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”.
=======================================================
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.
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.
And in the “dog that does not bark” line: what does CRN show for Dec/Jan? How come we never hear of data from CRN?
Way to move the goalposts on the discussion, Steven Mosher.
You talk about *global* warming when the *global* trend is upward. Then, when the global trend is *downward*, you find some data subset that happens to have an above-average trendline for that time interval and announce, “See! If you look more closely, the indicators are *rising*! We were actually talking about *this* trend all along…”
Global surface temps rise? That’s global warming! Global surface temps *aren’t* rising? Hmm… Ummm… Look at some local surface temps! HAH! See! I found a subset of the surface temps that is rising! So, nyah! …And when those stop rising, I’ll, um, tell everyone to look at the oceans or something…
Two months out of 12 in conjunction with elevated areas of snow coverage is a harbinger of a late Spring. This will evolve into a cold deficit that will be difficult to overcome in the Summer months of 2014.
To wit, on that Daily Mean Temperatures in the Arctic 1958 – 2014 web page, we can see that arctic temperatures in the first few months of 2006 were *way* hotter than average, whereas 2010 was more or less tracking the average; yet 2010 is one of the hottest years on record, whereas 2006 barely makes the top 10.
So, Steven Mosher, if you want to talk about global average temperatures, talk about global average temperatures. If you want to talk about Arctic temperatures, talk about Arctic temperatures. But you don’t get to switch back and forth between one and the other when the argument (or, more to the point, when reality itself) isn’t going your way.
wws says:
February 3, 2014 at 9:07 am
“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!!!” ”
But let’s get the perspective right on that, as well. It was hot mostly in just one narrow band, a reasonably small part of the whole continent. And that was caused by enhanced cooling trade wind flows this summer, which set up that pattern for overland heating of the returning air in the south. Several other people at WUWT have also pointed out that it has been anomalously cool where they are covering larger areas of Australia, for all of this Summer.
Today in fact was very cool and dry in North Queensland. Last Saturday morning, it was positively chilly when I woke up, and it was a bright sunny summers day. But also the coolest summers day I can remember – ever! It was like having outdoor air-conditioning. All of this summer we’ve had maybe 5 hot and humid days and nights. Where I’m at it’s normally hot and humid all summer long, and also well into early Autumn. But this year it’s easily the coolest Australian summer I’ve experienced in decades in northern eastern Australia.
I’ve literally never experienced a summer anywhere near this cool before. Everyone here’s been talking about how cool it’s been this year. The drought-stricken inland areas are feeling the pain though, due to no rainfall due to the lack of humidity from so much cool air coming up from the southern ocean and Tasman sea, but for most of the population on the east coast, it’s been a delightfully cool summer.
Though you would never guess this was the truth, if the media and was your only source of information and balanced reporting.
I have no doubt they’ll continue with the melodramas and misrepresentation of the actual situation though, but they must realize by now that the natives are getting restless. We know the spin is false, and more and more people are getting despondent and eventually annoyed by it. And they are starting to say so more often and more openly.
But to be more balanced myself I’ll add that last winter was also unusually and noticeably warm. I expect this was due similar wind-circulation induced reasons. So it’ll be interesting to see if that is repeated this coming winter, or if the Southern Ocean’s persistent coolness finally bites down.
If it does then at least BOM and the media might finally be forced to face the cooling southern summer facts, all of them, not just some of them. But I won’t hold my breath on that score.
@HenryP….Thanks for the response (on the other thread)….I didnt see it. I’m new to this so im still learning…but thats a good thing.
Steven Mosher says:
February 3, 2014 at 10:05 am
[IMG]http://i61.tinypic.com/2ylwzm9.png[/IMG]
Makes no sense. The 1930’s were warmer than recent warming as indicated on your plot.
Are you using the bastardized and homogenized data that is worthless to produce you plot?
The post’s headline says.
What if it said?
There would be much wailing and gnashing and grinding of teeth.
If one more person shows a temp data set…starting in 1850….to show how much global warming
…I’m throwing their happy butt in the freezer
Wow. Still 3°F to go to reach the depths of the 1970’s cooling. I’m glad BEST still shows it, it’s beginning to disappear everywhere else where such cooling is inconvenient.
Kenny says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1557699
Henry says
if you want to follow a thread because you want to see replies to your positions/comments you can tick the notify comments button when you make a new comment
You then have to check the e-mail box and click on confirm follow, and “appy”
So far, just to be sure that he keeps up with his own personal record to date, Steven Mosher has never replied to any of my comments. So don’t feel bad if you don’t receive an answer from him.
I wonder if he is real.
Sorry
“appy”
should be “apply”
in the website
It does support GHG warming. The lowest temperature decreases as you move back in time in a nice exponenetial pattern, as you’d expect since the GHE limits how much cooling happens and the effect decreases as concentrations increase.
It does not support meaningful feedbacks.
28.2 78/79
29.1 83/84
31.8 91/92
31.3 09/10
31.6 13/14
@aaron chmielewski
try to understand the forces behind the patterns
see my answer to Kenny, here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/31/open-letter-to-kevin-trenberth-ncar/#comment-1556131
Gary Pearse says: @ February 3, 2014 at 9:28 am
I think I would prefer dog sled to walking.
unmentionable says
The drought-stricken inland areas are feeling the pain though,
henry says
try to understand why it is getting drier at the higher latitudes and paradoxically even it a bit warmer there (when there is more sunshine)
during a cooling period
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
Not only is it colder here in Buffalo than the past two winters, but we’ve gotten more snow than the past two winters … combined … so much this year that we’re about a foot and a half ahead of the average … with more on the way (though they have pulled back on the 6 to 10 inch forecast to just 4 to 8 inches … which is pretty good, considering the storm that’s going to do this doesn’t exist yet).
Is it Spring yet ???
Interesting that the Laurentide Ice Sheet has the same foot print as the Polar Express/Polar Vortex: http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/geo/glaciers/glacimg/glacMap.gif
Britain is on course for having a very wet, pretty mild winter. The Southern side of the Alps dividing range and the Pyrenees are having an exceptionally snowy one.
There are plenty of extremes going on but few are the same.
Leon Brozyna says: @ February 3, 2014 at 12:05 pm …Is it Spring yet ???
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That is why I left that area.
Happiness is never having to shovel snow again.
rtj1211 says: @ February 3, 2014 at 12:10 pm
…There are plenty of extremes going on but few are the same.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That is because of meridional (loopy) vs zonal jet stream and the blocking highs that go with a meridional jet stream.
With all due respect to you sir, you are obviously looking at the situation backwards. It wasnt the 3rd coldest, it was actually the 27th warmest year of the last 30 years. So warm in fact that of the last 41 years, only 5 years were cooler.
/sarc
“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”
1. Ross wrote this paper which you support
http://www.rossmckitrick.com/temperature-data-quality.html
In that paper Ross claims to have found a human effect in grid cells of 5 degrees. Of course
at that time no one but me made the resolution argument.
2. If the rate of warming from surface air stations is .17C per decade And IF 50% of this
is due to human effects then what do you expect the rate of warming to be when measured from space?
A. what will the rate of warming be at the surface?
B at 1018 hPa etc
3. Think of it this way. if a surface station is a point in the grid cell ( say 1 degree grid cell)
and that point source warms at .17C while all the land around it warms at .08C,
then when you look at the average over 1 degree what will you see?
Basically I’m just building on work that Peilke Sr. and other skeptics id when they compared UAH to surface stations. Oh ya, Ross had a contribution there as well
see KLotzbach et al 2010
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/r-345a.pdf
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/07/un-muddying-the-waters/
REPLY: Nice dodge, you still didn’t answer the question. WHAT IS THE RESOLUTION OF YOUR SKIN TEMPERATURE DATA? If the resolution of that data can’t resolve the point sources, then you have no claim. Also, how much smoothing is applied to your data? No major cities appear, so it suggests braod smoothign much like GISS. Your map appears almost like a Koppen climate classification map, broad with no detail.- Anthony
henryP
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/alaska
February is looking abnormally cold nation-wide. Except FL.
Global Temperature: the Post-1998 Surprise
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/global-temperature-the-post-1998-surprise/
5 of the last 7 years have been below the 41-year average
Uh oh. I sure hope that “The Sixth Winter” turns out NOT to be predictive fiction. And yes, that’s a bit tongue in cheek, but still.
We used to call climate something else too. Climate used to be a relatively small time-scale description of the quasi-permanent general and seasonal weather pattern variations plus extremes, teleconnected to regional flora, and specific geographic and topographic parameters, along with latitude, longitude, and altitude location. It was not the “average” of weather. The “average” of weather was just that and nothing more. The media and most climate scientists have since allowed the morphing of a statistical measure (mean and/or anomoly) of weather data into “climate”. Descriptive numerical statistics of weather data do not comprise “climate”.
A bit OT station siting question.
Perhaps there’s no answer to this but, is there a way to determine if forecast that depended on data “down-weather” of poorly sited stations have a history of being more inaccurate than forecast that used data from well sited stations?
Anthony, you are asking the wrong person this question. Steven has a mate, Robert Way, who has already cringed [my spelling] all the arctic warming data into one nice bundle. It is so smoothed that when you use it there has never been one area of anomalous cooling, only warming in the arctic over the last 20 years. All the composed data modification is correct because each bit is supported by the surrounding, always warm cells. even when they are not there.
“Eureka NWT is a good example” Eureka has been in Nunavut since 1999.
“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”
So people that live in the Arctic are just imagining that things have warmed up???
Here’s the problem Mitchell, Mosher, et al have as far as I’m concerned:
Regional warming does NOT PROVE global warming, but regional cooling DISPROVES it.
You can’t have a theory that constantly adds energy into a system and yet still have areas with cooling trends. Some areas may not warm as fast as others, but the trend should only be in one direction; up.
Per says:
February 3, 2014 at 1:13 pm
Global Temperature: the Post-1998 Surprise
Actually, the big surprise that gets under weighted by several orders of magnitude in the discussion is the vegetative health, biosphere, crop yields and world food production that are exploding upwards.
While 2 sides battle over how much temperatures increased and how much they will increase and speculate over how much this has effected and will effect our planet, earth is telling us loud and clear, exactly how.
As the planet gets greener and greener and greener, it seems like a lot of people are not listening/looking.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-surges-as-co2-levels-rise-16094
The power of the known law of photosynthesis and the key role that carbon dioxide plays is somehow not counting all that much.
Unmentionable says:
February 3, 2014 at 11:06 am
” … this year it’s easily the coolest Australian summer I’ve experienced in decades in northern eastern Australia … ”
I concur.
Interesting thing happened when sexed-up Cyclone Dylan was approaching. Some hours before landfall I was driving, and found myself turning on the heater because of the cold.
After landfall (200km south of me) it was warmer again. The usual pattern with cyclones is warmer before, cooler after.
I’m also unconvinced by the designations for Edna and Fletcher. I suspect that BoM, having predicted 3 or 4 cyclones to come for Queensland this season, are determined to be “proved” right. Predictions in previous years have been so bad that they seemed to give up last year and predicted a “typical” cyclone season. Whatever that is supposed to mean.
Mike Maguire says:
February 3, 2014 at 2:55 pm
Actually, the big surprise that gets under weighted by several orders of magnitude in the discussion is the vegetative health, biosphere, crop yields and world food production that are exploding upwards
You are quite right about that, there can absolutely be NO mention of anything positive about increased CO2 in the press. People will be “disappeared” over that. These benefits are an immense positive for increased CO2. Needless to say, but all of this extra greening and increased photosynthesis is also a negative CO2 feed back effect on temperatures. A higher fraction of the sunlight that reaches the earth’s surface is converted into C-H bonds rather than ending up as waste heat in the environment.
“REPLY: … 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.”
So people that live in the Arctic are just imagining that things have warmed up???
Lets keep in mind that US is only a few percentage of the globe
“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”
I used to ride a motorcycle in rural Pennsylvania. Open helmet with no face shield (I was young and stupid back then). I was frequently impressed that every little creek was a local cold spot. I’d guess the resolution was 3 meters. I frequently gave thanks when riding in to a small town, as it was noticeably warmer. Of course, there needed to be no wind to notice this.
The last month has seen a big cooling in eastern equatorial subsurface water
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/sub_surf_mon.gif
suggesting that there may still be life in my prediction of a strong La Nina in the first half of this year.
daddylonglegs says:
February 3, 2014 at 4:38 pm
As well, the ENSO meter just reached -0.7 today. However check the predictions. Not one is in the ball park.
Here in Alaska, we are experiencing an extremely warm winter, and it can’t be strictly attributed to UHI. Alaska has several 300 mile dog sled races, many several decades old, and every race through the wilderness has found this to be a very warm winter. The Yukon Quest is a 1000 mile race that is currently underway is noteworthy for warm temperatures, and I imagine that the Iditarod will find more of the same when it starts the first of next month.
That said, this isn’t “proof” of global climate change or global warming. Those phrases have been intensely studied, and CAGW advocates pick their term based on “unusual” warmth, or the lack of “unusual” warmth. Their studies have found that people in general associate their limited experience with local conditions and are unable to conceive of global scale or the periods of time needed to establish climate. This blind spot is carefully exploited as they manage their message. Skeptics of CAGW lack a cohesive messaging package, and aren’t trying to sell doom (always a great lead story). The CAGW messaging package isn’t set up to deal with years of cool or cooling temperatures however, and it’s been fun watching them thrash about trying to overcome the human predisposition to extrapolate personal experience and local exposure to weather.
The pendulum swings back…
If you want to lose some of the Earth’s heat, export it to the Pole, where the sun never shines.
(Some will make things complex by bringing up the stratification of the polar atmosphere, and the difficulty of heat rising in a stratified situation, and to that I say, “humbug.” If the minus-thirty air stays up at the Pole, the Pole will lose less heat. If that air is replaced by plus-thirty air, the Pole will lose more heat.)
If you want to lose some more of the Earth’s heat, bring the minus-thirty air south to where the sun does shine, and freeze lakes that are usually open, and spread snow where the ground is usually bare. The “albedo” equations I leave to others, but I simply know that a snow-cover reduces temperatures. Even at night the temperatures, due to radiational cooling, are ten degrees colder. And a very noticeable difference (downwards) is seen in temperatures downwind of a lake, when it freezes over, and this is especially true of the Great Lakes on the Canada-USA border. (It is also seen when Hudson Bay freezes over.)
While the poor of Europe are getting a deserved break from energy-poverty, it is because they are in the path of warm air heading to the pole, on its way to leaving planet Earth.
Parts of Siberia that are above normal still are below freezing and have increased snowfall, (above average in extent where it is not above-average in depth.)
North America is getting a taste of what Eurasia got last winter. (And it is far from over.)
The net result, in my mind, of winters when the jet stream is loopy, is a loss of heat, compared to winters when the jet stream is zonal and cold stays up at the Pole.
(Likely this sort of loopy jet stream is the planet’s way of bringing things back into some yet-to-be-determined balance, but I think it is very bad news for those who desire warmth, whether it be for political or personal reasons.)
Martin Clark says:
February 3, 2014 at 3:10 pm
Unmentionable says:
February 3, 2014 at 11:06 am
” … this year it’s easily the coolest Australian summer I’ve experienced in decades in northern eastern Australia … ”
I concur.
Interesting thing happened when sexed-up Cyclone Dylan was approaching. Some hours before landfall I was driving, and found myself turning on the heater because of the cold.
After landfall (200km south of me) it was warmer again
>>>>
We must be situated very close to each other Martin. Re TC Dylan was a bit of a nothing, basically the Tasman Sea High predictably dried it out as it approached, prevented the inland rainfall from arriving via blocking and pushing back northwards the northern humid inflow stream. Only the convergent flow on the SE side arrived.
I said back in mid-January the unseasonal strong Tasman Highs were killing-off the wet season, continually pushing the humidity back up to PNG, so any Lows that tried to formed were dried out and sheared. Today it’s unusually cool and dry, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. It feels about like late April to me, rather than the middle of those high humidity summers we’re both familiar with. The more conspicuous point though, is that almost no one is even talking about what’s really happening, the mainstream media and BOM do not want to know about it, and all you get on ABC is endless heatwave propaganda, soon to transition to the global-warming-induced-drought blitzkrieg.
This sort of biased nonsense must change, we deserve far better from publicly-funded organization, who clearly do not have nearly enough competition, which will force them to actually perform, or else go away – permanently.
Their chartered protections must be removed, so competition is given room to emerge, or we’ll never rid ourselves of the established liars and snake-oil sellers in those public institutions. I’m not fan of government, but government created this and government needs to institute the inquiry processes needed to reform or remove it, and thus improve the services and remove the albatross around tax-payers necks, and its warping political influences.
I hope they finally do just that, we require much better than this nonsense and it’s clearly well past due, lever them all off the public tit and make them get a private job, where they actually have to perform for real, or fail and go away, as they should have already. If government expects us to pay tax, for this, the onus is on that government to clean-house. Let’s see how much the coalition really believes in smaller government and a lower tax burden.
@ Unmentionable and Martin Clark
Why can`t you australians have for yourself a proper national institute of meteorology of the kind that we have here, the Yr. no and Met.inst.Uio.no like we have it here in Norway with weather forecasts that can be more or less relied on and disputed. They further have cameras standing on steady on local sites that we can judge and make up our own minds and give thanks to the meteorologists for doing that at least, if we don`t believe in what they say. And for telling us of their methods and the problems that they have when they are not so sure.
And we further have Bjerknessentret.UiB.no. They follow the sea serpent and the large snake that goes around the world and bites itself in the tail, making large S- meanders that can be understood. They further follow the apple blossoms and the glaciers and ackers the ground on both sides because it is so steep there. They are quite fameous for being able to think rather vertically also you see., which obviously give better results.
I thought you had proper crocodiles. There you have water dragons as good as any to begin with.
But theese fellows do not fight the IPCC and they do not fight hockeysticks, On the contrary, they rather contribute and deliver to the IPCC and thus get paid for it. They are quite obviously more able to take advantage of their local waters and pools and ices and atmospheres and make it important to the world so they can sell their own and local raw materials in better purified, “lifted” and refined form on the world market and earn from it.
For acheiving that you should not just fight hockeysticks and sell unrefined bullshit on the free market and blame it on the politicians and on the taxes you see.
HenryP says:
February 3, 2014 at 11:57 am
unmentionable says
The drought-stricken inland areas are feeling the pain though,
henry says
try to understand why it is getting drier at the higher latitudes and paradoxically even it a bit warmer there (when there is more sunshine)
during a cooling period
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
>>>>
Yes, thank you for the link. The mechanisms are plainly observable to anyone who wants to see, recognize and understand that both the warming and the cooling in this Australian Summer are intimately related and can only be understood with respect to both sides of the coin. BOM, and the national media are simply trading (disgracefully) on a widespread lack of awareness of this fact, that these were and are both caused by the same region-wide circulation pattern that keeps brings up cooler direr air from the southern ocean.
Plus they’re certainly not wanting to dispel such unawareness, just the contrary, in their actions, melodrama and statements they are clearly seeking to enhance the lack of understanding of what is really causing it, and distracting from those problematic connections and details which destroy the narrative – at every turn.
Bless their cotton socks.
Unmentionable says:
February 3, 2014 at 9:04 pm
Martin Clark says:
February 3, 2014 at 3:10 pm
—
On last thing Martin, on the night of the 29th of January, before Dylan formed, ABC-1 News and weather, which uses the BOM data, reported that Townsville had “a steamy 36 degrees today”.
However, I’ve been routinely monitoring and audio recording the Airport ATIS frequency this summer after I detected these huge errors in temps BOM was reporting, and the highest temp given on ATIS on the 29th of Jan at Townsville airport was 32 degrees C.
That’s a massive 4 degree C divergence, with what BOM claims for Townsville’s max that day and what was recorded on ATIS. And the ATIS conditions are also logged by Air Services Australia who operate ATC (though Townsville’s ATC is performed by the RAAF), so that is available for any accident or incident inquiry.
So that data was recorded and is still available (and I also have time and date-stamped audio recordings of it). That 4 C difference in BOM’s claims was also the highest level of max-temp ‘error’ I’ve detected and logged, so far, this summer. But for the past two months I’ve consistently monitored both BOM’s daily over-stating of the local temps, which have been routinely been 1 to 2 C, and even up to 3 C, above what the ATIS reported, on almost all days this summer.
So where is BOM’s temp sensor in Townsville? It’s also situated at the same airport, and is probably within the same facility as that used by the ATC-ATIS system sensors. (and could it even be from the same thermometer? … if so … guess what that means …)
So anyone in officialdom, reading this, who does not believe this can be actually happening, daily, can simply review the ATIS max temp for the past three months, plus the BOM’s max temp from the same location over the same period. That will clearly confirm what I’ve observed and am saying here. Something stinks to high-heaven in BOM’s daily max temp claims, and this must be investigated.
And after all that, plus the farce surrounding TC Dylan’s track, its forward speed impossibility when plotted, and the intensity ‘forecasting’ nonsense of a cat-2 at landfall, plus now this alleged TC Fletcher utter farce, currently going on within the Gulf of Carpentaria I’ve more than sufficient grounds to regard BOM with contempt and its daily max temp ‘data’ with the deepest of suspicion.
Anyway, my apologies to others for stating all this within a page about the harsh north American conditions this year.
Carbomontanus says:
February 3, 2014 at 10:13 pm
@ Unmentionable and Martin Clark …………….
>>>>
Gee, play distract-the-public-from-an-open-discussion much?
Steven Mosher
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1557777
Henry says
Wow, I am honored to have deserved a reply!
first of all, I don’t trust graphs from before 1950, not much at any rate.
Problem is that thermometers were not re-calibrated before the fifties and there was no automatic temperature recording. I am therefore sceptical about those results.So looking from the sixties onward, we see from your quoted graph that the warming rate in Alaska declined from + 0.34 degrees C per decade in 1960 to only +0.065 C per decade in 1990…
Now if you go back to my graph,
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ql5zq8.jpg
observe with me that out of ten random Alaskan stations sampled, 9 show a decisive downward trend from 1998. The tenth station (Barrow) seems to have an incorrect result reported for 2000. Be that as it may, if I take an anverage of all ten stations sampled, I get that Alaska is cooling at a rate of -0.55 degrees C per decade since 1998.
SO IT IS +0.34 (1960) +0.066 (1990) AND NOW -0.55 (1998)
Do you see the (correct) global cooling pattern emerging?
In fact to explain these results, I can refer you again to my second graph here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
where I had good reliable data on maxima going back to 1942 from the Elmendorff military station in Alaska (for maxima they would have used the thermometers that got stuck on the top, which would be reasonable reliable)
Your Berkeley report does not report the rate since 2000? Why not? Without that information, you cannot challenge the information I am providing you now.
Unmentionable says:
February 3, 2014 at 10:17 pm
Some interesting points … BoM Townsville is located at 19°14’56.83″S, 146°45’56.73″E according to GoogleEarth. The equipment is on open ground about 70m to the east. Not that far from a runway, but could be worse. Unless they are still using the one in the Stevenson screen in the middle of the car park on the west side 🙂
Not sure what else is there – as it’s a military facility not many people get to look around, but there may be someone I can ask …
The mismatch between BoM and ATIS temperatures reminds me of the mismatch between what is reported from BoM tide gauges in Queensland (all 2 or 3 of them) compared to the other +/- 38 with long term records run by port authorities, Maritime Safety Qld etc, including one in the same tidal reach. The BoM/ATIS mismatch might be something that the people auditing BoM’s temperature series need to know about. Jo Nova would know how to contact them.
My email is troppo19 at gmail.com, or, if that is inappropriate to post, googling building urban design tropics will find me.
@ all an everyone exept two Australians plus an unmentionable one
Oh yes, there is a lot of “unions” in Australia also, I forgot that for a tiny while.
But allthough having been sent there on slave ships from their homelands, many of them, they do not necessarily have to “union”, holding hands shoulder by shoulder kissing each other on their mouths- and talk with one voice like fools on a ship ever after that.
mods
“Carbomontanus” seems to be a bot edited with minor human input to give an illusion of sentience. Please block it.
@all and everyone
on Daddylonglegs:
Here you have the monopoly- claim of being human also, that is, to be of the pure “blood” or beingt of the right “chemistery” and “sentinence” as they call it today.
Basic lectures in cleartekst for the study of that madness disease can be found at “the twenty-one conditions” on Wikipedia, ( The LENIN- doctrines) and in Maos little red book.
We know it also for years and decades on longwave radio from “Deutschlandesender” East Berlin.
Who for a series of decades showed us the basic religious beliefs, doctrines, and mental behaviours of dia- lectic materialism and denialism.
The chart shows 5 colder December-January periods over the last 40 years, so despite all the publicity surrounding this winter, it is not unusually cold for the continental US as a whole. Perhaps the better media coverage these days compared with the 70’s created the impression that this year’s weather was more unusual than was really the case?
@ richard baraclough
YES!
and we have had the opposite of it .
It is the S for Snake or Serpent, and here we have been in the opposite swing for whole December with no snow and frost at all.
Snowdrops Galanthus nivalis is coming, 60 deg North, 120 moh. Enviroment:=good enough for oaks apples and cherries to seed out naturally.
At the same time 30 cm Snow in Jerusalem and snow on the sphinx of Egypt.
Those events are extreemly rare and due to another Snake or Serpent down there..
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”.
When does a series of ” weather” winters become “climate “? I think we are there already.
. Global annual temperatures have not risen now for 16 years and there is a global warming halt since 1998. Northern Hemisphere winters have been cooling for the same period. Winters in Contiguous US have been cooling in every state since 1998. The same is happening in Canada. So this frigid weather is not just weather as some imply but part of a winter climate change that has been happening for nearly 2 decades. The Northern Hemisphere Oceans are cooling especially the North Atlantic and the North Pacific which has been cooling since 2005. Cooler ocean cycles can run for 30-35 years as we saw in 1880-1910 and again 1945-1975. To me this current winter is part of a colder winter climate that will be with us for the next 2-3 decades .
@herkimer
Your model theory has got 2 quite typical and basic doctrinary errors.
1, confusing or rather even exchanging temperature with heat and warming and building your proof procedure on that.
2, confusing or rather even exchanging surface area with content, weight, and volume, and building your proof procedure, “opinion” and political “sceptical” sales argument on that.
Correct those 2 basic errors first, and see what remains of it all.
@richard Barraclough
You have not got a clue. We have not even arrived at the bottom of the (relevant) sine wave, defining energy coming in
we are now in 2014.
the bottom is 2016 (comparable with 1927)
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
from there onward it will be another 5 years before the return of the major droughts,
famously called the “Dust Bowl droughts” (1932-1939)
@Carbomontanus
There are always those who don’t want to see what is clearly there, right in front of them (ehhh, snow?)
@Stephen Mosher
Come on Stephen, you can do it. Give me another reply on my comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1558127
@Herkimer
Your comment is spot on. My calculation (for the end of the current cooling period) is 2038.
Carbomantanus
Suggest you blog in simple English . Your blog is baffling .
Herkimer
Plain English = Englischer Platt
(London cockney & similar….. a local mental and socially provincial illusion)
Did nobody tell you that?
jai mitchell says:
February 3, 2014 at 9:49 am
meanwhile, arctic temperatures have been 12 degrees above normal and the 7-day temperature anomaly is showing incredible Alaskan warming.
—————————————————————-
It is easy to see why that is, when one looks at the current sst anomaly in the north Pacific and the jet stream pattern that has been in place for several years now. This should not be mysterious. Yes, No California has enjoyed spring like days, just like Alaska, since early December, and after ten weeks of bitter cold in the fall. Let us see what happens over the next several months. When I moved into the mountains in April of 2011, I was surprised at how cold it was, and then at how cold it stayed until the end of May of that year. From the 3rd week of April 2011 till the end of May 2011, the daily temperature did not rise much past 50 F at the highest. Ironically, the places where I have stayed in the past 3 years are cold spots in the local area.
Carbomontanus says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1558292
henry says
this is coming from the man/woman who has not presented any results him/herself….
Just a few final notes
1) Pity that dr. Roy has not reacted to my comments
2) if you look carefully at the graph presented by Roy
note with me that you can easily draw a parabolic curve (binomial best fit)
probably with high correlation!
if somebody can give me the original data I can work it out it for you,
[I just don’t have the time to try and work out the figures from the graph]
Depending on the correlation, you can project that best fit curve a bit forward,
and see that the worst of the big freeze in the next 5-10 winters is still coming up.
That would be in line with my own and herkimer’s findings…..
now that I’m freezing, remember this article?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/05/how-long-to-the-2425-solar-minimum/
now that we are in 2014 and the poles flipped, etc. can you post an updated chart of green corona emissions diagram produced by Richard Altrock?
and a new estimate on the end point of SC24??????
@freezing in Alaska
a good proxy for evaluating energy coming through the atmosphere is maximum temperatures.
I have done that already for you (47 weather stations, globally balanced)
What you end up with (unless we all freeze to death, look at the drop of the blue line)
is this graph here:
\
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
from there onward, you can see that in 2016 we will be in the deep end of the wave,
comparable to 1927.
I find that as we are moving back, up, from the deep end of the 88 year sine wave, there will be standstill in the change of the speed of cooling, neither accelerating nor decelerating, on the bottom of the wave; therefore naturally, there will also be a lull in pressure difference at that > [40 latitude], where the Dust Bowl drought took place, meaning: no wind and no weather (read: rain). According to my calculations, this will start around 2020 or 2021…..i.e. 1927=2016 (projected, by myself and the planets…)> add 5 years and we are in 2021.
Danger from global cooling is documented and provable. It looks we have only ca. 7 “fat” years left……
WHAT MUST WE DO?
We urgently need to develop and encourage more agriculture at lower latitudes, like in Africa and/or South America. This is where we can expect to find warmth and more rain during a global cooling period.
We need to warn the farmers living at the higher latitudes (greater than 40) who already suffered poor crops due to the droughts that things are not going to get better there for the next few decades. It will only get worse as time goes by.
We also have to provide more protection against more precipitation at certain places of lower latitudes (FLOODS!), at less than [30] latitude, especially around the equator.
HenryP says:
February 5, 2014
(47 weather stations, globally balanced)…..not exactly, 7 of them are in South Africa, 8 if you count Marion Island, and 2 are in Anchorage
@ Richard Barraclough
you are referring to my tables, here,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
note that I spent considerable time in thinking of a proper sampling technigue and in the end I decided that longitude does not matter,
because
1) earth turns every 24 hours
2) we are looking at the change in degrees C per annum at the station and one whole year includes the seasonal shifts within that year.
The rest of my sampling procedure is described before the tables begin and I suggest you read that. Note that the number of stations NH must be (more or less) equal to those from the SH.
This is what made me stop at 47, otherwise the sample would become too skewed, because it must also balance on latitude.
I am confident that anyone/class of students can duplicate my results and come to the same conclusion if they follow the given sampling procedure. If they took 5 stations in New York, that is fine. but they must balance on latitude and 70/30 @sea/inland
Longitude does not matter for what we want to see: change in (maximum) temperature per annum,i.e. the amount of energy being let through the atmosphere.(99.5% correlation for the binomial for the change in speed of warming)
For the means and minima tables there is some more noise, but even here you can also make good binomials of the 4 end results, with high correlation (95%)
So, in the end it is a combination of simple physics and good statistics.
Anyone can do it, if they were not so lazy and /or prejudiced
@ all and everyone exept Henry P
“Henry says
This is coming from the man/ woman who has not presented any results him/ herself”
Henry P is apparently scoring results and points here for him/ herself in the Party, as you can rather easily see. ( I have no other reference for it. P for Pure and for Party and Procedure, even the Peoples Party. the blood group P, you see)
That proceduse of exchanging heat with temperature and surface with volume and tension or voltage with energy is very common and standard operational procedure for bluffing and cheating, and should allways be remarked.
Never rely on and never buy anything from, never trust people wo demonstrate that kind of typical crooky or silly or mad manners or procedures.
And never trust or buy anything from people who rush out immediately to the defence of that kind of crooky and cheating and bluffing behaviours.
Because it is very standard and common operational routine and procedures for those who are most likely also to keep a fraud budget for instance.
Richard Barraclough says: @ February 4, 2014 at 6:40 am
The chart shows 5 colder December-January periods over the last 40 years, so despite all the publicity surrounding this winter, it is not unusually cold for the continental US as a whole…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The last five out of seven Dec/Jan in the USA have been below average in temperature which may indicate the end of the ‘plateau’ at the higher temperatures. There have certainly been some nasty winters in the last half decade with livestock freezing to death in the USA, Scotland, Tibet and South America.
carbomatanus says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/u-s-decjan-temperatures-3rd-coldest-in-30-years/#comment-1559062
translation
(seeing some might be confused)
I am the party pooper
there is no global cooling
everyone says it is still warming
so we must believe them
(never mind the snow in front of my door in late spring)
Henry says
it is cooling from the top [90] latitudes down
1)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/05/cryosat-shows-arctic-sea-ice-volume-up-50-from-last-year/
2)
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ql5zq8.jpg
cooling in Alaska at -0.55 degrees C / decade
3)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/22/nasa-announces-new-record-growth-of-antarctic-sea-ice-extent/#more-96133
just found all of that in 30 seconds
only fools would keep on thinking the agw route
and all of them (97%?) stand in the way of progress….
Sad, sad,sad.
God willing, I am in LA from 22-02-2014 until 02.03.2014
to discuss my results with anyone interested.
I think the 7 year warning (before the droughts) is important?