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The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for March 2009 was published yesterday and has dropped after peaking in January. The change from April with a value of 0.202°C to May’s 0.09°C is a (∆T) of -0.112°C.
Recent RSS anomalies
2008 10 0.181
2008 11 0.216
2008 12 0.174
2009 01 0.322
2009 02 0.230
2009 03 0.172
2009 04 0.202
2009 05 0.090
RSS (Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa)
The RSS data is here (RSS Data Version 3.2)
Oddly, a divergence developed in the Feb 09 data between RSS and UAH, and opposite in direction to boot. UAH was 0.347 and RSS was 0.230
I spoke with Dr. Roy Spencer at the ICCC09 conference (3/10) and asked him about the data divergence.
Here is what he had to say:
“I believe it has to do with the differences in how diurnal variation is tracked and adjusted for.” he said. I noted that Feburary was a month with large diurnal variations.
For that reason, UAH has been using data from the AQUA satellite MSU, and RSS to my knowledge does not, and makes an adjustment to account for it. I believe our data [UAH] is probably closer to the true anomaly temperature, and if I’m right, we’ll see the two datasets converge again when the diurnal variations are minimized.”
It certainly looks like the data sets are converging now, with a scant difference in May of .047°C and that Dr. Spencer was right.
John D.Aleo gives a reality check from ICECAP regarding the El-Nino prospects
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Romms_Fairy_Tales.pdf
Also, didn’t EarlHapp say something of something he expects will hold up this development before El-Nino is official, don’t forget the PDO cool signature and the dropping of the AMO according to Unisys (which gets its daily readings from Bouys with no heat sinks because of ships)
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
Off topic I know but does anyone know if there is a historic gloabal temperature anomally data set available that corrects the bucket problem discussed here a while back – link below. As far as I know data sets like Hadcrut3 are uncorreceted, as you would expect, have they been superceded?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/05/30/buckets-inlets-sst%e2%80%99s-and-all-that-part-2/
Ubuntu (13:25:29) :
{i}…Germany has really been sold on this whole global warming thing.
Here’ a good chuckle the Goode’s would appreciate….{/i}
Yeah, and the national german weather service (DWD, http://www.dwd.de)
did already on the 27th of April give a note to the press, that
according to first analysis, it was the hottest April ever.
Was on the biggest tabloid here.
A week later, the update (April was only 2nd hottest ever),
nobody took notice. Same was with: December/January/February
as season was among the coldest three seasons of the last 25 years.
Sure, that’s only weather.
Because the Earth’s climate is always recovering from the last thing that happened to it.
We’ll be recovering from the LIA for the next couple of hundred years…Then we’ll be recovering from the MWP (Modern Warm Period). Eventually the Earth’s climate will start recovering from the Holocene.
On a “local scale”…We’re currently recovering from the last positive shift in the PDO…In about 25 years we’ll be recovering from the recent negative shift in the PDO.
For the last couple of months, we’ve been recovering from winter…In about four months we’ll start recovering from summer.
Today we are recovering from last night…Word has it that tonight we will be recovering from today.
Tomorrow I expect to be recovering from a hang-over.
You’re right…Not a theory…Just a fancy name for an intuitively obvious observation…;-))
Dave Middleton (14:17:50)
very good Dave, very witty, but you forgot to give Joel the mechanism so i will give him a hint. It’s big and yellow and it rises to damn early every morning and goes down to damn early when I’m fishing. 🙂
Dave Middleton (14:17:50) :
re: Joel
Dave,
he’s still drinking AGW, his hang-over will come later.
sorry should be TOO damn early
Adam from Kansas. Note that the ” dynamic” models predict El Nino, and the ” statistical” models predict neutral. With the ONI for march-april-may at minus .1 and a cool PDO and AMO, an El Nino seems unlikely for me. As Joe points out, the vertical temp structure looks similar, but lacks the signature cool pool at 150m, 160e-180e. It sure is fun to speculate! More so since we will only have to wait a few months. fm
“”” jh (14:08:45) :
Off topic I know but does anyone know if there is a historic gloabal temperature anomally data set available that corrects the bucket problem discussed here a while back – link below. As far as I know data sets like Hadcrut3 are uncorreceted, as you would expect, have they been superceded? “””
Well jh, there couldn’t be any such corrected data set; and there never will be.
Check Geophysical Research Letters for Jan 2001. John Christy et al.
They report on about 20 years of the Argo buoy data. Actual water temperature measurements from a fixed (?1 metre) depth, and simultaneous air temperatures at a fixed (?3 meter) height.
The air temperaturews reported only about 60% of the warming that the water temperatures reported for the succeeding 20 odd years; showing that the previous 150 years of oceanic temperature measures were wrong vaslues to use as a proxy for the lower troposphere temperatures that the land sensors measure.
More importantly the data shows that the air and the water temperatures are not even correlated; let alone identical as had previously been assumed.
Consequently the lower air temperatures over the ocean can never be reconstructed prior to about 1980. That’s data for more than 70% of the earth’s surface.
So prior to 1980ish; we have no idea what the global mean lower troposphere temperature was.
Khuffy – we had 3 days of clear skies and hot weather. Then we have had 3 days of clear skies and cold weather.
My reading of this graph is that between 1980 and now temperatures have gone up and down a lot and right now are back were we started. So, after 30 years of alleged global warming, temperatures are exactly the same.
“Skeptic,” I wonder how long it will take for you to catch up. You are apparently still stuck on the original Mann “hockey stick” assertions about the relationship between temperatures in the Nineties and previous times.
Please read this. It will help you catch up. And, as you read it, keep at least these two things in mind: (1) “plausible” doesn’t mean anything like “certain,” and (2) the Little Ice Age was near its coldest period 400 years ago, so the warming that ended the LIA may have simply continued since the year 1600 cited in this report.
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11676
The report was requested by Congress after a controversy arose last year over surface temperature reconstructions published by climatologist Michael Mann and his colleagues in the late 1990s. The researchers concluded that the warming of the Northern Hemisphere in the last decades of the 20th century was unprecedented in the past thousand years. In particular, they concluded that the 1990s were the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year. Their graph depicting a rise in temperatures at the end of a long era became known as the “hockey stick.”
The Research Council committee found the Mann team’s conclusion that warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last thousand years to be plausible, but it had less confidence that the warming was unprecedented prior to 1600; fewer proxies — in fewer locations — provide temperatures for periods before then. Because of larger uncertainties in temperature reconstructions for decades and individual years, and because not all proxies record temperatures for such short timescales, even less confidence can be placed in the Mann team’s conclusions about the 1990s, and 1998 in particular.
I’m never ever going back to climate progress. The owner seemed nice enough, but there were people there that were making open threats against some for expressing their sincerely held views. I wonder why the owner of that site would allow that?
Mike
Hi Frank, can you tell me the difference between dynamic and statistical models and which ones have been shown to be more accurate?
Also I noticed there was no cool pool in the spot you described and BOM.gov is showing the surplus warm water in the western half of their depth maps almost gone. (after declining for a while). It depends on whether or not El-Ninos are supplied by water from the west near Indonesia or from the east near South America, if the west then El-Nino’s starting to look a bit more unlikely without that anomalously warm water supplying it to kick it into full gear, one more indication of a domino or two refusing to fall is the recent increase in cloudiness near the date-line.
Ubuntu (13:20:02) :
Climate Progress has moved it WUWT bashing article back to the top of the heap! This isn’t over by a long shot.
Don’t forget to watch The Goode family!
Ubuntu
I can’t see it. WebSense blocks ClimateProgress.com for sex.
“Joel Shore (13:48:43)
Why are we still recovering from the LIA? What evidence do you have for this and what is the mechanism that is leading to this warming?”
As you and the rest of the alarmists have apparently ‘settled the science’ shouldn’t you be telling us?
Whilst you are it you can also explain to the rest of us IQ challenged people what caused the Earth to warm up to the MWP and then subsequently cooled down to the LIA and then caused it to warm up again to the start of the 20th century.
You can then explain what caused the global temperatures to increase from 1910 to 1940 at a similar rate to 1975 to 2000 even though there was little change in atmospheric CO2 and atmospheric aerosols showed a very large increase.
Please be specific as to all the forcing factors involved, the measured changes etc and please explain in simplistic language so that IQ challenged people viewing here can understand.
Alan
Joel Shore (13:48:43)
One of my favourite things to do is to determine the area under the curve for the TSI chart (using a base of 1365.6 or thereabouts and always using Leif’s data!!) to determine the “activity” of the sun. If you do this you will find that the 19th century has ~10% more “activity” than the 18th; the 20th ~17% more than the 19th. Also the two halfs of the 20th century are almost equal (the later being slightly more!!). Leif has said that these numbers are basically correct. So the sun has been more active since the LIA and certainly since the M minimum of the 1600s
If you do the same for Volcano DVI (using Mann’s weighted DVI), the 19th century is, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, 60% (at least maybe more 80%? I’m not at home) greater than the 18th and the 20th even less than the 18th (~30%)
Surely this would have some effect on the earth’s average global temperature since the LIA with the 20th century likely to be the warmest.
Also, it has been pointed out by Bob Carter, Bob Tisdale and others that the El Nino of 1998 was an anomaly whose effects have, quite likely, not been dissapated. If you take the UAH trend from Dec 1978 to June 1997 the straight line trend is 0.036 Deg C/Decade. If you take the trend from 1989 to Nov 2008 the trend is 0.132 Deg C/Decade. I’m just waiting patiently to see what the temperatures do in the next few years. Maybe they will go down, revert to the very slight upward trend of before the El Nino or go through the roof!!
Steve Hempell: Be cautious about Mann’s DVI data in recent years. My first blog post was about the MBH manipulation of even that dataset:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/04/mann-et-al-weighted-dust-veil-index.html
Bottom line: after 30 years of unremitting, industrial strength, human production of CO2 from fossil carbon, global temperatures have risen a whopping 0.1 degree C.
If things keep up at this rate, by 2100 the Earth will be sweating from an unbearable temperature rise of 0.3 degrees C.
The shock, the horror of it all. Oh, the humanity! I’m moving to Mars.
Snow in the UK?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191089/Its-June–snowing-From-sweltering-shivering-just-week-happen-great-British-summer.html
To…. skeptic (12:20:59) :
“Always a pleasure to see the cherry-picked examples of lower temperatures.”
Not so much “Cherry picked” as pointed out Skep.
As for me and many on this site, we consider natural variation to be the phenomenon being observed rather than Anthropogenic CO2 forcing climate.
Sure I acknowledge Anthropogenic impacts. I quite readily accept Heat Island effects around cities. I am cognisant of the impact of land clearing. There is plenty of scientific observation to bear out those hypothesis….. But as far as CO2 and it’s supposed effect on global climate is concerned…. The observation does not bear out the Hypothesis at all.
That hottest decade you where talking about is not heating as per the AGW hypothesis despite a continuing rise in CO2 levels….
That would be pause for thought. Do you not agree?
2009 may not be cooler than 2008, but it will be a LONG way from the record. At this pace, it would need a monster of an El Nino to beat 1998. And I’m not seeing that….
Why does the AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent have a noticeable jump/ increase at the beginning of June of each year? It looks like at least 4 of the 8 years recorded has the exact same hiccup?
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
I appreciate any info on that.
REPLY:It is a seasonal adjustment for meltwater that is likely on the surface of the ice in some areas right about now. – Anthony
I see a 1977 type winter coming to a nation near you, that’s my theory. I hope I am incorrect, but the cards are lining up. I can’t wait to see what AGW says then. Oh that’s right, “we reached the tipping point and man made global warming caused it”.
AGW people are never wrong, it’s an interesting system they have.
I spy a cooling trend.
Just had a thought. That temperature signal is quite noisy, with much more high frequency than low frequency content.
Is this not indicative of a control system with a large amount of negative feedback, but where there is a low pass filter in the loop, so that there is less feedback at higher frequencies, and more negative feedback at lower frequencies? If so, then low frequencies are suppressed relative to high frequencies because of the negative feedback. The low pass filter is formed from consideration of the stabilizing effects of the oceanic heat capacity.
A feedback system with positive feedback and a low pass filter in the loop would have quite a different spectrum. Its gain would be a maximum at zero frequency, because positive feedback creates gain. However higher frequencies would tend to be filtered out and have reduced feedback, resulting in reduced closed-loop gain, and the overall signal would look smoother.