by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Yes, Virginia, it really has been a cold winter.
The winter months of December 2013 and January 2014 averaged over the contiguous 48 United States were the 3rd coldest Dec/Jan in the last 30 years.
The analysis is based upon ~350 NOAA/NWS stations that measure temperatures every 6 hours (or more frequently), many located at airports. This is different from the official NOAA temperature product (update not yet available), which is based upon daily max/min temperatures measured at 1,000+ co-op stations. Those stations have had large adjustments made due to (among other things) changing time of observation (TOBS) over the years.
Here’s a plot of the Dec/Jan averages for the last 41 years (click for large version):
An interesting feature is that 5 of the last 7 years have been below the 41-year average, which has happened only one other time in the 41-year period.
The data I use are adjusted for average spurious urban heat island (UHI) warming that increases with population density around the thermometer site. That relationship is shown at the end of this article. The analysis starts in only 1973 since that is the first year with a large amount of quality-controlled 6-hourly temperature data archived at NOAA.
So, does the cold winter disprove global warming theory? No more than an unusually warm winter proves the theory. It’s just what we used to call “weather”.
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More interesting stories about this winter are at Dr. Roy Spencer’s website: http://www.drroyspencer.com/ be sure to bookmark it.
It will be interesting to see what NOAA/NCDC comes up with for the December-January ranking in their “state of the climate” report due in a few days. My guess is that it won’t be anywhere close, probably something like 9th coolest.
Place your bets.
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What makes this cold fun (well, BEING cold is not fun) is being able to force all of the warmists to repeat ad nauseum “WEATHER ISN’T CLIMATE!!!” (just before they swallow their tongues.
Especially fun to see when one or two warm weeks in Australia has all the warmists down there shrieking “See! It’s Global Warming, We told you so!!!”
The “Weather isn’t Climate” message has got to be pounded home every chance we get, until they are so sick of hearing about it that they never dare to bring it up again. And winters like this are the PERFECT way to do just that.
Still a few months of winter left….I wonder how it will rank among all other winters as far as temp and snowfall.
Thanks Roy.
Interesting. No doubt they will fiddle with the data again.
In the meantime, making sure nobody looked,
I have been analysing daily data coming from Alaska, from 10 seemingly independant weather stations.
It seems to me that temperatures there have gone down by an average 0.55 degreesC per decade since 1998.
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ql5zq8.jpg
What is your take on that?
let me know
@Kenny
I wonder if you ever caught my response to your specific question (on another thread)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/31/open-letter-to-kevin-trenberth-ncar/#comment-1556131
Support for this: the Great Lakes (except so far for Lake Ontario) are nearly all frozen over – the worst ice conditions in over 20 years.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/great-lakes-under-the-largest-cover-of-ice-in-20-years-1.2513076
http://iceweb1.cis.ec.gc.ca/Prod20/page2.xhtml?CanID=11080&lang=en
Note that “blue is not open water. It is 1-3/10 ice. The ice cover exceeds most years total season coverage and we still have a good month more of ice growth. With the NH sea ice cover now pressing against Hokkaido Japan, we can walk on frozen ground or ice and snow from Japan to the Pan Handle of Texas or even farther from Pakistan to Texas.
I haven’t seen this much snow fall totals since at least the blizzards of the 90’s. I would say this will rank up there pretty high.
It looks like yet another way to present data to express the multidecadal cycle effects, such as PDO, AMO, and solar.
@all and everyone including Roy Spencer
Buy and act locally, but think globally. We have ad it quite extreemly warm here on the other side in december, after only a bit cold in January , it is rather quite warm again.
That so called Polar vortex is Midgardsormen. The big serpent that lie around the world biting itself in the tail making large meanders.
It must be taken serious again and kept under observation and conscideration.
The NAO rather than the ENSO may be deciding and symptomatic of the long term situation and forecasts, because the Bering street is very shallow whereas the north atlantic and Fram- street is quite open and with high exchamge to the arctic ocean.
Interesting that temps above 80 degs north are above normal: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
With the 2013/14 Dec-Jan 2C below the average of the last 40 years, and Jan already by itself even lower, Walter Dnes “January Leading Indicator” is likely to put 2014 firmly into another year of of temp decline – what 18yrs and counting?
Some wag a year or so said something to the effect, that ‘I sure wouldn’t want to be the spouses or small pets of the warmest team members!!’ Any news items on this so far?
meanwhile, arctic temperatures have been 12 degrees above normal and the 7-day temperature anomaly is showing incredible Alaskan warming.
REPLY: And that Arctic warming may not be truly indicative of reality, since virtually every weather station is in an artificial warm pocket of humanity, and it appears the Arctic boundary layers acts differently at high latitudes. – Anthony
In the “What goes around, Comes around” department:
All those historical temperatures shifted upwards by Hansen and company at GISS, is going to make any natural cycle cold spell look all the more alarming.
What a coincidence. Yesterday I calculated that here in Toronto, the average temperature (as measured at the airport, totally uncorrected for massive urbanization over the decades) for December 2013 and January 2014 was the coldest December & january since 1981.
don’t worry
people still having to shove snow in late spring
\will soon begin to doubt the data that is being presented
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
interesting that the super bowl was played in such abnormally warm temperatures and yet, this week will bring a severe snowstorm. http://www.weather.com/sports-rec/superbowl/photos-super-bowl-xlviii-played-abnormally-warm-weather-20140202
The first cold-weather Super Bowl was actually pretty warm. Temperatures for Sunday’s NFL title game at MetLife Stadium were 10 to 15 degrees above normal, and just nine degrees below the record high of 62 set in 1973.
jai mitchell says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1557604
henry says
never mind those 7 days
so what is your response to the apparent longterm trend in Alaska?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1557571
Not third-coldest, 27th warmest in 30 years! Twenty-seventh warmest! How will the Winter Olympics survive? Think of our grandchildren, people!
[IMG]http://i61.tinypic.com/2ylwzm9.png[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i61.tinypic.com/sv6p83.png[/IMG]
Amazing Jai Mitchell… if the COLD polar vortex is DISPLACED, causing enormous swathes of Canada and the US to be 20C BELOW normal, one would expect temperatures in the Arctic and in Alaska to probably be above normal, since the polar vortex is displaced. Make some sort of big deal out of it if you like, but all you have to do is go back and look at the winter of 1979… Polar vortex displaced, California in a drought, Alaska and the Arctic warmer than normal, while large areas of Canada and the US freeze to death.
Totally normal pattern, which, the last time it happened, caused the “Ice Age Scare”.
“REPLY: And that Arctic warming may not be truly indicative of reality, since virtually every weather station is in an artificial warm pocket of humanity, and it appears the Arctic boundary layers acts differently at high latitudes. – Anthony”
######################
from 2002 to 2013. AIRS data.
Below I show the surface skin temperature for the ascending orbit. The package for processing this data is done. so we can test the “theory” that weather stations in the arctic are “pockets” of humanity. In addition to the ascending orbit there is a descending orbit and in addition to
skinsurface temperature, I’ll have SAT, and temperatures at 24 pressure levels.
the warming rates over time should have something to say about the “theory”
Also, there will be cloud fractions for 12 pressure levels starting at 1018 hPa.
should be interesting data for GCR enthusiasts.
REPLY: But, what is the resolution of this skin temperature data? I’m guessing 2KM or maybe 5km? Since I’ve proven in my surfacestations study that proximity to human habitation acts over short distances, and since we know the majority of historic weather stations are often within 100 meters of the observer’s domicile, it is most likely that the effect is below the resolution of that data you present, making it essentially invisible. Many if not most, Arctic and Antarctic bases are less than 1KM wide. Eureka NWT is a good example. I think your premise falls flat.- Anthony
REPLY — Typo, I think. You mean within 10 meters within curator’s domicile, not 100 m. ~ Evan
No doubt to be spun as “27th warmest Dec/Jan in the past 30 years” by the usual suspects.
Anthony,
I know that you are working on climate station siting issues, and The Economist reported on Dr. Matthew Menne’s 2010 study that showed that, if one removed the data provided by the stations that you identified as “poor” that it produced no change to the temperature record.
In The Economist article, The clouds of unknowing, march 18, 2010 you said,
A recent analysis by Matthew Menne and his colleagues at America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, argued that trends calculated from climate stations that surfacestation.org found to be poorly sited and from those it found well sited were more or less indistinguishable. Mr Watts has problems with that analysis, and promises a thorough study of the project’s findings later.
well, I did a search on your site, I don’t see a tag for “menne” and there isn’t, apparently, any “thorough study” of the findings on this site.
What gives? did you not publish or is there a response somewhere that isn’t easily found???
,a href=”http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/poorly-sited-us-temperature-instruments-not-responsible-for–artific”Dr. Jeff Masters has this to say about it.
Fortunately, a proper analysis of the impact of these (Watt’s identified) poorly-sited surface stations on the U.S. historical temperature record has now been done by Dr. Matthew Menne and co-authors at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). In a talk at last week’s 90th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, Dr. Menne reported the results of their new paper just accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research titled, On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record. Dr. Menne’s study split the U.S. surface stations into two categories: good (rating 1 or 2) and bad (ratings 3, 4 or 5). They performed the analysis using both the rating provided by surfacestations.org, and from an independent rating provided by NOAA personnel. In general, the NOAA-provided ratings coincided with the ratings given by surfacestations.org. Of the NOAA-rated stations, only 71 stations fell into the “good” siting category, while 454 fell into the “bad” category. According to the authors, though, “the sites with good exposure, though small in number, are reasonably well distributed across the country and, as shown by Vose and Menne [2004], are of sufficient density to obtain a robust estimate of the CONUS average”. Dr. Menne’s study computed the average daily minimum and maximum temperatures from the good sites and poor sites. The results were surprising. While the poor sites had a slightly warmer average minimum temperature than the good sites (by 0.03°C), the average maximum temperature measured at the poor sites was significantly cooler (by 0.14°C) than the good sites. As a result, overall average temperatures measured at the poor sites were cooler than the good sites. This is the opposite of the conclusion reached by Anthony Watts in his 2009 Heartland Institute publication.
Perhaps Steven Mosher wants to give me an explanation for the observed long term cooling trend in Alaska?
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ql5zq8.jpg
The recent +PDO is clearly obvious in the data and, although insufficient data so far, the -PDO appears to be creating a cooling trend.