especially in predicting future changes? Why not make the evaluations on the basis of climate zones and then see how they fit together on a global scale? The answer to your question about the 1997 change is most likely to be due to a confluence of two or more zonal cycles as one would expect from a system that is dynamic and non linear if not chaotic.
Why do the land and ocean temperatures diverge?
Why should they be the same?
As Greg Goodman was (afaict) the first to point out, we’re dealing with anomalies here. All the temperatures were near their mean at around the same time. When they diverged from the mean, the temperatures over land diverged more than did the ocean temperatures.
The land surface mean temperature between 1901 and 2000 was 8.5 deg. C.
The sea surface mean temperature between 1901 and 2000 was 16.1 deg. C.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
If you look at the monthly averages, the land is coolest in January with a mean temperature of 2.8 deg. C. It is warmest in July with a mean temperature of 14.3 deg. C. The difference is 11.5 deg. C.
The ocean is coolest in December at 15.8 deg. C and warmest in July at 16.4 deg. C. The difference is 0.6 deg. C.
The temperature over land varies about 20 times as much (annually) as it does over the ocean.
markx: Thanks for the reply. If you don’t indicate that you’re presenting something tongue in cheek, others, like me, will take you seriously. And others, unlike me, may conclude that those estimate of absolute surface temperatures were in fact a problem.
Regards
markx says: “Hi Bob – don’t forget the XBTs used from the mid 60s….. (someone pulled me up on this one previously!)”
Thanks, you’re correct. The XBTs were used for determining ocean heat content prior to ARGO. And as a further clarification, they were not used to determine sea surface temperatures, as far as I know. That is, I’ve never seen XBTs mentioned in discussions of source data for sea surface temperatures.
Regards
Looks to me like the three land data sets (on visual examination) are still about the same shape as the lower sea surface temperatures except some how being vertically stretched, around 1977-1980 it appears an approximately linear .83 deg/decade addition was suddenly applied to the data. That segment from 1977-80 is vertically stretched with that increased slope. If you removed that additional factor those traces would conform fairly well with the sea surface traces below them.
I would say look for some sort of correction factor that was applied about that time, or a redefinition of some variable that resulted in an increased slope of about .83 deg F/ decade.
The following is an explanation for what is observed.
We know that there are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleoclimatic record which are called Bond events or Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and Heinrich events. There is a particular unusual regional pattern of warming and cooling in the paleo record when these cyclic warming and cooling events occur. An example is what is called the polar see-saw where the Greenland ice sheet cools and the Antarctic ice warms and vice verse. (Comment: Interestingly this was observed in the 20th century warming pattern which provides support for the assertion that the 20th century warming was caused by whatever caused the past cyclic warming.)
The graph below shows Greenland ice sheet temperature for the last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis. The data is from Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
From 1987 to 1997, low level planetary cloud cover was reduced with a calculated forcing change of 10 watts/m^2 (See Palle’s paper excerpts and linked to below). This caused the majority of the warming 1987 to 1997. During this period of time planetary cloud cover correlates with GCR changes.
Comment:
The 10 watts/m^2 increase in forcing 1987 to 1997 is due to a reduction in planetary cloud cover (4% to 5% reduction) which resulted in less sunlight be reflected off into space. It is interesting to note that there is a calculated 2 watts /m^2 increase in forcing due to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
From 1997 to 2013 there is a net increase in low level clouds (2% to 3%) and there is a 7% increase in high level clouds (See Palle’s paper excerpts and linked to below). An increase in low level clouds cools the planet by reflecting more sunlight off into space. An increase in high level clouds (cirrus type clouds) warms the planet due to the greenhouse effect of the ice in the clouds.
Comments:
1) Low level clouds have a higher albedo than cirrus clouds and hence reflect more sunlight off into space which explains why an increase in low level clouds cools the planet while an increase in high level clouds warms the planet.
2) Almost everyone has experienced sudden cooling on a summer day due to an increase in low level clouds. A lack of cirrus clouds over deserts explains why the desert night can be very cold as there is less or no ice in high level clouds to re radiate long wave radiation back to the surface of the planet.
The planet has not cooled as the cooling effect of the 2% to 3% increase in low level clouds is compensated by the 7% increase in high level clouds.
The following is an explanation (SWAG) for the reason why the land warmed more than the oceans around 1990.
The warming effect of increased cirrus clouds has a greater effect in high latitude regions in the winter, particularly over ice sheets and sea ice. This explains the significant warming that has occurred at high latitude regions. The warming is amplified by the reduction in sea ice in the Arctic.
The effect on an increase in cirrus clouds in over the Antarctic is less than in the Arctic as due to the elevation of the Antarctic ice sheet which reduces temperatures to point that there is very little water vapor over the ice sheet.
The Greenland ice sheet is at a lower latitude the Antarctic ice sheet which explains why the winter and summer Greenland temperatures are warmer than Antarctic. There is hence more water vapor available over the Greenland ice sheet so the increase in cirrus clouds result in significant warming.
It is interesting to note that the greenhouse warming due to atmospheric CO2 increases must be significantly less than calculated as it appears the majority of the 1987 to 1997 was caused by a reduction in planetary cloud cover.
Now the second part of the hypothesis is what caused the sudden increase (step change) in high level cirrus type clouds?
We know the height of the ionosphere suddenly for unexplained reasons dropped during the period when there was an increase in cirrus clouds. We know the north magnetic pole drift velocity suddenly increased from 15 km/year to 55 km/year (the north magnetic pole drift velocity had been moving at 10 km/year to 15 km/year for 150 years prior to the sudden unexplained increase in its velocity.
What is required to suddenly increase the north magnetic pole drift velocity by a factor of 4 to 5, reduce the height of the ionosphere, and increase the amount of cirrus clouds? (Assume the same forcing function is the cause of what is observed.)
We know the past cyclic climate changes, the Bond cycles (also called D-O cycles and when appropriate Heinrich events) correlate with changes to the solar magnetic cycle.
The sun in the last 70 years of the 20th century was at the highest magnetic cycle activity in 8000 years based on the analysis of isotopes in the paleo record.
If the 20th century warming was caused by changes to the solar magnetic cycle (i.e. The 20th century observed warming, was the warming portion of a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle.) then we would expect as there has been a sudden and unexplained peculiar slowdown to the solar magnetic cycle. The magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots is decaying linearly with time. What is now observed is the formation of pores (tiny short lived sunspots) rather than sunspots. It appears we will be experiencing a Maunder like minimum or a special Maunder minimum starting 2017 or sooner.
Based on the paleo climatic record we would now expect that low level planet cloud will increase and high level cirrus clouds will decrease. There will be significant cooling particularly in higher latitude regions.
http://www.iac.es/galeria/epalle/reprints/Palle_etal_EOS_2006.pdf
Can Earth’s Albedo and Surface Temperatures Increase Together?
The sign and magnitude of albedo changes over the past five years have been under debate. The evidence from a variety of sources suggests that the Earth’s albedo has increased from 2000 to 2004. However, the rising planetary albedo, and the increase of sunlight being reflected back into space, has not led to a reversal of global warming.
The most up-to-date cloud data, released in August 2005 from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP), a careful compilation of cloud observations covering the entire Earth from a range of meteorological satellites, reveal that the explanation of this seeming anomaly lies primarily in a redistribution of the clouds. Whereas low clouds have decreased (William: decreased 1987 to 1997 and then increased 1997 to 2006 which is the end of the data examined in the paper), as noted throughout the article) during the most recent years, high clouds have increased to a larger extent, leading to both an increase in cloud amount (higher albedo) and an increased trapping of infrared radiation by clouds (increased heating).
Fig. 2. Globally averaged reconstruction (black) of albedo anomalies from ISCCP cloud amount, optical thickness, and surface reflectance (following Pallé et al., 2004).The observed Earthshine albedo anomalies are in blue. All observations agree with the reconstruction to within the 1 σ uncertainties, except for the year with sparse ES data, 2003.The shaded region 1999 through mid-2001 was used (as in Pallé et al., 2004) to calibrate the reconstruction and is the reference against which anomalies are defined. The vertical red bar indicates the estimated size of the forcing by greenhouse gasses since 1850.
However, low clouds continued to decrease post-2000 (William: Low level clouds did not continue to decrease post-2000. This statement is not consistent with the data presented in the article. See figure 1. Planetary albedo decreased 1987 to 1997 (10 Watts/meter^2 and then planetary albedo increased 1997 to 2006 which is the end of the data examined in the paper), while middle and high clouds increased. In the bottom panel of Figure 1, the globally averaged cloud amount has been divided into low (p > 680 mbar) and middle combined with high (p < 680 mbar) cloud types and averaged in five-year bands.
Fig. 1. (top) Globally averaged monthly mean total cloud amount from the ISCCP data. The overall decrease in cloud amount from 1985 to 2000 is about 4–5% with a recovery of about 2–3% from 2000 to 2004. (bottom) Globally averaged 5-year mean low (blue) and middle + high (red) cloud amounts. The difference in percent between low and middle + high cloud amounts is also given on top of each of the four 5-year intervals. Note the near doubling of this difference over the 2000–2004 period with respect to the previous means.
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2008_JGR.pdf
Inter-annual variations in Earth's reflectance 1999-2007
Figure 2: Top panel: Annual mean Earth albedo anomalies, as derived from ISCCP FD data, over the period 1984-2006 are plotted in black. Also, plotted in blue, are the annual mean anomalies measured by earthshine (note that annual means are only plotted for the years with complete data coverage). Bottom panel: Annual mean albedo anomalies, as derived from ISCCP FD (black), earthshine observations (blue) and CERES data (red). For the earthshine data, annual means are calculated from November to October to take advantage of the full database (see main text). For the CERES data, de-seasonalized anomalies are used, which reduces the size of the error bars. However, it is worth noting that the scatter of the CERES points in the lower panel of Figure 1 is comparable to the error bars of the ISCPP FD and earthshine points in the lower panel of this figure.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years by S. K. Solanki, I. G. Usoskin, B. Kromer, M. Schussler & J. Beer
Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400 years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode. Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades. (William: The authors considered total solar irradiation TSI which is not the major mechanism by which the sun modulate planetary temperature. The mechanism is modulation of low level and high level clouds. During both Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle and the Heinrich events the mechanism is inhibited as the solar magnetic cycle is interrupted. (i.e. Galactic cosmic rays increase however there is not an increase in planetary clouds.))
This paper notes that roughly 10 years ago the magnetic field strength on newly formed sunspots started to decay linearly. Based on Eugene Parker’s analysis the magnetic ropes – the magnetic ropes are hypothesized to form at the solar tachocline and then rise up through the convection zone to form sunspots on the surface of the sun – require a minimum field strength to avoid being torn apart in by turbulence in the convection zone. The authors of this paper note there are no sunspots on the surface of the sun that have a magnetic field strength that is less than 1500 gauss. It the trend continues the sun will have no sunspots in around 2017.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field
strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25. .. ..We reported in Penn & Livingston (2006) that a time series of this magnetic field data showed a decrease in the umbral magnetic field strength which was independent of the normal sunspot cycle. Also, the measurements revealed a threshold magnetic field strength of about 1500 Gauss, below which no dark pores formed. A linear extrapolation of the magnetic field trend suggested that the mean field strength would reach this threshold 1500 Gauss value in the year 2017.
Greg Goodman says:
May 5, 2013 at 11:13 pm
Greg, I’m sorry but that’s simply not true. They are aligned VERTICALLY by the definition of the average period. But what differs in the different periods are the trends and the shapes of the curves, not the vertical location. Here are the trends from1900-1980, and then from 1980 onwards, in comma-delimited form:
As you can see, during the first period, the trends are almost identical at around 0.05 °C/decade.
Not only that, but if you look again at Figure 4, the same is true of the trends from 1900-1940, and from 1940-1980. Land and ocean are moving in parallel. Here are those trends.
In other words, not only the overall trends but the changes in the trends are very similar between the ocean and the land during the period 1900-1980. Neither of these is affected by the choice of averaging period.
In the thirty years post 1980, on the other hand, the trend of the land temperature has decoupled from the trend of the ocean, with the land warming very rapidly (~3°C per century) and the ocean warming at only a third of that (~1°/century) …
Best regards,
w.
The oddity to me in Figure 4 is that since about 1974, the land temperatures have been rising much faster than the sea surface temperatures. The SST records and the land temperature records run quite close to each other up until about 1975 or so, but after that land temperatures have been rising much more quickly, while the sea surface temperatures (and to a greater extent the sub-surface temperatures) have not followed suit.
What year was the EPA created?
Bob Tisdale says:
May 6, 2013 at 4:26 am (Edit)
Thanks, Bob. As always your input is welcome.
I don’t trust any of the datasets back much beyond 1900, and the CruTEM dataset doesn’t even start until 1896. So I’d be very reluctant to say anything about that pre-1900 period.
Since then and until recently, as I said, the land and ocean moved mostly in concert.
Then, in about 1970 or so, something changed. Your quote says that the warming is a result of “a worldwide warming of the oceans” … but given Figure 1, I don’t see how that could possibly true.
The subsurface oceans have been warming fairly steadily since about 1900. The surface oceans have moved in sync with the land until recently, when land warming increased and oceanic warming didn’t increase.
So how can the recent land increase be due to “a worldwide warming of the oceans” as your citation claims? That doesn’t make sense.
Best regards,
w.
Bill Illis says:
May 6, 2013 at 5:59 am
Great find, Bill. They’ve updated it since I wrote the dang article, and they’ve added a new section (0-100m) … back to the drawing board, with even more data. Be interesting to see how the new one compares … now I get to start all over.
w.
thingodonta says:
May 5, 2013 at 7:46 pm
“I think you will find that generally, during cold periods, land temperatures decouples from ocean temperatures downwards, as in around 1880 in Figure 4, and during warm periods it decouples from the ocean upwards, as after the 1970s in Figure 1. ”
I agree.
All significant climate change (manifested in changes in climate zone positioning and jet stream behaviour) is a consequence of an interplay between solar and oceanic forcing elements.
As regards solar, the mechanism is a change in the mix of particles and wavelengths altering the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere from above and working outward from the poles.
As regards oceanic, the mechanism is changes in the balance between El Nino and La Nina events on multi decadal time scales which are ultimately solar induced via cloudiness changes (not the Svensmark mechanism but instead changes in the length of the lines of air mass mixing as jet stream tracks become more zonal or meridional). That process works outward from the equator.
In comparison, variations in the net radiative capability of the atmosphere count for nearly nothing.
We are just riding a solar / oceanic see-saw.
These local cooling areas are referred to in the ClimateGateII emails and confirmed by Motl and BEST analyses as well as that of Tony Brown. Not only do 30% of the temperature trends show long term cooling and differences by latitude but Verity Jones and Brown have found that they show zonal cyclical trends:
That’s not what we showed.
peter azlac says:
May 6, 2013 at 8:20 am
“The point I want to make is that given the above – that climate is zonal, linked to ocean basins operating at differing cycles and with teleconnections between zones, and that the heat flux in these basins reflect lunar (Saros) and planetary-solar cycles expressed through changes in solar activity that affect ozone heating in the stratosphere, hence the speed and direction of trade winds and so convection, cloud cover, type and place as well as precipitation etc – why does anyone think that analyzing the climate on a global basis from a data soup of zonal temperatures, proxies, heat flux, TSI, precipitation etc can have any value in determining the causes of climate change, and especially in predicting future changes? Why not make the evaluations on the basis of climate zones and then see how they fit together on a global scale? ”
I agree. A summation of my proposals over the past 5 years.
Zonal climate zone shifting and changes in jet stream behaviour are the negative system response to ANY forcing element other than changes in atmospheric mass, strength of gravitational field or top of atmosphere insolation.
The negative system response required to negate our puny emissions of CO2 is miniscule compared to the negative system response to solar and oceanic forcing.
Willis: “Here are the trends from1900-1980, and then from 1980 onwards, in comma-delimited form:”
Oh, come Willis, you’re not going to try to put forward an argument based on fitting linear “trends” to this data, surely? Firstly climate is not linear, so let’s stop the naive ‘linear trends’ game, that’s half of what’s wrong with main-line climate science.
Secondly it has already been pointed out that ‘pentad’ smoothing actually INVERTS the 1998 El Nino, and you still want to talk like fitting anything to that will make sense. You’re no fool and I know you can do some good analysis , so please don’t disappoint me with that sort of stuff.
Bill has found you annual OHC, and in any case that was irrelevant to the land/sea comparison. So hopefully your new look will use a proper filter and we can forget the messy 5 y running means.
“Trends” are rate of change so why not just look directly at rate of change if that is what interests you. First difference is easy enough to do. That’s exactly what I did previously. It shows that land temps seem to change about twice as quick as SST. All I could see was 1945-1975 land temps varied less and were similar to SST.
If you have some comment on that or think I’m misreading the rate of change graph I’d like to hear about it. But please don’t refute what I say by referring to decadal linear trends of data distorted by 5 year runny means.
best regards.
Willis Eschenbach says: “I don’t trust any of the datasets back much beyond 1900, and the CruTEM dataset doesn’t even start until 1896. So I’d be very reluctant to say anything about that pre-1900 period.”
I don’t trust the early data either, but CRUTEM4 data extends all the way the back to 1850. At the KNMI Climate Explorer, just below the coordinates is a “demand at least” ‘x’% of the data” field. The only reason you’re losing the early data is the 30% default setting on that field. Set it to 1 or zero and you’ll get all of the data. Of course, you have to keep in mind how little data there is, but it’s there.
Willis Eschenbach says: “So how can the recent land increase be due to “a worldwide warming of the oceans” as your citation claims? That doesn’t make sense.”
Please clarify whether “recent” is after 1997 or after the 1970s–thinking of annual or monthly data. That is, sea surface temperatures flattened after 1997 but land surface air temperatures did not. Just trying to limit the time period to what you want to discuss.
Regards
PS the ‘linear trend’ would be the same as taking the average of my rate of change plot. In view of the ups and downs in that data, how relevant to you feel the arbitrary decadal periods you chose are and how good a choice are they as a period over which to take a mean?
That’s a rhetorical question, I’m sure you get my point.
😉
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=219
PPS, taking the three ‘bumps’ since 1975 ( which seems to be like a neutral point in the curve) I’d say all three plot lines are about even. Noting of course that BEST has been scaled down by a factor of two. So yes, land changing twice as quick as sea.
However, this does not seem atypical of the whole pre-war period 1860-1945 either though that is closer to mean of zero.
The point is that the more rapid warming of the later period seems to be in line with land being twice as volatile and is not a special effect or a “decoupling”.
Willis says: “The subsurface oceans have been warming fairly steadily since about 1900.”
The NODC OHC data you’ve presented starts in 1955 (or 1957 for the pentadal data), so your statement confuses me. But I recall a recent paper that extended the 0-300 meter data back to 1900 and if memory serves, it also had the warming from the mid-1970s to present, and the flat or cooling period from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s, and an early warming period up to the mid-1940s.
Please clarify.
[My error, moving too fast. I meant 1957. Good catch, thanks. -w.]
William Astley says:
May 6, 2013 at 9:13 am
1) Low level clouds have a higher albedo than cirrus clouds and hence reflect more sunlight off into space which explains why an increase in low level clouds cools the planet while an increase in high level clouds warms the planet.
So when sun bathing why do I feel cooler when a high level cloud drifts across the sun?
I may reveal my ignorance by asking this question, but wouldn’t land temps (which are air temps about 4-6 feet off the ground, right?) warming faster than ocean surface temps be a possible result of CO2-based warming? I understand that down-welling lR is unlikely to have much direct heating impact on the ocean, but it should have an impact on air, right? So, land (air) temps increasing faster than ocean (water) temps post 1970 sounds consistent with the AGW hypothesis. I’m agnostic on the AGW hypothesis — I’m just trying to understand how this data might be interpreted.
What further confuses me about the terms “ocean” and “land” temps terminology is that I should think the discussion would be about “air” temps (over land, over water, and over all) and “ocean” temps.
If I’m really confused here (quite likely), help me get un-confused. Thanks.
Willis: I bought an IR thermometer while in AZ during APRIL. I took it with me as I would travel up and down the dry river bed trail near my Mother’s double wide…A length of about 15 miles up and down. I’d “shoot” walls, buildings, ground, sky…and PLANTS. What I found MOST interesting was that I could find certain objects or areas to observe and they would match the ambient, shaded thermometer measurements fairly accurately. AS SOON as you got anywhere near a solar exposed surface, ZING….10 to 20 F higher than ambient air. HOWEVER, the GREENERY in the dry river bed, ALWAYS measured 10 to 15 F LOWER than the ambient temp. STRONG IR absorbers I will admit. But brought up some interesting thoughts about surface TEMP measurements, placement of instrumentation, local IR balances, etc. I’m more and MORE dubious of the validity of concept of “average temperature” . I think it is a completely BOGUS number with no real significance.
Most of the land temps have been “corrected” in the warming direction. Early 20th century temps have been adjusted in the cool direction and post 1945 temps have been gradually adjusted in the warming direction. Steven Goddard (and others) have sites showing this.
Uncorrected land temperature records for the 20th century show no significant warming globally.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/scale:1/plot/rss-land
Shows a realistic view of the land data. The satellite data are plotted on a second line showing that the “BEST” data are basically fiction.
There are old sources of data that show 1930s temps were warmer than current temps.
The entire AGW story is not about temperatures, it is about scientific fraud due to politics.
BTW nice post by Peter Axlac
I grabbed 0.5 as a quick SWAG that seemed to match up the land and sea data. It is also roughly the ration of the specific heat capacities of the two (dependant upon how wet your ‘land’ is).
Now rate of change of temp is a measure of power. So land showing twice the rate of change compared to ocean temps would be about right for how the two would respond to the same power input ( or “forcing” in climatology jargon ).
Some further thought may reveal why this ratio does not seem to be the same during the cooling period 1945-1975 when it seems closer to 1:1.
Bob Tisdale says:
May 6, 2013 at 10:29 am
My error, moving too fast, posting on a previous break. I meant 1957. Good catch, Bob, thanks.
w.
In reply to
Kelvin Vaughan says:
May 6, 2013 at 10:43 am
William Astley says:
May 6, 2013 at 9:13 am
1) Low level clouds have a higher albedo than cirrus clouds and hence reflect more sunlight off into space which explains why an increase in low level clouds cools the planet while an increase in high level clouds warms the planet.
So when sun bathing why do I feel cooler when a high level cloud drifts across the sun?
William:
All clouds are high from the perspective of a person on the surface of the planet. It is likely difficult to determine just by looking at the cloud to determine its height.
The cloud which makes it cold when you are sun bathing is a low level cloud.
Attached is a picture of a cirrus cloud.
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/cld/cldtyp/hgh/crs.rxml
What you are probably thinking of is a stratus cloud.
http://nenes.eas.gatech.edu/Cloud/Clouds.pdf
This is an interesting review paper for those who are interested in the global electric circuit and how it affects cloud formation and climate. As noted, how the sun modulates planetary cloud is more complicated than GCR is high, more clouds. This paper also explains why there are specific regions that are more affected by solar magnetic cycle changes.
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/faculty/tinsley/Role%20of%20Global%20Circuit.pdf
The role of the global electric circuit in solar and internal forcing of clouds and climate
Reports of a variety of short-term meteorological responses to changes in the global electric circuit associated with a set of disparate inputs are analyzed. The meteorological responses consist of changes in cloud cover, atmospheric temperature, pressure, or dynamics. All
of these are found to be responding to changes in a key linking agent, that of the downward current density, Jz, that flows from the ionosphere through the troposphere to the surface (ocean and land). As it flows through layer clouds, Jz generates space charge in conductivity
gradients at the upper and lower boundaries, and this electrical charge is capable of affecting the microphysical interactions between droplets and both ice-forming nuclei and condensation nuclei.
Four short-term inputs to the global circuit are due to solar activity and consist of (1) Forbush decreases of the galactic cosmic ray flux; (2) solar energetic particle events; (3) relativistic electron precipitation changes; and (4) polar cap ionospheric convection potential
changes. One input that is internal to the global circuit consists of (5) global ionospheric potential changes due to changes in the current output of the highly electrified clouds (mainly deep convective clouds at low latitudes) that act as generators for the circuit.
The observed short-term meteorological responses to these five inputs are of small amplitude but high statistical significance for repeated Jz changes of order 5% for low latitudes increasing to 25–30% at high latitudes. On the timescales of multidecadal solar minima, such as the Maunder minimum, changes in tropospheric dynamics and climate related to Jz are also larger at high latitudes, and correlate with the lower energy component (1 GeV) of the cosmic ray flux increasing by as much as a factor of two relative to present values.
Also, there are comparable cosmic ray flux changes and climate responses on millennial timescales. The persistence of the longer-term Jz changes for many decades to many centuries would produce an integrated effect on climate that could dominate over short-term weather
and climate variations, and explain the observed correlations. Thus, we propose that mechanisms responding to Jz are a candidate for explanations of sun–weather–climate correlations on multidecadal to millenial timescales, as well as on the day-to-day timescales analyzed here.
‘I grabbed 0.5 as a quick SWAG that seemed to match up the land and sea data. It is also roughly the ration of the specific heat capacities of the two (dependant upon how wet your ‘land’ is).
Now rate of change of temp is a measure of power. So land showing twice the rate of change compared to ocean temps would be about right for how the two would respond to the same power input ( or “forcing” in climatology jargon ).
Some further thought may reveal why this ratio does not seem to be the same during the cooling period 1945-1975 when it seems closer to 1:1.”
I believe over time it comes out to 1.6:1 and yes its related to the specific heat capacities.
Somewhere around here I have a presentation on this and interestingly enough climate models replicate this system metric
I think it has been demonstrated that the surface instrument temperature record has about 0.5 degrees C of warming biases built into it. If you back out the warming biases the divergence disappears. Isn’t that the most likely explanation?
Since 1975, the increase of forcing due to Co2 is around one watt per square meter. This is equivalent to around 2600 kW per square mile or 3500 horse-powers per square mile. The energy consumption in the few square miles around a station could easily match the increase due to Co2. And we don’t even talk about the snow melting on the pavement when it is -5C outside.
RACookPE1978 says:
May 5, 2013 at 8:56 pm
“Willis: I’m surprised you missed one very fundamental difference between the land-based record since 1970, and the sea-temperatures since 1970: CO2 itself IS a part of the increase in land temperature change because of albedo: greater plant growth earlier in the season over larger land areas WILL darken the plant, and that lower albdeo WILL tend to heat up the air masses flowing over the land. Look at desert (rocky) land thermometers? have they gone up as much a wetter, more plant-friendly areas? If EVERY plant on the face of the planet is growing 15 to 27% faster, greener, higher, taller, wider and more brushy, is not less solar energy reflecting back from previous light-colored rocks, dirt, and grassland?”
Vegetation does not get hotter than bare rock just because it is ‘darker’. It is common knowledge among glider pilots that woods and water will NOT give you ANY lift compared to open fields, drained land and hard man made surfaces. Heat will be stored in woods and lakes but this will provide only very week lift at the end of the day once the sun has weakened and the heat given off by surrounding areas has dropped off and only for a short period. I have never ever felt a leaf or any vegetation that is hot to the touch as opposed to walking bare foot on open sand (light in colour), tarmac (dark in colour). In addition the worlds hottest temperatures have been recorded in deserts, not jungles, and in the case of Death Valley there are areas of salt, which is white!
I speak from my own experience either looking for that lift, which means heat, or trying to get to that ice cream without shoes.
Albedo is not a useful measure when an objects thermal characteristics are not taken into to consideration but my guess is that is the quality of the data fed into climate models.
‘murrayv says:
May 6, 2013 at 1:06 pm
I think it has been demonstrated that the surface instrument temperature record has about 0.5 degrees C of warming biases built into it. If you back out the warming biases the divergence disappears. Isn’t that the most likely explanation?”
No see UAH
I looked into this a year or two ago.
I blame Russians, in late 60s and the early 70s there was cold war etc, science was preoccupied with the Jams Hansen’s promoting of the oncoming ‘ice age’; that meant a vary bad scenario for the Soviets, so all of their official reports were showing higher temperature rise than rest of the known ‘universe’, so the proletariat would be reassured.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/69-71.htm
Do I have any proof that temperatures were doctored?
No, but nature isn’t schizophrenic either. 🙂
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2011JCLI3893.1?journalCode=clim
https://ams.confex.com/ams/19Fluid17Middle/webprogram/Paper226726.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2007GL029755/abstract
WIllis
IMHO – Increased urbanization which goes hand in hand with increased food production, both meat and grain. Growing cities need water which must be drawn from somewhere nearby (consider the Colorado river and Owens lake) and food production needs both drained land and water at the same time. From the 1970s onward there has been an increase in grain and meet production as better agricultural methods and techniques have been found. The term UHI is limiting and encourages an incomplete view. On needs to not just look out the window but go out side and observe otherwise the lazy person will consider UHI is a phenomena that stops at the city limits.
Land that is open to the sky will dry out quicker than that covered in vegetation. Once dried out it will warm up even quicker. Land drainage and water extraction has only increased since the 1960s.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10040040/Mystery-fog-ruins-Bank-Holiday-break-for-thousands-of-beachgoers-as-it-engulfs-south-coast.html
Greg Goodman says:
May 6, 2013 at 10:16 am
I put them out as numerical support for what I can see without numbers. This is that the trends diverge around 1970 or so.
I said exactly what I did and why, which was because all I had was pentadal sub-surface data. If you prefer a gaussian average, which doesn’t invert anything, here you go:
This shows the annual data, along with the gaussian average, for the period of overlap of the four datasets.
As you can see, the choice of smoothing methods makes little difference. The oddity is still the differing trends of the land and ocean records around 1970. How come?
w.
‘As you can see, the choice of smoothing methods makes little difference. The oddity is still the differing trends of the land and ocean records around 1970. How come?”
see the papers I linked. the topic is land ocean constrast. there is a bunch of work on it.
here
http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~reichler/6030/presentations/Chris_OceanLand.pdf
I’m still looking for the workshop video on this topic that I posted a long time ago here at WUWT
But the paper above covers some of the issues
UAH and RSS have much less differential between Land and Ocean temperature trends than the above trends show..
Land is increasing faster than the Ocean by only 0.06C per decade in UAH and 0.08C per decade in RSS. They are also very similar over the time period.
Why it would be more than double these values in BEST, Hadcrut, etc. over the same time period, I don’t know. (Well it is probably from the adjustments and UHI I imagine).
http://s3.postimg.org/rtgo1oqzn/UAH_RSS_Land_Ocean_Differential.png
Bill Illis says:
May 6, 2013 at 4:35 pm
UAH and RSS have much less differential between Land and Ocean temperature trends than the above trends show..
Land is increasing faster than the Ocean by only 0.06C per decade in UAH and 0.08C per decade in RSS. They are also very similar over the time period.
###############
From will’s chart it looks as though the land (at the surface) is warming .16C faster than
the ocean. At the troposphere where there is no UHI, we see the differential as .07C/decade (UAH and RSS). we leaves about .09C/decde of warming differential to explain.
Lets call that 0.1C just to make it easy.
This differential could be due to.
A) some process to be defined.
B) microsite bias
C) UHI bias.
My take away from this is that we have a good first order estimate of the upper limit of the combination of UHI bias and microsite bias. Assume that A is zero ( until somebody steps forward to explain the difference) and we are left with B+C being less than 0.1C per decade.
This is important for folks to recognize because a bias this small will be and has been very difficult to detect in a non controversial manner. In our UHI study, for example, the 2 sigma value was around .2C decade. Basically, the UHI bias is hard to detect for S/N reasons.’
UHi and microsite real? yup. Easy to detect given all the other drivers? nope. Zeke has managed to find something around this order of magnitude (lessthan .01C) in the US and together we found something around .05/decade world wide, unpublished so FWIW.
Steven Mosher says:
May 6, 2013 at 3:34 pm
Thanks, Steven. I’ve looked at all the papers you linked, I think. There were four of them. None of them (as far as I could see) addresses the issue of the change in land minus ocean starting in ~ 1970. Prior to that, overall the two moved roughly in concert.
After that, however, the land has gone up much more than the ocean. Not one of your citations addressed that … so I’m still in mystery.
Let me add that all of them contain far too many model results, and far too little observations. For example, the abstract to one of them says:
I’m sorry, but my graph of the differences above shows nothing of the sort … and nobody’s come along to say my results are wrong. Let me give it again:
There is no “time-invariant” relationship there as they claim. Indeed, it is precisely the CHANGE in the relationship that is of interest. But they bypass that question entirely, roll right on past looking at the observations, and immediately fire up the good old computer model and start discussing model results … and regarding model results?
Frankly, Steven, I don’t give a damn.
Models are of little use until we understand the actual observations and the phenomena. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Observations and theory first, and then once the theory is established, THEN the models can help us TEST the theory.
But they cannot understand the reasons for the change for us, we have to do that ourselves.
Now, you’ve claimed that this issue has been discussed in the literature. But sadly, I find nothing in any of your citations that discuss this at all. Do you have a citation to a discussion what happened in the 1970s? That’s the oddity I pointed out.
Thanks for all the ideas,
w.
Sorry Willis I was not clear. The issue of land ocean contrast has been discussed ( there are more papers if you follow the references) The precise question “why the divergence” may be addressed in some so that is why I pointed you at them. You read them very quickly cool.
In some studies you will find folks comparing the observed land ocean contrast to the modelled land ocean contrast the measure of merit that I think they use is different than the one you use and I believe they have a physical basis for preferring it, basically the ratio of the changing rates.
I thought you might have looked at some of the references.
http://www.mit.edu/~pog/src/byrne_land_ocean_warming_contrast_2013.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006GL028164/abstract
for some possible hints
“Surface temperatures increase at a greater rate over land than ocean in simulations and observations
of global warming. It has previously been proposed that this land-ocean warming contrast is related
to different changes in lapse rates over land and ocean because of limited moisture availability over
land. A simple theory of the land-ocean warming contrast is developed here in which lapse rates
are determined by an assumption of convective quasi-equilibrium. The theory predicts that the
difference between land and ocean temperatures increases monotonically as the climate warms or
as the land becomes more arid. However, the ratio of differential warming over land and ocean
varies non-monotonically with temperature for constant relative humidities and reaches a maximum
at roughly 293K.”
here is another way to look at it.
You have one time series. Not too much you can understand from that except the ratio changes.
Willis: “As you can see, the choice of smoothing methods makes little difference. The oddity is still the differing trends of the land and ocean records around 1970. How come?”
This is basically a reworking of what stacase first brought up http://oi52.tinypic.com/24v5umd.jpg and is quite informative. It was not part of your post or your reply to me which I criticised for using decadal linear ‘trends’ of distorted 5y running means. It’s odd that you choose to reply to that criticism by showing _something else_ where it ‘makes little difference’. In what you posted it _did_ make a difference and that was why I commented. Enough on that.
So what does stacase’s approach show?
Well basically something that is quite similar to the temp record in overall shape. Now if the difference is similar to SST record then this confirms my point that it simply a greater sensitivity of land to whatever is driving overall change. Clouds, sun, GHG, whatever, land shows greater variance and this is in line with the difference in heat capacity that I already pointed out.
How does the land-sea difference plot vary from just being a linear difference in sensitivity?
1. post-75 rise is stonger than just linear scaling. This is probably the ‘oddity’ you are trying to focus on, so plotting it this way is probalby informative.
2. 1880-1915 does not dip like SST record. This is a substantive difference in form which is probably the most important deviation from the simple sensitivity argument.
Two caveats so far. Early data may be less reliable so some caution on interpretting #2. There is a danger of mixing too many things in your last plot here, especialy since BEST is a fair bit different to CRUtem, so again some caution needed.
Mosh has separated out 0.1/dec a likely UHI and other bias. That’s 0.1/0.16 ie about 60% of the difference.
If the post 1970 ramp is reduced by that amount your plot would come closer to a linear sensitivity as per #1 , so you get your oddity back and it ties my land-sea sensitivity argument in with Mosh’s observation.
Convergence of three different perspectives on this is encouraging.
Now rather than plotting the difference, it may be interesting to plot ratio of land anom to SST anom and see how this looks over time and whether it shows Mosh’s 60% UHI.
“Mosh’s 60% UHI.” That’s 60% of the anomaly difference, not total UHI+other bias.
So from 1940 to 197tysomething Antarctica warms, the globe cools, and land cools faster than the ocean. 197tysomething to 1997 The Arctic warms, the globe warms, and land warms faster than the ocean. Gentlemen, this just mimics the diurnal cycle. Land always warms faster and cools faster than water. Land is a better blackbody. Continental mass is concentrated in the northern hemisphere (next to the Arctic). Just that simple.
The current PDO phase cools the planet because if blocks El Ninos. Hola?
Steven Mosher says:
May 6, 2013 at 7:43 pm
Steven, I guess I was not clear. I know the issue of land-ocean contrast has been discussed by various folks. I’ve read a reasonable number of papers on it.
What I haven’t seen in any of the papers is a discussion of why there was such such a change around 1970. That’s the exact question I raised.
In response to my raising the question, you’ve assumed I know nothing about the subject … and you’ve waved your hand at the large pile of papers on the subject. Yes, I’ve read some of them, certainly not all of them or even a majority.
And I read the four you cited, in the hope that one of them would answer the question.
But you fooled me. I thought you’d pointed to them because they contained the answer. That’s why I asked it on the web, because I’d like to know. I thought you were answering the question.
Now I find out that despite your pretended authority on the subject, and despite your assumption that I’m the unlettered idiot in the game, clearly, YOU DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER EITHER.
So can I invite you give your paternalistic tone a rest until you do find out the answer? Because until then, my friend, our ignorance is on a par—neither of us knows the answer.
Regards,
w.
Greg Goodman says:
May 6, 2013 at 7:53 pm
As I understood you, you had complained about using 5-year averages, saying
so I showed the data with Gaussian smoothing instead of 5-year smoothing, to show that the smoothing choice was unimportant. Sorry if I didn’t understand your meaning.
If your main concern was calculating a linear trend using smoothed data, the smoothing choice generally does not change the linear trend appreciably.
Finally, are linear trends useful? I only brought them into the discussion because some folks, including you, didn’t seem to be able to see the difference in the graphs. You said:
Since it was clear that you couldn’t see from the graphs that the trends were coherent and moved in parallel from 1900-1970 and then diverged after that, I drew the picture with numbers instead, to show the divergence in the trends numerically … you seem very opposed to that, which is OK.
But if you can’t understand the pictures and you reject the numbers, on what basis are you claiming that they don’t decouple after about 1970?
w.
Mosher quotes:
http://www.mit.edu/~pog/src/byrne_land_ocean_warming_contrast_2013.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2006GL028164/abstract for some possible hints ‘Surface temperatures increase at a greater rate over land than ocean in simulations and observations of global warming. It has previously been proposed that this land-ocean warming contrast is related to different changes in lapse rates over land and ocean because of limited moisture availability over land. A simple theory of the land-ocean warming contrast is developed here in which lapse rates are determined by an assumption of convective quasi-equilibrium. The theory predicts that the difference between land and ocean temperatures increases monotonically as the climate warms or as the land becomes more arid. However, the ratio of differential warming over land and ocean varies non-monotonically with temperature for constant relative humidities and reaches a maximum at roughly 293K.’
This is in line with what I stated in my earlier post re the data of Best and Lasner. The question is which land is heating faster than the ocean and which ocean basin(s) faster than the land. Lasners Ruti project shows that coastal areas and inland areas at altitude are more linked to ocean temperatures than other land areas. We might thus expect these other land areas to be the ones that heat or cool faster than the oceans depending on precipitation cycles, such as the link between precipitation in the SE USA and ENSO and similar links with inland Australia. To solve this problem needs the evaluations to be on a zonal basis with the climate zones linked to the temperature changes in the ocean(s) that most affect them.
These shifts have been elaborated by Swanson and Tsonis,
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/04/08/has-the-climate-recently-shifted/
Tsonis, Swanson, and S. Kravtsov,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL036874/abstract
Douglas
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/30/shifts-phase-locked-state-and-chaos-in-climate-data/
Vaughan
http://www.billhowell.ca/Paul%20L%20Vaughan/Vaughan%20120324%20Solar-Terrestrial%20Resonance,%20Climate%20Shifts,%20%26%20the%20Chandler%20Wobble%20Phase%20Reversal.pdf
Stockwell and Cox Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.1650
The latter may be the answer to your question re 1997, they state:
‘ …we find evidence for a significant change in the temperature series around 1997, corroborated with evidence of a coincident oceanographic regime-shift. ‘
“But if you can’t understand the pictures and you reject the numbers, on what basis are you claiming that they don’t decouple after about 1970?”
I don’t reject all numbers , just the trends you presented and for clear reasons I should not need to repeat but since you seem intent on missing the point by focussing on one or other aspect, I’ll summarise. Running means have distorted the data. Linear trends are not good for this sort of data before distortion. The round number intervals you chose are aritrary as far as the data goes and mean you are linear trending across significant variations in the data on a similar scale without regard to where you start and end.
So yes, I reject those numbers. Not because I don’t like looking at numbers or I’m dumb. But for good reasons which I’d already stated.
I can “understand pictures” and I presented a rate of change “picture” that I thought was more informative than your trends. So far you have totally ignored it , presumably because it does not support your decoupling idea.
Since ‘trends’ are rate of change rate of change, it is a more rigorous way to examine that aspect of the data, yet you ignore it.
I could adopt the tone of your last reply and suggest you can’t understand the pictures but I know you can, so I’ll suggest you look at the rate of change plot again and see what it can tell you about “decoupling”. Maybe I’m missing something. That is why I previously asked you to comment if you thoughy my reading of it was wrong or incomplete.
Also note that in the course of what has been shown I have said that stacase’s approach, which you have adopted seems to show there may be a change of behaviour in the period you indicate, so don’t waste time arguing to refute something when the discussion has moved on.
Instead of getting obviously irritated why others don’t totally agree, try to see if there is some convergence of ideas. Your article admits ignoreance of the cause and the discussion lead to a point where you, Mosh and I all seem to be converging on something, as I noted in my last post.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/05/by-land-and-by-sea/#comment-1299108
The way land temperatures increase faster than sea is something I regarded as dubious for a long time and I think this was well worth bringing up. If everyone gets irratable it’s not going to get anywhere, which would be foolish since I think some insight is being gained here.
I’ll try to find time to plot this as a ratio and see what it shows.
Stay cool, regards.
Well ratio turns out to be not such a good idea. It’s ill-conditioned since, by definition, both spend a fair amount of time around zero.
I’ve plotted the crutem3 – hadsst3 difference :
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=220
I don’t see anything fundamentally different in the final segment. All parts seem to show greater volatility in land which, again, is not surprising on simple heat capacity arguments.
What may be more significant is that the earlier half deviates from the idea of simply following sea temperature but with bigger swings though it does do that in the most general terms.
Whether this deviation indicates residual problems in the data, over-manipulation by “bias correction” or something meaningful in climate is anyone’s guess.
Since hadSST has been ‘adjusted’ to a degree that is as big as the signal that remains and CRU has ‘lost the data’ so no one can even check for processing errors, it is not surprising that none of this ties up too closely.
I’ve spent as much time as I think this mess warrants, the rest is IMO looking for meaning in the noise and corruption of the data.
I think Mosh’s estimation of UHI and other bias from comparing RSS to thermometer record is about the most sense we’ll get out of this.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=221
I’ve replaced the earlier plot with one including SST for comparison.
The most significant question this raises for me is why, in the early 20th c. , the two anomalies were almost in anti-phase. Ignoring pre1860 as unreliable, most of the rest seems to tie in with the idea the the difference follows SST, ie land anom= 2x SST anom.
That break in phase seems odder to me than the larger the sensitivity shown in land temps.
Greg Goodman says:
May 7, 2013 at 1:35 am
Since you first made that objection, I supplied you with numbers that met all of those objections. Yet you still complain. I’m not following this.
Since you originally made that objection, I have presented the annual data without the 5-year averaging, and without the linear trends. I showed the differences between the ANNUAL DATA. I’ll post them again, since they seem to have escaped you.
Please point out where I have “distorted the data” in that graph. Then point out the “linear trends” you object to.
My question has to do with the SHAPE of the curve, not the values. The values are meaningless, since the temperatures are expressed as anomalies. If you want to express them around some other anomaly, it doesn’t change the SHAPE of the curve.
It is the change that shape in 1970 that is of interest, regardless of the value used as the basis for the anomaly. Up until then the land and sea ran in parallel. After that, they went separate ways. That has nothing to do with the numbers or the anomaly base.
So there you have it, Greg.
1. Those are annual numbers.
2. There is no mention of linear trends or trend lines.
3. The interval picked for the anomaly is makes no difference to the shape. Pick another one if you like.
4. There are no 5-year running means to “distort the data”.
As far as I know, every single one of your objections are satisfied … and have been for a while. I gave you exactly what you requested, and you are still not happy.
Good reasons? Perhaps you have others unmentioned, but none of your stated reasons apply in the slightest.
w.
“Please point out where I have “distorted the data” in that graph.”
Willis, I never said you had distorted _that_ graph.
“My question has to do with the SHAPE of the curve”.
So what is it about the SHAPE that we should regard as significant or pointing to a problem?
Sure, one bit is straight the other bendy . Which SHAPE is ‘normal’ and which problematic. Is there any reason why they should be the same or why their being different tells us something?
You may be right but I don’t see you presenting a convincing argument for the supposed ‘decoupling’ yet.
I have presented two ways of looking at the data that suggest a general 2x land sensitivity and a simple reason why that may be so, you have not even commented on it.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=221
If there is a divergence or a ‘decoupling’ I see the early 20th c. as more anomalous than the end of the record.