Bill Illis and Bob Tisdale will likely make use of this. h/t to WUWT reader Chris D.

NOAA Releases Expanded World Ocean Database

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

The 2009 database, updated from the 2005 edition, is significantly larger providing approximately 9.1 million temperature profiles and 3.5 million salinity reports.  The 2009 database also captures 29 categories of scientific information from the oceans, including oxygen levels and chemical tracers, plus information on gases and isotopes that can be used to trace the movement of ocean currents.

“There is now more data about the global oceans than ever before,” said Sydney Levitus, director of the World Data Center for Oceanography, which is part of NOAA’s National Oceanographic Data Center. “Previous databases have shown the world ocean has warmed during the last 53 years, and it’s crucial we have reliable, accurate monitoring of our oceans into the future.”

Climate scientists use the World Ocean Database to track changing conditions which adds to the international science community’s understanding of global climate change. Forecast centers, such as NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center, also use the information for quality control of real-time oceanographic information.

The database is a crucial part of the Integrated Ocean Observing System and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS, as a reliable source of oceanic information. The information was compiled by scientists at the Ocean Climate Laboratory, part of the NOAA Satellite and Information Service.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment—from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun—and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

This is likely to cause a bit of a stir. Michael  from the Climate Skeptics Party in Australia writes in Tips and Notes:

The TCS ad campaign hit the airwaves last night in Australia. I thought you might be interested and post them on your website.

Here are the other TV advertisements:

Kind Regards

Michael

The Climate Sceptics

Policy and Media Unit

Townsville Qld

email: climatesceptics.policy.media@gmail.com

website: http://www.climatesceptics.com.au

Here’s the latest global temperature plot from UAH:

From Dr. Roy Spencer - click to enlarge

From Eurekalert: Human emissions rise 2 percent despite global financial crisis

		IMAGE: Human emissions rise 2 percent despite the global financial crisis. Click here for more information.

Despite the economic effects of the global financial crisis (GFC), carbon dioxide emissions from human activities rose 2 per cent in 2008 to an all-time high of 1.3 tonnes of carbon per capita per year, according to a paper published today in Nature Geoscience.

The paper – by scientists from the internationally respected climate research group, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) – says rising emissions from fossil fuels last year were caused mainly by increased use of coal but there were minor decreases in emissions from oil and deforestation.

“The current growth in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is closely linked to growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” said one of the paper’s lead authors, CSIRO’s Dr Mike Raupach.

“CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion are estimated to have increased 41 per cent above 1990 levels with emissions continuing to track close to the worst-case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“There will be a small downturn in emissions because of the GFC, but anthropogenic emissions growth will resume when the economy recovers unless the global effort to reduce emissions from human activity is accelerated.”

The GCP estimates that the growth in emissions from developing countries increased in part due to the production of manufactured goods consumed in developed countries. In China alone, 50 per cent of the growth in emissions from 2002 to 2005 was attributed to the country’s export industries.

According to the GCP’s findings, atmospheric CO₂ growth was about four billion metric tonnes of carbon in 2008 and global atmospheric CO₂ concentrations reached 385 parts per million – 38 per cent above pre-industrial levels.

According to co-author and GCP Executive Director, CSIRO’s Dr Pep Canadell, the findings also indicate that natural carbon sinks, which play an important role in buffering the impact of rising emissions from human activity, have not been able to keep pace with rising CO₂ levels.

“On average only 45 per cent of each year’s emissions remain in the atmosphere,” Dr Canadell said.

“The remaining 55 per cent is absorbed by land and ocean sinks.

“However, CO₂ sinks have not kept pace with rapidly increasing emissions, as the fraction of emissions remaining in the atmosphere has increased over the past 50 years. This is of concern as it indicates the vulnerability of the sinks to increasing emissions and climate change, making natural sinks less efficient ‘cleaners’ of human carbon pollution.”

More than 30 experts from major international climate research institutions contributed to the GCP’s annual Global Carbon Budget report – now considered a primary reference on the human effects on atmospheric CO₂ for governments and policy-makers around the world.

Media Note:

Dr Raupach will be available to speak to the media at a briefing at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney at 10.30am today.

For details go to: www.aussmc.org or contact Imogen Jubb on 0417 258 020.

Image available at: http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/mediarelease/mr09-206.html

Further Information:
Dr Michael Raupach, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research
Ph: +61 2 6246 5573
E: Michael.Raupach@csiro.au
Ph: +61 408 020 952

Dr Pep Canadell, CSIRO Marine & Atmospheric Research
E: Pep.Canadell@csiro.au

Further information available at: www.globalcarbonproject.org

Guest post by Larry Fields

The last Ice Age razed all of the coniferous forests in Finland. After the ice sheet retreated, trees from elsewhere–like the Scots Pine–gradually colonized the vacant niches. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened in many high mountains of the Earth’s temperate regions, including the Sierra Nevada Range of California. We can learn a thing or two about climate history from Alpine dendrology.

Round Top Lake, at 9340 feet elevation in the Northern Sierra near Carson Pass, is my favorite place for informal climate history research. Whitebark Pine trees grow in tight clumps around the North half of the lake.

Other high altitude conifers–like Lodgepole Pine, Mountain Hemlock, and Red Fir–also grow in the Carson Pass area. But Whitebark Pines can grow at slightly high elevations than these other trees.

At Round Top Lake, the Whitebark Pines in any given group are nearly identical genetically, since they reproduce asexually. New tree trunks grow outward from an existing root system. This is called suckering. The seeds that do sprout can’t endure the harsh Winters at that altitude. Walking 100  yards downhill from the lake on the main trail, one can see Whitebark Pines that have grown in a more normal way.

Naturalist Jeffrey P. Schaffer mentioned Round Top Lake in the 1989 edition of his book, The Tahoe Sierra: A Natural History Guide to the 106 Hikes in the Northern Sierra. Here’s a link to a review of a more recent book by Schaffer.
http://www.amazon.com/Tahoe-Sierra-Natural-History-Northern/dp/0899972209

Question: After the last Ice Age, how did the Whitebark Pines reach the lake in the first place?
My answer: At some time after the last Ice Age, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than it is these days. The Whitebark Pines sprouted from seeds at that time, with a little avian assistance.

The Clark nutcracker helps to spread seeds from the conifers in the Carson Pass area. The bird caches seeds that it gathers in anticipation of the Winter food shortage, but often stores more than it needs. Some of the forgotten seeds sprout a fair distance–and even uphill–from the parent trees.

Several years ago, I was surprised to see a knee-high Whitebark Pine seedling outside the half-circle of clone clusters hugging Round Top Lake. However it did not survive.

If the Northern Sierra climate heats up in a big way, I’d expect individual seed-sprouted Whitebark Pines at Round Top Lake to eventually supplant the clumps of small trees. Over the last 1000 or more years, the clones have been gradually accumulating random mutations, which should put them at a slight competitive disadvantage with any future surviving seed-sprouted progeny. When I see a lot of isolated Whitebark Pine seedlings that grow to 6 feet in height at Round Top Lake, then I’ll believe that the Northern Sierra climate is the warmest that it’s been since before the last Ice Age.

Jennifer Marohasy kindly allowed me to guest-post a guest article about this preliminary investigation on her blog.  That report is similar to this one, but with less detail. On 29 August 2009, co-investigator James Mayeau and I visited Round Top Lake for more detailed study. Here’s a link to James’ account of our exploits on that day, in a second guest-posting at Jennifer’s blog.
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/white-bark-pine-trees-part-2-a-note-from-james-mayeau/
This blog post includes a link to more of James’ photos from Round Top Lake.

Although the overwhelming majority of Whitebark Pines at Round Top Lake were clones growing in clumps, we did manage to find a few medium-sized individual trees near the sunnier West end.  I’m guessing that their growth rates were pretty slow, given the marginal nature of the habitat. They probably predate the latest global warming that started in the late 1970s. If any of the West-end trees date from the 1930s, that would be additional evidence that the last round of’ global warming in the 80s and 90s was not a big deal, even by 20th Century standards.

A good follow-up project would be to count the growth rings in these few West-end trees, in order to determine their ages. Alas, my academic background is in analytical chemistry; I’m not qualified to drill for core samples in living trees.

Studies that emphasize tree ring analysis tell parts of several different stories that Nature has woven together into the fabric of climate history. These stories are about precipitation (in the case of Bristlecone Pines in the semi-arid Basin and Range Region of the Western US), insolation, wind, and yes temperature. Modern dendroclimatology often requires sophisticated  techniques to tease out the temperature parts of tree-ring stories. One lesson from the recent Keith Briffa controversy: In modern-dendroclimatology-based climate history studies, the methodological uncertainties stemming from sampling error, inter alia, are huge.

On the other hand, Seat-of-the-Pants Dendroclimatology (SPDC) emphasizes straightforward early 20th Century technology: shoeleather, cameras, maps, field guides, and optional hand-operated tree-boring devices. The key insight of SPDC: For a given topography, temperature is the single unambiguous control variable that governs tree reproduction mode just below Alpine timberline. When clumps of clone trees dominate the landscape there, one can be certain that the climate was appreciably warmer at some time in the past.

Side note. At timberline in the Northern Sierra, it is difficult to find Whitebark Pines in the form of trees; instead they typically grow as Alpine shrubs–known as krummholz. This is the subject of ongoing climate-related investigation by other researchers.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/programs/snrc/climate_landscape/high_elevation_sub1/genetic_variability.shtml

Summary. In the Northern Sierra, Seat-of-the-Pants Dendroclimatology can give a more accurate indication of pivotal warming events in Earth’s geologically recent climate history than can modern dendroclimatology. In terms of the debate surrounding the ‘unprecedented’ global warming of the late 20th Century, Round Top Lake is ‘the elephant in the room’.

Cluster of Whitebark Pines at Round Top L. Photo by James Mayeau.

We’ve made so much progress in the USA. 75 years ago, we may have witnessed some scenes like this in today’s China. Unfortunately, the de-industrialization of the west just moved the western problems of the past to a country that doesn’t seem to care much about pollution control.

At the junction of Ningxia province and Inner Mongolia province, I saw a tall chimney puffing out golden smoke covering the blue sky, large tracts of the grassland have become industrial waste dumps; unbearable foul smell made people want to cough; Surging industrial sewage flowed into the Yellow River…”

- Lu Guang

Or how about his one?

In Inner Mongolia there were 2 “black dragons” from the Lasengmiao Power Plant (内蒙古拉僧庙发电厂) covering the nearby villages. July 26, 2005

See the complete photo essay on pollution in China here.

Be thankful for what you have, and show this to your favorite environmentalist the next time he/she complains about the pollution sins of western civilization.

Global warming skeptic tells group that cure is worse than problem.

By Lee Roop, special to The Huntsville Times

Dr. John Christy

HUNTSVILLE, AL – Science doesn’t support current global warming alarms and, even if it did, current proposals to fix things won’t work and might make life worse.

That’s the well-known view of Dr. John Christy, a University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist, and Christy spelled out the “whys” and “why nots” of his perspective Tuesday to the Huntsville Rotary Club.

“Consensus is not science,” Christy began, quoting the late author Michael Crichton.
Christy, the state climatologist, is well-known in the global warming debate. He has testified before Congress many times and was an unpaid expert witness for the automobile industry in a federal lawsuit against fleet mileage requirements.

Here’s Christy’s basic argument:

* The data being used to predict catastrophic warming is suspect.

* Models generated from that data “overstate the warming” actually taking place. The earth is warming, but not that much, and it has warmed and cooled for eons.

* The Earth’s atmosphere is nowhere near as sensitive to carbon dioxide as some environmentalists believe.

* Any “solution” to perceived global warming must balance the growing worldwide demand for energy against cutting carbon dioxide output.

Fleet mileage requirements now proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency “would reduce global temperatures by about 1/100th of a degree,” Christy said.

You would need to replace 1,000 coal-fired power plants with 1,000 nuclear plants to change global climate even .15 of a degree, he said.

“This is the scale (of global climate) we are talking about,” Christy said.

* One cost of mandating harsh energy controls is the migration of industry to areas where requirements are less, Christy said.

In his talk, Christy also took aim at several other widely discussed pronouncements.

* Temperatures in the Arctic have increased over the last 100 years, he agreed, but that’s only because 100 years ago “was the coldest it’s been in a long time.”

* Arctic ice has melted, but ice has grown in Anartica. Between the two, there’s about as much ice as always.

* There are more polar bears now, not fewer. Canada issues 800 bear-hunting permits each year, he pointed out.

* Temperatures may be warmer in Greenland, but scientific experiments with ice fields show “that 4,000 years ago, it was warmer in Greenland than it is today.

“Greenland did not melt,” Christy said.

Why is the apocalyptic view of climate change so widespread?

“Funding comes if you have an alarming story,” Christy said.

He also cited “group think” and said scientists revel in the attention their views about climate brings.

“It’s almost a drug,” Christy said.

h/t to Climate Depot

You can’t make this stuff up.  A priest, a rabbi, and a minister…no wait. A Prius, a Tesla, and an SUV…

3 car pileup - Prius, Tesla, SUV: caption your own joke

No, this isn’t a Photoshop trick. Proving truth is indeed stranger than fiction, it actually happened in Denmark on October 9th. It is likely the only accident of its kind in the world.

WUWT reader Lars Seiersen gives us the details and translation of this newspaper article that appeared in Ekstra Bladet:

Lars writes:

Dear Anthony,
I think the more hardcore part of your American readers will like this and provide a number of funny comments and interpretations:

http://ekstrabladet.dk/biler/bil_nyheder/article1243890.ece
(in Danish)

It is a weird car accidence:
Ocober 9, Northern Part of Jutland (near Skagen)

A VW Tuareg (a rare bird in DK because of the price, one of the biggest and most incorrect cars you find in DK) is stopped on a small road due to construction works.
Behind it stops a Tesla (an extremely rare bird – I have never seen one!).
Then a Toyota Prius ( also rare in DK) for some reason doesnt stop and pushes the Tesla under the Tuareg!
Nobody was seriously hurt!

By William M. Briggs, professional statistician

“J’accuse! A statistician may prove anything with his nefarious methods. He may even say a negative number is positive! You cannot trust anything he says.”

Sigh. Unfortunately, this oft-hurled charge is all too true. I and my fellow statisticians must bear its sad burden, knowing it is caused by our more zealous brethren (and sisthren). But, you know, it really isn’t their fault, for they are victims of loving not wisely but too well their own creations.

First, a fact. It is true that, based on the observed satellite data, average global temperatures since about 1998 have not continued the rough year-by-year increase that had been noticed in the decade or so before that date. The temperatures since about 1998 have increased in some years, but more often have they decreased. For example, last year was cooler than the year before last. These statements, barring unknown errors in the measurement of that data, are taken as true by everybody, even statisticians.

Th AP gave this data—concealing its source—to “several independent statisticians” who said they “found no true temperature declines over time” (link)

How can this be? Why would a statistician say that the observed cooling is not “scientifically legitimate”; and why would another state that noticing the cooling “is a case of ‘people coming at the data with preconceived notions’”?

Are these statisticians, since they are concluding the opposite of what has been observed, insane? This is impossible: statisticians are highly lucid individuals, its male members exceedingly handsome and charming. Perhaps they are rabid environmentalists who care nothing for truth? No, because none of them knew the source of the data they were analyzing. What can account for this preposterous situation!

Love. The keen pleasures of their own handiwork. That is, the adoration of lovingly crafted models.

Let me teach you to be a classical statistician. Go to your favorite climate site and download a time series picture of the satellite-derived temperature (so that we have no complications from mixing of different data sources); any will do. Here’s one from our pal Anthony Watts.

Now fetch a ruler—a straight edge—preferably one with which you have an emotional attachment. Perhaps the one your daughter used in kindergarten. The only proviso is that you must love the ruler.

Place the ruler on the temperature plot and orient it along the data so that it most pleases your eye. Grab a pencil and draw a line along its edge. Then, if you can, erase all the original temperature points so that all you are left with is the line you drew.

If a reporter calls and asks if the temperature was warmer or colder last year, do not use the original data, which of course you cannot since you erased it, but use instead your line. According to that very objective line the temperature has obviously increased. Insist on the scientificity of that line—say that according to its sophisticated inner-methodology, the pronouncement must be that the temperature has gone up! Even though, in fact, it has gone down.

Don’t laugh yet, dear ones. That analogy is too close to the truth. The only twist is that statisticians don’t use a ruler to draw their lines—some use a hockey stick. Just kidding! (Now you can laugh.) Instead, they use the mathematical equivalent of rulers and other flexible lines.

Your ruler is a model Statisticians are taught—their entire training stresses—that data isn’t data until it is modeled. Those temperatures don’t attain significance until a model can be laid over the top of them. Further, it is our credo to, in the end, ignore the data and talk solely of the model and its properties. We love models!

All this would be OK, except for one fact that is always forgotten. For any set of data, there are always an infinite number of possible models. Which is the correct one? Which indeed!

Many of these models will say the temperature has gone down, just as others will say that it has gone up. The AP statisticians used models most familiar to them; like “moving averages of about 10 years” (moving average is the most used method of replacing actual data with a model in time series); or “trend” models, which are distinct cousins to rulers.

Since we are free to choose from an infinite bag, all of our models are suspect and should not be trusted until they have proven their worth by skillfully predicting data that has not yet been seen. None of the models in the AP study have done so. Even stronger, since they said temperatures were higher when they were in fact lower, they must predict higher temperatures in the coming years, a forecast which few are making.

We are too comfortable with this old way of doing things. We really can prove anything we want with careful choice of models.

But they do say that “first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080″. By then there will be nobody that remembers this forecast.

Yet on the same day, bumbling Arctic explorer Pen Hadow says in a UK Telegraph interview:

“To all intents and purposes the Arctic will be ice free in a decade. I do find the implications of this happening in my lifetime quite shocking.“.

Gosh, who to believe? Somebody that fakes biotelemetry data or somebody that won’t hand over climate data for replication studies?

From a Met Office press release on October 15th

The extent of Arctic sea ice has been decreasing since the late 1970s. In 2007 it decreased dramatically in a single year, reaching an all-time low. At the time it was widely reported that this was caused by man-made climate change and that the rate of decline of summer sea ice was increasing.

Modelling of Arctic sea ice by the Met Office Hadley Centre climate model shows that ice invariably recovers from extreme events, and that the long-term trend of reduction is robust — with the first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080. It is unlikely that the Arctic will experience ice-free summers by 2020.

Analysis of the 2007 summer sea-ice minimum has subsequently shown that this was due, in part, to unusual weather patterns. Arctic weather systems are highly variable year-on-year and the prevailing winds can enhance, or oppose, the southward flow of ice into the Atlantic. Consequently, the sea ice has not declined every year, but has shown considerable variability — both in extent and thickness.

The high variability has made it difficult to attribute the observed trend to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, although there is now enough data to detect a human signal in the 30-year trend. The trend and observed variability, including the minimum extent observed in 2007, is consistent with climate modelling from the Met Office.

About half of the climate models involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth assessment report, show that ice declines in steps — failing to recover from extreme years. The observed temporary recovery from the 2007 minimum in 2008 and 2009 indicates that the Arctic ice has not yet reached a tipping point, if such exists. We expect Arctic ice to continue to decline in line with increasing global temperatures. If the rate of global temperature rise increases then so will the rate of Arctic sea-ice decline.

h/t to WUWT reader Patrick Davis

I’m off this weekend – talk quietly and politely amongst yourselves. Don’t make me come back here.

If you have something worth posting on the front page, flag a moderator.  In the meantime I have a couple of stories that will post using the WordPress scheduler. – Anthony

From World Climate Report: Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.

Figure 1. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).

The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.

It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).

But not a peep.

But such is not always the case—or rather, such is not ever the case when ice melt is pushing the other end of the record scale.

For instance, below is a collection of NASA stories highlighting record high amounts of melting (or in most cases, simply higher than normal amounts in some regions) across Greenland in each of the past 3 years, as ascertained by Marco Tedesco (the lead author of the latest report on Antarctica):

NASA Researcher Finds Days of Snow Melting on the Rise in Greenland

“In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years, according to a new NASA-funded project using satellite observations….”

NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in High Places

“A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland is the equivalent of more than twice the surface size of the U.S…”

Melting on the Greenland Ice Cap, 2008

“The northern fringes of Greenland’s ice sheet experienced extreme melting in 2008, according to NASA scientist Marco Tedesco and his colleagues.”

And lest you think that perhaps NASA hasn’t had any data on ice melt across Antarctica in past years, we give you this one:

NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland

“On the world’s coldest continent of Antarctica, the landscape is so vast and varied that only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in the snow melting across its valleys, mountains, glaciers and ice shelves. In a new NASA study, researchers [including Marco Tedesco] using 20 years of data from space-based sensors have confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland from the coast over time, melting at higher altitudes than ever and increasingly melting on Antarctica’s largest ice shelf.”

But this time around, nothing, nada, zippo from NASA when their ice melt go-to guy Marco Tedesco reports that Antarctica has set a record for the lack of surface ice melt (even more interestingly coming on the heels of a near-record low ice-melt year last summer).

So, seriously, NASA, what gives? If ice melt is an important enough topic to warrant annual updates of the goings-on across Greenland, it is not important enough to elucidate the history and recent behavior across Antarctica?

(These are not meant as rhetorical questions)

Reference

Tedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18502, doi:10.1029/2009GL039186.

August 2009 Global Temperature Update: +0.23 deg. C

Dr. Roy Spencer September 4th, 2009

Spurious SST Warming Revisited

Dr. Roy Spencer August 31st, 2009

My previous post described what I called “smoking gun” evidence of a spurious drift in the NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) product when compared to SSTs from the TRMM satellite Microwave Imager (TMI). The drift seemed to be mostly confined to 2001, almost a ’step’ jump. The moored buoy validation statistics of the TMI sea surface temperatures from Frank Wentz’s web site (SSMI.com) suggested that the TMI SSTs had good long-term stability.

But 2001 was also the year that the TRMM satellite was boosted into a higher orbit, which concerned me. I asked Frank about the effect of this event on the TMI SSTs (which also come from his web site). Frank couldn’t remember the details, but said he spent quite a bit of time correcting for the altitude change on the retrieved SSTs since the microwave emission of the sea surface depends upon the TMI instrument’s view angle with respect to the local vertical.

I know from our many years of work together on the AMSR-E Science Team that Frank is indeed a careful researcher, yet it seemed like more than a coincidence that the TMI and NOAA sea surface temperatures diverged during the same year as the orbit boost. So, I went back to see what might have caused the problem. I went back and thought about the different ways in which one can compute area averages from satellite data.

To make a long story short, because the orbit boost caused the TMI to be able to “see” to slightly higher latitudes, the way in which individual latitude bands are handled has a significant impact on the resulting temperature anomalies that are computed over time. The previous results I presented were for the 40N to 40S latitude band, which is nominally what the TMI instrument sees today. But before 2001, the latitudinal extent was slightly smaller than it was after 2001.

As shown in the following figure, if I restrict the latitude range to 38N to 38S, which was always covered during the entire TRMM mission, I find that the divergence between the TMI and NOAA average SST measurements essentially disappears.

Click for larger image

Even though I was processing the NOAA and TMI datasets in the same manner, I should NOT have been. This is because there were not as many gridpoints over cooler SST regions going into the ‘global’ averages before the satellite altitude boost as after the boost. So, for example, one must be very careful in computing a latitude band average, say from 39N to 40N, to make sure that there has been no long-term change in the sampling of that band.

Based upon the above comparisons, I would now say there is no statistically significant difference in the SST trends since 1998 between TMI, the NOAA ERSSTv3b product, and the HadSST2 product. And it does look like July 2009 might well have experienced a warmer SST anomaly than July 1998, as was originally claimed by NOAA. (Remember, TMI can not see all of the global oceans, just equatorward of about 40 deg. N and S latitude.)

In the bottom panel of the above figure, I also have a comparison between the TMI and AMSR-E sea surface temperatures, which are available only since June of 2002 from the Aqua satellite. As can be seen, there is no evidence of a calibration (or sampling) drift in that comparison either.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Always question your results…even after finding the obvious errors. And maybe I should eliminate the term ’smoking gun evidence’ from any results I describe in the future.

Oh…and don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

From NASA’s hurricane/tropical cyclone page

NASA's MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite captured Typhoon Vamco on August 24 at 0255 UTC (August 23 at 10:55 p.m. EDT). Credit: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team

Typhoon Vamco is being as stubborn in its quest to live in the Pacific Ocean as Bill is in the Atlantic Ocean this past week, and NASA satellite data confirmed that the large storm has a huge eye, about 45 miles in diameter!

NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over Typhoon Vamco early today, Monday, August 24, and infrared imagery from Aqua’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument clearly showed Vamco’s 45-mile in diameter eye. Around the huge eye, AIRS showed Vamco’s cold high thunderstorm cloud temperatures were colder than minus 63 Fahrenheit. That’s an indication that the storm is still strong, and it is still a category one typhoon.

Also on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a stunning look at Typhoon Vamco’s clouds at 0255 UTC (August 23 at 10:55 p.m. EDT).

On August 24, Vamco was 990 miles northwest of Wake Island, near 32.1 north and 155.0 east. It was moving north near 12 mph and had sustained winds near 85 knots (97 mph) creating 25 foot-high waves in the open ocean. Typhoon Vamco is maintaining strength and will start to weaken later as upper-level winds start to batter the storm.

Vamco is currently in the Northern West Pacific Ocean and will begin changing to an extra-tropical storm tomorrow while moving into the North Central Pacific Ocean. The extreme west Aleutian Islands will see Vamco as a non-tropical low by Wednesday (today).

The Aleutian Islands are a chain of 300 small volcanic islands in the Northern Pacific Ocean that extend about 1,200 miles west from the Alaska Peninsula toward the Kamchatka Peninsula. They are the westernmost part of the United States.

> View larger image
Aqua’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured Vamco’s frigid cloud temperatures at the same time. The image revealed Vamco’s huge eye 45 miles in diameter, and indicated Vamco’s high thunderstorm cloud temperatures were colder than minus 63 Fahrenheit.
Credit: NASA/JPL, Ed Olsen

Hot off the press from Dr. Roy Spencer. After being essentially zero last month, we have a jump to .410°C in July. This was not unexpected, as a El Nino has been developing.

July 2009 Global Temperature Update: +0.41 deg. C

August 5th, 2009

Guest post by John Goetz

The GISStemp Step 1 code combines “scribal records” (multiple temperature records collected at presumably the same station) into a single, continuous record. There are multiple detailed posts on Climate Audit (including this one) that describe the Step 1 process, known affectionately as The Bias Method.

On the surface seems like a reasonable concept, and in reading HL87 the description of the algorithm makes complete sense. In simple terms, HL87 says that:

1. The longest available record is compared with the next longest record, and the period of overlap between the two records is identified.
2. The average temperature during the period of overlap is calculated for each station.
3. The difference between the average temperature for the longer station and shorter station is calculated, and that difference (a bias) is added to all temperatures of the shorter station to bias it – bringing it in line with the longer station.
4. The two records can now be combined as one, and the process repeats for additional records.

In looking at numerous stations with multiple records, more often than not the temperatures during the period of overlap are identical, so one would expect the bias to be zero. However, we often see a slight bias existing in the GISS results for such stations, and over the course of combining multiple records, that bias can be several tenths of a degree.

This was one of Steve McIntyre’s many puzzles, and we eventually figured out why we were getting bias when two records with identical overlap periods were combined: GISStemp estimates the averages during the overlap period.

GISStemp does not take the monthly data during the overlap period and simply average it. Instead, it calculates seasonal averages from monthly averages (for example, winter is Dec-Jan-Feb), and then it calculates annual averages from the four seasonal averages. If a single monthly average is missing, the seasonal average is estimated. This estimate is based on historical data found in the individual scribal record. If two records are missing the same data point (say, March 1989), but one record covers 1900 – 1990 and the other 1987 – 2009, they will each produce a different estimate for March, 1989.  All other data points might match during the period of overlap, but a bias will be introduced nonetheless.

The GISS algorithm forces at least one estimation to always occur. The records used begin with January data, but the winter season includes the previous December. That December datapoint is always missing from the first year of a scribal record, which means the first winter season and first annual temperature in each scribal record is estimated. Thus, if two stations overlap from January 1987 through December 1990 (a common occurance), and all overlapping temperatures are identical, a bias will be applied because the 1987 annual temperature for the newer record will be estimated.

Obviously, the bias could go either way: it could warm or cool the older records. With a large enough sample size, one would expect the average bias to be near zero. So what does the average bias really look like? Using the GISStemp logs from June, 2009, the average bias on a yearly basis across 7006 scribal records was:

Guest post by John Goetz

#17 - Selinsgrove, PA (in 2003)

The GISS temperature record, with its various adjustments, estimations, and re-estimations, has drawn my attention since I first became interested in the methods used to measure a global temperature. In particular, I have wondered how the current global average can even be compared with that of 1987, which was produced using between six and seven times more stations than today. Commenter George E. Smith noted accurately that it is a “simple failure to observe the standard laws of sampled data systems.” GISS presents so many puzzles in this area, it is difficult to know where to begin.

My recent post on the June, 2009 temperature found that the vast majority of temperatures were taken from airports and urban stations. This would cause some concern if the urban heat island (UHI) effect were not accounted for in those stations. GISS does attempt to filter out UHI from urban stations by using “nearby” rural stations – “nearby” meaning anything within 1000 KM. No attempt is made to filter UHI from airports not strictly listed as urban.

If stations from far, far away can be used to filter UHI, then it stands to reason some stations may be used multiple times as filters for multiple urban stations. I thought it would be amusing to list which stations were used the most to adjust for UHI. Fortunately, NASA prints that data in the PApars.statn.use.GHCN.CL.1000.20 log file.

The results were as I expected – amusing. Here are the top ten, ranked in order of the number of urban stations they help adjust:

Unfortunately, having three of the top four stations located at airports was the the sort of thing I expected.

Looking a little further, it turns out all of the top 100 stations are in either the US or Canada, and none of those 100 stations have reported data since 2007. (By the way, #100 is itself used 147 times.) Several of the top-100 stations have been surveyed by surfacestations.org volunteers who have documented siting issues, such as the following:

• Mohonk Lake, N.Y. (197 times) – much too close to ground, shading issues, nearby building
• Falls Village, Conn. (193 times) – near building and parking lot
• Cornwall, Vt. (187 times) – near building
• Northfield, Vt. (187 times) – near driveway, building
• Enosburg Falls, Vt. (180 times) – adjacent to driveway, nearby building.
• Greenwood, Del. (171 times) – sited on concrete platform
• Logan, Iowa (164 times) – near building, concrete slabs
• Block Island, R.I. (150 times) – adjacent to parking lot and aircraft parking area.

The current state of a rural station, however, is an insufficient criterion for deciding to use it to adjust the history of one or more other urban stations. The rural station’s history must be considered as well, with equipment record and location changes being two of the most important considerations.

Take for example good ‘ole Crawfordsville, which came in at #23, having been used 219 times. As discussed here, Crawfordsville’s station lives happily on a farm, and does seem to enjoy life in the country. However, up until 16 years ago the station lived in the middle of Crawfordsville, spending over 100 years at Wabash College and at the town’s power plant.

Guest post by John Goetz

As noted in the previous post, GISS has released their monthly global temperature summary for June, 2009. This month’s whopping anomaly of 0.63C is once again much higher than that of RSS, UAH, and even NOAA, which is the source of the GISS temperature data. Not only is the anomaly higher than the other metrics, but it is trending in the opposite direction.

Temperature data from 1079 stations worldwide contributed to the analysis, 134 of them being located in the 50 US states. Data from essentially the same few stations have been used for the past twenty-four months. Many, many hundreds of stations that have historically been included in the record and still collect data today continue to be ignored by GISS in global temperature calculations.

Once again, the bulk of temperatures comprising the present-day worldwide GISS average come from airports – in this case 554 airports, according to the NOAA metadata from the V2 station inventory. In the US, the ratio of airports to total stations continues to run very high, with 121 out of the 134 reporting stations being located at airports.

Why worry about airports? Aside from recent posts on this site documenting problems with airport ASOS equipment in the US, WUWT has also documented a number of equipment siting problems, notably the typical close proximity of the equipment to a tarmac heat sink. Airports can introduce a mini-UHI effect where one would otherwise not be found.

The NOAA metadata is not entirely accurate, and several stations located at airports are not noted as such. Some examples include Londrina and Brasilia in Brazil, Ely / Yelland in Nevada, and Broome in Austrailia. Those stations were easy to find because they had “airport” (or some variant) in the station name. A check of coordinates using Google Earth confirmed the airport locations.

Let’s examine the metadata a little further, shall we?

NOAA says that 345 of the stations it passes on to GISS are rural and presumably free of UHI influence. Fifteen of those stations are located in the US. However, only 201 of those rural stations are not located at an airport, and therefore presumably free of UHI effects (including tarmac heat sinks). In the US, only one of the fifteen stations is listed as both rural, and not located at an airport: Ely / Yelland in Nevada.

Doh!!! As noted above, that station is located at an airport – confirmed not just by Google Earth, but also by NOAA’s NCDC website as well! This means that all of the US temperatures – including those for Alaska and Hawaii – were collected from either an airport (the bulk of the data) or an urban location.

As for the rest of the world, some of the stations listed as being rural and not at an airport have metadata indicating they are located in an area of “dim” or “bright” lights. Filtering those out, we find a total of 128 stations that are rural, not at an airport, and “dark”.

Why are “dark” stations important? Recall that GISS uses dark stations to adjust for UHI in the urban stations. With only 128 dark stations available, none being in the US, it would seem this is an impossible task.

Fortunately, GISS adjustment rules allow old data to be used in adjusting new data. The older “non-reporting” rural weather stations continue to adjust reporting urban stations, even though the most recent two years of overlap is missing.

Thankfully, the algorithms are robust enough to calculate adjustments to the 100th of a degree even when data is missing.

I was surprised to learn today, that one of the most prominent newspapers in the USA, the Orange County Register in the Los Angeles area, carried an editorial of which my work was the subject. It is quite a turnaround from the brush off I got last year by their Science Dude blogger who wrote a story on the warming of Santa Ana, CA.

By the way here is what the official NOAA weather station for Santa Ana looks like, note the a/c heat exchanger exhausts:

Santa Ana Station looking North.  Click for a larger image

The editorial about my work was published in the OC Register on Monday, June 1st. I’ve reposted it below.

Editorial: Cooling down with global-warming data

U.S. and world temperature records are compromised by monitoring station errors.