More on Ocean Heat Content and recent revisions to the data

5 02 2010
OHC Linear Trends and Recent Update of NODC OHC (0-700 Meters) Data

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

[This is a follow up post to the first one on WUWT where Bob first examined the recent OHC revision, seen below  - Anthony]


http://i48.tinypic.com/14e6wjn.gif

The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) presented its Ocean Heat Content (OHC) data in conjunction with the Levitus et al (2009) Paper. The NODC makes the data available to the public and maintains it at their GLOBAL OCEAN HEAT CONTENT webpage. About January 20, 2010, the NODC added its 4th quarter and annual 2009 OHC data so that it covered the period of 1955 to 2009. On January 29 and February 1, 2010, the NODC also updated its 2006-and-later data. The KNMI Climate Explorer was updated in response to the 4th quarter NODC OHC additions and, on February 1, to the 2006-and-later revisions. (Thanks to Tim and Geert Jan for the timely updates.)

This post presents:
1. A brief look at impact of the revisions (corrections) to the 2006-and-later OHC data
2. OHC Trend Comparisons for individual ocean basins and hemispheres
3. An update of the global, hemispheric, and basin OHC data through December 2009

A Note About The Data Presented In This Post: This data used in the graphs (except Figure 2) was downloaded through the KNMI Climate Explorer website, which allows users to define the coordinates of the desired data subset. The data is presented in Gigajoules per square meter (GJ/m^2), not in 10^22 Joules like the NODC. In the GJ/m^2 format, subsets are easier to compare, since adjustments for surface area do not have to be made (they’ve already been made). The NODC presents quarterly data. KNMI includes those quarterly values for each corresponding month. This “squares off” the monthly data in the graphs, since the one value is the same for three consecutive months, but it permits comparisons to other monthly datasets, such as NINO3.4 SST anomalies.

REVISIONS (Corrections) TO THE 2006-AND-LATER NODC OHC DATA Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 47 Comments »

Categories : oceans

NODC revises ocean heat content data – it’s now dropping slightly

31 01 2010

NODC Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) – 2007, 2008 & 2009 Corrections

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) recently updated its 4th quarter and annual 2009 Ocean Heat Content (OHC) data. The data that was presented in conjunction with the Levitus et al (2009) Paper now covers the period of 1955 to 2009. There have been changes that some might find significant.

This post presents:
1. A brief look at the revisions (corrections) to the data in 2007 and 2008 OHC data
2. A comparison of the NODC OHC data for the period of 2003 to 2009 versus the GISS projection

REVISIONS (Corrections) TO THE 2007 AND 2008 NODC OHC DATA

Figure 1 is a gif animation of two Ocean Heat Content graphs posted on the NODC GLOBAL OCEAN HEAT CONTENT webpage. It shows the differences between the current (January 2010) version and one that appears to include data through June or September 2009. So this is an “Official” correction (not more incompletely updated data posted on the NODC website discussed in NODC’s CORRECTION TO OHC (0-700m) DATA, which required me to make corrections to a handful of posts). I have found nothing in the NODC OHC web pages that discuss these new corrections. Due to the years involved, is it safe to assume these are more corrections for ARGO biases? As of this writing, I have not gone through the individual ocean basins to determine if the corrections were to one ocean basin, a group of basins, or if they’re global; I’ll put aside the multipart post I’ve been working on for the past few weeks and try to take a look over the next few days.

http://i48.tinypic.com/14e6wjn.gif
Figure 1

NODC OHC OBSERVATIONS VERSUS GISS PROJECTION (2003-2009) Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 174 Comments »

Categories : oceans

Diverging views

29 01 2010

The GISS Temperature Record Divergence Problem

Guest post by Tilo Reber

In connection with James Hansen’s explanation of why his GISS temperature record diverges from that of HadCRUT, I decided to check on the legitimacy of what GISS was doing. Dr. Hansen’s article is here at RealClimate. This is the specific chart of interest:
(click on chart to expand)
In this chart, Dr. Hansen explains how the GISS record is different from HadCRUT.   The essential difference is that there are areas at the poles where GISS has filled in the values by extrapolating from the nearest land based records.   Dr. Hansen created a mask of all the areas that HadCRUT does not cover.  He then applies this mask to the GISS record and deletes the readings for the areas that are masked off.  The resulting chart is marked GISS/HadCRUT mask above.   Dr. Hansen then goes on to provide a graph which shows that the GISS divergence with HadCRUT no longer exists after the missing HadCRUT boxes have been removed from the GISS record. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 150 Comments »

Categories : Antarctic, Arctic, climate data

Sanity check: 2008 & 2009 Were The Coolest Years Since 1998 in the USA

23 01 2010

While the press is hyperventilating over NASA GISS recent announcement of the “Hottest Decade Ever“, it pays to keep in mind what happened the last two years of the past decade.

According to NCDC, 2009 temperatures in the US (53.13F) were the 33rd warmest and very close to the long term mean of 52.86F.

Generated from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html

Since 1998, according to NCDC’s own figures,  temperatures in the US have been dropping at a rate of more than 10 degrees F per century. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 240 Comments »

Categories : Climate News, climate data

American Thinker on CRU, GISS, and Climategate

22 01 2010

Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg

By Marc Sheppard

Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain’s premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation’s borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our government’s principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.

Not only does the preliminary report [PDF] indict a broader network of conspirators, but it also challenges the very mechanism by which global temperatures are measured, published, and historically ranked.

Last Thursday, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV [Video] to discuss the Climategate — American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D’Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny, “[w]e think NOAA is complicit, if not the real ground zero for the issue.”

And their primary accomplices are the scientists at GISS, who put the altered data through an even more biased regimen of alterations, including intentionally replacing the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.

As you’ll soon see, the ultimate effects of these statistical transgressions on the reports which influence climate alarm and subsequently world energy policy are nothing short of staggering. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 156 Comments »

Categories : Climategate, climate data

Flashback – Bob Tisdale’s November prediction on GISS exploiting the “warmest decade on record”

22 01 2010

To help understand the context of the NASA GISS announcement, I’m reposting Bob Tisdales’s excellent analysis from 2009 which ran on WUWT on November 10th

Global Temperatures This Decade Will Be The Warmest On Record…

…And It Will Be Exploited By Those Who Fail To Understand The Reasons For The Rise

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

snowman_forecaster

INITIAL NOTES

For some visitors to this blog, this post will be a merging and rehashing of a few of my earlier posts. But this post is different in a very important way. I have attempted to simplify the discussion of El Nino-caused step changes for those with less technical backgrounds.

The post does assume the reader knows of El Nino and La Nina events. If not, here are links to two NOAA El Nino Frequently Asked Question web pages:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/enso_faq/
http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/occasionally-asked-questions.html

The following narrated video “Visualizing El Nino” from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio provides an excellent overview of the 1997/98 E; Nino, one of the El Nino events that created the aftereffects illustrated in this post.

YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbNzw1CCKHo

I have provided links to the referenced studies and to the posts that provide more detailed explanations at the end of the following. They do not appear within the general discussion of this post.

Many of the illustrations in the following are .gif animations, with 5- to 10-second pauses between cells.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURES THIS DECADE WILL BE THE WARMEST ON RECORD Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 87 Comments »

Categories : climate data

Warmest decade on record*

22 01 2010

From NASA’s press release

NASA Research Finds Last Decade was Warmest on Record, 2009 One of Warmest Years

From NASA GISTEMP- Click image for original source

WASHINGTON — A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.

Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 221 Comments »

Categories : climate data

Searchable PDF created for NASA GISS FOIA documents

18 01 2010

As we reported earlier:

Newly released FOIA’d emails from Hansen and GISS staffers show disagreement over 1998-1934 U.S. temperature ranking

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/nasa_email_sato_0814071.jpg?w=316&h=368

click for a larger image

Now thanks to the efforts of Richard Henry Lee, a searchable PDF document of those files has been set up.

Download it here:

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 21 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Pielke Senior: NASA GISS Inaccurate Press Release On The Surface Temperature Trend Data

17 01 2010

From Dr. Roger Pielke Senior’s blog:

UPDATE PM JANUARY 16 2010 – Jim Hansen has released a statement on his current conclusions regarding the global average surface temperature trends [and thanks to Leonard Ornstein and Brian Toon for alerting us to this information].   The statement is If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold? by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo

My comments below remain unchanged. Readers will note that Jim Hansen does not cite or comment on any of the substantive unresolved uncertainties and systematic warm bias that we report on in our papers. They only report on their research papers.   This is a clear example of  ignoring peer reviewed studies which conflict with one’s conclusions.

***ORIGINAL POST***

Thanks to Anthony Watts for alerting us to a news release by NASA GISS (see) which reads

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis. The analysis utilizes three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data. The analysis methodology as well as updates to the analysis are publicly available on our website. The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically based conclusions regarding global temperatures.” (GISS temperature analysis website: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)” [note: I could not find the specific url from NASA, so I welcome being sent this original source].

This statement perpetuates the erroneous claim that the data sources are independent [I welcome information from GISS to justify their statement, and will post if they do].  This issue exists even without considering any other concerns regarding their analyses. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 156 Comments »

Categories : climate data

NCAR’s dirty little secret

16 01 2010

by Anthony Watts

WUWT readers of course have heard about the Met Office and their giant new supercomputer called “deep black” that they use for climate simulation and short term forecasts.

Not to be outdone, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO has commissioned a new supercomputer project of their own: The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) shown in artist rendering below.

click for a larger image

In the initial press release they state the location and purpose: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 175 Comments »

Categories : Opinion, energy, modeling, politics, ridiculae

Hansen responds to John Coleman’s KUSI Special report

15 01 2010

According to the KUSI special report page, Dr. Hansen has issued the following statement.

NASA has issued the following statement in response to the KUSI Special Report. This statement is from Dr. James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City:

“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis. The analysis utilizes three independent data sources provided by other agencies. Quality control checks are regularly performed on that data. The analysis methodology as well as updates to the analysis are publicly available on our website. The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically based conclusions regarding global temperatures.” (GISS temperature analysis website: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/)

For more on Dr. Hansen, here is a Youtube clip of his recent appearance on the David Letterman show. Apparently Dr. Hansen does “joust with jesters” after all. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 162 Comments »

Categories : media

Newly released FOIA’d emails from Hansen and GISS staffers show disagreement over 1998-1934 U.S. temperature ranking

14 01 2010

From a Judicial watch press release

NASA Scientists Go on Attack After Climate Data Error Exposed

Contact Information: Press Office 202-646-5172, ext 305
Washington, DC — January 14, 2010


Email from Sato to Hansen 8-14-07 click to enlarge (Note: email addresses redacted as a courtesy by WUWT)

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA’s handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA’s rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.

These new documents, obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), include internal GISS email correspondence as NASA scientists attempted to deal with the media firestorm resulting from the controversy. In one exchange GISS head James Hansen tells a reporter from Bloomberg that NASA had not previously published rankings with 1998 atop the list as the hottest year on record in the 20th century. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 137 Comments »

Categories : FOI, climate data

Climategate—The CTM story

13 01 2010

Me ~ ctm

by charles the moderator

Many of you know me by my sometimes flippant moderation comments here.  Sometimes concern is expressed over my anonymity since Anthony occasionally berates some who comment here for hiding behind anonymous Internet handles.  Anthony long ago accepted my personal reasons for maintaining my anonymity and I have personally contacted others who expressed concerns and have given them explanations to which no one to date has refused to accept.

I am the head moderator here, with administrative as well as moderation privileges.  I supervise the other moderators and sometimes publish posts, or correct typos as needed.  Despite the accusations from Drs. Mann, Hansen et al., I have yet to meet my corporate overlords, view my directives from above, or receive a single cent for my hundreds of hours of services.

Here’s the story of how I was one of the very first to see the CRU files and what transpired.

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 225 Comments »

Categories : Climategate

Hansen on the surface temperature record, Climategate, solar, and El Nino

21 12 2009

The Temperature of Science (PDF available here)
James Hansen

My experience with global temperature data over 30 years provides insight about how the science and its public perception have changed. In the late 1970s I became curious about well known analyses of global temperature change published by climatologist J. Murray Mitchell: why were his estimates for large-scale temperature change restricted to northern latitudes? As a planetary scientist, it seemed to me there were enough data points in the Southern Hemisphere to allow useful estimates both for that hemisphere and for the global average. So I requested a tape of meteorological station data from Roy Jenne of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who obtained the data from records of the World Meteorological Organization, and I made my own analysis.

Fast forward to December 2009, when I gave a talk at the Progressive Forum in Houston Texas. The organizers there felt it necessary that I have a police escort between my hotel and the forum where I spoke. Days earlier bloggers reported that I was probably the hacker who broke into East Anglia computers and stole e-mails. Their rationale: I was not implicated in any of the pirated e-mails, so I must have eliminated incriminating messages before releasing the hacked emails.

The next day another popular blog concluded that I deserved capital punishment. Web chatter on this topic, including indignation that I was coming to Texas, led to a police escort.

How did we devolve to this state? Any useful lessons? Is there still interesting science in analyses of surface temperature change? Why spend time on it, if other groups are also doing it? First I describe the current monthly updates of global surface temperature at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Then I show graphs illustrating scientific inferences and issues. Finally I respond to questions in the above paragraph. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 380 Comments »

Categories : Climategate, ENSO, Sea Surface Temperature, climate data, solar

GISS “raw” station data – before and after

11 12 2009

I’ve been following this issue a few days and looking at a number of stations and had planned to make a detailed post about my findings, but WUWT commenter Steven Douglas posted in comments about this curious change in GISS data recently, and it got picked up by Kate at SDA, which necessitated me commenting on it now. This goes back to the beginning days of surfacestations.org in June 2007 and the second station I surveyed.

Remember Orland? That nicely sited station with a long record?

Note the graph I put in place in June 2007 on that image.

Now look at the graph in a blink comparator showing Orland GISS data plotted in June 2007 and today: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 247 Comments »

Categories : climate data, weather_stations

Shocker – CRU’s Jones: GISS is inferior

29 11 2009

I was working on another project related to the CRU emails and came across this email from Dr.Phil Jones. I was stunned, not only because he was dissing another dataset, but mostly because that dissing hit many of the points about problems with the NASA GISS products we’ve covered here on WUWT and at Climate Audit.

Here’s the email with my highlights added. Email addresses have been partially redacted.

click for larger image

The original email can be seen at this link: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 184 Comments »

Categories : Climategate

Climategate: Pielke Senior on the NCDC CCSP report – “strong arm tactics”

26 11 2009

From Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.

http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/img/ncdc-logo.jpg

E-mail Documentation Of The Successful Attempt By Thomas Karl Director Of the U.S. National Climate Data Center To Suppress Biases and Uncertainties In the Assessment Surface Temperature Trends

The release of the e-mails from Phil Jones further confirmed the attempts to suppress viewpoints of climate change issues, which conflict with the IPCC viewpoint.

In the example I present below, the issue is the robustness of the surface temperature trend record.  The three main groups that compile and analyze this information are NCDC (directed by Tom Karl), GISS (directed by Jim Hansen) and CRU (directed by Phil Jones).

In 2005, as I document in

Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”. 88 pp including appendices,

strong arm tactics of the Editor of this report (Tom Karl, Director of the US National Data Climate Center) were used to remove information in the CCSP report which raised questions about the robustness of his (and Jim Hansen’s GISS and Phil Jones’s CRU)  surface temperature data. Phil Jones was a  National Research Council panel member in a review of an interim draft of the CCSP report. In my Public Comment, I provided e-mail documentation of how these questions were excluded. At the time, my Public Comment did not receive much attention. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 89 Comments »

Categories : Climategate, climate data

CEI Files Notice of Intent to Sue NASA GISS

24 11 2009

UPDATED: related FOIA documents are now posted at the end of this story.

Posted on the American Spectator:

“Climate Gate” Development: CEI Files Notice of Intent to Sue NASA

By on 11.24.09 @ 9:46AM

Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 247 Comments »

Categories : Climategate, FOI

Little Ice Age thermometers – History and Reliability

14 11 2009

Little Ice Age thermometers – History and Reliability

Guest post by TonyB

How reliable are The Little Ice Age thermometers ?

The Little Ice age thermometers project is an attempt to compile instrumental readings from 1660 that predate the era of modern ‘global temperatures’ as recorded by Hadley (1850) and Giss (1880). These datasets are accessed from a graphic through this link;

http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/

LIA Thermometers

The project will examine the reliability of these historic datasets as a means for climate researchers to gaze into our past to see if there are any lessons for the present. In this respect many of those individual stations found to date will have been included in the Cru datasets that are not readily accessible to those outside selected members of the scientific community. In order to examine these records and place them into context with Hadley/Cru and Giss, the author has produced three separate but interlinked articles as follows;

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 68 Comments »

Categories : climate data, measurement, records, weather, weather_stations

Countdown to an “unprecedented warm decade” – 2 months to go

10 11 2009

Global Temperatures This Decade Will Be The Warmest On Record…

…And It Will Be Exploited By Those Who Fail To Understand The Reasons For The Rise

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

snowman_forecaster

INITIAL NOTES

For some visitors to this blog, this post will be a merging and rehashing of a few of my earlier posts. But this post is different in a very important way. I have attempted to simplify the discussion of El Nino-caused step changes for those with less technical backgrounds.

The post does assume the reader knows of El Nino and La Nina events. If not, here are links to two NOAA El Nino Frequently Asked Question web pages:
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/enso_faq/
http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/occasionally-asked-questions.html

The following narrated video “Visualizing El Nino” from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio provides an excellent overview of the 1997/98 E; Nino, one of the El Nino events that created the aftereffects illustrated in this post.

YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbNzw1CCKHo

I have provided links to the referenced studies and to the posts that provide more detailed explanations at the end of the following. They do not appear within the general discussion of this post.

Many of the illustrations in the following are .gif animations, with 5- to 10-second pauses between cells. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 78 Comments »

Categories : ENSO, climate data

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