Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I got to thinking again about the thunderstorms, and how much heat they remove from the surface by means of evaporation. We have good data on this from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellites. Here is the distribution and strength of rainfall, and thus evaporation, around the middle of the planet.
Figure 1. Evaporation in W/m2 as shown by rainfall data from the TRMM. It takes about 80 watt-years of energy to evaporate a cubic metre of water, so a metre of rainfall per year is equivalent to an average surface cooling of 80 watts per square metre. The TRMM satellite only covers from 40° North to 40° South.
I have held for some time that the global surface temperature is restricted to a fairly narrow region (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th century) by the action of emergent phenomena (see references at the end of the post). Chief among these emergent phenomena are tropical thunderstorms. My hypothesis says that when the tropical surface temperature goes over a certain threshold, that thunderstorms emerge to put a firm cap on the temperature by cooling the surface.
Thunderstorms cool the surface in a number of ways, but the main cooling method uses the exact same mechanism used by the refrigerators that keep our food cold. Thunderstorms use a standard evaporation/condensation cycle. In one part of the cycle the working fluid evaporates, cooling the surroundings. In another part of the cycle in another location, the working fluid condenses. For a refrigerator, the working fluid used to be some form of Freon, nowadays it’s some other fluid. For thunderstorms, the working fluid is water. When it evaporates at the surface, it cools the local area, and the heat is moved from the surface to the clouds and on upwards.
Now, for my hypothesis to be correct, the number and intensity of thunderstorms needs to increase quickly as temperatures go above a certain temperature threshold. In addition, the change in the resulting evaporation needs to be quite large in order to successfully control the system.
With that in mind, I made a scatterplot of sea surface temperature versus thunderstorm evaporative cooling. Figure 2 shows that result.
Figure 2. Scatterplot of 1° x 1° gridcell annual average ocean-only thunderstorm evaporative cooling on the vertical axis, in watts per square metre (W/m2) versus 1° x 1° gridcell annual average sea surface temperature on the horizontal axis.
As you can see, the thunderstorms are clearly functioning to cap the temperature. When the ocean surface gets hot, thunderstorms form and exert immense cooling power. There are some points worth noting about Figure 2.
First, the red area shows the tropics. This part of the earth is important because it is not only about 40% of the planet’s surface. In addition, just over half of all the energy absorbed by the surface of the earth is absorbed in the tropical regions of the planet. As a result, the regulation of this large amount of incoming energy by albedo control is crucial to the overall energy balance of the planet.
Next, these are annual averages. However, they are also daily averages. But during the day/night cycle in the tropics, the evaporation is by no means constant. At night the evaporation is small, some tens of watts per square metre. During the day, on the other hand, evaporation is quite large, hundreds of watts per square metre, because the strong tropical sunshine evaporates the water directly, plus the thunderstorms are largely a daytime phenomenon. This means that the peak hourly thunderstorm evaporative cooling is on the order of twice the average values shown above, up to about 600 W/m2.
Next, the cooling effect of the thunderstorms is not applied blindly or randomly. The thunderstorms only form as and when the local area is above the temperature threshold. This means that the cooling effect, which can be up to 500-600 w/m2, is always located where it is most needed, on the local hotspots.
Finally, here is the most important consideration. The timing and the amount of thunderstorms are NOT a function of greenhouse gas forcing, or of solar forcing, or of volcanic forcing, or of any other kind of forcing. As Figure 2 shows, they are a function of temperature. As long as the surface-atmosphere temperature difference is large enough, thunderstorms will form even at night when the radiative forcing is quite small.
This means that their effect will be to maintain the same temperature, regardless of reasonable-sized fluctuations in the amount of forcing. Clouds don’t know about forcing, they form and disappear based on local conditions.
And this is simply one more piece of observational support for my hypothesis that emergent phenomena regulate the temperature and maintain it within a fairly narrow range.
My best to everyone. Here in California, we have about 150% of the usual snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. When it was drought, it was said to be the result of global warming … and of course, now that there is heavy snow, that is also said to be the result of global warming.
Buckle your seatbelts and keep your hands inside the vehicle, it’s gonna be a long, uphill struggle to get rid of this madness …
My best to all,
w.
My Usual Request: If you disagree with me or anyone, please quote the exact words you disagree with. I can defend my own words. I cannot defend someone’s interpretation of my words.
My Other Request: If you think that e.g. I’m using the wrong method on the wrong dataset, please educate me and others by demonstrating the proper use of the right method on the right dataset. Simply claiming I’m wrong doesn’t advance the discussion.
Some Of My Previous Posts On The Subject:
Cooling and Warming, Clouds and Thunderstorms
Data:
TRMM Data is here, see the bottom of the page for the NetCDF file.
CERES Data is here, I used the EBAF dataset.
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Hi Willis.
A small point, but you said “… thunderstorms only form as and when the local area is above the temperature threshold.”
I would agree with this statement much more strongly if the word “only” was replaced with “largely”, “mostly”, or “primarily”.
Because there are other mechanisms for thunderstorm formation that purely by surface heating. Some of the others are converging surface winds, cold core lows aloft, frontal boundary lifting, and orographic lifting.
In each of these cases, it is likely true that the storms that do form will be more numerous, or longer lasting, or rise to greater altitudes when the surface air which is entrained into them starts off warmer or more humid (because in both of these conditions there is more energy available).
Thunderstorm height may be very important in large scale global feedbacks, as the higher the heat from the surface is transported, the more readily/completely it may be transferred to space.
Thanks for another interesting article!
Indeed, Willis and Menicholas, like a pan of boiling water on the stove, adding more energy does not change the temperature of the water. The energy is still in the system, though. Only radiation of photons to space can truly cool a “global” temperature.
Not just radiation but also solar reflection from cloud tops which should be greater.
I guess the argument is that thunderstorms transport heat from the surface to high in the atmosphere, where the greenhouse effect is less.
but if the pan ISN’T boiling, then adding more energy DOES change the water temperature…and last time I checked, we didn’t have any boiling seas…so what was your point?
pete, I didn’t intend for you to interpret my comment as an analogy. It’s just a familiar example of a natural mechanism that provides limiting behavior through a discontinuity.
Yes, but latent heat from condensation during cloud formation warms the clouds which increases the radiation to space. The warming is evident with the warmer part of the cloud rising and producing the cloud tops. And at this altitude, the low water vapor content means the atmospheric window passes about 75% of IR radiation to space, up from about only 25% from the surface on a clear day.
“””””…..
Richard Petschauer
January 8, 2016 at 1:30 pm
Yes, but latent heat from condensation during cloud formation warms the clouds which increases the radiation to space. …..”””””
I’m of the opinion that latent heat does NOT warm diddley squat.
Water vapor molecules floating around in the atmosphere have more energy, than water molecules floating around in the ocean; that extra energy is the latent heat of vaporization.
Those atmospheric water vapor molecules are going to remain as water vapor molecules so long as they retain that extra energy. As the water vapor rises, the ambient Temperature falls and since the water vapor molecule is in collisions with the air molecules, that extra energy is thermalized and distributed around to the other air molecules, which are in turn in collision contact with even colder molecules at higher altitudes.
Only after all that excess (latent) heat is extracted, by air molecules which remain colder than the water vapor molecule (in terms of where its energy is on the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution tail) will the water vapor molecule be able to deposit on some substrate with other H2O molecules and form liquid water, or ice crystals.
The surrounding atmospheric air molecules never become hotter than the water vapor molecule or else it will stop cooling and losing its latent (excess) heat.
I don’t know where the notion that condensing water vapor hits the atmosphere with a blast of heat and warms it comes from.
When steam from boiling coffee hits your skin, and scalds you, it does dump a lot of heat into your skin (590 cal/gm) but it never raises your skin temperature above that of the steam. Your skin is at 37 deg. C (98.6 deg. F but if the steam is at 70 deg C you will really feel it even though your skin will not reach 70 deg’ C.
g
George says:
I’m of the opinion that latent heat does NOT warm diddley squat.
…..As the water vapor rises, the ambient Temperature falls and since the water vapor molecule is in collisions with the air molecules, that extra energy is thermalized and distributed around to the other air molecules….
It seems to me something is getting warmed. Not the water vapour in the cloud tops, but the other gases which must be mixed in there.
George E Smith,
In very small droplets of a few molecules, these are the surface molecules of the droplet so even if large droplets of water should spontaneously form, they don’t unless nucleated by the presence of something that can make the droplet stable while still small.
The gaseous water molecules don’t lose thermal energy to the surrounding air to become liquid molecules of water. The initial small droplet is much warmer than the air and like the heat transfer from surfaces to air, most of it is through emission of LWIR. The droplet will then grow with warming of the droplet when another molecule condenses and that energy being lost through emission of LWIR.
Not sure how to reply to George E Smith’s reply, but latent heat release when water condenses out of a rising airmass and removes water from the cloud does warm the local air parcel and the best example of this is the fohen wind blowing over mountain ranges. Water removed from the air on the windward uplift side warms the air compared to its surrounding environmental air mass. When this air falls back down the lee side the air warms anomalously to its environmental airmass. I experienced this first hand just a couple of weeks ago driving from Christchurch NZ to Mount Cook. Christchurch broke its December temp record 36 deg C. Yet when I arrived in Mount Cook cloud was streaming over the mountains and evaporating rapidly as it decended with occasional rain.
Search for comment below by gymnosperm.
I have described one view of the evaporation process (of water) several times at WUWT; I’ll try again.
My thought experimental setup consists of H2O molecules in pure water. The possible presence of any other sort of molecule simply complicates things, so this experiment assumes there are none such.
A molecule in the bulk, a m, cm, mm, whatever deep is attracted on all sides by other water molecules for some reason. I called it Van der Waals forces; Phil has told us it is Hydrogen bonds. I don’t understand what Hydrogen bonds are, although I have heard and read of them; I’m not a chemist. I’m happy to accept Phil’s statement. so H bonds it is.
So an individual H2O molecule has no net tendency to go anywhere, and they vibrate around, with an average kinetic energy per degree of freedom, that is determined by the water Temperature.
Those water molecules are much closer together than are the air molecules immediately above the water surface, which are also at the same Temperature as the water if (heat) energy is not being transferred between water and air.
At the water/air interface surface, the H2O molecules have neighbors around and below them, but not above, so there is a net downward pull on a surface H2O molecule by all those hydrogen bonds, and that prevents an H2O molecule from wandering off into space. We call the effect surface tension, and it has the effect of trying to keep the surface flat; whatever flat means at the molecular level.
The KE of the water molecules has some Maxwell-Boltzmann like distribution, which crowds most molecules towards the low energy end of the distribution, with a long decaying tail at the high energy end.
Every now and then, a H2O molecule gets an upward velocity at one of these higher energy values, and pulls away from the surface, breaking its hydrogen bond restraint. This should slow down the escaping molecule, and it might immediately get knocked back down into the water.
The further out of the MB distribution tail, a molecule is, the higher its KE and the greater the probability it will escape with a high enough velocity to get away from the surface.
But the further out on that tail the fewer water molecules there are.
So below some “escape” energy there is low probability of escape, and above some high tail energy there is a low probability of finding many molecules.
So there clearly is some high energy out on that tail, where there are a lot of molecules, and they also have plenty of energy with which to escape.
Consequently, the H2O molecules that escape from the surface tension and drift away from the surface, also have a net KE per degree of freedom that also has a peaked distribution which is at a much higher energy than that of the bulk water molecules.
So the water vapor that is escaping from the water, has a higher Temperature than the water bulk temperature. It might be much higher.
Now the air (N2/O2/Ar) is at the same Temperature as the water because of conduction between them, which won’t allow A HIGH Temperature gradient, so the escaping “steam” finds itself in collisions with air molecules that are much colder, and the water vapor quickly re-establishes thermal equilibrium with the air Temperature, thereby losing all of its excess KE .
By the time the water vapor molecules have moved far enough from the water surface; maybe microns or less, to escape recapture by the water and its hydrogen bond attractions, collisions with air molecules has removed all of its excess energy so it has cooled to the same temperature as the air, which has some Temperature lapse rate with altitude, and as the lighter H2O molecules rise in the atmosphere they too cool and remain at the same Temperature as their local air.
So this process has transferred heat energy from the water and delivered it to the gases of the atmosphere, over and above the mean energy appropriate to the water/air Temperature that would be, in the absence of evaporation, and yes we would describe this as warming/heating of the atmosphere.
BUT! This all happened within microns of the water surface; not at some km altitude.
In the bulk of the humid atmosphere, the H2O molecules are at the same Temperature as the air molecules, and they all cool together as they rise in altitude, at whatever the lapse rate is.
So now what happens if some H2O vapor molecules collide with each other and maybe a few of them. Why don’t those hydrogen bonds make them grab onto each other and remain in contact to form a water droplet.
So now we have to think about that surface tension again.
ST manifest itself as a surface area contracting force of so many newton per meter. A water film that terminates on a wire say one meter long, exerts a pull (per surface) of t newton on the wire, or 2 t for a double sided water film.
If we have a water droplet of radius (r) or a bubble of radius (r) in water, the surface tension (t) tries to reduce the surface area and shrink the bubble or compress the water droplet. Well the hydrogen bonds in the droplet are doing the sucking, that is manifested as (t) but the end result is that the water droplet or the bubble in water, must have an internal pressure that exceeds the ambient pressure either in the ater or the air around the droplet.
How much is that excess internal pressure ?
It’s a 4-H club exercise to show that the excess pressure is 2.t/r newton per meter squared. For a soap bubble with two water surfaces it would be 4t/r.
OOooops ! I see a glitch .
If the water droplet needs an internal excess pressure of 2t/r, then that would require infinite pressure for a zero starting radius droplet.
Now the evaporating water surface was mostly flat, so the internal excess pressure is zero, but to form a coalescing droplet at near zero radius, requires a much higher excess pressure, so it is much easier to evaporate than to condense. In particular the water vapor temperature has to get much lower to reduce the tendency of the intra-molecular collisions KE to just blow the molecules apart.
I’m afraid, I still don’t see how H2O molecules in the gaseous phase can remain well above their local air Temperature and convey excess energy to some high altitude. It seems like they did all their warming (of diddley squat) within microns of the evaporating surface.
But I’m eager to learn differently from someone with a better understanding of it than I do.
g
Menicholas, my thoughts exactly. Plus the effect of wind blowing the evaporated moisture around, sometimes thousands of kilometres away. It doesn’t just rain on the ocean. The evaporation cools the ocean, and the clouds and rainfall can cool land as well, or suppress evaporation over water in other areas. Another factor limiting thunderstorm development would be higher pressure areas, when the surface cools via evaporation but the moisture is blown somewhere else and few clouds form locally. This is seen in the dry season in monsoonal regions (at least north Australian waters) and even in the supposedly wet season in El Nino years.
As always, a stimulating article. Thanks, Willis.
KS
It’s also not entirely true that increased SST will cause an increase in thunderstorms. This is seen during El Nino, when the cloud cover actually decreases in the eastern Pacific, and a decreases overall worldwide. The opposite is true for La Nina.
I think this has to do with El Nino reducing nutrients in tropical waters, restricting plankton growth (especially diatoms), which in turn reduces dimethyl sulfides in the air, reducing the nuclei for cloud formation.
Not sure I agree with this analysis. Just because sea level evaporation increases doesn’t mean that cloud formation will increase in the same region, as that will depend on RH/ temperatures at higher altitudes as well as prevalent winds at different altitudes carrying away the water vapour that results from the surface evaporation. e.g.- B.C. is at some distance Northward from the el nino mass but is receiving heavy snowfalls this winter.
RW Turner, John Harmsworth,
Note Willis has calculated the energy moved from rainfall data.
So, on the proviso the TRMM database is accurate, that water vapour has evaporated, has formed clouds, and has fallen as rain.
I think you have Nina and Nino cloud amounts reversed. The OLR decreases (cloud increases) over the Eastern tropical Pacific during El Nino because the warmer SSTs induce more convection and cloud cover. Save some satellite pictures this year and compare them with a year from now when the inevitable cooler La Nina Phase kicks in.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~rmeast/OceanCloudsweb.pdf
I was mistaken by confusing stratus cloud cover with cumulus, which I suppose is the only cloud type that pertains to this essay. There is a negative correlation with marine stratus and stratocumulus to SST, not a negative correlation with cumulus.
Pretty much agree with all this. The way I look at this is essentially, the climate/ weather system of earth is a heat engine. All the movement of air and water is caused by the heat input to the system, with the end result being heat output to space. More heat input mainly accelerates the engine. Water is clearly a primary mode of transport for this heat, and based on what is evident from our knowledge of water evaporation and rainfall, it is obvious that more heat causes more rainfall on a pretty immediate basis. Unfortunately, it is also obvious that the field requires this thorough explanation and even this will probably prove to be insufficient. I’m not a scientist. I’m just a refrigeration tech with a lot of design experience in psychrometrics but I know the heat capacity of humidity would stagger most people and I believed from early on that water vapour was key to this question. This is very good work and needs to be seized upon and stressed until the talking heads acknowledge it’s importance.
Well I have no disagreement with Willis or his hypothesis.
I have often cited Wentz et al SCIENCE July 13 2007 (I think) “How much more Rain will Global Warming bring ? ” and its consequent presumption of cloud cover modulation and ultimately surface solar energy negative feedback, as a basic mechanism of earth Temperature regulation.
It seems to me that Willis’s process, is a part of that negative feedback loop.
I don’t think earth’s temperature has much to do with GHGs at all (except water).
An atmosphere without water would launch the mother of all radiative forcings
Menicholas, the storms formed by the mechanisms you mention would be very rare in the tropics, even rarer over the oceans, which is where the cooling effects Willis is describing take place.
Willis, what is the response of thunderstorms to the current Nino in the Nino 3-4 area? It seems to max out a little over 29 deg C.
Is the “max out at a little over 29C” referring to SST’s in the Nino 3-4 area or Figure 2 in Willis’s posting? If the former, then figure 2 gives a good indication as why SST’s max out at 29C.
I was intrigued by an earlier WUWT article by Willis on SST’s versus thunderstorm activity. Crunched some numbers relating to steam table data and found out that some where between 25C and 30C, the buoyancy for air (inverse of density) at 100% RH went from being driven by air expanding due to temperature (roughy linear) to being driven by the increase in water vapor (roughly exponential). Also noted that the NWS considers SST’s of 26C needed for tropical cyclone intensification.
I thought the “max out” value that Willis has used in the past was about 31C. But I may be misremembering
Owen in GA January 8, 2016 at 2:00 pm
Thanks, Owen. The answer is, we’re looking at annual averages, so the average is a bit below 30°C, which is approximately the open ocean temperature limit.
w.
Whatever the physics is, it is universal across the globe, and whilst the majority of the oceans in the tropical regions do not have a SST exceeding 30 to 31degC, this is not because evaporation places such a cap on ocean temperatures (as Willis initially suggested in one of his ARGO posts). It is far more complex and there are many processes at work which act to effectively restrict SST in the majority of the oceans exceeding that temperature. Currents in 3D being the main one, and winds being another, and of course evaporation also plays a part. If evaporation capped temperatures at around 30 to 31degC, one would not see swimming pools with summer temps of around 36degC (my swimming pool often has such a temp in late July), nor would one see any oceans such as the Red Sea, the Gulf of Mexico etc regularly supporting SSTs in excess of 31degC..
However, as I pointed out in the ARGO thread there are dozens of seas and gulfs which regularly have surface temperatures exceeding 32 degC and often up to 34 to 36degC. I recall posting a comment on the ARGO thread where I listed at least half a dozen port authorities currently that day listing highs exceeding 32degC.
That said, the higher the surface temperature the more evaporation is driven, the earlier the clouds begin to form etc.
richard verney – A single swimming pool is way too small to create a thunderstorm. On land, quarter section plowed fields can generate enough convection to form small cumulus clouds, but it takes a large area to generate the convective flow needed for a major thunderstorm.
Thanks, Steve, good to hear from you. The thunderstorm evaporation gets much larger during the El Nino events, so it is obviously acting to cool the surface. Unfortunately, my TRMM dataset doesn’t cover enough of 2015 to see the most recent El Nino, but the previous El Ninos (1998, 2003, 2007, and 2010) are clearly visible.
?w=640
My best to you, and thanks as always for your marvelous website,
w.
that’s an interesting perspective on the Nino area, to say the least.
Mr. Eschenbach–
“…but the previous El Ninos (1998, 2003, 2007, and 2010) are clearly visible.” I can track, based on the above figure, with this statement regarding the El Ninos of 1998, 2003 (I suppose) and 2010, but 2007? I find your emergent-phenomena concept compelling, to say the least, so I want to agree with everything you say that has to do with it, but my eyes see nothing of note for 2007. Am I out of it, or what?
This is what the IRIS interferometer measured from 1100 km over Guam in clear skies vs the top of thunderstorm anvils back in the day. The cloud top temperature tracks the 215K Planck function like it is on rails except for blurbs of higher temperature radiation in the CO2 and ozone bands. Shades of an Antarctic spectrum.
Unfortunately, it seems clear skies do a much better job of radiating to space in the atmospheric window than thunderstorms do, probably because water is such a versatile GHG. Somehow the cloud top temperature seems to be constrained to the lapse rate, as 215K is pretty chilly.
On the other hand, there is evidence that energy gets transmitted to the stratosphere by Ninos, monsoons, volcanoes, etc. We know that thunderstorm anvils occur because they flatten out against the stratospheric inversion. Maybe there are tunnels of conduction there?
Not trying to be difficult but we have to deal with all the data.
Is your spectral chart daytime or nighttime?
Think it is daytime. Think the graphic is from Petty. Don’t recall any discussion of day vs night.
Interesting question though. Does the temperature of the stratopause change at night?
I’ve been thinking the spectrometer may be reading some sort of “cool skin” on the cloud that belies the internal temperature. But if that skin is persistent, the effective radiative temperature does not change.
Unfortunately, it seems clear skies do a much better job of radiating to space in the atmospheric window than thunderstorms do, probably because water is such a versatile GHG. Somehow the cloud top temperature seems to be constrained to the lapse rate, as 215K is pretty chilly.
I think that there is a subtle error here. Without clouds, what you are ‘seeing’ is of course largely the ground radiating. With clouds, of course its the cloud tops, which of course are pretty cold, the adiabatic cooling haven taken care of that.
215k is not chilly in comparison to deep space, which is what counts for net radiation interchange between two ‘black bodies…’
If cloud tops are not losing heat, and if the radiation is so much better from the ground, what happened to the albedo? Or is that radiating/reflecting in a frequency that that graph doesn’t show? And how come warm wet air goes up and cold rain comes down?
I would absolutely believe those curves as night time curves, because we know that clouds make it warmer at night, but by day? When that spectrum is not just deep infra red, but massively up to the visible and UV.?
I am not questioning the data, but does it mean what you say it does?
I’m struggling with that too. As I mentioned there is very good evidence for monsoon and enso energy transfer to the stratosphere. How do they do it if the cloud tops are radiating at a lower temperature than the stratosphere above?
Albedo (reflection) of high energy solar light is not thought to affect the temperature of the reflecting body, but if it did, the effect would be to warm it.
Crazy instant idea: what if the apparent energy transfer to the stratosphere were just the cloud top reflectance forcing the solar SW to make two runs through the ozone?
” How do they do it if the cloud tops are radiating at a lower temperature than the stratosphere above?”
The temperature of molecules at high altitude is high, but the density has to be very low, so it doesn’t matter.
From the ground, the ir window reads 100F or more colder than surface temps, which has to include all molecule average temp in that column of air. At cloud tops, there must be more loss to space. I think there should be a strong ir signature from water vapor losing energy to become liquid water, while some must be reabsorbed a lot can dump straight out that window to space.
The following is a widely known old school spectrum from Petty that was taken with the same instrument from a (U-2?) at 20 km and from the surface of the Arctic ice looking up.
You are right. In the atmospheric window the U-2 sees something like the surface at 288K and the guy looking up sees the chilly Arctic tropopause at like 160K. Bear in mind that ice has very low vapor pressure and surface humidities can be as low as CO2 concentration.
How can this be? These instruments measure photons. Photons radiate equally in all directions. It is easy to see how the upwelling from the surface (if as I suspect that surface is the ice which is a surprisingly good blackbody) is going nowhere but up. However, the radiation at the tropopause goes both ways.
It must boil down to intensity. The surface intensity is very high, but it is running away from the sensor looking up.The tropopause intensity is very low (barely above zero), and winds up being lunch money for the sensor looking through it.
Not sure where this leaves us regarding cloud tops. Maybe the same thing, but the cloud tops are way above zero. Something like 30 radiance units for the cloud tops vs 100 for clear skies…
Just thinking the high altitude sensor can’t really be seeing the ice itself as it is hard to imagine 15 C ice. Just another mystery. A melted skin?
Nice work! Water vapor is the superhero of climate modulation. As such it has a CAPE. “Convective Available Potential Energy” in meteorology. This old-school mechanical engineer appreciates the immense refrigeration system with which the atmosphere rejects just the right amount of heat.
You get additional radiative cooling in the tops of those thunderclouds that return cold rain and hail to the surface.
How can ocean temperature not be a function of heating by the sun, and possibly of undersea volcanism?
Some people think that DWLWIR plays a role, but they do not explain what processes are at work which effectively sequester the DWLWIR energy that is absorbed in just a few microns to depth, thereby dissipating and diluting that energy by volume, at a rate fast enough to prevent the oceans being boiled off from the top down.
Some people consider that ocean overturning (which does not operate 24/7 since it is a diurnal event) and other slow mechanical processes such as wind, waves and swell mix the absorbed LWIR to depth but since these are slow mechanical processes, and do not operate effectively when weather conditions are calm say BF2-3 and less, these people never explain how these processes can overcome the consequences of DWLWIR being fully absorbed in a wafer thin volume of water (fractions of a human hair width) before that energy if absorbed would drive evaporation.
Fortunately, for us, solar is absorbed at depth and over a large volume and hence the energy is dissipated and diluted by volume. IF the absorption of solar was the same as that of LWIR, the oceans would have boiled off long ago and we would not be living on this water world of ours.
Naturally, quite so. But relatively small changes in solar activity can produce climatic effects over decades, centuries and millennia. On the time scale of tens and hundreds of thousands of years (and probably shorter scales as well), insolation variation based upon Milankovitch cycles produce larger effects.
Most of the heat that is discharged during El Ninos comes ultimately from the sun. Thus El Ninos should and do occur with greater frequency and amplitude during periods of higher solar activity.
El Nino conditions and episodes increase during solar minima!
I’ve heard this ‘IR cannot heat the oceans’ meme a number of times. But never from a researcher.
The ocean is constantly losing heat through evaporation. Add heat from IR and yes, it will disappear as evaporation – but an equivalent amount of heat that was already in the ocean will, as a result, NOT be lost. So it does cause heat to build up. Conceivably the amount of heat accumulation in the ocean will be less than the increase in IR, due to increased evaporation, and conceivably for this reason solar could be more (causing a greater proportion of ocean heating vs evaporation as compared to IR). I’m out of my depth now. But IR does heat the ocean, you can be sure.
The idea that IR cannot heat the oceans also fails the sanity check. If not increased downwelling IR, what has caused the buildup in ocean heat content? I’ve heard about decreasing cloud cover but that applied to the 1980-2000 period or so, not the last 15 years (when OHC buildup has continued).
Thanks for the highly interesting article Willis.
Always ” thought” that forcings were an administrative term.
Willis you say: “The timing and the amount of thunderstorms are NOT a function of greenhouse gas forcing, or of solar forcing, or of volcanic forcing, or of any other kind of forcing. As Figure 2 shows, they are a function of temperature. ” (my emphasis added)
…
Are you implying that temperature is not a function of solar forcing?
IMO submarine volcanism also is a factor in ocean temperature, even of the surface, as is of course average depth. For instance, in the hottest part of Cretaceous, the accelerating breakup of Pangaea caused thermal expansion of the oceans, driving them up onto the continents, as in the shallow epicontinental seas of Europe and North America so comfy to giant marine reptiles. Tropical ocean temperature then was 37 degrees C (98.6 °F) or more, even with the sun producing almost one percent less power.
Michael Palmer January 8, 2016 at 11:31 am
Thanks for the question, Michael. The answer, as is often the case in matters of climate, is yes and no. Yes, temperatures are sensitive to forcing. We see this every morning when the sun comes up.
However, this relationship between forcing and temperature breaks down when we are considering the global average surface temperature in the running system. For example, the sun is estimated to have warmed by 5% in the last half billion years … but the earth’s temperature over the same period has cooled slightly.
As another example, volcanoes make little difference in the global surface temperature. Why not? Because their blocking of the sunlight is quickly adjusted for by a reduction in tropical albedo and thunderstorm cooling, so the previous temperature range is quickly restored.
It’s like a house with a thermostat that’s been unoccupied for a while. We come in and we turn on the gas furnace. Is the house temperature a function of gas use?
Well, just as with the earth, the answer is yes and no. Clearly the house ends up warmer with the furnace turned on, so that part of the answer is yes. But once the house reaches the set-point temperature of the thermostat, the house temperature is no longer a function of gas use. At that point, the gas use becomes a function of the outdoor temperature, and the average house temperature is totally decoupled from the amount of gas used.
All the best,
w.
Willis,
While the Early Cambrian might have been cool as a hangover from the Snowball Earth, its average temperature has been estimate much warmer than now, ie c. 21 °C
(7 °C above modern level).
IMO your analogy overlooks the possibility of turning up the thermostat, as happens when the sun is more active both in its irradiance and magnetic flux. The sun has been more active coming out of the LIA than it was during it. SST also reacts with a lag to accumulated solar heating on annual to decadal time scales, which affects the changes in wind force and direction which drive the ENSO, for instance.
Willis…I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the contribution of surface wind to the rate of evaporation.
@Michael Palmer: I understood him to be saying that *given* temperature, solar forcing as such doesn’t have any predictive value for timing & amount of thunderstorms. I certainly didn’t see anything there saying that solar forcing had no effect on temperature.
When I was at school, this is what I was taught about the pattern of weather in the tropics. This was one of the characteristics. Just like in some areas monsoons being another. No one at that stage was addressing global warming or climate change, and therefore no one suggested that this process/pattern was the or even a control knob which kept centennial temperatures at a level of say +/- 0.3 degC, but it was well known and accepted that was simply the pattern of the day; the temperature increased, clouds formed, thunderstorms emerged, and the day cooled.
A similar course of events usually happens to end warm spells in the UK.. There may be a few goods days of weather, the week heats up, and then the good weather is brought to a sudden end with a thunderstorm , Usually, in time for the weekend so that the planned for BBQ is ruined. Following the thunderstorm, the air is fresh and cool, and temperatures return to ‘normal.’
I lived in Zambia for five years and the year was divided into two, re weather – wet season 6 months and 6 months totally dry no rain. The wet was a major thunderstorm every day about 2:30pm lasting about 1 hour, very heavy torrential rain. Within minutes of the rain ceasing the roads would be drying up, steam rising from the tarmac. Within half an hour the whole place was dry. I read somewhere at the time that 70% of the rainfall was immediately transpired back into the atmosphere. This was at least 1000 miles from any ocean. As it did so the temperature noticeably cooled – so it was ok for our local cricket matches starting after work at 4pm!
Just an observation.
Perhaps cricket causes cooling? Gives me the chills just thinking about watching it : )
See this happen all the time on the bottom edge of the tropics where I live – hot day often ends with a thunderstorm and cooler afternoon.
Brian j in UK January 8, 2016 at 11:42 am
Indeed, this kind of thunderstorm cooling is common across the tropics, not just on the ocean. I used the ocean because the response is clearer, since it is not confounded by elevation and other orographic features.
Eric Worrall January 8, 2016 at 11:47 am
It is also common in other parts of the planet, but often only at certain times of the year.
Regards to you both,
w.
Willis, I read your contributions with v great interest. I also lived in Sydney for many years and same thing there. V hot day or days then a line of thunderstorms would come up – known locally as a “Southerly Buster” with torrential rain and enormous lightning activity – sometimes lasting many hours. Result – temperature would drop as much as 15 degF in as many minutes. Great relief all round!! We thanked all that was holy for those Southerly Busters. I know this is only anecdotal, but thunderstorms cool locally wherever they occur. So if they occur over a very wide area as you maintain then massive cooling will result.
Just as a side note on this. It is always apparent here in Western Canada in the winter time that snowy days are typically warmer. Below approximately -30C it very rarely snows and is usually bright and sunny. The phase change of water vapour to snow ( ice) is 970 btus per lb water vapour to liquid sate+ 144 btus per lb liquid to ice with the heat given off helping to keep surface temps slightly higher. Unfortunately, some of that heat ( most? ) escapes to space. Seems to me we have pretty good numbers worldwide on precipitation in different forms so we should be able to calculate total heat transfer.
When I lived in St Louis county Missouri, in the Summer time, every Sunday afternoon at 3-4PM there was a thunderstorm, and me and my buddy would go out in a corn filed and set up our cameras to record the lightning strikes.
We gave up the practice, when on one of those occasions, a big tornado went through the cornfield, and tore it up something fierce.
The nearest ocean to St Louis County, is Lake of the Ozarks.
g
A watt is a power unit, 3.412 Btu per English hour or 3.60 kJ per metric hour. The sensible heat of dry air is 0.24 Btu/lb-F, of liquid water 1 Btu/lb-F. Water evaporates/condenses latent heat at constant temperature at about 1,000 Btu/lb. The heat in moist air (see psychrometric charts, programs) is a combination of dry air sensible heat and water vapor heat, dry at the sensible heat value and the water vapor holding over 1,000 Btu/lb.
The water vapor cycle is the thermal gorilla that runs the climate, CO2/GHG RF is a flea on that gorilla’s butt.
More likely it’s a pimple on the butt of said flea.
Willis said 0.8 Wa/m2 equals the heat required to evaporate a 1mm thick layer of water. So 2xCO2 means about 5mm increase in yearly rainfall / evaporation would eat the heat flow. But. How much the temperature rises to do that? A little? Or more? And the atmospheric water vapour, I thought it is not increasing atm?
P.S. It’s relative humidity that drives evap/cond more so than temp.
That’s probably why you do not see thunderstorms develop over desert regions.
Desert thunderstorms do occur but with less frequency, as during the Arizona monsoon season. They are a major cause of hazardous flash floods.
Lived in Reno, NV for some 8 years. We had thunder storms in the summer without seeing a cloud. They would start brush/forest fires.
Or wind multiplied with RH?
Relative humidity is a function of both temperature and absolute humidity so can’t exactly discount temperature.
Rel Humidity also plays a role in night time cooling, when it increases as it cools, once it in the 80’s and 90’s, the hourly rate of cooling slows. I’ve not sorted out if it’s just the latent heat of condensation contributing to a constant rate of energy loss, or whether the larger water molecules slows the rate of energy loss in the IR bands.
Very nice analysis. There is a compounding knockon effect beyond SST thermoregulation, Lindzen’s adaptive infrared iris (BAMS 2001) which he showed regulates regionally over multiple days via tropical cirrus impacts. More/strongerTstorms, more rainout, less moisture detrainment from the thunderhead ‘anvil’, so less cirrus (dryer upper troposphere), so more cooling. Cirrus are are ice, so ‘warm’ since opaque to outbound infrared LWR while transparent to incoming SWR. Bjorn Smith’s paper last year showed that by adding adaptive iris alone, model sensitivity was moved halfway to observational. Judith and I did back to back posts on it over at CE. That Without including the additional Eschenbach heat flux effect.
Dai’s 2006 J. Climate paper showed precipitation is undermodeled. Wentz’s 2007 Science paper showed by about half in the tropics. Strong literature support for this solid looking theory highlighting fundamental climate model flaws.
Cool.
With a chance of rain!
This mechanism controls nicely the temperature in the tropical region, but there is heat dissipating to the higher latitudes with an amplifying effect on the temperature. The ultimate heat sinkholes are the poles. Incremental heat effects like the anthropogenic will become apparent at the polar regions. There is no measurable change at Antarctic and minor change at the Arctic because the majority of the anthropogenic contribution is in the Northern Hemisphere. Is the conclusion justified that the anthropogenic contribution to the climate is far less than the proponents of AGW are telling.
Most of the heat dissipated to the poles would be “attached” to water vapour so an important effect would be increased precipitation which would reduce the realized temperature effect. Perhaps this is why the actual observed temp rise is vastly lower than the models predict and why Antarctica is gaining billions of tons of snow mass. Arctic snowfall mainly occurs over water I would expect so quantity is probably largely unknown?
Great!
“Buckle your seatbelts and keep your hands inside the vehicle, it’s gonna be a long, uphill struggle to get rid of this madness …”
Posts like this will help to make ‘the uphill struggle’ much shorter!
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we …
So how do lapse rates fit into the picture or can they be considered to be Constant?
You need a T-phi diagram to find out.
On this one, the atmosphere is stable, until the surface temperature hist 35ºc. Then the dry adiabatic line (DALR green sloping left) hits the CMR line from the dewpoint temp (purple line sloping right). At that point, the air condensates, and follows the saturated adiabatic lapse rate (SALR green dotted that bows right and left).
The basic premise is that the air will stop rising when either the DALR or SALR hit the bold temperature line (red). But as soon as cloud formation starts, the air gets a warming boos from the latent heat of condensation. This is why the SALR line is almost vertical, and suddenly the rising air pocket is not goind to hit the stabilisation red temperature line until 150 mb (44,000 ft). Presto, you have a thunderstorm.
So yes, the lapse rate is key to thunderstorm formation.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QnO-j1SaIl0/TqXJNuPkeiI/AAAAAAAAAHw/vbnXxN1gwoU/s1600/skew-t++for+use+in+the+blog+3.png
Here, I have filled it in.
My purple pocket of air rises up the DALR line and hits the red temperature line, and comes to a halt at a low level. ie: there is no deep convection and no thunderstorm.
But when the surface temperature reaches 37ºc, my blue pocket of rising air hits the CMR (my orange) and condensates, before hitting the red line. So it then follows the SALR all the way to 44,000 ft. So a very little extra surface warming, can cause a massive change in cloud top altitude.
http://s30.postimg.org/a5411makh/T_phi.jpg
Good posts Ralph …
However the Cb will not top-out at the where it crosses the ELR – it has momentum. You need to calculate the CAPE (in my experience your T-Phi exhibits massive CAPE and will (given correct wind profile) a supercell/tornados.
A T-Phi/SkewlogT has energy equaling equal areas, and so for the area enclosed by your SALR and ELR from the Normand’s point, the cloud could well rise an equal area above the 150mb level into the Strat.
Follow the SALR on up until a line drawn horizontally from it back the the right until reaching the ELR again and you have your cloud (Cb or thunderhead top).
It’s interesting to watch anvil clouds form and disappear over Lake Erie during the summer months. It’s the big anvil clouds you have to be wary of. Small anvils no problem.
tell that to Wilie E
By no problem. I mean small anvil clouds are not so dangerous in regards to thunder storms.
‘Weird Clouds Look Even Better From Space’
Has photo of anvil clouds from space. Location – West Africa.
http://www.wired.com/2010/05/gallery-clouds
Photos of Great Lakes anvil clouds are on the internet.
Barbara,
Interesting collection of satellite photos of clouds in your link above. Thank you.
Personally, I don’t care to be standing under clouds made of ANY size anvil. I’ll leave that to Wile E. Coyote, Super-Genius, and welcome to it!
In support of the points made above by other commenters, here is a quote from a NASA web article on its EarthObservatory website (Lindsey, 2009) “At an altitude of roughly 5-6 kilometers, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the overlying atmosphere is so small that heat can radiate freely to space.” 5-6 km is about 18,000 feet. Thunderstorms top out typically much higher than that, reaching over 50,000 feet in some cases. Every thunderstorm launches a massive burst of upward/outward longwave radiation unhindered by the overlying atmosphere!
I think a very important quote! Thanks!
Ristvan, thanks. “There are two altitudes for the two GHG, and they vary wirh latitude”. Can you give us some examples of their altitude in the tropics and on higher latitudes?
Actually,this altitude can be calculated more prescisely from CO2 concentration, surface specific humidity plus lapse rate, and local surface barometric pressure. There are two altitudes for the two GHG, and they vary wirh latitude. Essay Sensitive Uncertainty. Models don’t do any of this. But if they did, they would show that the CMIP5 models were falsified by this excellent cited observation.
Simplified, models have to parameterize convective processes like Tstorms because their computationally constrained minimum grid scales are several orders of magnitude too big tomeven attempt a bad mthematical simulation. Guest post here last year. And, per IPCC, the parameterization left out natural variation. So they must–and do– run hot by a lot.
Sorry, took the wrong ‘reply’:
Ristvan, thanks. “There are two altitudes for the two GHG, and they vary wirh latitude”. Can you give us some examples of their altitude in the tropics and on higher latitudes?
Several interesting (to me anyway) things. First it looks like tropical latitudes take longer to respond to heat than extra-tropical ones, if I’m interpreting your scatterplot correctly. It looks like NH and SH regions produce significant evaporative cooling at 15-20°C, while the tropical areas hardly register at 20°C and really take off around 25°C. I can’t think of why that might be. Why wouldn’t the onset of evaporative cooling occur at approximately the same temperature in all regions?
Second, echoing Steve Mcintyre’s comment, I would expect there to be an El Niño signal in the TRMM data. Does it go back far enough to include the 1998 El Niño?
Willis:
You have explained—with elegant charts and prose—that t-storms have a governing (thermostat) effect on local temperatures but it is not clear to me what this has to do with the question of climate “forcings.”
It is obvious and established fact that thunderstorms form when hot moist air is lifted. If conditions are right, the lifted air is cooled by expansion, so the lifted moisture condenses to form cloud particles, and the resulting latent heat of condensation causes further lifting. The fact that the local environment is cooler just before, during, and after a thunderstorm forms has been known since well before man had evolved sufficiently to invent the word “cold.”
In the satellite temperature record of the lower troposphere one can clearly see the effect of volcanic forcing from the eruptions of El Chichon and Pinitubo on global temperature. That these eruptions were the cause of global cooling is further backed up by measurements of atmospheric optical depth.
However, tropical thunderstorms (presumably a dearth of them) were not able to overcome cooling caused by those volcanic eruptions. The global temperature did not recover until the had dust settled. It is not unreasonable to conclude the t-storm thermostat would also not be able to overcome any CO2 forcing on global temperature.
On the other hand, I know of no scientifically credible evidence to support the idea of runaway AGM. We have already conducted a 100 year experiment and we find that the current global temperature is probably no warmer than it was in the recent Holocene past.
Humankind has prospered because of our use of fossil fuels. Yet, all the global warming claimed by alarmists would, only just, be detectible by the average human being if it occurred instantly. No human could detect such a small temperature rise occurring slowly over 135 years (for obvious reasons).
Media hype about increases in dangerous weather, droughts and floods is not substantiated in any scientific record that I have ever seen, and I’ve seen quite a few.
Future global warming is likely to be similar to past warming, mild and mostly beneficial for Earth’s biosphere, which we are an integral part of.
Thomas January 8, 2016 at 1:02 pm
Thanks, Thomas, but that’s not as true as you seem to think. See my previous posts on the subject, viz:
BEST, Volcanoes and Climate Sensitivity 2012-08-13
I’ve argued in a variety of posts that the usual canonical estimate of climate sensitivity, which is 3°C of warming for a doubling of CO2, is an order of magnitude too large. Today, at the urging of Steven Mosher in a thread on Lucia Liljegren’s excellent blog “The Blackboard”, I’ve…
Volcanoes: Active, Inactive, and Retroactive 2013-05-22
Anthony put up a post titled “Why the new Otto et al climate sensitivity paper is important – it’s a sea change for some IPCC authors” The paper in question is “Energy budget constraints on climate response” (free registration required), supplementary online information (SOI) here, by Otto et alia, sixteen…
Stacked Volcanoes Falsify Models 2013-05-25
Well, this has been a circuitous journey. I started out to research volcanoes. First I got distracted by the question of model sensitivity, as I described in Model Climate Sensitivity Calculated Directly From Model Results. Then I was diverted by the question of smoothing of the Otto data, as I reported…
The Eruption Over the IPCC AR5 2013-09-22
In the leaked version of the upcoming United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Chapter 1, we find the following claims regarding volcanoes. The forcing from stratospheric volcanic aerosols can have a large impact on the climate for some years after volcanic eruptions. Several…
Overshoot and Undershoot 2010-11-29
Today I thought I’d discuss my research into what is put forward as one of the key pieces of evidence that GCMs (global climate models) are able to accurately reproduce the climate. This is the claim that the GCMs are able to reproduce the effects of volcanoes on the climate.…
Eruptions and Ocean Heat Content 2014-04-06
I was out trolling for science the other day at the AGW Observer site. It’s a great place, they list lots and lots of science including the good, the bad, and the ugly, like for example all the references from the UN IPCC AR5. The beauty part is that the…
Prediction is hard, especially of the future. 2010-12-29
[UPDATE]: I have added a discussion of the size of the model error at the end of this post. Over at Judith Curry’s climate blog, the NASA climate scientist Dr. Andrew Lacis has been providing some comments. He was asked: Please provide 5- 10 recent ‘proof points’ which you would…
Volcanoes Erupt Again 2014-02-24
I see that Susan Solomon and her climate police have rounded up the usual suspects, which in this case are volcanic eruptions, in their desperation to explain the so-called “pause” in global warming that’s stretching towards two decades now. Their problem is that for a long while the climate alarmists…
Volcanic Disruptions 2012-03-16
The claim is often made that volcanoes support the theory that forcing rules temperature. The aerosols from the eruptions are injected into the stratosphere. This reflects additional sunlight, and cuts the amount of sunshine that strikes the surface. As a result of this reduction in forcing, the biggest volcanic eruptions…
Dronning Maud Meets the Little Ice Age 2012-04-13
I have to learn to keep my blood pressure down … this new paper, “Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks“, hereinafter M2012, has me shaking my head. It has gotten favorable reports in the scientific blogs … I don’t see it at…
Missing the Missing Summer 2012-04-15
Since I was a kid I’ve been reading stories about “The Year Without A Summer”. This was the summer of 1816, one year after the great eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia. The Tambora eruption, in April of 1815, was so huge it could be heard from 2,600 km…
New Data, Old Claims About Volcanoes 2012-07-30
Richard Muller and the good folks over at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project have released their temperature analysis back to 1750, and are making their usual unsupportable claims. I don’t mean his risible statements that the temperature changes are due to CO2 because the curves look alike—that joke has…
Volcanic Corroboration 2012-09-10
Back in 2010, I wrote a post called “Prediction is hard, especially of the future“. It turned out to be the first of a series of posts that I ended up writing on the inability of climate models to successfully replicate the effects of volcanoes. It was an investigation occasioned…
Get Laki, Get Unlaki 2014-11-18
Well, we haven’t had a game of “Spot The Volcano” in a while, so I thought I’d take a look at what is likely the earliest volcanic eruption for which we have actual temperature records. This was the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki in June of 1783. It is claimed to…
Volcanoes Once Again, Again 2015-01-09
[also, see update at the end of the post] Anthony recently highlighted a couple of new papers claiming to explain the current plateau in global warming. This time, it’s volcanoes, but the claim this time is that it’s not the big volcanoes. It’s the small volcanoes. The studies both seem to…
My best to you,
w.
Willis,
If we compare Global Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness (link below) with UAH Lower Tropospheric Temperature, we can clearly see the effect of the eruptions of Pinatubo and El Chichon. First on optical thickness, then on global temperature.
El Chichon in 1982 caused a notable increase in global optical thickness in 1983. The global temperature bottomed out in 1984 and didn’t recover until the dust had settled back to background levels in 1987.
With Pinatubo, global temperature fell immediately (1992) and didn’t recover for four years.
In your “Spot the Volcano” post you mention Mt. Redoubt in Alaska (2009) but that eruption had no notable affect on global optical depth, partly because it occurred in the far north, and partly because there was little ash and sulphur dioxide ejected into the upper atmosphere.
If we look at eruptions that eject large amounts of ash and sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, sufficient to cause a significant increase in optical thickness, they have a strong global cooling effect and the effect lasts until the dust settles. This is evidence that the thermostat effect of thunderstorms, while real, is not sufficient to overcome the cooling effect of aerosol forcing.
For El Chichon and Pinatubo, the cooling effect is small, 0.25°C and 0.30°C respectively, but it’s clearly real. They occurred early in the UAH record and there have been no significant eruptions since, which makes me wonder of if the lack of recent volcanos might be the major cause of all the warming trend in that record. Was global temperature suppressed by volcanos in the 1980’s and early 1990’s so that what appears to be a warming trend is just a recovery back to normal? In other words, did a lack of volcanos cause global warming?
I will email my chart to Anthony and ask him to forward it to you. I would appreciate further discussion with you if you are in the mood.
One subject that currently fascinates me is that global warming as evidenced in the UAH record isn’t global at all. Almost all the warming is in the norther extra-tropics and polar regions. There seems to be a close correlation with the AMO and hurricane tracks, which can carry heat from the tropics up the gulf stream “super highway” and into the Arctic Ocean. The Atlantic has a large water connection to the Arctic Ocean while the Pacific has only a small connection at the Bering Strait.
GISS Global Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness site:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/
GISS Global Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness DATA
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/tau.line_2012.12.txt
Thomas January 8, 2016 at 11:11 pm
Thanks, Thomas. I’m not sure what you are objecting to in this part of your comment. I’ve never denied that we can see the volcanic eruptions in the stratospheric records. But as my “Spot the Volcano” analysis clearly shows, volcanoes do NOT have the effect usually claimed for them.
I’m sorry, but your uncited and unsupported claim that volcanoes “have a strong global cooling effect and the effect lasts until the dust settles” does NOT constitute “evidence that the thermostat effect of thunderstorms, while real, is not sufficient to overcome the cooling effect of aerosol forcing”. Evidence is verifiable facts and observations, Thomas, not your uncited claims.
Nope. If they had, the lack of volcanoes since 1992 would have led to continual warming, but in fact the world hasn’t warmed in almost two decades. Which makes me wonder if you actually read all of my discussions on this question …
And then we have the recurring problem of your uncited claims, like the idea that “For El Chichon and Pinatubo, the cooling effect is small, 0.25°C and 0.30°C respectively, but it’s clearly real.” No mention of either what is being measured, who measured it, or where it was measured. It’s just an anecdote.
In fact, El Chichon occurred in the middle of the temperature drop that you think it caused, and it did not appreciably change the speed of the temperature drop. See here for details.
So while it is true that you’ve provided lots of anecdotes, I’m sorry, Thomas, but as they say, “The plural of anecdote is not data.”
Please do not take this, however, as disparaging your efforts. I am always pleased to see people actively investigating what is going on rather than just accepting what passes for peer-reviewed scientific papers these days …
w.
Does anyone know how much energy in MWatts is released in a single lightning strike? and;
How many tonnes of CO2 would it take to make the same amount of energy ?
MW is power, not energy. Btu is energy. MW is 3.4E6 Btu/h.
ManBear
Your first question is answerable, and the number is very large. It is not a useful number but there is such a number. Suppose the voltage was 100m and the current (typical) is 20,000 amps. The duration is not relevant because asking for MW automatically introduces time which is independent. The answer is about 2 million MW but the time interval is short. Multiple to time in seconds (as a decimal) by the 2 million MW and you get MJ.
The second question is not answerable. CO2 doesn’t make MW.
More important is the fact that the energy in the lightning bolt mostly comes from friction in the atmosphere so it is not a net heating factor. It just concentrates energy from a diffuse source to a concentrated point. If we could tap lightning, it would cool the atmosphere, eventually, unless it was all turned into heat, not radio waves, deformed materials or high energy chemicals.
Willis did you see Steve Mc’s question.
Stephen Richards January 8, 2016 at 1:38 pm
Answered, thanks for the reminder.
w.
Fascinating. I wish I knew what makes the depths of the ocean so cold. There seems to be even more refrigeration going on there. Do you suppose the mid-atlantic ridge is a ridge due to heat?
It is actually pretty simple conceptually, even if the details are horribly complicated. It starts mainly in the Arctic. Google thermohaline circulation.
In a nutshell:
The annual Arctic winter ice buildup cause of subfreezing atmospheric temps means the new sea ice exudes brine. (Ice is freshwater). Resulting briny cold (near freezing) surface seas are denser thanks to the extra salt, so sink to the ocean bottom. Now that ‘thermal engine’ flow displaces other deep water around the globe, based on ocean bottom ‘shapes’. Until it reemerges hundreds of years later as nutrient rich upwellings like off the western Americas.
Thus is the briny deep always near the freezing point of seawater. Actually, about 0C- 2C compared to seawater freezing point about -2C. Ignore depth pressure considerations in this rough sketch explanation.
It seems peculiar and surprising that the energy that drives this thing is found at a polar extreme. Is there some kind of latent heat of solidification or liquification at play? It seems akin to that thing that makes ice cream makers work. How would one go about estimating the kind of energy it takes to maintain the extreme cold of the abyss of the ocean?
HH, I had an interesting day with Lindzen himself at MIT, since I asked him to critique the climate chapter of The Arts of Truth pre publication, at my expense. He asked me your very question (among many others–resulting in the lengthly Svalbard footnote in the continental drift example).
There is poleward heat transport both in the atmosphere and the oceans. Skip all the specific known mechanisms. The simplest answer is heat flows from hot to cold.
So the equators heat (subject to the Lindzen/ Eschenbach regulation theories), and what happens at the poles says what eventually happens to that heat.
An anecdote:
Going north in the Malacca Strait at around 20:00 local time I ran into a real humdinger of a thunderstorm, loaded with a full cargo of petrol (gasoline) and rain so hard that the radar was totally blank. Before running into the rain I had several very large vessels steaming in the same direction in the vicinity and good reason to believe that there were similar vessels coming the other way.
The quartermaster on the wheel had a spinal deformation and could not stand up straight.
So we steamed along in almost zero visibility with the E/R on standby and hearts in mouths.
Then the wind picked up from ahead, and at the same time the E/R phoned to say they had a problem which was causing sparks to come out of the funnel The fumes of gasoline from the masthead vents from the cargo tanks were therefor going straight back into the sparks.
What to do?
Well I turned round to go the other way so that the wind was aft.
And just after I turned round a lightning strike hit the water about 100 yards away. I swear that the quartermaster stood up straight as a ramrod. For the next few minutes we had St. Elmo’s Fire on the mast rigging. Then the rain stopped, all was well and we proceeded on our way.
But during the actual thunderstorm the temperature dropped noticably, and rose again once we were clear.
I think I aged 10 years in that half hour.
Is this controversial? Are there “climate scientists” disputing this theory … a theory that Willis has been writing about, with data, for years? Are they ignoring it? It’s not like this blog is unknown and unread by “climate scientists.”
It’s not a theory. At most it’s an hypothesis, but really more of an observation. It’s not in the least bit original. Here is a skeptical climate scientist’s take on the phenomenon of thunderclouds and evaporative cooling and of Willis’ views about the same:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/10/citizen-scientist-willis-and-the-cloud-radiative-effect/
Clouds and evaporative cooling are indeed however an important part of climatology ignored by the models of so-called “climate scientists”, ie GIGO computer gamers.
The extraordinary heat of the mid-Cretaceous I mentioned above has been attributed to lower biological productivity from the very hot seawater of that epoch, hence fewer cloud condensation nuclei.
Gloatus:
“Clouds and evaporative cooling are indeed however an important part of climatology ignored by the models of so-called “climate scientists”, ie GIGO computer gamers.”
Incorrect:
“Moist convection releases latent heat and is important to the Earth’s energy budget. Convection occurs on too small a scale to be resolved by climate models, and hence it must be handled via parameters. This has been done since the 1950s. Akio Arakawa did much of the early work, and variants of his scheme are still used, although a variety of different schemes are now in use.[20][21][22] Clouds are also typically handled with a parameter, for a similar lack of scale. Limited understanding of clouds has limited the success of this strategy, but not due to some inherent shortcoming of the method.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Circulation_Model
And:
“Moist convection causes the release of latent heat and is important to the Earth’s energy budget. Convection occurs on too small a scale to be resolved by climate models, and hence must be parameterized.”
From
http://climate.unist.ac.kr/research/globalClimateModel.sko;jsessionid=0A27400024AD01C884B7ED2DD36BB4D0
To list but 2 references.
Gloateus Maximus January 8, 2016 at 2:47 pm Edit
Nonsense. First, I’ve provided lots of observational data to support my hypothesis, so at this point it is a theory.
And as to your claim that it is not original? Prove it. Provide us with one person who has made the same claim before I did, that the timing and strength of emergent phenomena control the global temperature. I know of no one who made that claim before I did … and I say you don’t know of anyone either, you’re just flapping your lips.
Dr. Roy is one of my heroes, but on this one he was dead wrong. He accused me of not crediting Ramanathan, whose theory was totally different from mine, so there was no reason to credit him. Dr. Roy also neglected to do enough homework to notice that I HAD credited Ramanathan when I talked about his work. For those interested in facts rather than Maximus’s pathetic attempt to gloat, see my post responding to Dr. Roy’s unpleasant accusations, linked below.
w.
Apparently you don’t know the difference between a theory and an hypothesis. Some theories are those of universal gravitation, atomic matter, germ-caused diseases, evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics. Do you seriously expect anyone to place your unfounded conjecture in the same category as these well-supported, general scientific theories (actually laws in some cases)?
Sorry, but I’m going with Roy on this one, who has produced far more than enough evidence in the link provided.
What exactly do you imagine to be original in your hypothesis, if your assertion may be so dignified? The roles of evaporative cooling and moist convection have been well understood in meteorology for decades, at least. Is it your unsupported claim that tropical thunderstorms in particular limit global temperature, to the exclusion of other factors? Here’s a discussion of moist convection from over ten years ago:
http://people.atmos.ucla.edu/bstevens/Documents/annurev.earth.33.092203.pdf
If there’s any nonsense here, it’s all yours.
I’m also still interested in your response to my comments on the role of the sun and volcanoes in SSTs, which have been much higher in the past than permitted by your “theoretical” limit. I don’t see how anyone can argue that solar activity currently plays no role in ENSO and climate. The sun heats the ocean. When it shines more brightly for periods than in other periods, El Ninos are more frequent and stronger. Also, when its magnetic field is stronger, fewer clouds form, leading to more surface heating.
Gloateus Maximus January 8, 2016 at 4:09 pm
From the web, what is basically the definition I was using:
Since I have provided a wide variety of actual observations to back up my hypothesis, and since the testable predictions from my hypothesis have been shown to be true (including in this post), I call it a theory rather than a hypothesis. Is it the same as the theory of gravity? Nope, never said it was. At present it is an unaccepted theory.
Roy provided no evidence of prior art to back up his bogus claim, and you’re just waving your hands without producing any prior art either. If you have prior art to share that makes the same claims that I have made regarding emergent phenomena regulating the planet’s temperature, it’s time for you to put up or shut up. Flapping your lips just isn’t enough.
w.
If there’s any lip-flapping and hand-waving going on here, it’s by you. “Continental drift” via seafloor spreading of tectonic plates is a theory. Your unoriginal observation of the well-known effects of tropical thunderstorms is not even an hypothesis, let alone a theory.
Clearly, you didn’t do enough of a literature search before claiming to have made a discovery and developed a unique “theory”, which your unoriginal observation isn’t. No surprise that you can’t state what you imagine to be original about your observation.
That earth’s temperature is self-regulating is about as far from an original observation as possible. That tropical clouds (cirrus in this case rather than cumulo-nimbus) play a role in this homeostatic process is also no surprise. Lindzen, et al, wrote a paper on the topic in 2001 in the AMS Bulletin:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=8144
Commenters here discuss the phenomenon which you imagine you have discovered. The observation is a commonplace, so no wonder Roy took exception to your false claim of originality:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.cl/2014/02/why-earths-climate-is-self-regulating.html
Gloateus
You are digging over a field already ploughed. Willis already presented here months ago an excellent defence as to the novel nature of his theory. It may be worth your going to read that so he doesn’t have to repost everything here. You are guessing and hoping. The readership here is waiting for you to catch up. Please don’t waste more of our time.
It is novel, it is published, it is a theory now. It is also correct, IMV.