RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) RSS Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for July 2008 was published today and has moved a bit above the zero anomaly line, with a value of 0.147°C for a positive change (∆T) of 0.112°C globally from June 2008.
RSS
2008 1 -0.070
2008 2 -0.002
2008 3 0.079
2008 4 0.080
2008 5 -0.083
2008 6 0.035
2008 7 0.147
I rather expected it to go up a bit, given that La Nina has diminsihed, plus the NH has a greater landmass than the SH, and we are in summer. But compared though to July 2007, at 0.363, it is still lower, down 0.216.
Click for larger image
So what happened to UAH? Aren’t they usually first to report?
Just eyeballing it looks like we are still about 0.2C cooler than this time last year. I am looking forward to seeing UAH numbers. It looks like we may have taken a pretty serious down tick on the last 12-18 months. Can’t wait to see what January brings. I think I will get some extra fire wood in just in case.
Bill Derryberry
Has anyone subjected these temperature readings to statistical analysis to see if they are “memoryless” or just how much “momentum” is involved?
For example, if know a stock price today, you can make some kind of guess what the price will be tomorrow, but knowing yesterday’s price won’t help at all. i.e. any “momentum” is just an illusion.
Do global surface temp anomalies exhibit the same phenomenon? Just eyeballing the temperature graph in this post, it looks to me like it could have easily resulted from a “random walk” type memoryless process.
Can anyone here tell me just how accurate UAH really is(I mean an explanation with scientific evidence)? I noticed how the May 2008 temp anomalies were extremely cool mostly due to a big cold anomaly in the tropical Indian Ocean that had no correlation with the water temperatures just below it according to NCDC and Hadley. Is it really an accurate representation of the air temperature, or does it monitor a layer of atmosphere that is dreadfully warped by El Nino and La Nina and has limited relevance to what is really going on with Gaia’s fever? It seems to me the tropical temperature gives a poor representation of how Gaia actually feels during El Nino and La Nina events GLOBALLY. I feel the data lets El Nino and La Nina heating and cooling run rampant across the globe even if it is not being felt on the surface air(excluding UHI). I have seen this happen with both, but it is VERY obvious in the UAH data, generally over the oceans.
dreamin, I assume you know that almost all of ‘climate science’, the IPCC and AGW theory is dependent on persistence of forcings, or in your terms ‘climate memory’.
If forcings (things that make the climate warmer or cooler) aren’t persistent, then we can toss all climate science to date in the bin.
Personally, I’m sceptical of the forcings persistence model. One reason being what you point out, global temperatures look too random on shorter timescales. The standard explanation is weather noise, but I see no reason why the Earth’s weather in aggregate (ie its climate) should be noisy, as weather is just transfer of heat and moisture from one place to another.
Despite this seeming to have all the excitement of watching grass grow, I now wait with bated breath each month for the new numbers to be revealed.
How will the new numbers compare to last month? Last year? Or, on an anecdotal level, how do they compare to last month’s temperature record for where I live? {Seems to have been boringly average}.
If the last few months develop into a trend and there is a cooling, we’ll be well into any possible cooling before it becomes obvious. If the line returns to, and stays with, the trendline of the past few years, then all it will tell us is that the climate is staying with the status quo.
The trouble is, if that red line does start dropping over the long haul, I’ll be freezing my buns off over the coming winters. A most unpleasant prospect. Give me a warming climate and day and it’s every polar bear for itself.
Whoops – Give me a warming climate any day and it’s every polar bear for itself.
Bill in Vigo…
The 12 month running mean is still falling. See http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/mean:12/from:1980/plot/uah/mean:12/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/mean:12/from:1980/plot/gistemp/mean:12/from:1980 for a graph of 4 major global temperature datasets.
dreamin…
Global temperatures respond to influences like ENSO (i.e. El Nino and La Nina) and PDO, so your question amounts to what are they doing. Also, month-to-month looks quite random, but July 2008 versus July 2007 is more predictable. Since the average of the July 2008 daily temperatures at http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_chLT.r001.txt was below the July 2007 average, something similar is expected for the monthly data. I’ve done a linear regression for what it’s worth, and it’s OK for UAH and RSS, and better than random, but not super, for Hadley and GISS.
If you want an idea of where August is going, follow the UAH daily temperatures at the above link. The linear regression between year-over-year RSS monthly temps, and year-over-year monthly-average-average-of-UAH-daily-temps has a correlation of 0.963 (Using 12 points, Aug 2007..Jul 2008). The y-intercept is -0.081 and the slope is 0.971. The average temperature for Aug 1 through 5 is 0.0444 C degree higher than last year. Using good ole “y = mx + b”, I get -0.038 as the projected temperature delta from Aug 2007 to Aug 2008. Since Aug 2007 was 0.367, this is a prediction that Aug 2008 will be 0.367 – 0.038 = 0.329. Of course, the daily temperatures will be wandering all over for the remaining 26 days of the month, so the projection will change every day.
For a look at ENSO, see the discussion and links at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/mei.html The MEI (Multivariate ENSO Index) is currently neutral.
Anyone want to take bets that GISS comes out and says that this was the hottest July ever in the History of the World?
BTW, there are signs the La Nina may be reforming. Looking at Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) there is a positive anomaly on or near the equator across most of the Pacific. Increasing OLR (more heat lost to space) is a primary cause of the cool waters that constitute La Nina.
http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/matw/maproom/OLR/m.3d.html
It doesn’t suprise me to much that the data is up. We’ve had a warm and occasonally humid last 3 weeks (purely observational – some down to high pressure over the UK)
Phillip,
NOAA’s weekly ENSO report seems to be predicting that La Nina conditions will return late Winter or Early spring, what I find even more interesting is that the North Atlantic seems to be developing some cool spots as well, and NOAA seems to be predicting a growing cooling trend starting this fall which should continue through Spring.
NOAA, of course, has started to only display their climate predictions PLUS trend, so if the trend line has changed, to the cool side more than NOAA acknowledges then its very possible that we could see the cooling trend resume in force come October or so.
Another thing that I have been following with some interest is a growing cold spot between Hawaii and Alaska. What will become of this? I don’t know.
I don’t know what’s taking UAH so long, but I’m guessing based on this that they should be right around the 0 anomaly or just below. And August temps are currently in a tailspin…we’ll see how low they go.
You said: “I rather expected it to go up a bit, given that La Nina has diminsihed, plus the NH has a greater landmass than the SH, and we are in summer. ”
I do not understand how summer and the the greater landmass could cause the temperature anomaly to raise. Isn’t the landmass the same as the base period 1979-2000 or what ever base period that is used for calculating the average for each month? I can’t see how it will cause temperature anomaly for July to raise this year, unless there is a significant change in landuse this summer.
But the global absolute temperature is higher when it is summertime in NH though, due to landmass, right?
The IPCC are good at coming up with eye catching lines such as
” 11 of the last 12 years are among the highest global temperatures ever recorded”.
Has anyone any alternative one liner suggestions for the downward temperature trends since the start of the new millenium?
Adding to Jecker’s obvious statements in (00:12:10), I’d also like to point out the other obvious:
People are watching grass grow lower this year and calling AGW off. I’ve no problem on that, love the controversies. BUT, if one watches 1998 clearly off any possible trend, one learns that looking at 2008 as if endorsing the position that GW is called off is as specious and false as if looking at 1998 (in 1998) endorsing a huge acceleration of GW.
So people, calm down and if you really want to see grass grow, fine by me. I just tell you that it won’t reach any interesting “height” to reach conclusions until next two or three years (and even still!).
Environment Canada here in Ottawa has been telling us that June and July daily average temperatures have been, well, average. To the amazement of the locals.
The reasoning is that, with all this cloud cover,the highs aren’t as high, but at night, the lows aren’t as low.
Jerker,
Yes, I was going to note the same thing: The anomalies are from monthly averages, so the seasonal NH/SH differentials are already taken care of (that’s why there is no detectable 12 month signal, it has already been subtracted out):
Band-pass around annual signal for RSS compared to raw signal
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/fourier/low-pass:35/high-pass:25/inverse-fourier/plot/rss
Just to emphasise the point, here’s the same for HADCRUT Northern Hemisphere only, which you’d other expect to show a very strong annual signal:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/fourier/low-pass:35/high-pass:25/inverse-fourier/plot/hadcrut3vnh
I also expected RSS (and UAH) to ‘bounce back’ a bit; it seems to me they react more strongly to short-term El Nino/La Nina events – perhaps simply because of the greater thermal mass of the land/sea measurements?
Oops! Please ignore the HADCRUT one above. I forgot to adjust the harmonic numbers for the longer period (or equivalently reduce the timescale) – so that graph shows the approximately 5 year signal (which is also more-or-less absent).
Here’s what I meant to do:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/from:1979/fourier/low-pass:35/high-pass:25/inverse-fourier/plot/hadcrut3vnh/from:1979
I’m just the messenger,
Arctic sea ice could reach 2007 levels by next week.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Paul, ignore my email, for a second I thought I had deleted one of your posts.
LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND ALARMIST!
(hat-tip to IceCap)
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/gore-hits-the-waves-with-a-massive-new-houseboat/
Sorry Anthony, but I couldn’t resist. They’re are our ultimate role models after all.
Johnnyb (22:19:57) :
‘Anyone want to take bets that GISS comes out and says that this was the hottest July ever in the History of the World?’
They will say it’s 8 hottest July for the last millennium, updated in the CCSP and splice it to the “Hockey Stick”. LOL
expected 9/10 of land mass is NH so when its heats up, it heats up global. Generally though temps are on the way down. Just you wait for 2009-2010!
Pierre Gosselin – ze messenger:
The ice extend could in one week reach 2007 levels.
Its true that the melting right now is a little speedy, but still, this would mean that we should get from the left picture to the right in one week?
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=08&fd=06&fy=2008&sm=08&sd=13&sy=2007
To determine size, know that Greenland is 2,15 mio kvm2.
In many cases I have tested NSIDC and cryosphere to show (much) lower difference between 2007 and 2008 than you can see from the pictures. I donnt know why this is the case, but never the less, when looking at the pictures it should be a very melty week indeed to achieve what you say.
Best regards, Frank