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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.
I am not ridiculing the -0.4degree prediction, just pointing out that it may have been overambitious. You see when people predict things with great confidence; it seems natural for people to remember and check if it came true.
Looking at a record of various scientists’ predictions is extremely useful, because those that get them right with very little error means that it is likely they have a technique that works and that will be very useful in predicting future events!
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
The SOI has dipped to similar values as in 2007, the year of the last El Nino disturbance…
We will wait and see. Records show that it is common to see an El Nino after a La Nina and vice versa. We have had 2 mild/moderate La Ninas in consecutive order, what is the chance that given that the SOI has dropped to El Nino territory that there will be no El Nino and a third La Nina?
khufy
“You have to be kidding me. Were you the only man in England who missed the heat wave we just had? ”
No heat wave, just nice temps in the low 20’s, nothing exceptional about that.
“Barbeque weather. in spring.”
Yes, last year it was in April, for around a week and then an awful summer.
“Oh and Midsummer isn’t actually “mid summer”. We’ve only had 5 days of summer so far.”
Actually, summer starts officially on 20/21 of June depending on the solstice so we have had no summer yet.
http://www.calendar-updates.com/info/holidays/us/summer.aspx
Its still cold here in the south of the UK.
We still have our heating on which I don’t recall doing in June before.
P
>>Germany’s last glacier… is getting a protective tarpaulin to
>>help shield it from summer melting.
Let’s hope they use a rostingly hot, black tarp…
Watching the Italian Government TV channel Rai 1 I was dumbfounded to hear the head of the meteorologist office (Italian Gov.) say that ”we have great difficulty in giving accurate forecasts for one week in advance, as far as I know there is no way to predict the weather, it changes.
How long will it be before (Already happened anyway) the BoM in Aus, the Met in the UK and equivalent authorities in the US etc will state that it would be colder if it wasn’t for AGW?
George E. Smith (14:59:56) :
“”” 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.
George, thanks for these comments – all rather unfortunate for the modelers and correlators of whatever species. Many of the GCM models proudly captured this ‘blip’ and used it as part of the validation of their success.
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
I think this is an important question. As far as I can tell, there are two possibilities:
(1) There is some unknown cause (forcing) which can result in significant temperature changes over tens or hundreds of years.
(2) The climate is somewhat chaotic over such time periods, i.e. a little ice age can develop in the same unpredictable way that a storm can develop.
Either way, it completely calls into question all these simulations which are alleged to be able to predict global surface temperatures in 2100.
And I have never seen or heard a warmist address this problem beyond hand-waving and ad homenim attacks.
Whilst the temperature of one part of the system goes up or down a little bit each month, it is of no consequence as AGW can’t be disproven anyway.
Many people have confused new ethics based on ecology for one theory dreamt up in a fancy spreadsheet. These people need to study ethics, not computer models. They need to study human motivation, not temperature charts. They need to understand cultural evolution, not whether they can scare everyone into “action” based on whethet malaria spreads in an extra bit of warmth.
Most people disagree with AGW not because they disagree with science, but because they disagree with the particular ethical judgements of many environmentalists.
They have put all their eggs into AGW to get us to act, so if AGW becomes scientifically a weak hypothesis, that blows their new ethics out if the water. Gee thanks, but we don’t need it anymore.
The question environmentalists should be asking, is not when will we act on climate change, but rather, if we are faced with a class of problem like the world’s ecology, what new ethical principles might we need to explore, as a new stage on our cultural and moral evolution?
If there really was a crisis, there are plenty of regimes in the would that would simply think it in their rights to go to war and kill off the competition. For a truly new ecologically sound ethics, that would obviously be missing the point.
Let the ecologists debate and discuss ethics. Scaring people into action has so obviously not worked. And let them begin with the little moral of the boy who cried wolf. .
And by the way, my instinct is that the chaos option is correct. I think it’s impossible to accurately predict whether 100 years from now we will be in another LIA or another MWP.
Modern so-called climate science is founded on the hope that the chaotic elements in the climate system will largely cancel eachother out over periods of 50-100 years resulting in a process which can be predicted. But there is absolutely no evidence to think this is so. And until it is understood what caused the LIA, the natural assumption should be chaos.
Do they use temperature anomaly graphs because a tiny change from the average can be made to look like a substantial change in temperature???
This graph shows absolute annual temperatures from cental England starting 1659
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/HadCET_an.html
And the orriginal data from the UK metoffice
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
If you’re selective about which parts of the graph you look at You can see any trend you want.
Kazinski (13:52:35) :
Always a pleasure to see the cherry-picked examples of lower temperatures.
That is dead on, rather than cherry picking some outlying data point to try to make some bogus point, Steve should be looking at the most current data.
Or the oldest:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/picking-cherries-in-sweden/
paulID (14:35:03) : It’s big and yellow and it rises to damn early every morning and goes down to damn early when I’m fishing. 🙂
No no NO Paul! It goes down too damn LATE when fishing (think CatFish !! )
(Using a couple of day old ‘innards’ on the bottom at night works really well.)
khufy (13:07:44) : Oh and Midsummer isn’t actually “mid summer”. We’ve only had 5 days of summer so far.
Summer has a cultural component to the definition:
Today, the meteorological reckoning of the seasons is used in Australia, Denmark and the former USSR; it is also used by many people in the United Kingdom, where summer is thought of as extending from mid-May to mid-August. The definition based on equinoxes and solstices is more frequently used in the United States where many regions have a continental climate with a temperature lag of about half a season.
Elsewhere, however, the solstices and the equinoxes are taken to mark the mid-points, not the beginnings, of the seasons. In Chinese astronomy, for example, summer starts on or around May 5, with the jiéqì (solar term) known as Lixia (立夏), i.e. “establishment of summer”, and it ends on or around August 6.
An example of Western usage would be William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the play takes place over the shortest night of the year, which is the summer solstice.
In Ireland, the summer months according to the national meteorological service, Met Eireann, are June, July and August. However, according to the Irish Calendar summer begins May 1 and ends July 31. School textbooks in Ireland follow the cultural norm of summer commencing on 1 May rather than the meteorological definition of 1 June.
In southern and southeast Asia, where the monsoon occurs, summer is more generally defined as lasting from March to May/early June, their warmest time of the year, ending with the onset of the monsoon rains.[citation needed]
From a popular culture point of view, in some areas of the United States, summer season is often considered to begin at the Memorial Day weekend (the last Monday in May) and end at the Labor Day weekend (the first Monday in September). Likewise, another set of pop-cultural reference points for summer is the time when elementary and secondary schools close down for the “summer vacation”. This period usually lasts from around early to mid June until around late August to early September, depending on where the school is located.
In the New York legal community, summer is generally considered to begin when summer associates arrive in April or May.
So please do try to be a bit less narrow in your acceptance of the many flavors of summer…
Grudging one para article on the Grauniad website today.
“Rain across the Cumbrian fells and the north Pennines helped to lower the temperature sufficiently for the rain to turn to sleet and then to snow today. While roads stayed largely clear, snow settled on hillsides, notably around Upper Teesdale and Weardale at about 600 metres and above. The most significant June snowfall in recent memory was on 2 June 1975, when snow fell in many parts of the country. The Essex and Kent cricket match in Colchester was interrupted, while the match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton was called off after 2.5cm (1in) of snow settled on the outfield.”
” This is a common misconception about the meaning of ‘theory’ as scientists use the word. It does NOT mean that something is vague and hypothetical and ill-founded, ‘just a theory’. On the contrary, a ‘theory’ is something that expresses the truth given by a great mass of observations. E.g. instead of extensive tables of planetary positions they can be calculated from Newton’s theory of gravitation that can be written on a single page of text. E.g. instead of huge tables of empirical data on spectral lines of chemical elements, these wavelengths can be calculated from quantum theory, etc. A ‘theory’ of a phenomenon is but a shorthand for all our observations of that phenomenon up to now.”
My overly-cultivated inner semanticist whispers to me that we would do well to distinguish between ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’. I would never use the phrase ‘just a theory’, although I might say ‘just a hypothesis’.
A judicious appeal to etymology can often be of service when clarifying terms. Very briefly and inadequately, then, in classical Greek, the noun ‘theoros’, in its earliest usage, denoted an individual who was sent by a city as something like a cross between an ambassador and a secret agent to observe carefully goings-on elsewhere; ‘theorioi’ also might be sent to Delphi to consult an oracle. A further development of the word led to its application to the spectators at games or at theatrical performances. The verb ‘theoreo’ means ‘to act as a theoros’, i.e. to engage in the kind of careful, synoptic observation characteristic of a good ‘theoros’.
Of course the term is used in every day parlance, as epitomized in the expression ‘just a theory’, to mean something that has not yet been proven to be true; hence the opposition of ‘theory’ to ‘fact’. But that is not the meaning I intended in the post Dr Svalgaard responded to. What I mean by theory is a generalizing account of a phenomenon or a particular set of phenomena. Dr Svalgaard mentions quantum theory, which is still ‘theory’ in the sense I intend although it is, at least in its descriptive function
(the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’), triumphantly and grandly proven by the indisputable fact that it works and that much of contemporary technology is based on upon it. The theory of relativity and the theory of plate tectonics provide further grand examples from the 20th century. On the other hand, as much as I enjoy reading ‘weird science’ and despite the fact that I am a great fan of Brian Greene, superstring theory and ‘brane’ theory remain just attractive hypotheses.
To sum up: a theory is the simplest synoptic account of phenomena that ‘saves the appearances’. That is, I think, a rough-and-ready paraphrase of ‘Occam’s razor’, although the phrase ‘save the appearances’ is attributed to the 7th c. AD philosopher Simplicius.
Yes, O you unthinking adherents of the Whig theory of intellectual history, one of the basic tenets of natural science can be traced back to a 14th century monk and further back to the midnight hour of the ‘dark’ ages.
There is a very important post by Roger Pielke Sr. on his blog about how heat should be measured and what has been happening with the heat content of the oceans. He clarifies the only true way to measure what, if any, heating is taking place due to either CO2 or more likely natural causes. I urge everyone to go to his site and read his response to Joe Romm. http://climatesci.org
Re: different definitions of summer.
Astronomically, summer begins with the solstice. Meteorologically, summer means the months of June, July and August.
My favorite definition of summer, however, is implied in the line ‘I spent the summer one day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.’
No summer yesterday here at 40.7 N, 74.5 W, but this afternoon, we will have summer. Or so we are promised.
Sumer is icomen in,
Lhude sing cuccu.
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu:
Bulluc sterteth
bucke verteth
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu:
Ne swike thu naver nu;
Another useful definition of summer would be the ninety-day period, 45 days on either side of the solstice, when the sun is highest in the sky. In the northern hemisphere that would mean the period from the second week of May
through the first week of September.
Snow, Hail
weather by seablogger
Dickenson, North Dakota currently reports heavy snow with half a mile visibility. This is prairie, folks, not some mountaintop in the Rockies. Meanwhile, a polar low has dug over the waters just west of South Florida. Its circulation has brought a layer of dry air at mid levels of the atmosphere. Consequence: severe hail is likely in today’s South Florida storms. Yesterday Miami Beach had eight inches of rain. Global cooling, anyone?
http://www.seablogger.com/?p=14942
International Falls, Mn bottomed out at 27F this morning, the fourth day this month of record lows for the date and the lowest temp ever recorded this late
(though not the record low for the month).
Arthur Glass,
“Astronomically, summer begins with the solstice”
No, that would be its mid-point astronomically. So summer would run from May 6th to August 6th (for the NH).
I’m happy with the June, July and August apportioning. Makes most sense with each season lasting three months, otherwise you get autumn lasting until Deember 21st, which is ridiculous.
I can confirm that it has been raining all day in the south-west of England, with floods and power cuts due to lightning. My heating is on.
Steve Hempell: You wrote, “Bob, I used Mann’s because, by eyeballing it, it seemed to me to be the most conservative.”
While preparing the post linked above, I compared the Mann and the Lamb DVI found here:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp013/ndp013.dat
The only difference I can recall was the inflated values MBH tacked on at the end for Mount Pinatubo. They may have bumped up El Chichon as well.
Regards
E.M.Smith (05:47:24) :
Summer has a cultural component to the definition:
Indeed. According to the ancient Norwegian calendar stick (“primstav”), the first day of summer (“Sommerdag”) is 14. April. http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primstav
It is still referred to in modern culture as the first day of summer, even by some TV-meteorologists 🙂