NASA GISS has released their global temperature anomaly data for June 2009 and it is quite the surprise.
In both the UAH and RSS satellite data sets, global temperature anomaly went down in June. GISS went up, and is now the largest June anomaly since 1998, when we had the super El Nino.
Data source:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
Here are the June global temperature anomaly comparisons:
GISS .63C
RSS .075
UAH .001
The divergence between the satellite derived global temperature anomalies of UAH and RSS and the GISS land-ocean anomaly is the largest in recent memory.
But that isn’t the only oddity. Over on Lucia’s blog, the first commenter out of the gate, “Nylo” noticed something odd:
Nylo (Comment#16257) July 14th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Regarding updates in past temperatures, this is not the most important change. Very noticeable is the fact that now 2007 is the second hottest year, having replaced 1998 in the statistics. This has been achieved by lowering the 1998 J-D average temperature anomaly to 0.56 , and raising the 2007 J-D average temperature anomaly to 0.57. Last month they were viceversa.
It is curious to me that such adjustments in GISS seem to occur in a way that enhances the present trend. Perhaps it is like a fine liqueur, aged to perfection.
Blink comparator of GISS USA temperature anomaly – click image if not blinking
Jeff Shifrin wrote: “Living in Canada where the winter temperatures often hover around the freezing point, I often laugh when I hear a clueless radio or television reporter say “Yesterday, the high was only 1 degree Celsius. Today, the the high will be 2 degrees Celsius. So, it will be twice as warm today as it was yesterday.” (It doesn’t have the same effect if you use Fahrenheit.) In the case of Paul K., I can’t tell if he is mathematically and scientifically challenged like the clueless reporters, or whether he is just being intellectually dishonest when he attempts to demonstrate that the differences in the June anomalies are not so unusual by saying..”
Jeff, the one day temperature comparison is a joke, I agree. Your analogy to my statement is also a joke. I am linking to data showing the twenty year averages for both the UAH and GISS monthly mean anomalies. It is an average of averages, and to see this much discrepancy in the twenty year averages is statistically meaningful. Either the UAH or the other records are wrong (Mr. Watts jumped to the assumption that the GISS record is WAY OUT THERE) or there is something unusual about the UAH data, but I am simply asking ‘what’s up with that’?
I found Flanagan’s post (at 6:57 on July 15) linking to the AMSU graphs very interesting. There may be a change in the shape of the annual cycle of warming and cooling measured by the satellites.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Select the years from 2003 to 2008 plus 2009 so far, and click ‘redraw graph’. We can see the recent warming all across the seasons, but there does seem to be a delay in the global heating in May and June, with a prolonged and delayed seasonal cooldown compared to the 20 year average.
Also, clearly the July UAH anomaly is going to be scary, if the trend so far stays up.
In any case, I don’t find the UAH data persuasive in showing the GISS June anomaly data wrong, unlike Mr. Watts and many of the commenters here. I think that resolving the discrepancy will involve more in evaluation of the UAH data, and understanding what the unusual seasonal trend in the UAH data is telling us.
Lubos Motl (13:48:07) :
Dear Jim,
your question what is the mechanism behind the surface-to-troposphere lag I mentioned is an interesting one. On one hand, it can be a reason to abandon the idea about the lag.
On the other hand, I can imagine a lot of processes that slow such things down, mostly things related to turbulence. Much like El Nino always seems to propagate from the Western coast of South America to the West, it may be propagating upwards.
The speed of winds in the vertical direction is arguably much slower than in the horizontal direction, which makes these signals vertical propagation much slower, too.
There’s another way to think about the lag. If you look at this plot
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2005/scale:0.5/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2005/offset:-0.4/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2005/trend/offset:-0.4/plot/uah/from:2005/trend/scale:0.5
From this period of relative solar quiet, the lag is quite long. A cooler troposphere is going to take longer to react. The ocean has far more heat capacity than the atmosphere, but it’s still a big beast nonetheless. If we think in terms of resonance rather than one to one photon – molecule interactions, the lag becomes more understandable. Waves of energy bouncing up and down inside the atmosphere as the sea emits, and the atmosphere absorbs and reflects, creating evaporation and convection, precipitation and advection.
Shake and repeat many times during 4 months.
Jeff Shifrin (14:11:34) :
The joys of using numbers without units, and in this case Paul K. is a culprit, too. The second plot on deepclimate’s blog post is not temperature anomalies by month but decadal trends these monthly anomalies. So whereas RSS, GISTEMP, Hadcrut and NOAA find that the temperatures in May rise by 0.14°C/decade, UAH finds only half the warming rate, i.e. 0.07°C/decade. UAH agrees with the other data sets in December to February. So UAH is the odd one out.
is irrelevant, as the RSS anomaly of 0.075°C and the GISTEMP anomaly of 0.63°C refer to different base periods, they are measured from different starting points. How often does this simple fact have to be repeated?
oops, I stand corrected by bluegrue… the data is decadal trends.
In any case, the data is statistically meaningful, and there is a meaningful seasonal trend in the UAH data. This is what seems to be driving the unusual May/June UAH numbers.
An extensive publication about this subject is published at ICECAP.US including a PDF.
Anyone want to play ‘guess the anomaly with this baby:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
Either the satellite has gone into meltdown, or we’re in for one heck a result this month!!
How much cooling is enough?
http://minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2009/07/how-much-cooling-is-enough.html
As our politicians live in a virtual world, working hard to solve virtual problems
that take a lot of virtual money, it does not matter to them what happens in the real world.
No matter how deep temperatures drop, our politicians proceed.
tallbloke (15:35:40) : I’m just not getting the vision. Relative to air, water is dense, high viscosity, high heat capacity and I can see why ocean patterns take day to decades or more to play out. But the air is light, easily heated, and has a low viscosity. If you heat or cool a parcel of air relative to its surroundings, it will rise or fall immediately. I hark back to clouds that are born, climb to thousands of feet high, and die all in the course of one day. The atmosphere disperses energy quickly. So, I still don’t see a mechanism for this lag you speak of.
imapopulistnow (10:39:30) :
“So true. I hope they have a file at home in a safe place that specifically documents each date, time, place, authority, and action required, with any and all documentation in support of the actions they were required to take. Otherwise they will be thrown under the bus. I have seen it happen all too many times.
Even then, the attorneys will get involved, question their character and turn it all around.
“If you disagreed then wasn’t it your responsibility to inform management?”
“Isn’t it at fact that, by your inaction, you bear full responsibility for the bad data that the Agency disseminated?”
Of course they could go to the Inspector General or the Main Stream Media……. (On second thought………)”
I have been there more than once. The only option is to cut and run. If you can hand off the incriminating data to someone who can use it so much the better. Unfortunately the Government was worse than useless in two instances I tried so people in one casewere injuried and in the other died.
At the third company, who was knowingly endangering peoples health and lives, I suggested to the Union Steward where to find my report with the data after I left…. His father was a lawyer.
I am sadden to say I found honesty to be a very bad handicap as a scientist in industry. The conflict between loyalty to a corporation and honesty is a major problem. My loyalty ends when the actions of the company can cause significant injury to people. Unfortunately it still can get you blackballed.
And yes I think this is an example of cooked data. An honest scientist ALWAYS explains corrections to data and why. We do not see this nor do we see calibration and adjustment of the sensors that were identified as off calibration. We are expected to believe badly sited, out of calibration equipment can show the precision of a rise of 0.6 degrees over 30 years when the equipment precision is +/- 5 degrees??? (The 5 degree precision is because the equipment is not calibrated so scientists can not identify drift over time)
Simon’s Law:
It is unwise to attribute to malice alone that which can be attributed to malice and stupidity.
Looking at the NOAA records again, at first there doesn’t seem to be a straightfoward reason for the big run-up in July, however the number of record high low temperatures reported increased a bit in the last week or so despite a steady stream of record lows and record low highs, but the record low highs, record highs, and record lows were still coming in numbers seen before so part of the run-up could be because of an acceleration in record high low temps if this is what started happening in many areas of the world, at least in the US.
Phil: rte amsu 600 mb nothing unusual CHECK ALL the past years from 1998!
Actually I reckon leave GISS “way out there” it only helps the skeptics case when you think of it….especially when all the others are a hundredfolds lower. ie 0.00 v 0.63
The AMSU 600mb is above the 20 yr record high line. The uptick shows up in all the jumps up to 90mb where it disappears. Eyeballing the latest NOAA weekly SST anomaly map vs their June monthly map http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/wkanomv2.png
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/monanomv2.png
the only thing that jumps out is substantial hotspot in the North Atlantic and a lesser one south of Alaska in the Pacific, but these don’t seem substantial enough to be driving the mini hockey stick in the AMSU graph.
Flanagan (13:56:36) :
“Heating by the top does not cause such type of instabilities (there’s no double diffusion effect in the atmosphere).”
So if there is CO2 heating the atmosphere, it should still be up there now, right? 😉
Paul K (15:33:35): Also, clearly the July UAH anomaly is going to be scary, if the trend so far stays up.
Whoo, whoo, I’m scared!!! (sarc-off)
Sorry PK, but I am bored to tears by Alarmist terror tactics. You may be wetting your pants, but I am not. We just had some record cold days here in July in Oregon. If the globe is warming (scary, scary!) it ain’t happening here.
Warmer is better, anyway. It is nothing to set your hair on fire about. Nothing to run around in the bushes screaming scary scary, scary.
Put a sock in it, please.
Paul K, a 0.07 difference in trends is irrelevant, according to GISTEMP sources, which call “negligible” any trend difference inferior to 0.1C that happens as a result of changing their methodology, like they did in April 2006.
In April 2006, GISTEMP introduced a change in methodology that raised their own trend for the period 1880-2005 from 0.49 to 0.54C/100y. The description of that change stands in their Updates and Analisys information page as having a “negligible” impact in global temperatures.
By the way, the change consisted on deciding to forever ignore data from a number of gridcells close to Anctartic which weren’t showing the “right” ammount of warming. Now the “Global” temperature of GISTEMP doesn’t include those gridcells. It is a bit less “global” than before.
Jim (17:05:37) :
tallbloke (15:35:40) : I’m just not getting the vision. Relative to air, water is dense, high viscosity, high heat capacity and I can see why ocean patterns take day to decades or more to play out. But the air is light, easily heated, and has a low viscosity. If you heat or cool a parcel of air relative to its surroundings, it will rise or fall immediately. I hark back to clouds that are born, climb to thousands of feet high, and die all in the course of one day. The atmosphere disperses energy quickly. So, I still don’t see a mechanism for this lag you speak of.
1)The Climate is not homogenous. It takes time for changes in key areas to propogate around the system. This is true both of the ocean and atmosphere.
2)A lot of the radiation leaving the ocean gets bounced straight back down again to cause evaporative processes, which in turn cause convective processes and precipitation processes, which in turn cause advection and pressure change processes. These all take time to balance the change in SST through the multiple times the energy bounces back and forth between ocean and air. So although big weather events can happen in a single day, the net effect is only a fraction of the energy released or withheld by the ocean. The numbers are something like 330W/m2 radiated by ocean, plus 30 in thermal convection plus 30 evaporation, but only a net 68 escaping without getting bounced back down at any one time.
These numbers are suspect and the difference is too low, because they are based on incorrect assumptions about ocean heat content. I haven’t yet had time to work on them in the light of the calcs of ocean heat content I did which Leif Svalgaard confirmed as correct.
I don’t have all the answers and I’m learning as fast as I can. I hope it helps a bit and sorry if my explanation seems muddled.
Fraud. Simple as that.
REPLY: Let’s not use that word. Never assign malice where simple incompetence will do. – Anthony.
It is not only incompetence and may not even be fraud. A large part is the delusion scientifically inclined people have in favor of their theory of the world. ( a good example: the barycenter followers.)
Perhaps bias is the right word?!?! But if you are changing data to fit your bias is that not a kind of fraud? If I were to change my clinical trial results ( calling them adjustments ) on a new kind of drug would it be looked on with anything less then as a fraudulent act? Incompetence occurs when people DO NOT KNOW BETTER. My assumption is these people have taken basic math classes to know that if you adjust a number it is no longer the same…
And if you are implying that they do not know that their adjustments are not right… I hate to say this but I think they have heard enough criticism to at least QUESTION it now.
Is it fraud??? I do not know… Is it incompetence??? Again I am unsure. But the numbers they have cooked no longer have just a scientific meaning to them. Based on the numbers they have cooked I WILL BE PAYING MORE IN TAXES. If someone tells me something is occurring and it is a lie, but they told me the lie to obtain my money… Isn’t that what is refereed to as a Con?
Again just upset here. Thanks for letting me blow off steam.
Did someone notice, that NASA also changed even the normally long manifested GISS data of the last century every month?
See http://img.umweltluege.de/fudging0809.jpg for example
John K. Sutherland (09:00:00) :
Jeff:
‘Could we start a campaign to educate Bill O’Reilly on Fox News.’
I’d go with that. I like Bill and I am Brit – I was once a left wing Brit at that – until I grew up. I don’t know if he drinks but I reckon he’d make a pretty decent drinking mate. I agree with John: once the penny drops he’ll be a useful ally. And I agree on Laura Ingram too – she’s definitely on the ball.
@Jeff Shifrin:
Paul K is comparing ANOMALIES (look it up), not just the difference in temperature. So the joke is on you….
bluegrue (15:45:43) :
Jeff Shifrin (14:11:34) :
The joys of using numbers without units, and in this case Paul K. is a culprit, too. The second plot on deepclimate’s blog post is not temperature anomalies by month but decadal trends these monthly anomalies. So whereas RSS, GISTEMP, Hadcrut and NOAA find that the temperatures in May rise by 0.14°C/decade, UAH finds only half the warming rate, i.e. 0.07°C/decade. UAH agrees with the other data sets in December to February. So UAH is the odd one out.
the difference between .075 and .63 is .555
is irrelevant, as the RSS anomaly of 0.075°C and the GISTEMP anomaly of 0.63°C refer to different base periods, they are measured from different starting points.
Correct. The GISS June anomaly with respect to 1979-1998 (the satellite base period) is +0.42 deg. Still high but I reckon that UAH and RSS will be heading in that direction in the next month or two. If not my ‘lag’ theory bites the dust. Is it mine or Flanagan’s? If it turns out to be wrong – it’s Flanagan’s.
How often does this simple fact have to be repeated?
Quite a lot by the looks of this post ->
VG (19:59:25) :
Actually I reckon leave GISS “way out there” it only helps the skeptics case when you think of it….especially when all the others are a hundredfolds lower. ie 0.00 v 0.63
Paul K (15:33:35) :
Your point is that there seems to be something wrong with UAH for Mays and Junes, and, although I am an AGW sceptic and growing more so over the past couple of years of cooling temperatures, I’m sure most scientists on this post would like to have this looked into and resolved one way or the other. The only comment I would make is that this particular May and June and I’m already expecting that July will also add to the cooling picture, has been cool over much of N.Am., and apparently S. Am, Australia is cooler than normal. I’m not manning a satelite or managing a weather station, I’m stepping outside and I’m sticking my toe in the lake and changing my mind about going for a swim – this isn’t because of an 0.07 difference in temperature. Scientists may not look out the window these days for inspiration with all the wonderful gadgets they have to monitor and play with, but the average citizen, whose vote you need to begin your multi trillion dollar remediation programs does go out, has lousy summer weekends at the cottage and farmers look out in dismay at crops that are weeks behind. Paul, you can use your own skin to sense that things are pretty cool these days. The 250 children that froze to death in Peru and the early skiing in Australia and NZ aren’t measuring fractions of a degree change whether it is an anomaly or the whole temperature. This is July the 16th- even GISS with its 2% of the globe is going to have a tough time adjusting this whole summer up.
And to add to my post above, if GISS had substituted this in for only one of its weather stations, their numbers may have come in lower than UAH:
http://globalfreeze.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/regina-beats-92-year-old-record-low/
Its even colder today at 3C ( 37.4F) this morning, four days later. This is Canada’s breadbasket country and this minimum is 9C below the average min temp.