Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Following up on a suggestion made to me by one of my long-time scientific heroes, Dr. Fred Singer, I’ve been looking at the rainfall dataset from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. Here’s s the TRMM average rainfall data for the entire mission to date:
Figure 1. Average annual rainfall, metres per year, as measured by the TRMM satellite. The TRMM satellite only measures from 40°N to 40°S, hence the “Tropical” in the name. Data source: KNMI: Click on “Monthly Observations”, click the TRMM data checkbox and then click “Select field” at the top of the page. When the page comes up, the NetCDF file link is at the very bottom of the page
Note the horizontal yellow/red area generally girdling the planet above or around the equator. This is the average position of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). The ITCZ is the location of the energetic deep tropical circulation that powers the great atmospheric Hadley circulation. As you can see, the ITCZ is the wettest large area of the planet, with over 4 metres (13 feet) of rain in some areas. Although this is the average position, it moves during the year. You can see in the Pacific south of the Equator near South America the position it takes over part of the year, as a “ghost” of the average position parallel to the Equator.
Now, the TRMM dataset is fascinating in and of itself, but I was interested in it for a specific reason.
My hypothesis is that the earth has a thermoregulatory system keeping the global temperature within narrow bounds (e.g. ±0.3°C over the 20th century). A major part of this thermoregulatory system is that the tropical cumulus and thunderstorms act to limit the tropical temperatures on both the warm and cool ends. Generally in the tropics, when a morning is cooler than usual, cumulus clouds form later in the day and they are weaker. The same is true of the thunderstorms. On cool days, thunderstorms form later than average or not at all. As a result of the reduction of clouds and thunderstorms, the surface is strongly warmed by the sun, and there is reduced loss of surface energy via the various thunderstorm mechanisms.
On days that are warmer than average, the reverse is true. There is an early and strong development of the tropical cumulus field. In addition, the cumulus formation is also earlier and stronger. Both of these act to cool the surface, with both the cumulus and the thunderstorms able to not only slow the warming, but actually cool the surface below their initiation temperatures. I describe the entire daily cycle in my post Emergent Climate Phenomena.
A hypothesis requires observational support, of course. Now, with such a system, according to my hypothesis as the tropical temperature rises, the albedo should go up, and the thunderstorms should also increase. Do the observations support this?
As I’ve discussed before, the CERES satellite radiation dataset lets us test the first of these consequences of my ideas. If my hypothesis is true, in the tropics, we should see a positive correlation of the albedo and the temperature. Here is that relationship on a 1°x1° gridcell basis:
Figure 2. Correlation of albedo and temperature. A positive correlation means that when temperature increases, so does albedo, and vice versa.
As is predicted by my hypothesis, in the tropics and particularly in the areas just north and south of the Equator where the ITCZ wanders around, there is a strong positive correlation of albedo with temperature.
However, I’d been unable to get any global handle on the effects of the thunderstorms until I started looking at the TRMM. Across the tropics in general and particularly in the ITCZ, the rainfall is from thunderstorms, towering storms that drive the deep tropical convection. Having the rainfall data allows me to do the same thing I did with the albedo—see how the rainfall varies with the temperature. IF my hypothesis is correct, tropical rainfall should increase with temperature, particularly in the ITCZ areas. Figure 3 shows the correlation of rainfall with temperature:
Figure 3. As in Figure 2, correlations. This shows the correlation of rainfall and temperature. A positive correlation means that when temperature increases, so does rainfall, and vice versa.
Now, in the yellow to red sections, as the temperature increases the rainfall increases. As always, there are mysterious and interesting things revealed by any new observational dataset. In this case, the rainfall increases with temperature in the ocean and in the drier parts of the land. But in the wetter parts of the land such as tropical Africa and the Amazon, the rainfall is about neutral or actually decreases with respect to temperature .. go figure.
In any case, over the tropics in general (shown by dashed lines at 23.5°N/S of the Equator) the correlation is generally positive. So for the tropics, my hypothesis is indeed verified—increasing temperature leads to increasing thunderstorms. You can also see how the extra-tropical areas in general are more negatively correlated than is the tropics.
The TRMM dataset also allows us to see not only the correlation, but how much actual change in rainfall we are talking about. Figure 4 shows the change in rainfall per degree C of warming.
Figure 4. Change in annual rainfall per degree celsius of warming.
Now, this is indeed interesting … across the tropics, on average we get 22 mm/year more rain for each degree of surface temperature increase. And since the trends have the same signs as the correlations, as with the correlations the areas north and south of the tropics generally show falling rainfall with increasing temperatures.
Here’s the beauty part. I realized that we can use these TRMM rainfall figures to estimate the amount of energy involved. The main cooling mechanism of thunderstorms is evaporative cooling. We can calculate the energy involved in that evaporative cooling by noting that to reverse the old saying, with rainfall it’s “what comes down must go up” … meaning that whatever water rains down, it had to be evaporated first. To evaporate a cubic metre of seawater in one year takes a constant energy flux of about 80 W/m2. This works out to about 0.08 W/m2 to evaporate one mm of rain. So let me use that conversion, 0.08 W/m2 of evaporative cooling per millimetre of rain, to show the same TRMM data from Figure 1 in terms of the energy needed to annually evaporate the amount of water of the gridcell annual rainfall.
Figure 5. Evaporative surface cooling from the evaporation of the amount of water in the annual rainfall. Annual rainfall from TRMM as shown in Figure 1.
I was pleasantly surprised by the very large amount of energy being moved constantly by thunderstorms in the ITCZ and elsewhere. In parts of the ITCZ, the evaporative cooling effect is well over 300 W/m2 … we can compare that to the cooling effect of the earths variable albedo, in W/m2, shown below in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Surface cooling from the reflection of the solar energy by the earth’s albedo. This includes both surface and cloud reflections. I note in passing the odd equality of the mean hemispheric reflections.
Taken together these last two graphs show something interesting. In the tropics, the average surface cooling from evaporation is about the same as the cooling from albedo reflection of solar energy. Both are about 90 W/m2. However, the variation in thunderstorm evaporative cooling (Fig. 5, from 0 – 375 W/m2) is much larger than the variation in reflected energy (Fig. 6, from 50 -175 W/m2).
To assess the instantaneous strength of these cloud and thunderstorm thermoregulatory mechanisms, we must bear in mind that these are annual averages. Even in the ITCZ it doesn’t rain all the time. So when it is raining, the effect would be much larger. How much larger? Well, a lot. My guess from living in the tropics near and in the ITCZ is that you might be under a thunderstorm maybe 5%-10% of the time on an annual basis … and if that’s the case, then the instantaneous evaporative cooling effect of individual thunderstorms will be about 10 to 20 times larger than the annual averages shown in Figure 5.
Let me move on to the question of what happens to the cloud reflective cooling and the evaporative cooling as the surface warms. This can be calculated as the trend of evaporative cooling in W/m2 for each additional degree C of warming. This is the same rainfall trend data shown in Figure 4, but expressed as the energy needed to evaporate that amount of rain. Figure 7 shows the change in surface evaporative cooling in watts/m2 per degree C of warming (W/m2/°C):
Figure 7. Change in thunderstorm evaporative cooling with surface warming, in W/m2 per degree celsius of surface warming. Negative values indicate a reduction in evaporative cooling with increasing temperatures.[NOTE: Figure updated.]
It is important to note that this average of the surface-cooling effect of the clouds and thunderstorms hides the fact that the effects are not applied evenly across an area. Instead, the clouds and thunderstorms form only over the warmer areas, and move huge amounts of energy out of those warmer areas and up into the troposphere. As a result, their efforts are concentrated exactly where and when they are needed. Cooling is applied only when and where the surface is warmer, and warming is applied only when and where it is cooler.
To close the circle, we can compare the amount of change in evaporation (Figure 7) per degree of warming with the change in reflective cooling per degree of surface warming (Figure 8 below). Figure 8 shows the change in albedo per degree of warming times the gridcell annual average downwelling solar.
Figure 8. Change in the amount of reflected solar energy due to increased albedo for every degree of warming. As in Figure 7, negative values indicate additional warming with increasing temperature.
Near the poles there is a strong negative correlation between albedo and temperature, meaning that there is reflective warming (negative values in Figure 8). However, because the sun is so weak in those areas the additional warming in actual watts per degree of temperature rise is not that large.
Figure 8 also shows that as the surface warms, the change in W/m2 of tropical evaporative cooling per degree C of warming is about twice that of the change in W/m2 of reflective cooling (Fig. 8, 1.2 W/m2 tropical increase in solar reflections per °C of warming, versus Fig. 7, 2.2 W/m2/°C increased evaporative cooling)
Finally, note that albedo changes and evaporative cooling are only two of the ways that clouds and thunderstorms cool the surface. As a result, the effect will be slightly larger than the numbers above indicate. I append a more complete list in the notes.
So that’s why I wanted to look at the TRMM data. I wanted to determine if my hypothesis about thunderstorms increasing with temperature is correct. And in the event, it appears that my hypothesis has been totally supported by the results.
CONCLUSIONS
• This is a significant addition to the variety of evidence that I’ve amassed showing that the earth indeed has strong thermoregulating mechanisms (see links below). It gives us an idea of the size of the cooling effect due to the tropical thunderstorms, along with actual values for the increase in thunderstorm cooling with increasing temperature.
• As is consonant with my hypothesis, both the tropical albedo and evaporative cooling increase with temperature, especially around the ITCZ.
• The evaporative cooling effect in the ITCZ is on the order of hundreds of watts per square metre. This is evidence of the strength of my hypothesized thermoregulatory mechanism.
• The change in evaporative cooling in the ITCZ is on the order of 10-20 W/m2 more evaporative cooling per degree celsius. This is evidence of the thermally responsive nature of the thermoregulatory mechanism.
• The thermoregulation from tropical clouds and thunderstorms occurs on a daily and hourly basis, not on the yearly basis shown in the Figures. As a result, we know that the instantaneous changes from clouds and thunderstorms are many times larger than the averages shown above. In addition the clouds and thunderstorms only emerge in response to local high temperatures, so their effect is not averaged across space and time as is shown in the Figures. The result is that the thermoregulatory system is applying cooling on the order of hundreds of watts/m2, but not blindly—the cooling is focused only where and when it is needed, towards the warmer sections of the local areas.
My best to you all at one am of a foggy night,
w.
To Avoid Misunderstandings: Let me request that if you disagree with someone, you quote the exact words you disagree with. This lets all of us understand just what you are objecting to.
TRMM Data: For convenience I’ve placed the KNMI TRMM netCDF file here
Ways Other Than Albedo and Evaporation That Thunderstorms Cool The Surface
Cold rain and cold wind. As the moist air rises inside the thunderstorm’s heat pipe, water condenses and falls. The water starts out at the very cold or freezing temperatures aloft. As a result, it cools the lower atmosphere it falls through, and it cools the surface when it hits. The falling rain also entrains a downwards wind which is strongly cooled by the evaporation of the falling raindrops. When it strikes the ground, this cold wind blows radially outwards from the center of the falling rain. Because it is much cooler than the surrounding air, this radial wind runs along the ground, cooling the surrounding area. When I lived in the tropics, at night this wind was often the first indication of a nearby thunderstorm, as it outpaces the rain. It smells wonderful, crisp like the pure upper air … and best of all, on a muggy tropical night it blows through the open windows of all the houses and chills the entire area surrounding the rain.
This combination of cold rain and cold wind could be a shocking change, particularly when I’d be running an open skiff across the ocean at night. The temperature would go from a warm tropical night before I’d hit the thunderstorm, to cold and shivering under the storm, and back into the warmth once I’d run clear of the storm. Not fun. Well, yeah, fun, but cold fun …
Modification of upper tropospheric ice crystal cloud amounts (Lindzen 2001, Spencer 2007) . These clouds form from the tiny ice particles that come out the top of the smokestack of the thunderstorm heat engines. It appears that the varying amounts of this type of clouds has a large radiative effect, as they are thought to warm (through IR absorption) more than they cool (through reflection).
Enhanced night-time radiation. Unlike long-lived stratus clouds, tropical cumulus and cumulonimbus often die out and vanish as the night cools, leading to the typically clear skies at dawn. This allows greatly increased nighttime surface radiative cooling to space.
Drying of the bulk atmosphere. Thunderstorms move huge amounts of air vertically at a rapid rate. During the ascent, almost all the water vapor is stripped from the rising air column and falls as rain. After exiting the top of the thunderstorms, the now-dry air descends in the area around and between the thunderstorms. And because this air is dryer than it would be without the thunderstorms, the reduced levels of water vapor allow for increased longwave radiative surface cooling in the bulk of the atmosphere between the storms.
I haven’t even attempted a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the global average size of those effects. And of course, having mentioned it, I now have to give it a shot. Rats, I thought I was almost done with this post … here we go.
The effect of the cold rain, well, in the tropics if the temperature is say 26°C and the rain is maybe at 10°C when it hits the ground, for each cubic metre of rain that’s about 2 W/m2 of cooling effect. (I use my rule of thumb, that 1 W/m2 over 1 year heats 1 cubic metre of water by 8°C.)
I couldn’t even guess the amount of change from the Iris Effect per degree of surface warming. I’ll leave that to the good Drs. Lindzen and Spencer.
The night-time radiation … the night-time cloud radiative effect is entirely longwave, and is about 26 W/m2 of warming. So if there’s say a 10% decrease in night-time clouds that would also be one or two watts/m2.
Finally, the drying of the bulk atmosphere. This is a tough one, in part because the maximum daytime drying will likely occur around the afternoon peak in the temperature, and will be at a minimum around dawn when it’s cool. Hang on, I’ve got an idea … ok, MODTRAN says that in the tropics, if I set the water vapor to zero it lets an additional 58 W/m2 through the atmosphere.
So if the drying of the bulk atmosphere is on the order of 10%, it would be a cooling effect of about 6 W/m2.
Between these three, then, we have a total cooling effect of somewhere around 10 W/m2 on a 24/7 basis. Compare this to the thunderstorm evaporative effect, which Figure 5 says in the tropics averages about 90 W/m2. Thus, it appears that these secondary effects increase the total thunderstorm evaporative effects by on the order of 10%.
There is one more factor that increases thunderstorm cooling, but generally is not occurring on the above Figures. This is when a storm is delivering freezing rain and snow. In that case, the latent heat of fusion also needs to be considered. This is the energy needed to melt the ice at the surface. Energy to melt ice is about an eighth of the energy needed to evaporate the same amount of water. So for polar storms with snow, sleet, hail, or graupel, they would have a total cooling effect about 10% greater than a storm delivering the same amount of rain.
Further Reading About My Thermoregulatory Hypothesis
The Thermostat Hypothesis 2009-06-14
Abstract: The Thermostat Hypothesis is that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth. This keeps the earth at an equilibrium temperature.
Which way to the feedback? 2010-12-11
There is an interesting new study by Lauer et al. entitled “The Impact of Global Warming on Marine Boundary Layer Clouds over the Eastern Pacific—A Regional Model Study” [hereinafter Lauer10]. Anthony Watts has discussed some early issues with the paper here. The Lauer10 study has been controversial because it found that…
The Details Are In The Devil 2010-12-13
I love thought experiments. They allow us to understand complex systems that don’t fit into the laboratory. They have been an invaluable tool in the scientific inventory for centuries. Here’s my thought experiment for today. Imagine a room. In a room dirt collects, as you might imagine. In my household…
Further Evidence for my Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis 2011-06-07
For some time now I’ve been wondering what kind of new evidence I could come up with to add support to my Thunderstorm Thermostat hypothesis (q.v.). This is the idea that cumulus clouds and thunderstorms combine to cap the rise of tropical temperatures. In particular, thunderstorms are able to drive…
It’s Not About Feedback 2011-08-14
The current climate paradigm believed by most scientists in the field can be likened to the movement of balls on a pool table. Figure 1. Pool balls on a level table. Response is directly proportional to applied force (double the force, double the distance). There are no “preferred” positions—every position…
A Demonstration of Negative Climate Sensitivity 2012-06-19
Well, after my brief digression to some other topics, I’ve finally been able to get back to the reason that I got the CERES albedo and radiation data in the first place. This was to look at the relationship between the top of atmosphere (TOA) radiation imbalance and the surface…
The Tao of El Nino 2013-01-28
I was wandering through the graphics section of the TAO buoy data this evening. I noted that they have an outstanding animation of the most recent sixty months of tropical sea temperatures and surface heights. Go to their graphics page, click on “Animation”. Then click on “Animate”. When the new…
Emergent Climate Phenomena 2013-02-07
In a recent post, I described how the El Nino/La Nina alteration operates as a giant pump. Whenever the Pacific Ocean gets too warm across its surface, the Nino/Nina pump kicks in and removes the warm water from the Pacific, pumping it first west and thence poleward. I also wrote…
Slow Drift in Thermoregulated Emergent Systems 2013-02-08
In my last post, “Emergent Climate Phenomena“, I gave a different paradigm for the climate. The current paradigm is that climate is a system in which temperature slavishly follows the changes in inputs. Under my paradigm, on the other hand, natural thermoregulatory systems constrain the temperature to vary within a…
Air Conditioning Nairobi, Refrigerating The Planet 2013-03-11
I’ve mentioned before that a thunderstorm functions as a natural refrigeration system. I’d like to explain in a bit more detail what I mean by that. However, let me start by explaining my credentials as regards my knowledge of refrigeration. The simplest explanation of my refrigeration credentials is that I…
Dehumidifying the Tropics 2013-04-21
I once had the good fortune to fly over an amazing spectacle, where I saw all of the various stages of emergent phenomena involving thunderstorms. It happened on a flight over the Coral Sea from the Solomon Islands, which are near the Equator, south to Brisbane. Brisbane is at 27°…
Decadal Oscillations Of The Pacific Kind 2013-06-08
The recent post here on WUWT about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has a lot of folks claiming that the PDO is useful for predicting the future of the climate … I don’t think so myself, and this post is about why I don’t think the PDO predicts the climate…
Stalking the Rogue Hotspot 2013-08-21
[I’m making this excellent essay a top sticky post for a day or two, I urge sharing it far and wide. New stories will appear below this one. – Anthony] Dr. Kevin Trenberth is a mainstream climate scientist, best known for inadvertently telling the world the truth about the parlous…
The Magnificent Climate Heat Engine 2013-12-21
I’ve been reflecting over the last few days about how the climate system of the earth functions as a giant natural heat engine. A “heat engine”, whether natural or man-made, is a mechanism that converts heat into mechanical energy of some kind. In the case of the climate system, the…
The Thermostatic Throttle 2013-12-28
I have theorized that the reflective nature of the tropical clouds, in particular those of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) just above the equator, functions as the “throttle” on the global climate engine. We’re all familiar with what a throttle does, because the gas pedal on your car controls the…
On The Stability and Symmetry Of The Climate System 2014-01-06
The CERES data has its problems, because the three datasets (incoming solar, outgoing longwave, and reflected shortwave) don’t add up to anything near zero. So the keepers of the keys adjusted them to an artificial imbalance of +0.85 W/m2 (warming). Despite that lack of accuracy, however, the CERES data is…
Dust In My Eyes 2014-02-13
I was thinking about “dust devils”, the little whirlwinds of dust that you see on a hot day, and they reminded me that we get dulled by familiarity with the wonders of our planet. Suppose, for example, you that “back in the olden days” your family lived for generations in…
The Power Stroke 2014-02-27
I got to thinking about the well-known correlation of El Ninos and global temperature. I knew that the Pacific temperatures lead the global temperatures, and the tropics lead the Pacific, but I’d never looked at the actual physical distribution of the correlation. So I went to the CERES dataset, and…
Albedic Meanderings 2015-06-03
I’ve been considering the nature of the relationship between the albedo and temperature. I have hypothesized elsewhere that variations in tropical cloud albedo are one of the main mechanisms that maintain the global surface temperature within a fairly narrow range (e.g. within ± 0.3°C during the entire 20th Century). To…
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Willis,
Nice work. More evidence the tuned positive feedback of water vapor forcing in the GCMs is dead wrong.
Have looked over Dr Roy Spencer’s latest blog post on his work in regards to water vapor feedbacks measured with the AMSU and its comparison to a GCM tuned water vapor forcing?
There I can see it on the maps.
40 deg. S latitude goes right smack dab through Wanganui.
Went through there on the back of a 350 Norton, just to check that out.
g
There is also an interesting article along these lines called, “New Evidence Regarding Tropical Water Vapor Feedback, Lindzen’s Iris Efffect, and the Missing Hot Spot” on Dr. Roy Spencer’s web site.
http://www.drroyspencer.com
Willis says but the only problem is it does not work in the long run, or even in the short run as is evidenced time and time again by the many abrupt past climatic changes, and the changes from a glacial to inter-glacial state.
Talk about insane here Willis has a theory that is PROVEN to be wrong by the historical climatic record and yet he goes right ahead and criticizes al other climatic theories that conform to the historical climatic record such as the one I have proposed.
Now that does not make sense to me.
Salvatore, I think that Willis is right on the spot with this problem. Just check this temperature graph for 600 million years.
?w=720
There is clear top cap on Earth temperature. Somewhere around 26C which interestingly corresponds with sea temperature found by Willis in “Albedic Meanderings” post, where albedo is starting to increase.
You can explain flat temperature graph only by some thermo regulatory mechanism with strictly defined temperature level.
It is very simply possible, that based on current configuration of Earth, gravity, density of atmosphere, atmosphere height this is maximum temperature of Earth.
With increasing energy input, only tropical band of saturated temperature 26C is widening. And only area outside of this band is able to warm up. This is in line with findings that tropics are refusing to warm, what was impossible to explain by GW theory.
Wait it depends on what one means when referring to a thermo regulatory mechanism. If it means a range of plus or minus .3c as Willis suggested, to it does not hold up, if your talking about a range of plus or minus 6c or so that is a different story but a thermo regulatory mechanism in that context is meaningless.
In addition I am talking about the globe as a whole not the tropics which feature much greater climate stability.
As I have said his theory as a daily regulator of the climate in the context of the climate being in a given a given climate regime has merit.
.
26C is also the temperature considered to be necessary to support intensification of tropical cyclones.
The rise in temperature that does happen is in the regions below the heavily buffered maximum temperature. The average rises but the maximums don’t rise much at all.
The system Willis describes has a lower boundary. There is no negative portion of the regulator. If there is not enough energy arriving at the Equator then the thunderstorms don’t form at all. They can’t do anything less than not kick in.
If one were to hook up the Earth to a cable and tow it away from The Sun then at some point clouds would cease to form on the Equator. Towing it further away wouldn’t form a negative regulator. The regulator Willis describes has done all it can do by not forming at all.
So, no, Willis is not ‘insane’. You were so busy typing (as usual) that you completely forgot to read and digest.
Nice work joelobryan says . I say are you kidding it does NOT hold up because if it did the climate would flat line forever within a narrow plus or minus.3c range.
How obvious does it have to be? Wow!
a) Stop thread bombing anything Willis publishes
b) Think about what Willis is saying before typing.
c) See my earlier reply to your last ill conceived post.
Obviously somewhere beyond your comprehension.
Review the concept of “potential energy surfaces”. If could very well be that there is a strong thermoregulatory mechanism that caps the maximum SST/air temperatures and has a dominant impact in today’s climate. However, if something radically changes, the earth could move into a completely different scenario where a different thermoregulatory mechanism (runaway albedo/snowball earth) dominates.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/02/multiple-intense-abrupt-late-pleisitocene-warming-and-cooling-implications-for-understanding-the-cause-of-global-climate-change/
Willis reconcile your theory with the reality which is in the above ice core climatic record.
You can not do it. It does not hold up.
IPCC AR5
7.2.1.2 Effects of Clouds on the Earth’s Radiation Budget
The effect of clouds on the Earth’s present-day top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget, or cloud radiative effect (CRE), can be inferred from satellite data by comparing upwelling radiation in cloudy and non-cloudy conditions (Ramanathan et al., 1989). By enhancing the planetary albedo, cloudy conditions exert a global and annual shortwave cloud radiative effect (SWCRE) of approximately –50 W m–2 and, by contributing to the greenhouse effect, exert a mean longwave effect (LWCRE) of approximately +30 W m–2, with a range of 10% or less between published satellite estimates (Loeb et al., 2009). Some of the apparent LWCRE comes from the enhanced water vapour coinciding with the natural cloud fluctuations used to measure the effect, so the true cloud LWCRE is about 10% smaller (Sohn et al., 2010).
!!!!!The net global mean CRE of approximately –20 W m–2 implies a net cooling!!!!
(emphasis mine)
Anthropogenic GHGs add less than 3 W/m2. CRE cooling is six times as much as GHG warming.
Evaporation of water from the surface of the World Ocean and land of the planet is the main process providing water vapor transport to the atmosphere. Evaporation of water takes much heat (1.26 x 10^24 joules), or about 25% of all the energy received at the Earth’s surface.
Willis, something you might miss on use of annual data for the Temperate latitudes
Total annual evaporation from most water areas of the World Ocean depends on the conditions during the autumn-winter period. During this time of the year the water surface is warmer than the air. Concurrently, the highest wind velocity above the water surface is observed during this period. The range of evaporation distribution during a year is especially wide at temperate latitudes and in the west of the subequatrorial zone of the northern hemisphere. Cold and dry Arctic and continental air masses move onto warm water areas in these zones. Therefore, more water evaporates from the water surface during this time, i.e. up to 15-20% of annual evaporation during some months.
Both from – http://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c07/e2-02-03-02.pdf
DD More August 18, 2015 at 3:39 pm
One of the joys of having my analysis programs written is that I can investigate questions like this quite quickly. The TRMM rainfall (aka evaporation) data for the northern hemisphere oceans 0-40°N varies from a low of about 70 mm/month in March to an evaporation of about 110 mm/month in September. This agrees with their claim. NH ocean rain/evaporation is below average from January to June, and above average from July to December. On NH land the peak rain/evaporation is in August and the minimum in January.
w.
Water evaporates into air because the air is relatively dry, not necessarily because it is warm.
“””””….. Nicholas Schroeder
August 18, 2015 at 4:07 pm …..”””””
Well actually water evaporates into air when the WATER is relatively warm. It has nothing to do with what the air thinks.
Now condensation / precipitation does depend on the air temperature and relative humidity, and is independent of the water temperature.
Gonna have to disagree that evaporation is only a function of water temp.
A wet floor will dry, even in a cold room. A fan will speed this up quite a bit. Dry air will speed it up a whole lot. If it is foggy (100% humidity), nothing will dry.
Willis, something you might miss on use of annual data for the Temperate latitudes …
It is difficult to quantify the effects at higher latitudes simply because ‘water vapour’ is so mobile.
The eg. cloud over my part of England right now might well have its beginnings somewhere far away in the SW Atlantic. (our (British) prevalent weather direction). Pretty much impossible to apply what Willis is describing at the Equator to eg England.
Tropical thunderstorms (according to NASA) link directly into ionosphere and the equatorial electrojet created by solar effects.
I would dare say it could also be the other way, the equatorial electrojet provides some of the power to the tropical thunderstorms
Some more details HERE
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/154188main_plasma_bands_lgweb.jpg
Image of ultraviolet light from two plasma bands in the ionosphere that encircle the Earth over the equator. Bright, blue-white areas are where the plasma is densest. Dotted white lines mark regions where rising tides of hot air indirectly create the bright, dense zones in the bands. Credit: NASA/University of California, Berkeley
Thanks very much not only for the work in the main post but also for pulling together the previous posts on the same subject. I have almost always found them compelling.
This one gets bookmarked.
Thanks for that, Joe. Your comments always get my attention as well.
w.
Here is what regulates the climate , in a brief concise nutshell.
Land/Ocean Arrangements and Land Elevation.
Milankovitch Cycles- where earth is in regard to these cycles.
Solar Variability- primary and secondary effects..
Geo Magnetic Intensity- which moderates solar activity.
Initial State Of The Climate- how far the climate is from the glacial /inter-glacial threshold.
Ice ,Snow, Cloud Cover Dynamic – which are tied to the above to one degree or another.
Intrinsic Earth Bound Climatic Items- such as ENSO which refine the climate trends.
Rogue Terrestrial Event- such as a Super Volcanic Eruption.
Rogue Extra Terrestrial Event – such as an impact.
Willis is so big on correlations, and yet his theory does not correlate and or reconcile with the historical climatic record.
I don’t think anyone would expect you to presume he (or anyone else) would completely dismiss the effects of any of those listed.
Are you not curious about the mechanisms behind the stability of the temperature during the holocene?
Hi Willis,
Your thermostat theory, I believe, also meshes well with the Kimoto papers, which show how an increase of water vapor, or an increase of ‘radiative forcing’ from doubled CO2, decreases the lapse rate (contrary to the false fixed-lapse rate assumption in climate models), resulting in negligible surface warming of only 0.1-0.2K:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-climate-modelers-seeking-funds-fame.html
I’d appreciate your opinions on Kimoto’s works Willis, if you wish.
By the lapse rate equation,
dT/dh = -g/Cp
whereby dT is inversely related to change in heat capacity at constant pressure Cp
Since GHGs increase Cp (especially water vapor), they decrease the lapse rate by ~1/2, thereby cooling the surface, up to 25C in the case of water vapor:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=lapse+rate+25C
Best regards, HS
Salvatore Del Prete remarks that the the Eschenbach hypothesis “does not correlate and or reconcile with historical climatic record.”
Leading me to ask for clarification — WHICH climate record? Dr Mann’s hockey stick, with the implicit assertion that climate had done nothing interesting at all for approximately 1000 years despite Solar Variability, Volcanic Eruptions, etc? Or is there a Hubert Lamb or other sort of historical climatic record the Eschenbach formula might be correlated to, reconciled with, or tested against?
http://www.c3headlines.com/temperature-charts-historical-proxies.html
Here you go.
Look at all of the many charts and tell me how his theory reconciles with them?
My hypothesis is that the earth has a thermoregulatory system keeping the global temperature within narrow bounds (e.g. ±0.3°C over the 20th century). A major part of this thermoregulatory system is that the tropical cumulus and thunderstorms act to limit the tropical temperatures on both the warm and cool ends.
I understand the daily processes you describe but there must be larger forces that overwhelm or cancel out this thermoregulatory system outside of the tropics since the earth has seen multiple ice ages.
Or are you saying that for short periods of time this system works to maintain whatever climate/temperature the earth happens to be experiencing?
Eschenbach seems to be saying a lot of this happens in the equatorial regions. During a glacial we’d expect less cooling there and more warming. Diminished clouds is what the doctor ordered. During an interglacial, more cooling with more clouds. The relatively lower temperature changes expected in the tropics by climate scientists seems to agree with the idea that that place regulates itself, it adapts to changing conditions. It has resiliency. The rest of the globe less so, showing larger changes. Glaciations do happen and then the equatorial oceans are expected to help retain habitable areas for life which they’ve done for the past 400,000 years successfully.
Will rainfall and evaporation line up like that? Won’t winds carry the moisture from where it evaporated to where it will fall, or is that distance expected to be small enough to not matter at the scales involved here?
Willis and his theory show how the climate is REGULATED on a daily basis against the back drop of the forces that actually change the climate from one regime to another regime which I have outlined.
So if you want to talk about climate regulation by what he proposes, when the climate is in a particular climatic regime I can go with that, but as far as being a climatic governor over the long run it fails miserably as is evidenced by the historical climatic record.
Salvatore Del Prete August 18, 2015 at 2:42 pm
Thanks, Salvatore. It’s clear that you don’t understand what an amazing thing it is that the 20th century temperature varied by only ± 0.3°K. Since the average global temperature is on the order of 290K, that means that this is a system which is thermally stabilized to within a tenth of a percent.
As someone who has had to regulate a balky diesel generator to maintain a constant speed despite varying loads, I can assure you than regulating a machine to a tenth of a percent is very, very difficult. And the regulation of the planet’s temperature is done by nothing more tangible than winds and clouds …
And I can also say that that kind of temperature record is very strong evidence of a very strong thermoregulatory system. We can debate just what kept the temperatures so stable over the 20th century … but it’s obvious that something kept them stable.
Now, of course this natural thermal regulation system is subject to physical constraints. For example, the position and height of the continents affects how fast and how efficiently the climate system can move energy from the tropics to the poles. This of course affects the global temperature, as does anything affecting the energy throughput of the system.
In addition, for unknown reasons, about a million years ago the climate took up a condition we can describe as “bi-stable”. Although it is statistically related to the Milankovic cycles of the earth’s orbit, it is not clear why this change to ice ages and interglacials happened a million years ago, and not five or fifty million years ago.
And even the variation ice age to interglacials to ice age is only about ± 2.5°K, or about ± 1%. So in the interglacial the regulation is to ± .1%, and over the last million years the regulation is still to ± 1%.
Finally, we have things like the “Younger Dryas” event you point to in your link. These were abrupt temporary breakouts from the regulated interglacial state of climate to a much cooler climate. As I’ve said to you before, any regulatory system can be overwhelmed by physical conditions, so I fail to see why you continue to harp on this issue. I thought we’d settled this one.
These breakout coolings seem to be related to the changing conditions during the emergence from the last glaciation, as they have not occurred for about 10,000 years or so. Their various causes have been much debated. A huge influx of fresh water from the melting and release of ice-bound lakes in Canada is one theory. And yes, if you dump a jillion cubic kilometres of ice water into the North Atlantic, the northern hemisphere temperature just might change … I fail to see what that has to do with the existence of a thermoregulatory system.
The point to recall is that yes, we had all those events … and after those events, we ended up about where we started. The regulatory system continued to work, despite volcanoes and changing insolation and melting ice lakes and all the rest.
Best regards,
w.
Bravo Willis. This is real climate science. Obviously it is not the final word, but the regulation mechanism is highly plausible and fits well with observations.
Willis , I think we are mixing words in that yes there is a thermo regulatory system at work but our view of the efficiency or lack of it is different.
I do not view a thermo regulatory system as being efficient as far as climatic impacts to humans if the climate of the globe can go from glacial to inter- glacial conditions or have periods of abrupt climatic change such as the YD , one of many. Even though the climate will not go in one direction for eternity and always comes back to a mean.
That is where the difference is.
My idea of an efficient thermo regulatory system would keep the climate forever in the 20th century range which we know will not happen going forward. Sooner or late the climate will emerge from this range.
Willis you are presenting great post and bringing up great points. I respect your knowledge, and I am as always trying to play the other side.
I am not against you just questioning as you always do with me and everyone else which is good ,do not miss understand.
This is a complex tough muddy subject and one thing I can say for guys like us is at least we try to tackle it even if view points may differ but that is what it is all about. I have high regard for you, despite my post at times.. Take Care
“My idea of an efficient thermo regulatory system would keep the climate forever in the 20th century range”
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Who says the 20th c. range was the stable or “normal” climate? Hydrologists and climate scientists agree in general that when the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams were built in the early 20th c. that rainfall rates were far above what turns out to be a historical “normal”. It explains the drought today, why Lakes Mead and Powell are so low and why there may be nothing we can do to stop their eventual drying up.
I fail to see how your opinion of what an efficient, stable thermoregulatory earth system is can be justified by relating to a single historical century. It is entirely feasible that Willis’ data is relevant regardless of whether the earth is in a glacial or interglacial geological period because of the focus on tropical zones.
Salvatore,
What do you think the tropical temperature range is during ice ages?
Any regulatory mechanism seems limited to equatorial regions. During ice ages, colder regions have a larger impact on the planet wide average, but the warmer regions still exist. At the boundary between ice and no ice the net feedback is actually positive (due to forming/melting ice) and during ice ages there is more of this as well.
Frank Wentz et al; ” How much more Rain will Global Warming bring ? ”
Says 7% increase in evaporation / atmospheric water / precipitation (ergo cloud cover).
That’s one mighty fine thermo-regulatory system in my book.
The ergo is my postulated extension of what Wentz et al wrote.
g
Salvatore you have fixed your thinking on one aspect of earth climate and conflating it with a completely different aspect. Go have a lie down and re-engage your brain. Then come back and read Willis’ post.
It’s a good post, lots of info to digest and yes there are times when large perturbations occur but this is not one of them.
AZ1971 tell it to Willis not me.
I believe your regulatory system and glaciation was addressed by Rondanelli & Lindzen. Comment on “Clouds and the Faint Young Sun Paradox” by Goldblatt &Zahnle. OOPS! Addressed to W.
There is evidence the Younger Dryas events may have been due to comet impacts. Yet the earth then recovered its temperature control.
Willis,
Life has the ability to react quicker than most other processes and microbes in clouds make a big difference (so Judith Curry said in one of her blogs). I’ve seen somewhere that microbes can produce the ‘particles’ which seed clouds …
Another area for Life to confound the physicists is the carbon cycle – plankton and single-celled diatoms may have a big influence that’s not been allowed for.
I’ve also noticed that as the average tropical input power increases, the temperature starts to level off and even decrease. I attribute this to incremental solar input evaporating incrementally more water and consequently removing more latent heat than the incremental solar input. Most of the latent heat is returned to the surface as liquid water, as the heat removed from the surface by evaporation is released into droplets of water as they condense, eventually falling as rain that’s warmer than it would be otherwise,
http://www.palisad.com/co2/sens/pi/st.png
Each dot is a month of data for one 2.5 degree slice of latitude and the larger dots are the average across 3 decades of weather satellite imagery. Poles are at the lower left and the equator is upper right. Note how the temperature starts to decrease as input energy increases at the equator. The reason is in the next plot which shows an exponential increase in atmospheric water content (evaporation) as the input power increases (towards the equator). This appears nearly asymptotic to an average surface (mostly ocean) temperature of about 300K which is the temperature where Hurricanes start to form.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/sens/pi/wc.png
So the question is would the people of the world be able to flourish if more of the world were tropical in climate. (should you buy the CAGW story)
The question i ask is how many of us travel to the tropics to enjoy the weather on our vacations.
Now that’s a saving.
Great to see that you’ve obtained data that backs up your theory. The fact that it doesn’t work the same over the tropical (wetter) land masses is one of those fascinating findings that jump out by accident. I also notice that the areas east and west of Indonesia have a negative correlation with rainfall vs increasing temps. Could this be because these are areas that produce rain more from other types of clouds than thunderstorms? I wonder if anyone knows of a data set that shows thunderstorms (lightning?)
An interesting observation, Bear.
Perhaps start at:http://webflash.ess.washington.edu/
“Great to see that you’ve obtained data that backs up your theory. The fact that it doesn’t work the same over the tropical (wetter) land masses is one of those fascinating findings that jump out by accident. ”
Other folks would call it falsification..
Steven, perhaps you could let us all know just what proposition you think has been falsified …
w.
others would, in this case be wrong.
Of course when one creates work that by definition cannot be falsified one is creating Climate Science.
Steven Mosher: Other folks would call it falsification..
The geographic variation does indeed display clearly in the graphs. It cries out, as do all the geographic variations, for extensions to the basic ideas, for extensions to provide more complete and accurate explanation. All it shows about Willis’ hypothesis is that it does not apply universally to all wet areas. I don’t think he claimed that it did.
Besides, you don’t have a better theory, so by the idiosyncratic “Mosher principle” (recall that Stigler’s principle, first enunciated by Morris Degroot, is that most scientific principles are misnamed), you have to believe Willis’ theory.
God you have become just the most awful person over these past years. Stay away from Howsyerfather and you might revert to the Mosher we used to like.
And they would be just as snarky as you are. Get a grip. If I found cases where your BEST adjustments were off would you stop touting BEST temp data and declare it falsified or analyze why they didn’t work in that situation? Your contributions to the discussion have really deteriorated.
Those other folks would be jumping to conclusions – as Mr. Mosher certainly knows. I think he is just ridiculing the commenters on this site (and elsewhere) that call “falsification” all the time for all the wrong reasons.
In this case the finding that rainfall is going up with temperature over the oceans and down over land does not disprove the thermoregulatory effect Mr. Eschenbach describes: There is more ocean than land and the increase in rainfall over water is also stronger than the decrease over land. The net effect is still …thermoregulatory.
One could have actually anticipated this pattern: there is less water in a rainforest to form thunderstorms than over the open ocean. Land does get hot and dry. Try this with an ocean…
the equator is largely ocean so mostly well regulated would you not think.
Hello … someone is spoofing …I certainly did not write that above.
Could be John Cook?
What, a new alias for Cookie?
Heat capacity of water. Takes longer to warm up, takes longer to cool down. Regulates weather extremes. Does nothing for average temperatures
The heat capacity just affects the time constant, not what the equilibrium temperature will be. Regulation requires negative feedback. My guess is that the net effect of weather is to cool the surface, which means that the net effect from evaporation, clouds and rain is surface cooling. More surface heat means more evaporation, more clouds, more weather, more rain and more surface cooling and this is the basic regulation method. Evidence of this is that hurricanes leave a trail of cold water in their wake, rather than the trail of warm water they would leave if the net water vapor feedback was positive. Further confirmation comes from the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that a heat engine (i.e. the heat engine driving weather) can not warm its source of heat (the surface). This also means that the net feedback from water vapor is not the strongly positive feedback required for CAGW.
Nice work Willis.
I have always though the evaporo-transpiration cycle must be a significant element in the planets climate system. Evaporate 1 kg of water and the latent heat required is enough to cool over 2000 cubic metres of adjacent air (~2230 cu m is the correct value as I recall). Now that is an effective mechanism considered just at that simplistic level (no wonder all those plants and animals use it).
The trouble for the models is that their grid size is way too big to even hope to ‘model’ the mechanism as it actually happens. To even hope to do so the ‘modellers’ would have to reduce the grid size in the most active areas by one or two orders of magnitude and in doing so drive up the calculation time inversely. The alternative is to resort to fudge factors. Say no more.
Basically this post identifies the most likely reason why the models are so out of whack with reality, well leaving aside the eco-political fundamentalism of so many CAGWarmists.
M Seward (not M Simon – 🙂 )
cool over 2000 cu m of air by 1˚ C that is
Thanks, Willis. The evidence keeps on coming on the side of the thermostatic Earth.
Congratulations!
Salvatore, Willis’s hypothesis applies in detail on a daily basis where the changes in the factors you are dealing with over 100,000yrs. Let’s take the argument to pieces. You probably grant that thunderstorms are a common feature of the ITCZ. Do you argue the figures for evaporative cooling that gives water for the storms? Do you accept the physics of energy required for evaporation? Do you accept increased albedo of the storm clouds, the cooled water falling down, the cool dry decending winds. Is it your hypothesis that the reverse happens, that these things warm the ITCZ? If not, then you may not realize it, but you actually accept the hypothesis.
Let’s see if I can integrate your 100,000 yr look at climate. Willis’s idea even has something for you here. Ask your self what keeps the engine going. It is the temperature of the surface. What happens when this surface is a few degrees cooler than average. Well, Willis himself says the clouds don’t form until it does reach a certain temperature so, if for some reason the temperature of this region doesn’t rise adequately to bring on clouds, then this engine stops!!
Imagine us heading off toward the apogee of your Milankovitch cycle. At some point, the temperature of the tropics drops those few degrees that brings on perennial clearing – its effort to let the sun heat up the surface. The heating is thwarted as Milanko does its work. This in turn reduces warm water and warm air for melting the ice and the ice grows. The tropics now have gorgeous sunny days 24/7, but the water still cools and the ice grows….
Salvatore, cut this baloney out already. You fill acres of web space without showing finesse and insight. All of global warming is happening during an interglacial and this is being regulated by negative feedbacks. When the the holocene is over, the warming reverses and we go into a glacial period. Are you saying that lovely steam locomotive at the Museum of Science and Technology lying there frozen in the next glacial ice sheet didn’t exist or couldn’t have worked? Let’s all accept as given that we go into ice ages, and then move on to the topical climate stuff that is being slung at us today. I studied ice ages in Manitoba in 1957 sitting in a building on the bottom of glacial lake Agassiz where all this stuff was discovered. As Keynes said, in the long run we will all be dead. It’s the now we are battling with in terms of climate (and everything else). Your long run doesn’t contribute to the debate.
+1. Thanks Gary.
Well done Gary. It really bugs me when readers ignore the good stuff, only criticising without trying to work out what the guy is trying to say. Technically, Willis had only omitted one word which all readers should try to work out for themselves rather than beating up the author.
Willis
Compliments on your thermo-regulation theory and systematically working to support it.
PS Note the TRMM does not catch high precipitation locations. e.g., at Cherrapunji
World record point precipitation measurements NOAA
Cherrapunji, Meghalaya, India: 26.461 m/y (1041.78″/year)
Cherrapunji Extreme science
Bottom line, no matter what humans do to the earth, there is a regulatory system to make sure that temperatures stay the same withing a few degrees. To think that anything that Humans can do will affect the climate (especially increasing a miniscule component of the atmosphere) is shear stupidity.We are but an infitesimally small part of this living breathing entity that may or may not be unique in the universe for its ability to sutain life.
Fascinating work, Willis. Analysis of the surface energy budget is complementary with analysis of energy flux to and from space. This is because changes in the energy flow between the surface and the atmosphere are approximately equal to changes in energy flow between the atmosphere and space.
We have:
-dABS + dEBS – dBR + dCV + dLH = dSW + dOLR
Where ABS is the solar radiation absorbed by the surface, EBS is the radiation emitted by the surface upwards, BR is the radiation emitted by the atmosphere downward, CV is the conductive/convective cooling of the surface, LH is the latent heat flux (mostly evaporation) SW is the solar radiation reflected out to space, and OLR is the radiation emitted out to space. Since a decrease (increase) in the solar radiation absorbed by the surface and an increase (decrease) in the solar radiation reflected out to space must be the same thing, these terms cancel out of the above equation, meaning that:
dEBS – dBR + dCV + dLH = dOLR
In other words, the change in the radiation emitted to space is partly determined by the change in evaporative cooling at the surface!
Climate feedback flux is usually calculated as dSW/dT + dOLR/dT, but we could just as easily express climate feedbacks in purely surface flux terms!
I calculated dLH/dT to be on the order of 6 W/m^2/K which is a very strong negative feedback. Of course this doesn’t take into account possible non linearities which are at the heart of what makes your hypothesis distinct, but it agrees with your analysis here in that it shows that evaporative cooling helps to stabilize the Earth’s climate.