In America we have a saying, “Seeing the forest for the trees…” which is used to suggest seeing the bigger picture. In Britain, the similar saying is “Seeing the wood for the trees…”. I’ll explain this in a moment, please read on.
Last week, when Basil and I posted Part 2 of our series on seeing a solar imprint in the HadCRUT temperature record, it spawned a lot of interest, debate, replication, and criticisms. One of the criticisms from Tamino surrounding the concluding results presented in figure 5 showed how using a different statistical test nullified the results. Thats good, falsification of results by alternate methods is what science is about, and we are now reworking our approach using some different data and methods to see if we can create a robust conclusion that stands up to many different statistical tests.
In the days following the posting of the essay, there was a lot of unnecessary name calling, but out of all the negativity, I’m happy to report that something very positive has emerged in the form of one Mr. Paul Clark, an audio specialist and C++/Linux programmer in the UK.
Our essay gave him an idea, and he ran with it. He ran far and wide.
Basil and I have spent the last week helping him refine it. Mr. Clark, like many people, had questions about climate science and data analysis, and felt that sometimes it is just too complex for the layman to get their mind around the way it is often presented.
I’ve often felt that “playing around” with something technical can often be a useful learning exercise. Paul felt the same way and took our idea of pulling signals from the noisy temperature data and turned it into a splendid interactive signal processing website called WoodForTrees.org
Below, you can see it displaying the signal from our original essay, replicated via FFT and other steps.
Paul writes on the main page:
This is the graph that kicked this off; Basil Copeland and Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That are using filtering techniques from economics to look for a solar cycle imprint on global temperature.
Hang on, I thought, this needs a low-pass filter in the frequency domain, and I want to be able to play with different filters and link to the results easily from blog comments. Maybe other people would like to do that too…
The ‘analyse‘ tool and this website are the result of that thought, and this is the graph that resulted, which more or less replicates their filtering technique by a different method:
HADCRUT3 with Fourier low-pass filter at harmonic 18, differentiated
Please visit the site, and see the examples page. More data sets and filters will be added, and you should consider this version 1.0, meaning errors may be present. With your help, we’ll find them. Try it out, but most of all, learn while having fun.
Web driven digital climate signal analysis is now available for the common man, the amatuer scientist, and the researcher. Thanks Paul!
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Paul Clark
Here it is. The whole thing is filled with data, some of it ready to cut and paste into spread sheets and then search for correlations. Like finding a gold vein in a mountain. It also has excellent descriptions of what all the stuff is that comes out of the sun that you might be able to site and cut and paste. I have found lots of other really cool data sets on this site that are more earth bound. Explore!
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/ftpsolarflares.html
I keep staring at that cosmic ray data. When the sun is full of flares, its strong magnetic field shields the earth and our greenhouse ozone blanket from the affects of cosmic ray destruction of that blanket (those rays just can’t escape the magnet). A really active series of cycles would lead me to think that the blanket is an extra thick woolly one that keeps us toasty warm. Then when the sun is quiet, those cosmic rays reach all the way to earth, right down to the ground, eating away at our blanket, creating holes and thin areas. All our nice warm air escapes out the roof. And if the sun is really quiet over several cycles, we are sitting in a frig with just our underwear on.
Maybe the thicker the ozone layer is, or the longer it stays thick, the warmer it gets. CO2 is trapped as well in such a thermally encased greenhouse. In fact all kinds of stuff are trapped inside the greenhouse. But the ozone layer is what is causing the earth to stay toasty. Then when the blanket thins during minimums, the temperature decreases. It may also be that the temperature decreases unevenly since the blanket is worn thin in an uneven pattern.
Since the sun has been ramping down over the past few years as it heads toward minimum, more and more rays are getting to our ozone layer and even through it (which can easily be measured and is at several sites around the globe). Maybe that is why we haven’t seen an increase in temperature.
Let’s add cosmic ray data to the playground.
Side note: Does CO2 escape with the warm air. Is it somehow destroyed by some aspect of the rays as they penetrate through the thinned blanket?
I know you guys are busy with developing a response to hansen’s bulldog’s stats, but you may be interested in a blast from the past when even NASA thought it was all about the sun, although note the rather forlorn disclaimer at the bottom of the second link;
http:/www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20011206/
http:/www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_06/
Link to the satellite info, launched in 2002(?) that measures, indirectly, ozone:
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/earth/pictures/noaam/LG-2002-4-044-GSFC.pdf_1.pdf
More stuff about ozone, including very cool maps:
http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rgk/atm101/ozmeas.htm
Possible ozone data:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ozwv/dobson/
You are gonna love this. December 1992 ozone layer was VERY THIN (like 7 to 10% BELOW normal)! It was the beginning of Solar cycle 23 (July 1992) and several scientist were as worried as a newborn’s mother on just how thin the ozone layer had become by December of 1992. Anyone care to take a guess at what global temperatures have done over time since these various scientists got their knickers in a twist over our blanket? Hint: the ozone layer thinned BEFORE temperatures started to back away from hell on earth.