A few days ago I highlighted the drop in global temperatures as measured by satellite from UAH, the University of Alabama, Huntsville. They published their satellite derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008 and it showed that it is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008.
The global ∆T for UAH from April to May 2008 was -.195°C
RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) RSS Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data by For May 2008 is published and has moved below the zero anomaly line, with a value of -0.083°C for a change (∆T) of -0.163 °C globally from April 2008.
RSS
2008 1 -0.070
2008 2 -0.002
2008 3 0.079
2008 4 0.080
2008 5 -0.083
I had predicted when I posted the UAH data that the RSS value for global temperature anomaly for the lower troposphere would end up around 0.05 to -0.15°C. Coming in at -0.083°C, I was on target.
This value is greater in magnitude than the drop seen in January 2008 to -0.07°C
click for a larger image
Reference: RSS data here (RSS Data Version 3.1)
While I like poking the Church of Global Warming with a sharp stick as much as anybody else (grin), I expect the temperatures for June will be warmer.
/Or else my livestock expenses are gonna be astronomical this year. No hay, no pasture, and no corn as well? *sigh*
Looking at their SST data:
http://www.remss.com/pub/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Ocean_v03_1.txt
May 2008 = -0.164 deg C
June 1999 = -0.182 deg C
November 1994 = -0.180 deg C
You have to go back to 1993 to find colder SSTs.
Brrrr. No kayaking for me. I’ll have to wait until the GISSTEMP data comes out. It’ll warm up then.
Graph should say May 08, not April 08, Anthony.
With this cooler air bucking the the warmer air, it sure is making a rough go in the central US. Lots of rain, wind, hail, and tornadoes. The system that just went through yesterday and today was more early spring like. Sure hope summer starts soon, like it is in the south. We only get so many days of it here. Ice out to green up ran almost 2 weeks behind. Lilacs are finally coming out and apple trees are now in full bloom. Looking like green tomatoes in the fall if this continues.
REPLY: Fixed, fighting allergy and head cold this week, thus I’m marginally stupid at times.
Hi Anthony,
Short message from France.
I discovered this blog in january. I am a part of the 402 277 and I have to say I feel very proud to be a part of your success. Great SWAG for RSS MSU.
In your last plot : I think you wanted to write may 08 as the last month on record.
It has been raining quite a lot here in Toulouse in may but the most impressive event was a rough hail drop : about 5 inches in 15 minutes.
REPLY: Fixed, May 08, thanks. I’m fighting allergy and head cold this week, thus I’m marginally stupid at times.
“I had predicted…0.05 to -0.15°C”
Thats -0.05 +/- 0.10
Can you tighten up those error bars a little next month?
How about just up or down (+/-) ?
BTW, great site (posts and comments). I check it out a couple times a day.
Is there any way to get these numbers weekly?
We are 25% thru June and I’m wondering the trend.
REPLY: Thanks to Dr. Roy Spencer & Dr. Danny Braswell, GHCC at the University of Alabama, Hunsville, we can watch global temperatures of the lower troposphere daily at this page:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
watch this closely
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=05&fy=2007&sm=06&sd=05&sy=2008
and then compare with this
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
what would be your verdict?
Sir Anthony,
Those daily lower troposphere temps seem to show a seasonal variance. Are they northern hemisphere biased?
Thank you.
REPLY: They are both NH and SH combined, but remember that SH has more ocean
I appreciate the strong work here. I’ve looking at the data for about a month and I am totally amazed at how over-hyped agw seems to be.
Y2K was a real problem. I mean we actually fixed software in that runup. I told everyone we’d be just fine. Today, It astounds me to think of the number of scientists who are locked into the CO2 hypothesis. And it may not even be a real problem. Ya can’t make this stuff up.
Thanks Anthony – exactly what is was looking for.
June 5, 2008: -0.31F (I thought they used C?)
While poking around at that link, I discovered they had the temps for 10 different altitudes.
Do they average them, weight them, or what, to come up with their final number?
BTW, @ur momisugly 25K ft. the value was -0.66F
I guess if I poked around some more, I’d find the background details.
“I expect the temperatures for June will be warmer.”
Not where I live (SF Bay area). We are consistently running 10 degrees below normal here for weeks. The temps are supposed to shoot all the way up to “normal” around the 11th of the month for about 4 or 5 days and are forecast to drop back to 10 below normal again.
I did see that temps were going to spike up on the East coast for a few days but I noticed this over at icecap.us:
The next week will see a sudden arrival of summer temperatures in the east and central United States as the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) is in a location that favors a western North American trough and the building of a southeast and south central ridge. After mid-month, the MJO should advance to a spot favoring the trough coming east and the ridge backing up to the south central and Rockies/Intermountain. The heat will retreat west gain and more normal June readings will return to the east.
Rex,
Thanks for your contribution. I am glad that I am not the only one puzzled by the year-to-year image comparison vs. graph of daily arctic ice. I also would tend to give the benefit of the doubt and would imagine that computers are on autopilot translating images into graphs. However, the results are getting beyond the edge of credibility.
Tom in Texas
I think this is what you are looking for:
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#figures
I ran my heater full blast on my way home from work around 7:00 PM, from Livermore to Brentwood, CA. That’s not very “summer” like. Perhaps June will continue the cooling trend.
Dang, Anthony, good call. Seems to me you know what you are doing (well, of course, I already knew that). And to think the debate was over!
rex (20:17:42) :
An Inquirer (22:01:01)
i too have been puzzled by that anomaly
anyone have a better site?
sorry for the off topic post.
Sorry for asking a second time. I promise this will be the last. How does one get from the UAH daily temps http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_chLT.r001.txt to their monthy temps at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2 There doesn’t seem to be any logic connecting the daily temps to the monthlies, or ami I using the wrong daily file?
It’s getting cooler?!?!
Well, I’m not really convinced global temps are on some kind of cooling trend over the short or midterm, as often asserted by skeptics. When you look at sea surface temps over the last few months, one actucally sees just the opposite. Compare the SSTs:
of Feb 4:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.2.4.2008.gif
of Mar 3
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.3.6.2008.gif
of April 3
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.4.3.2008.gif
of May 5
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.5.5.2008.gif
June 5
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.5.5.2008.gif
Appears to me, just eyeballing these charts, the SSTs of the 3 big oceans are moving up, and not down.
So either the above graphics are wrong, or the satellite data are wrong.
What’s going on here?
Rex,
The images look very similar. Actually there even appears to be more snow last year at this time than there is today. The sea ice graph also indicates that there was a bit more ice last year. But that alone could be an indication of the huge melt-off from last summer, which was fully recovered during the hard winter of 07/08. If 08 is indeed colder than 07, as indicated by satellite data, then the 08 summer melt-off shouldn’t reach the levels of last summer.
Anthony,
I checked the AMSU graphic. What is meant by “Channel 4”?
REPLY: Thats the microwave frequency channel. Each channel has characteristics which resolve differt parts of the atmosphere in different ways.
The AMSU has two sub-instruments, AMSU-A and AMSU-B. AMSU-A has 15 channels between 23.8 and 89 GHz, and is used primarily for measuring atmospheric temperatures (known as “temperature sounding”). It has a ground resolution near nadir of 45 km. AMSU-B, with five channels between 89 and 183.3 GHz, has a spatial resolution near nadir of 15 km and is primarily intended for moisture sounding. Spot size of both sub-instruments becomes larger and more elongated toward the edges of the swath. When the two instruments are used together, there are roughly 9 AMSU-B fields-of-view in a 3×3 array corresponding to each AMSU-A field-of-view. This reflects the higher spatial variability of water vapor compared to temperature. HIRS/3 infrared sounders with the same spatial resolution as AMSU-B are also included on NOAA 15-17 satellites and are used together with AMSU-A and AMSU-B. Together the three instruments form ATOVS, the Advanced TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder.
The Aqua and MetOp AMSU-A instruments are 15-channel microwave sounders designed primarily to obtain temperature profiles in the upper atmosphere (especially the stratosphere) and to provide a cloud-filtering capability for tropospheric temperature observations.
More: http://www.aqua.nasa.gov/about/instrument_amsu.php
A kindý request as a reader to other readers:
With all due respect I honestly find all these anecdotes about temperatures “here im my hometown” being below normal, etc. etc. etc. to be awfully boring, and they are indeed by themselves completely meaningless as climate data. You can find cold and warm extremes anytime and anywhere. Perhaps we ought to focus much more on the scientific approach and meaningful data. I think such anecdotes merely represent annoying chaff that needs to be discarded from the real scientific hay. You can’t draw the big picture with a couple of pixels. If Anthony had a rule banning local weather anecdotes, etc. from his blog, I’d be the last to protest.
PS
By the way, the temperature in my town here in Quakenbreuck, Germany was 5.3°C above normal yesterday.
Now wasn’t that interesting?!
(Of course not! Who gives a rat’s a$$?).
REPLY: Pierre, as a TV/and now radio meteorologist, people have always simply “talked” about the weather to me. I view it as an honor. It is and always has been, a universal conversational ice breaker. I’m not about to restrict what I view as a friendly exchange. Chill.
Now as to the weather in my hometown, you can check it out right here on my live weather station and webcam: http://www.bidwellranchcam.com
Anybody that wants one of these for their hometown, feel free to contact me.
rex, there isn’t an issue here. The first link shows ice thickness as well as extent. The much greater area of thinner ice this year versus last year is due to the ice extent that melted last year after this point in the year, which you can clearly see in your second link.
The interesting question is will we see a new record low for NH sea ice extent this summer. Some well known ‘experts’ are saying we will. Here is one,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080430124607.htm
It will be an interesting test of model forecasts. To date, this year looks almost identical to last year.
In terms of the ice extent comparisons, I note that the ice data has been subject to the same “adjustments” that have been done to the temperature data.
This “before and after” animation of the changes made by the NSIDC in January 2007 should introduce a little scepticism in any objective person. There was no explanation provided for the changes.
The January 2007 sea ice extent was reduced by 750,000 sq. kms in this “adjustment”, while the previous low record in 1995 was adjusted upward by 250,000 sq. kms.
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/2918/anomalykm3.gif
Pierre, anecdotal evidence is the first stage of the scientific method: OBSERVATION. Every single thing we have discussed on every thread can be traced back to that first and all important stage. Galileo, as documented in his short book, The Starry Messenger, was and still is the greatest anecdotal observer ever lived.
You get an F in 5th grade science young man.
Pam,
Okay. It’s 5°C warmer than normal where I live today.
Gee! The world muat be getting warmer!
Anecdotes are what AGW loonies use to form their “science”, and that’s why they can’t win debates. Anecdotes can be used to spawn a hypotheis, but certainly cannot serve as postulates. Again, single weather events by themselves are utterly meaningless in the climate debate. The integral of massive amounts of weather data over longer time periods starts to mean something. For example, if the average temperature in Boston over the last 10 years is 1°C lower than normal, then it says something for that region.
I’m glad you weren’t my science teacher, young lady.
Pierre,
Increase in ocean surface temps could be because the current La Nina is fading and shifting to ‘neutral’ . I think you get warmer surface temps when that happens.