Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I discussed the role of tropical albedo in regulating the temperature in two previous posts entitled Albedic Meanderings and An Inherently Stable System. This post builds on that foundation. I said in the latter post that I would discuss the diurnal changes in tropical cloud albedo. For this I use a marvelous dataset called the TAO dataset. It is measurements from a number of moored buoys in the tropical Pacific.
Figure 1. Locations of all of the TAO buoys ever in operation. Background shows the sea surface temperature.
Sadly, despite the billions spent on “global warming”, the TAO buoys don’t have funds for maintenance. As a result, the records from some have ceased entirely. But I digress … the great thing about the TAO buoy records is that they are either hourly, or every ten minutes, or even every two minutes in some cases. This lets us accurately reconstruct the daily cycles.
To refresh your memory, my hypothesis is that variations in the timing and strength of the emergence of tropical cumulus and tropical thunderstorms act to regulate both the amount of incoming energy and the tropical surface temperature. I say that whenever there is a hot day or a hot area, we get earlier and more dense cumulus and thunderstorms. The cumulus clouds act solely by reflecting the sunlight. Thunderstorms, on the other hand, cool the surface in dozens of ways. This prevents the surface temperature from overheating.
So with that hypothesis in mind, let me start by looking at the daily air temperature cycles. Because of availability of data, I’ve used data from a string of buoys along the Equator. The buoys I used stretch from 95°W (buoy just to the left of the “E” in “Equator”) to 165°E (on the Equator northeast of Australia). Conveniently, the average temperature increases steadily along the line. Figure 2 shows the daily variations in surface air temperature for those Equatorial buoys:
Figure 2. Average daily air temperatures measured at ten minute intervals at eight different buoys. Colors represent temperatures.
Using just locations along the Equator gives me a peculiar advantage. All of the locations receive exactly, precisely, the same amount of top-of-atmosphere solar energy every single day. This means that the differences between them can’t be from different solar forcing. It eliminates a variable from the equation.
Now, there is an oddity about these records, which no doubt you’ve noticed. The temperature doesn’t warm steadily during the day. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a chart I made a while back showing temperatures at Santa Rosa, California, the met station nearest to where I live.
Figure 3. Hourly temperatures averaged over a year in Santa Rosa, CA. About 20 miles (30 km) from the ocean. The photo shows wine grape trellises.
As you might expect in a generally marine climate that usually doesn’t get much in the way of afternoon clouds or thunderstorms, the graph is simple. As the solar energy increases the earth warms. It continues to warm until around 2:00 and then starts to drop. It cools rapidly at first, then more slowly towards early morning.
However, that’s not the pattern we saw in Figure 2. Instead of a steady straight rise from dawn to noon, there is a bend or a “dip” in the rate of temperature rise. This can be seen more clearly when we look at the same records shown in Figure 2 as anomalies (variations about their individual averages). Figure 4 shows the same data as in Figure 2, but with each individual average subtracted from its respective record.
Figure 4. Same data as in Figure 2, but expressed as anomalies about the individual means (averages). Colors indicate buoy average temperature as shown in Figure 2.
Here we see a most interesting progression. The cyan (light blue) colored trace of 95°W, the coolest buoy, shows only a slight bend in temperatures from 6 am to the afternoon peak. It’s nearly straight. But as we look at warmer and warmer buoy locations, the bend becomes more and more pronounced. In the warmest five locations, there is an actual “dip”, a reduction in temperature as the day progresses.
In addition, the peak temperature anomalies start decreasing with warmer temperatures. Since there is identical solar input to all of the buoys, this must reflect some local phenomenon.
To me, the “dip” in the morning records is the clear sign of the phenomenon I described in my last post—the emergence of the cumulus clouds starting in mid-to-late morning. Through variations in their emergence time, as soon as a certain temperature threshold is surpassed these clouds “throttle” the incoming solar energy by reflecting some of it back to space. This cloud throttling effect is so strong and comes on so suddenly that in the warmer locations, the temperature actually drops despite the continually increasing morning sunshine.
However, in no case is the throttling effect of the morning albedo change sufficient to overcome the full strength of the tropical sun. This is because there is no way for these cumulus to cover the entire sky—there needs to be clear descending air around each cumulus cloud to maintain circulation. As a result, there is only so much the cumulus reflections can do … and so past noon the day continues to warm. The later reduction of the peak afternoon temperature values is due not to increased albedo but to the emergence of afternoon thunderstorms. These “chop the top” off of the temperatures, imposing a high temperature limit and preventing further surface temperature rise.
Having seen that, let me move on to another way that we can see the effect of the morning-time cloud albedo. Note that the clouds that create the reflective albedo which helps regulate the tropical temperature only emerge in response to the surpassing of a temperature threshold. Once that threshold is passed and the increased cloud albedo has come into existence, it acts to reduce the high temperatures by cutting way back on the incoming solar energy.
Given the nature of the regulation, which depends on reflecting the sun’s rays, we can make the following predictions.
• The regulation of the temperature will be stronger in the day than in the night. No sun, no reflection …
• The regulation of the temperature will be greater in the morning than the afternoon. This is because the early morning is often clear and the late morning is cloudy, whereas there are generally clouds throughout the afternoon. As a result, controlling the onset time of the cloud formation will provide powerful regulation, and generally that happens in the morning.
• The regulation of the temperature will be greater up at the warm end of the scale than down at the cool end. This is because the emergent phenomena act to reduce peak temperatures.
With those predictions in mind, I cast around for some way to visualize the effects of the thermal regulation due to clouds and thunderstorms. Figure 5 shows my solution. It is the record of the hourly air temperature from the TAO buoy on the Equator at 165 East. This is the warmest of the buoys in the graphs above (red line in those graphs).
Figure 5. Boxplots of the hourly air temperatures at 0N165E. There are 59,429 observations, or about 2,500 for each hour of the day.
A “boxplot” gives various information about the distribution of the data, including outliers. The green boxes show the range that contains half of the data (the “interquartile range” or IQR). The heavy black line is the median of the data, which is the point with half the data above it and half below. The dotted “whiskers” show a distance from each green box of 1.5 times the IQR for that data. Black crosses show “outliers”, which are data points that are further from the boxes than the extent of the whiskers.
An examination of Figure 5 shows that the predictions of the distributions are borne out by the data. First, daytime regulation, from 6 AM to 6 PM (18:00 hours), is much stronger than night-time regulation. Daytime temperature regulation is so strong that there is not one single outlier on the warm side from dawn until noon, and only one (or in one instance two) outliers in each hour from noon to sunset. In fact, daytime regulation is so strong that there are many night-time temperatures that are greater than the record noon-time temperature … go figure.
Second, the regulation is stronger in the morning than the afternoon. The variations in the timing of the albedo changes are able to oppose the sun successfully until about noon (see Figure 4). After that, the continued solar input starts driving the temperature higher, and the regulation is not as certain.
Third, it is clear from the number and distribution of the outliers above and below the row of boxes that there is extensive downward pressure on any warm temperatures. This shows the cloud/thunderstorm control system is pushing back at the hot spots, cooling them down. Nor does this downward pressure only exist on the warmest temperatures. A close examination of the location of the median line shows that the median is in the middle of the green box from midnight to dawn. But during the day, the median is high up in the green box, showing that downwards pressure from the regulatory mechanisms extends well down into the body of the data.
My conclusion is that this downward pressure is the combination of cumulus clouds throttling back solar input in the morning, and thunderstorms and squall lines moving heat from the surface to up near the tropopause in the afternoon. It is this regulation of each day’s maximum tropical temperature via a host of inter-related mechanisms that keeps the earth from overheating on a daily basis.
And as I mentioned in my previous post, my insight was that if there are mechanisms that reliably keep the earth from overheating for a single day, they would keep the earth from overheating for a million years …
I may return to these topics in a future post, I’ve only scratched the surface of the TAO data.
My best wishes to each of you,
w.
My Customary Request: If you disagree with someone, please quote the exact words you disagree with. That way, everyone can understand your objection.
Data and Code: I’ve been wrestling this for too long, I’m burnt. I’ll post up the code when I get time if someone wants it. This code a dog’s breakfast, no order, functions used before they’re defined, sections of dead code exploring blind alleys. The data, on the other hand, is from the TAO website.
Couldn’t the variations be reduced by proper averaging? Not forgetting the sqrt 2 factor?
Minor “typo”
“Figure 4 shows my solution. It is the record of the hourly air temperature from the Argo buoy on the Equator at 165 East. This is the warmest of the buoys in the graphs above (red line in those graphs).”
I think you mean TAO instead of Argo here.
How many TAOs remain on active duty?
Thanks, George, fixed. And I don’t know the answer to your question.
w.
probable typo; ‘continually increasing morning sunshine’ implies fits and starts. ‘Continuous’ doesn’t.
Find the status of the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array system here
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/global/status/
According to this information the global system seems to be ailing but OK.
mebbe one is an adverb, and the other is an adjective.
Yes, george, and you could quibble with any editing comment if you were determined to miss the point.
‘continuous’ and ‘continual’ are not synonyms, whether they’re adjectives or adverbs.
Well here at WUWT, most of us guests do not quibble about pedantic grammar issues. The purpose here is to communicate information and ideas. If you want a forum to quibble about grammar well I can’t think of a better place than twitter, where you can tinkle to your heart’s content.
george, you’re the twit.
adjectives and adverbs are grammar and you introduced that quibble.
My point was one of lexical semantics, which is not grammar; it’s the meaning of words.
Stick to Nyquist sampling comments if you don’t want to come across as an irascible old petard.
Actually, that might not work. So, do what you want.
Petard: “An explosive device used to break down a gate or wall.”
Huh?
It is a given that GCM’s will never be able to model mechanisms at this time scale, to improve overall long-term climate modeling. But what is the possibility that they can use parameterized versions of mechanisms like these inside a GCM grid cell to better model the climate. For example, average daily regulation onset time, average density of thunderstorms, etc…
You have two figures labeled “Figure 3” and refer to them multiple times. Makes it kinda hard to follow your argument.
Otherwise, another excellent write-up.
Thanks, fixed.
w.
Willis, don’t forget that the radiant emittance of the surface increases as T^4 and the spectral radiant emittance as T^5.
Both lead to faster cooling while Temperatures are higher, as in your daytime heating slowdown, and also the night time cool slowdown.
And the higher Temperature periods, tend to move the LWIR emission spectral peak to shorter wavelengths, where lies the “atmospheric window”.
g
That should be ‘peak’ spectral radiant emittance, and of course assuming some semblance of black/gray/colored body behavior.
Your diurnal Temperature graphs also point out why the twice a day (min / max) Temperature reporting regime, doesn’t satisfy the Nyquist sampling criterion, so those sorts of daily Temperature reports don’t give a correct average Temperature without aliasing noise.
g
The distribution of warmer and cooler buoy locations seems odd to me. Why does the daily temperature fall off steadily towards the eastern Pacific?
The North and South Pacific currents bring cold water down/up the East Pacific coastlines to the equator, where it is warmed and pushed west, only to flow toward the poles along Australia/NZ (in the south) and the Philippines and Japan (in the north).
This should be obvious from Figure 1.
Colder water = lower night time temperatures = lower day time temperatures.
I’ll say. Cold water is pulled up along the California coast It is about 45 F here. As that heads toward Indonesia, it takes time to warm… Surface still has cycles at the surface, but the layer a few feet down mixes up by wind and waves tending back to cool, until enough depth is warmed.
http://thejunkwave.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/world16-gyre-from-seafriends.org_.gif
The tradewinds more water from East to West and it is warmed along the way. The East pulls cooler water from the South and there is often upwelling of cooler water from below.
Move not more above.
What a joke !.
It would be great talking about daily temperature fluctuations if the academics could manage to understand the fact that the Earth turns 365 1/4 times within the confines of an annual circuit instead of the horror notion of 366 1/4 times –
“During one orbit around the Sun, Earth rotates about its own axis 366.26 times” Main ‘Earth’ article, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
The Earth turns 1461 times within the confines of 4 annual circuits to a close approximation therefore turns 365 1/4 times per annual orbital circuit. The ridiculous 366 1/4 rotations is a consequence of the ‘solar vs sidereal’ fiction yet it is left to stand as though it was the greatest fact ever.
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” NASA /Harvard
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1904PA…..12..649B
It is not that academics can believe that nonsense, it is that the extension of that stupidity really surfaces in the lack of an explanation for the purpose of the extra 24 hour day and the extra rotation (with all the daily effects) that closes out 4 annual circuits on February 29th.
The most astonishing thing about this is that nobody else is astonished.
Copied an pasted your link, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1904PA…..12..649B, into my browser.
Produces an Invalid bibliographic code message.
Also, no one will mind if you were to correct the Wikipedia reference.
It is an open source document, and you did find the error.
You fail to appreciate that the abominable 366 1/4 rotations value is a result of dubious reasoning based on the ‘solar vs sidereal’ fiction. The ‘fact’ in Wikipedia is not presented as an error but rather a result of a failure to appreciate the juncture where timekeeping merges with the daily and orbital cyclical dynamics of the Earth. The external references which defines the Earth’s position in space and the number of times the planet turns within an orbital circuit is absent from all descriptions and everywhere.
Through a generational error, most schoolboys learn that the Earth is into the next full rotation after 23 hours 56 minutes 04 seconds hence the accumulative 3 minute 56 seconds difference to 24 hours is supposed to build up into an extra rotation than there are 24 hour days. Even though the appearance of the Sun followed by the appearance of the stars within each 24 hour day is meant to satisfy any intelligent person as to the underlying cause of a single rotation, we live in an era where it is common practice to ignore the most basic of all facts where days and rotations keep in step.
It may be fine for Willis here to wax lyrical about daily temperatures and how they pick up over the course of a day but he is doing it in a world that is unable to untangle timekeeping from planetary dynamics with the result that the most inviolate facts known to humanity are challenged such as the correspondence between a single day and all the effects within a 24 hour and extended out to a mismatch between rotations and orbital circuits.
Off the Topic of Willis’ blog, and also wrong. This was explained in elementary astronomy class. The earth moves along its orbit around the sun slightly less than 1 degree each day. So after a complete rotation on its axis relative to distant stars, it must rotate that additional 1 degree for the sun to appear in the same position as the day before. This takes aout 4 minutes. If the earth were rotating in the reverse direction from its orbital direction around the sun, we would have 367.22 days per year instead of 365.22 (that is, one more day than the 366.22 in a sidereal year, instead of the one less day we have in the real world.
Well,well ,well Mayor of Venus.
The dumb idea is that the Earth is into the next full rotation after 23 hours 56 minutes 04 seconds and therefore 24 hour days and rotations fall out of step within an orbital cycle given the hideous 366 1/4 rotations per orbital circuit . It doesn’t matter that the 24 hour system and the Lat/Long system work in tandem within the confines of 4 annual circuits where the average 24 hour hour days substitutes for constant rotation at a rate of 15 degrees per hour, academics contrive an alternative explanation to suit a conclusion made way back in the late 17th century .
Not being able to match the daily 24 hour temperature fluctuations with the single rotation behind it, and this is exactly how that dumb ‘solar vs sidereal’ fiction does introduces the spectre of pandemic incompetence and that is where the real catastrophe is.
Personally I enjoy the Sun coming up in the morning as the Earth turns and brings it into view followed by the stars as the Earth turns away from the central Sun. If any of you find yourselves believing there is one more rotation than there are 24 hour days (as implied by the ‘solar vs then I suggest you go out walking in the early morning or at twilight and get all the ‘solar vs sidereal’ nonsense out of your heads. Common sense is a wonderful thing .
[Personally, I enjoy threads that stay on topic, and I’m forcing that point today – Anthony]
The Wikipedia statement is correct. Imagine the Earth would rotate around the Sun in a year’s time with the same side of the Earth always facing the Sun (like the Moon revolves around the Earth). Then by completing one full rotation around the Sun the Earth would also have rotated about its own axis once – in the same direction as it normally does. However, we would not see a sunrise or sunset and as such won’t experience this extra rotation as an additional day. Yet, the additional rotation of the Earth has meanwhile happened.
[snip -OK you are done here, your theories aren’t pertinent to the discussuion, and are wildly off-topic. You’ve been put into the troll bin before for thread bombing, and back you go -Anthony]
“Then by completing one full rotation around the Sun the Earth would also have rotated about its own axis once”. How so? If you spin a globe it rotates around its axis, meaning it spins similarly to a wheel on an axle. The axle itself is not spinning with the wheel. In your example the globe and its axis orbit the Solar System’s gravitational center without Earth rotating on the axis at all. Earth and its axis could be glued together as Earth is not spinning relative to its axis. That’s not “rotation” on its axis when the “rotation” of Earth you describe as seen from anywhere off Earth is due to the axis itself orbiting the Sun. Notice you said “like the Moon revolves around the Earth”. Revolves is correct. The Moon doesn’t rotate around its axis by always keeping one side to Earth.
BobM
In my thought experiment, consider an observer sitting on the North Pole who keeps his nose pointing at a distant star in the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. When looking down at Earth, the observer would see the Earth rotating about its own axis in a year’s time.
(If you would think of the axle being fixed to the wheel, the axle would run in imaginary outer bearings.)
Similarly, an observer sitting on top of the Moon keeping his nose pointed at the Sun will see the Moon making a full rotation below him in about a month’s time.
I’m aware it’s off-topic, hope to get into Willis’s revelations when time allows.
Frans – I don’t disagree. It’s what I get for swooping into WUWT while working and not paying close enough attention. Its all way OT anyway… I didn’t think your example was great, and I don’t think my response was great either… Best example I’ve heard of is a diagram of the Sun and Earth with an arrow through Earth pointing at the Sun, indicating noon, with the feathers of the arrow at midnight. Six months later, say 183 days, if Earth has rotated exactly 183 times on its axis, the arrow is pointing in the same direction, but with Earth on the other side of the Sun, it is the feathers that would be sunlit, not the point. But we know that 183 days later the arrow WILL BE pointing at the sun, so Earth has rotated 183 complete times, plus another 180 degrees (1/2 rotation) for the arrow to point to the Sun each day at noon. Hence, 183 1/2 rotations in 183 days, with each day completing one full rotation plus just under another degree of rotation to accommodate Earth’s orbital movement around the Sun, about 1.6 M miles a day. Repeat another six months and Earth has to have rotated another 1/2 rotation more than the number of days. Hence, 366 rotations in a 365 day year.
OK, done with this.
So when is Willis going to submit his great stuff to be published?
Gkell1
And again I say to one of your posts… wait, what?
Or to put it more clearly, what does this have to do with the article?
Thanks Frans and the Mayor of Venus, I was never aware of that.
Hi mr Eschenbach
I am wondering about the “plateau” in the cooling ? do you have a theory there as well?
Like all great ideas, this one seems obvious when looked at through the retrospectoscope. I guess it doesn’t fit the narrative of the “made to order” science that is so common in the climate arena so no one wants to look at it.
As usual, an edifying and fascinating (and fantastically succinct) analysis from the always enlightening Mr. Eschenbach!
+1. Great, and in retrospect obvious, analysis. Sorry AJ, you seem to have said that already.
Thanks Willis.
As usual, excellent and clear. The one thing that bothers me is those warm outliers prior to sunrise. What sort of phenomenon can account for the appearance of the morning sun’s cooling things by several degrees C? Fog? Temperature inversion? Maybe if I had spent more time in the tropics (too bloody hot for me) the answer would be obvious. Anyway, I’d like to see a plausible explanation just for reassurance that they don’t signal some sort of a data collection/analysis artifact that also somehow affects the daytime data.
The temperature would continue to sink until the sunshine became strong enough (high enough in the sky) to overcome the natural cooling from no sun.
Isn’t this the time when “green house gases” would have most effect?
The thought then arises that someone (not me – I’ve tried playing with R and I don’t have enough years left ;-)) might be able to see if there is any detectable signal with increasing CO2 and other gases over time?
Tisdale and Eschenbach (and of course Watts will go down in history as Climate heroes – that’s my prediction.
Thanks Willis, up in the great white north we have a similar “control” . The forecast is for very high temps but as soon as temps go up in late morning clouds form (with occasional t-storms) from evaporating late spring mountain snow and moisture from our spring rains and voila the temps are generally 3-5 degrees colder than what was predicted. I have really like these reports, fascinating.
The same thing happens in Arctic coastal areas in summer. The land warms until it creates an onshore sea breeze that cools the air for several mile inland by tens of degrees.
Passes the smell test. Only thing now is to wed it to some cloud data; if such a thing exists.
Another fascinating read thank you. You make it easier to understand what is going on both in the ocean and in your head as you work through the data. Talking of data that is probably why the buoys are not being looked after who wants data when it doesn’t follow the party line or the money can go on the gravy train as Dr Tim Ball wrote in his post,
To cover these diversions they took money from other programs. There are fewer weather stations in Canada now than in 1960, many replaced with unreliable Automatic Weather Observing Stations (AWOS). Many important activities and data collection practices were abandoned. While I was chair of the Assiniboine River Management Advisory Board (ARMAB) in Manitoba the worst flood on record occurred. We asked Water Resources why they didn’t forecast the event. They said they had no data on the amount of water in the snow in the valley. We learned EC canceled flights that used special radar to determine water content. Savings, as I recall, were $26,000. The cost of unexpected flood damage was $7 million to one level of government alone. Loss of weather data means long continuous records, essential to any climate studies, are impossible.
And who wants to hear that the earth can and does look after itself and has been and will keep doing it.
James Bull
The fact that our planet Earth has to have its own self-regulating thermostat system seems to me to be self-evident, otherwise life as we know it today simply would not exist.
Cumulus cloud formation and their resultant thunderstorms appear to be a major part of this thermostat process, doubtless overlooked or underestimated (deliberately?) in most/all IPCC climate models.
Climate models don’t have the resolution (grid size) to see a Thunderstorm. Or the physics to properly simulate convection.
The diurnal wake up processes that Willis describes here, with his thundercloud development, in the afternoon, reminds me of summer life in Saint Louis Mo. County region in the mid 1960s.
It seemed that every Sunday afternoon at around 4PM, there was a thunderstorm front passing through, and one of my colleagues and I, took that as an occasion to get out of our apartment complex swimming pool, and head out into the county farmland to set up our cameras in the cornfields to take lightning pictures. It was our regular entertainment.
Well we stopped doing that after one day, watching a huge tornado sweep through our favorite cornfield, and sending all those corn cobs to heaven. Our camera gear never went back in the car so fast before or since.
But fun aside, Willis’s essay gives voice to one of the reasons why I detest the Kevin Trenberth et al global energy budget cartoon, with its 342 W/m^2 ho hum nothing ever happens static planet earth model.
So as I recall, the 390 W/m^2 number, corresponds to a black body Temperature of 288 K. Well you can all check that with your BB IR Applet
So taking that as a base number, we can take (342 / 390)^0.25 x 288 and come up with 278.7 kelvin, instead of 288.
So Trenberth’s magic number cannot get the planet up to beyond 4.5 deg. C no matter how long that steady state persists.
But noting Willis’s assertion that the sun always shines 24 hours per day straight down on the “subsolar” point, where it is always noon, and at a TSI of circa 1362 W/m^2; if that all survived the atmospheric transport, it could send the surface heading towards (1362 / 390)^0.25 x 288 K which is 394 K or about 121 deg. C
Luckily, even with CAVU morning weather, it seems that on the surface it is only a mere 1,000 W/m^2 so we have (1,000 / 390)^0.25 x 288 which is now a tolerable 364.4 K or 91.25 deg. C
Now that is more like something we can live with. In fact I do believe that some actual blacktop Temperatures of that order have indeed been measured.
So how does that grab you ?? Imagine that Willis’s thunderstorm regulator decided to take a vacation. If something wasn’t shutting off that solar blow torch each and every day, with processes that happen in as short as atto-seconds as far as we know, then we would indeed be cooking on planet earth.
Now in the dry arid tropical deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, then the daily afternoon surface Temperatures can get to around +60 deg. C or 333K. which corresponds to (333 / 288)^4 x 390, or 697 W/m^2 BB total radiant emittance or about 1.8 times Trenberth’s assumed value.
So look to those hot deserts for earth’s maxi cooling; not to the ice masses of Antarctica or Greenland, which are puny radiators.
So while Willis’s thunderheads are building during the day, the radiative cooling engine is also operating in top gear, to help keep planet earth livable.
You should bookmark this essay of Willis, and send it to all of your friends.
Maybe copy in Kevin Trenberth, and tell him that there is nothing in the entire universe, that can sense, observe, measure, evade, react to, warn against, or take any sort of action with regard to ANY average of ANYTHING !
Physics takes place instantly in the shortest time units we know how to measure or take data in, and in our models, we can explain things down to 10^-43 seconds or thereabouts. …(some people can; not me)…
Averages and other statistical paraphernalia, are somewhat akin to Origami.
If you take a suitable square table napkin, and you apply some 4,000 year old algorithm to that napkin, you can actually turn it into a frog, that can hop; as did an elderly Chinese lady who gave that frog to me last Sunday ,morning at a local MacDonalds restaurant. I now have it on my car passenger seat, to remind me, that there are all sorts of algorithms that can turn real weather data, into frogs, that lead you to believe things, that simply are not real.
I’m almost embarrassed to have to share the same land of birth, that gave us Kevin Trenberth.
g
Hey Willis,
Great article once again. Off the subject, it seems that plants have an adaptability which is most probably genetic in function. They adapt very quickly to changes in atmospheric co2 levels. This adaptation would indicate that plant life in the past has had to adjust itself to changes in various levels of co2, which means that, most probably, co2 has been at lower and higher levels of co2 in the past, which, it seems, has been hard to determine. If plants have the ability to adapt to higher levels of co2 in the atmosphere and also have the ability to decrease water consumption by decreasing the exposure to the atmosphere, it would indicate that there has been higher levels of co2 in the atmosphere and probably at many times in the past. Adaptation comes from exposure to variation in climate.
Just a thought.
R.
Well, of course plants have the ability to adapt to higher levels of CO2. They came into existence when CO2 levels were 10 times higher than they are today. Plants like CO2. This is what they photosynthesise to make food. And that food is also the base of our own food chain. Without the Plants and the CO2 all life on this planet would perish.
From a geological perspective, CO2 levels today are at an all-time low.
http://www.catholica.com.au/misc/images2013/AJB-Global-Temp-Atmospheric-CO2-over-Geologic-Time_640x513.gif
MikeB.
See http://WWW.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html. Plant respiration adjusts to levels of co2 and proves atmospheric co2 levels have been much higher and lower during more recent times…A few million years rather than hundreds of million years.
This helps argue against the theories that co2 levels have remained at or near 280 ppm over the last few million years. Per plant fossil study, the atmospheric volume of co2 has been much higher than current levels within leat few million years and life survived.
R
The drop in temperature of the North Atlantic is already visible in Greenland.
http://www.dmi.dk/uploads/tx_dmidatastore/webservice/e/n/i/b/m/Melt_combine.png
Left: Maps showing areas where melting has taken place within the last two days. Right: The percentage of the total area of the ice where the melting occurred from January 1 until today (in blue). For comparison the average for the period 1990-2011 is shown in the dark grey curve. The variation from year to year for each of the days during the melt season are shown as the gray shaded area.
The increase in ionization of air over the polar circle increases albedo.
http://sol.spacenvironment.net/raps_ops/current_files/rtimg/dose.15km.png
And in the fact that I am still wearing my winter woolies in the UK midlands.
Nice work Willis. It looks like a lot of cold outliers in fig5. What % of the data are they? It suggests a quite assymetric distribution of temperatures.
This is good stuff Willis. Climate model “parameters” for all these processes are largely guesswork and make a nonsense of all the claims about them being built on basic, known physical laws. Here you have something concrete.
.
Morning cooling caused by afternoon clouds ? I don’t think that came out quite the way you intended. 😉
The ERBE reflected SW needs to account for differing flyover times at each location. It has a near polar orbit with a period of about 93 min. ( it does about 15 orbits per day ) . This calculation requires an estimation of cloud cover. For some obscure reason they decided to assume ( as one does ) constant meteorology through out the day. The tropical equivalent of a spherical cow.
This wonderful pattern is an alias of the daily cycle reflected out to 36 days. ( The total orbit repeat is 72 days but each orbit passes equator twice : up and down , so the tropical pattern is 36d. ) In fact this is two 72d cycles superimposed. Each has a 12h bump and a 12h flat: night time: no reflected SW. So the bump pattern close to 6h-18h cycle.
Now it looks like we can see the daily anomaly profile with the mid-day dip reflected in this data.
By making the spurious assumption of constant cloud cover in processing the actual SW measurements they have created a record of the averaged daily cloud cover.
Another interesting feature is the 1991 red line. It sets out from the pack in the latter half of 1991 and shows the effects of Mt Pinatubo.
Checking back on my notes, this alias should be a good indication of the daily SW albedo changes. The calculation is done taking into account zenith angle at flyover time and assuming constant SW meteo throughout the day. So an increase in reflected SW should be a reasonably good indication of changes in SW albedo.
What surprises me is the fact that the diurnal temperature cycle is fine tuned to plus or minus 0.4 deg C (Anomalies fig. 4) while the average temperature can vary from 23 to 28 deg C (Averages fig. 2) – without much influence on the diurnal pattern.
In other words: why do the same cloud patterns form in the eastern pacific around 23 deg C and in the western pacific around 28 deg C?
Should’t we expect thunderstorms already at sunrise near australia?
I understand Willis’ argument regarding the existence of a governor as being dependent on absolute temperature and not relative temperature. What am I missing?
Apparently, temperature is only half of the cause of clouds. Try biological dust for the other half of cloud formation.
…or Influence of Cosmic Rays on Earth’s Climate by Henrik Svensmark shows another contributor to cloud formation. CERN’s CLOUD project discovered another….
dependent on absolute temperature
============
that cannot be the whole story, because warm air rises relative to cold air, not relative to absolute temperature.
what changes however is the amount of moisture in the rising air, which is a function of absolute temperature.
so while you get rising air during the day regardless, the warmer the underlying ocean the greater the chance of thunderstorms.
so while you get rising air during the day regardless, the warmer the underlying ocean the greater the chance of thunderstorms.
============
Of course. I just don’t remember Willis talking much about the amount of moisture in the rising air with respect to his proposed governor mechanism. As far as I understand it it’s an absolute temperature threshold that supposedly triggers the onset times of the emergent phenomena – clouds, thunderstorms, squall lines – and not just a temperature difference that results in a variation of the amount of moisture rising. I’m afraid figure 2 is not supporting his idea. From Willis’ earlier posts I would have expected rather different diurnal temp profiles at different longitudes, converging at the onset times of cloud and thunderstorm formation.
Fascinating…
I hope that is clear enough. I’m familiar with this so may be is clear to me and not others.
Behind the bumps there is double dip annual cycle of the tropics. There is a regular 2-3-2-3 monthly pattern in the deeper dips. I do not know where that comes from. Very likely also an alias.
This data was further processed into circa 30 day monthly averages which produces another alias ! The 36d and 30d periods combine to produce an alias of about 6 months ( 198 days IIRC ). Since the annual cycle is two six month bumps this aliased-aliased daily signal was a significant distortion of the annual cycle. This was picked up by Kevin Trenberth on one of his better days.
This is a beautiful example what aliasing does and why it is essential to do proper anti-alias filtering before resampling data.
Had they filter out the 36 day cycle with a well behaved low pass filter they would have got a reliable monthly resampling.
Professor Humlum discusses the apparent relationship between tropical cloud cover and global temperature at his climate4you site:
http://climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3 and TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif
http://climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3 and TropicalCloudCoverHIGH-MEDIUM-LOW ISCCP.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20and%20TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif
Oh no, is it just me or do I detect a distinct “pause” in both of those temperature plots? And by a professor of all, tsk tsk. The Obama administration’s data scrubbers should be notified for an adjustment session immediately.
No, it’s just you Wayne, there is only one temperature plot.
Here’s another pause: TLS:
Looks like the only thing that is not pausing is Karl et al’s latest attempt at gerry-rigging that surface record.
The above graph: the data ends in 2011 and 2009. Is there an updated graph? I could be wrong but doesn’t the graph show a negative cloud forcing from 1983 to 1997 then the “pause”?
yes indeed, I was a bit too brief. The stratosphere works the other way around: volacanoes initially cause warming , not cooling.
More detailed explanation here and updated graph:
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=902
In figure 3, the late night reduction of cooling corsponds to a rise in rel humidity, there a big change in the cooling rate in the middle of the night in figure 4, does it too corspond to high rel humidity (temp dropping down to near dew point )?
In figure 3, the late night reduction of cooling corsponds to a rise in rel humidity, there a big change in the cooling rate in the middle of the night in figure 4, does it too corspond to high rel humidity (temp dropping down to near dew point )?
Dew points do tend to put a floor on temperature change. Only really dry air can have large downward temperature swings.
It continues to cool until sunrise, just at a lower rate.
Hi Willis, there’s something here I don’t quite understand.
Looking at figure 4 you see approximately the same temperature profile for each of the buoy lines, with a clear different between the warmer and cooler records.
But if the mid-morning “kink” is an emergent phenomenon triggered by temperature, why does the same thing happen at below 24C in some regions but above 28C in others? Why are thunderstorms triggered at approx 4pm despite the absolute temps being several degrees apart?
I would expect the cooler regions to continue increasing to well after 4pm since they are still many degrees cooler than the regions where the storms started at 28C+ ?
Not Absolute Temp, but maybe Temperature differential?
Don’t see how that would work – a kettle boils at 100C whether in a hot or a cold room.
Maybe the length of time it takes a thunderstorm to develop is unrelated to the surface temperature. After all, water vapor, in large quantities, has to meander up to >30,000ft.
I had the good fortune to spend some three years in Singapore long ago, well before people worried about global temperatures. I do remember the nights didn’t offer much relief from the days and if you complained the cry would come back “It’s not the heat. It’s the humidity.” The afternoon rain showers were so normal they got no comment and could be avoided by walking on the other side of the street. If you were unfortunate and it was raining on both sides there was always a street vendor who would sell you a varnished paper umbrella for a dollar. If you didn’t have a dollar, no problem, the rain was pleasantly warm and never lasted long.
Seems like a reasonable explanation of limiting maximum temperatures. However, the global warming doom mongers are all about mean temperatures.
My layman’s experience with cloud cover is generally, cooler in the day warmer at night. That generally goes for air humidity too. This leads me to suspect that the so called greenhouse gasses are more a function of basic two way insulation than “back radiation”. I suspect if one adjusts for changing atmospheric pressure, the difference in mean temperature at any particular location checked over the years on the same date, with different weather conditions, will show very little variation, regardless of the massive swings in overhead “greenhouse” water vapour or clouds.
I will leave it for a scientist with funding to check this out properly. Don’t forget to adjust for the differing barometric pressure readings!
Mind you, thinking about this further, clear non humid days followed by a cloudy night would produce the opposite to the reverse situation. Then there is wind transferring heat horrizontally to consider. Still, I’m sure a budding scientist could find ways to negate these other variables…. Given enough funding 😀
With you there wickedwenchfan. I have noticed many times over the years how during a clear sunny and low humidity day temperature climbs. With no change in conditions temperature drops quite sharply after sunset. If a bank of low cloud moves over, temperature starts to climb, but never exceeds daytime maximum. My layman interpretation of these events is ‘radiation’ from the bottom of the cloud layer is reducing the rate of radiative cooling of the surface allowing the more deeply embedded heat energy to warm the air above. But as you say, we will have to leave this to the budding scientists if there are any.
Richard111 commented on The Daily Albedo Cycle.
in response to wickedwenchfan:
I’ve spent the last 5 or 6 years following this.
65 some million Surface station records from 1950 show slightly more cooling at night than warming the prior day.
Then and IR thermometer when pointed to a clear sky when the humidity is low is quite cold, 80F to over 100F colder than the ground. Cloud bottoms can be as warm as 20F or 30F colder than the surface, thin high clouds are 50F-60F colder than the ground. On hot high humidity days, clear sky is much warmer 50F-60F colder than the ground.
I started doing astrophotography, and noticed how quickly it cooled once the sun went down, got me thinking, got me to get some data and look at it.
In the tropics, the clouds tend to dissipate right after the thunder squalls. You get these really tremendous late afternoon squalls followed by clear blue sunsets. Great viewing of the constellations unless a marine layer haze sets in. So the clouds have no night time impact. This is one of the many asymmetrical phenomena that occur in climate that do not make it into the numerical models.
wwf
I have been plotting the barometric pressure since December 2014 on a daily basis. I am using a weather station that you can find almost anywhere. I plot each change of the digital digits which is .01 inch of mercury. I gave up trying to use time as a cadence because sometimes the pressure does not change for several hours. I have established a set of “opinion” plots that represent the shape of the wave itself. The one I am using presently is a “low opinion” because the barometric pressure is at a low state and has remained constant since the solar activity has basically dissappeared from its interferrence of the diurnal shape.
I recently found that between high noon and eight pm it doesn’t change its shape (during the period using the opinion as a reference). The AM portion can be referenced using the high noon point as a reference and aligning backwards until it fits the pattern. If the midnight point is used, nothing correlates.
Like you, I am a layman looking for data. I gave up on the published data and started using my Christmas present (to myself). I suggest you do the same. I would love to start comparing the daily cycle as it happens with other people in different parts of the world to see if the cycle looks the same. I have confirmed many times this ESR cycle. My ranch name El Starvo Rancho.
If you do attempt this, I could lead you through the process of seeing the data.
LeeO
Obscurity is personal security.