There’s some really interesting things going on with global temperature. On one hand we have UAH and RSS which show Global Temperature anomalies near zero, while NCDC/NOAA and GISS (which derives from NCDC data with their own adjustments added) show large positive anomalies.
Joe D’Aleo at ICECAP writes:
Last month, NOAA had May 2009 to be the 4th warmest on record globally. Meanwhile NASA UAH MSU satellite assessment showed it was the 15th coldest May in the 31 years of its record. This divergence is not new and has been growing. Just a year ago, NOAA proclaimed June 2008 to be the 8th warmest for the globe in 129 years of record keeping. Meanwhile NASA satellites showed it was the 9th coldest June in the 30 years of its record.
Of course the obvious question “who’s right” will be the subject of many posts to come, but I wanted to get this out there for discussion. There’s some interesting things going on with the NCDC data.
The combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the second warmest on record in June, behind 2005, and tied with 2004 as the fifth warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period. The global ocean had the warmest June on record. The ranks found in the tables below are based on records that began in 1880.
What is truly interesting about June (besides the wide discrepancy between global data sets) is the time period with which the onset of the warming occurred. Some say it has to do with El Nino developing in the Pacific. Perhaps, but the El Nino conditions we see now are not comparable to what we saw in 1998, yet we have global temperatures being reported that are comparable.
It is an interesting mystery, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out and what is discovered. Stay tuned for more on this topic.
Addendum: I should point out that there is a lag between surface and lower troposphere, so we’ll see what July says as LT is already shaping up a bit warmer at UAH. – Anthony
Flanagan (00:26:29) :
Note also that NOAA had the hottest sea surface temperature EVER. Urban heat island effect?
Don’t be silly, its the soot !! 😉
Tenuc
July 17, 2009 1:15 am
I think the issues illustrated by this widening divergence of global temperature estimates is yet another example of the sorry state of climate science.
If more effort could be put into getting the basics right, then perhaps more progress to understanding would be made. It is never a good idea to build on weak foundatons.
Philip_B
July 17, 2009 1:24 am
Note also that NOAA had the hottest sea surface temperature EVER. Urban heat island effect?
No. Fastest rate of climate cooling ever recorded.
Almost all the heat in the Earth’s climate is in the oceans. Warmer SSTs mean more heat transferred into the atmosphere and then radiated out into space.
Read tallbloke’s post above for more details.
rbateman
July 17, 2009 1:24 am
tallbloke (00:31:57) :
Osmosis of the heat from ocean to atmosphere due to sun in Lodi mode.
When winter comes, it will find a cooler ocean to run amok over, bringing an even harsher time to the Northern Hemisphere.
It’ll be 2010 and froze to death.
Flanagan
July 17, 2009 1:35 am
Phillip and talbloke: what a special sense of physics that is… So it means having la ninas and associated low SSTs is a proof of global warming? And where do you think the released heat is going to? Right into space, just like if there were no greenhouse gases in between?
And then, why do we observe an increase in SSTs going in line with air temperature in the las 30 years?
Flanagan
July 17, 2009 1:37 am
In any case, I think we should be careful and wait for possible corrections for the SSTs. In my sense, it has been overestimated.
Re Steve Fielding case; the AGWers argumentation “the air temperatures are not important, but ocean temperatures are” are (coincidentally) immediately followed by “highest SST ever”. AFAIK, GISTEMP uses RSS data for oceans, which do 70% of the trend. Can anyone extract the RSS above ocean data for June?
Once again concerning present UAH anomaly, a similar one in summer 2007 was followed by pretty deep La Nina 😮
Tenuc
July 17, 2009 2:38 am
I think your right, rbateman, my guess is also for a cold end to 2009 and an even colder 2010 winter. It will be interesting to see how much our current qute sun wll contribute to the change.
I thought it might be interesting to compare the current situation with that just before the 1998 El Nino spike:
Here’s the 4 years around 1998: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1996/to:2000/plot/uah/from:1996/to:2000/plot/gistemp/from:1996/to:2000/offset:-0.24
(GISTEMP baseline adjusted to same as UAH)
Around March 1997 (1997.25) is interesting, when the divergence between GISS (blue) and UAH (green) is almost as great as we have now. However within a few months UAH had bounced up and exceeded GISS. If you look at the sea surface temperatures (red), it leads both by a couple of months.
So how’s this for a very basic theory: An El Nino-generated pulse starts at the sea surface, and takes time to pull up atmospheric temperatures. Because GISS/HADCRUT are partially sea surface and partially land, they get some impulse immediately from the sea, but the land part has to wait for the atmosphere to catch up (and then some – thermal mass?). So the ‘spike’ in the surface signal (GISTEMP) is wider but lower than the satellite one?
So, here’s the same range and series now: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2006/to:2010/plot/uah/from:2006/to:2010/plot/gistemp/from:2006/to:2010/offset:-0.24
SST has already gone up in May (June not available at time of writing), and GISS followed in June. It now looks like the satellite is spiking up as well in July, rather like mid-1997.
Caveat: I’m not sure any of this is much help in determining long-term trends, but it’s interesting nonetheless!
Nick Yates
July 17, 2009 3:39 am
Flanagan (23:41:10) : Well, I think we should rename the Finn-Flanagan theory on the surface-troposphere lag the “Finn-D’Aleo-Flanagan” (FDF) theory now :0)
Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain how this lag works then? The troposphere starts about 8Km up so even if convected air only moved up at 1KmH it wouldn’t take long to get there. How long will it be before the troposphere starts catching up, and when can we expect this big jump in the satellite temps?
They are showing a huge positive anomaly over Atlantic Canada for June?!?!?!?!?
Sorry, I live there and environment Canada reports it as well below seasonal. I will not ascribe to malice what incompetence will explain, but does anybody check this stuff if it goes in the “right” direction? There is no way this is anything but wrong.
Allan M
July 17, 2009 5:05 am
Glenn (21:34:19) :
“Following her confirmation, Lubchenco declared that science would guide the agency and that she expects it to play a role in developing a green economy.”
Well, we know how “green” works. First go hug a tree. Then emote. This puts you in intimate touch with nature. After all this, it is only necessary to say the first thing that comes into your head, and it is bound to be the absolute truth. Next get a committee of such people together and you have – GREEN SCIENCE.
The experimental method is so seventeenth century.
Gary P
July 17, 2009 5:08 am
Here at 92°W, 45°N we had one week of warm summer weather in June. Last weekend I needed to wear a long shirt and jeans while sitting in the sun watching a sporting event. 64°F yesterday. Not a single strong hot weather thunderstorm all summer. At least the map shows we are in the middle of a big blue patch. Until verified by an unbiased source, I don’t believe the big hot spot in Siberia.
Larry T
July 17, 2009 5:14 am
The GISS map shows PA as being a+3 degrees while my local observations show a 3-6 degree below average.
Manfred and Cary,
you ask how good NOAA’s global data be worse than local data in Australia and elsewhere? It is simple (and trust me, I work for NASA and this is not beyond the pale). They averaged it (or smeared it) with other data to raise it up. They can rationalize why they need to over ride or lower the weighting of the cooler data. They just need to agree on some lame excuse to dilute good measurements with bad.
These people do not care. Their jobs are now tied to the alarmists, and in this economy people will do anything to have or keep a job.
Do you really think the Shuttle accidents were not caused by higher ups telling people lower down to be quiet or they can be replaced? If we government can let little tin dictators destroy two shuttles, what makes you think the properly placed idiots can’t screw up some simple math with their own agenda?
Seriously. The way to fight back is to run scenarios with the same data that takes out the smearing. Make the assumption the satellite data is solid and that the ground based sensors are only there to do local validation of the sat data. What is the answer when we process the data with these assumptions, where we don’t ‘fill in’ holes by averaging the two sets?
What does the last 3 decades look like under these assumptions. Show a range of assumptions and how they change the processing methodologies and weights and produce a range of answers.
BTW, there is no way June was the 15th warmest for the last 31 years and the 9th warmest over the last 129. Just not possible. If your math comes up with that result – it is wrong! I don’t care how you average it. That’s not the point. Instead of thinking about data sets with errors think about having perfect knowledge and running numbers. That can’t happen with perfect knowledge. Either June 2009 is 8th, 15th or higher (if there were some warms spikes before the 31 recent years).
What the data tells me, when you get two numbers like this is the math is wrong. It could be the way the averaging is being done, but it is more likely it is how the measurement error is being handled.
As I said before, Sat data is many orders of magnitude more consistent than a bunch of sparse surface based sensors. If the surface sensors can’t produce the same results as the satellite, it ain’t the satellite that has the source of errors.
Barry Foster
July 17, 2009 5:18 am
Juraj, thanks for that.
Flanagan: “Note also that NOAA had the hottest sea surface temperature EVER”. Saying “EVER” is extraordinarily stupid. We’ve only been recording temperatures a VERY short while. In future, please say, “on record”.
Gail Combs
July 17, 2009 5:29 am
A quick check of temperature here in mid North Carolina shows we were cooler here in May and June 2009 than last year and much cooler than 2004 (mid cycle 23) I have also noticed the daily min and max temp morph upwards by 2 to 5 degrees F by the next day so my believe in the accuracy of government data has hit bottom as my believe in government corruption skyrockets.
As people pull on sweaters instead of turning on the fans and AC they are going to start smelling a rat. Compound that with reports of how Veggies are not growing in the newspapers and they will KNOW theer is a rat. Can you say Cap and Trade?
Rather than an anomaly, has anyone compiled a graph of actual Earth temperature? If so, anyone got a link?
@Barry, look here: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/index.html
and select Weekly Anomaly to get absolute temps. You can select also anomaly vs 1971-2000 there.
Don’t be silly, its the soot !! 😉
I think the issues illustrated by this widening divergence of global temperature estimates is yet another example of the sorry state of climate science.
If more effort could be put into getting the basics right, then perhaps more progress to understanding would be made. It is never a good idea to build on weak foundatons.
Note also that NOAA had the hottest sea surface temperature EVER. Urban heat island effect?
No. Fastest rate of climate cooling ever recorded.
Almost all the heat in the Earth’s climate is in the oceans. Warmer SSTs mean more heat transferred into the atmosphere and then radiated out into space.
Read tallbloke’s post above for more details.
tallbloke (00:31:57) :
Osmosis of the heat from ocean to atmosphere due to sun in Lodi mode.
When winter comes, it will find a cooler ocean to run amok over, bringing an even harsher time to the Northern Hemisphere.
It’ll be 2010 and froze to death.
Phillip and talbloke: what a special sense of physics that is… So it means having la ninas and associated low SSTs is a proof of global warming? And where do you think the released heat is going to? Right into space, just like if there were no greenhouse gases in between?
And then, why do we observe an increase in SSTs going in line with air temperature in the las 30 years?
In any case, I think we should be careful and wait for possible corrections for the SSTs. In my sense, it has been overestimated.
Anyone done a Benson analysis on GISS data?
Is there a reason to measure the anomaly vs. 1960-90? Do they just pull this stuff out of their behinds?
M
Amazing, Gore was right after all…..nice here in Ky though, coolest July in years where I live.
Re Steve Fielding case; the AGWers argumentation “the air temperatures are not important, but ocean temperatures are” are (coincidentally) immediately followed by “highest SST ever”. AFAIK, GISTEMP uses RSS data for oceans, which do 70% of the trend. Can anyone extract the RSS above ocean data for June?
Once again concerning present UAH anomaly, a similar one in summer 2007 was followed by pretty deep La Nina 😮
I think your right, rbateman, my guess is also for a cold end to 2009 and an even colder 2010 winter. It will be interesting to see how much our current qute sun wll contribute to the change.
I thought it might be interesting to compare the current situation with that just before the 1998 El Nino spike:
Here’s the 4 years around 1998:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1996/to:2000/plot/uah/from:1996/to:2000/plot/gistemp/from:1996/to:2000/offset:-0.24
(GISTEMP baseline adjusted to same as UAH)
Around March 1997 (1997.25) is interesting, when the divergence between GISS (blue) and UAH (green) is almost as great as we have now. However within a few months UAH had bounced up and exceeded GISS. If you look at the sea surface temperatures (red), it leads both by a couple of months.
So how’s this for a very basic theory: An El Nino-generated pulse starts at the sea surface, and takes time to pull up atmospheric temperatures. Because GISS/HADCRUT are partially sea surface and partially land, they get some impulse immediately from the sea, but the land part has to wait for the atmosphere to catch up (and then some – thermal mass?). So the ‘spike’ in the surface signal (GISTEMP) is wider but lower than the satellite one?
So, here’s the same range and series now:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2006/to:2010/plot/uah/from:2006/to:2010/plot/gistemp/from:2006/to:2010/offset:-0.24
SST has already gone up in May (June not available at time of writing), and GISS followed in June. It now looks like the satellite is spiking up as well in July, rather like mid-1997.
Caveat: I’m not sure any of this is much help in determining long-term trends, but it’s interesting nonetheless!
Flanagan (23:41:10) :
Well, I think we should rename the Finn-Flanagan theory on the surface-troposphere lag the “Finn-D’Aleo-Flanagan” (FDF) theory now :0)
Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain how this lag works then? The troposphere starts about 8Km up so even if convected air only moved up at 1KmH it wouldn’t take long to get there. How long will it be before the troposphere starts catching up, and when can we expect this big jump in the satellite temps?
Excellent link, thanks for that
Just in time for Copenhagen. July will also be another “n-th warmest month on record” etc. Bah humbug!
With regard to ‘Lamont’s idea of an annual cycle in UAH, I don’t know if this might help… This is a Fourier filter of all four series selecting for signal between roughly 11 and 13 months (harmonic 27 and 33 of a 360-month range):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:2009/fourier/high-pass:27/low-pass:33/inverse-fourier/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2009/fourier/high-pass:27/low-pass:33/inverse-fourier/offset:-0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/to:2009/fourier/high-pass:27/low-pass:33/inverse-fourier/offset:-0.4/plot/gistemp/from:1979/to:2009/fourier/high-pass:27/low-pass:33/inverse-fourier/offset:-0.6
It does seem to show a recent increase in the annual signal of UAH to about 0.2K pp. But it’s also worth noting that GISTEMP seems to have a consistent 0.1K pp signal too!
They are showing a huge positive anomaly over Atlantic Canada for June?!?!?!?!?
Sorry, I live there and environment Canada reports it as well below seasonal. I will not ascribe to malice what incompetence will explain, but does anybody check this stuff if it goes in the “right” direction? There is no way this is anything but wrong.
Glenn (21:34:19) :
“Following her confirmation, Lubchenco declared that science would guide the agency and that she expects it to play a role in developing a green economy.”
Well, we know how “green” works. First go hug a tree. Then emote. This puts you in intimate touch with nature. After all this, it is only necessary to say the first thing that comes into your head, and it is bound to be the absolute truth. Next get a committee of such people together and you have – GREEN SCIENCE.
The experimental method is so seventeenth century.
Here at 92°W, 45°N we had one week of warm summer weather in June. Last weekend I needed to wear a long shirt and jeans while sitting in the sun watching a sporting event. 64°F yesterday. Not a single strong hot weather thunderstorm all summer. At least the map shows we are in the middle of a big blue patch. Until verified by an unbiased source, I don’t believe the big hot spot in Siberia.
The GISS map shows PA as being a+3 degrees while my local observations show a 3-6 degree below average.
Manfred and Cary,
you ask how good NOAA’s global data be worse than local data in Australia and elsewhere? It is simple (and trust me, I work for NASA and this is not beyond the pale). They averaged it (or smeared it) with other data to raise it up. They can rationalize why they need to over ride or lower the weighting of the cooler data. They just need to agree on some lame excuse to dilute good measurements with bad.
These people do not care. Their jobs are now tied to the alarmists, and in this economy people will do anything to have or keep a job.
Do you really think the Shuttle accidents were not caused by higher ups telling people lower down to be quiet or they can be replaced? If we government can let little tin dictators destroy two shuttles, what makes you think the properly placed idiots can’t screw up some simple math with their own agenda?
Seriously. The way to fight back is to run scenarios with the same data that takes out the smearing. Make the assumption the satellite data is solid and that the ground based sensors are only there to do local validation of the sat data. What is the answer when we process the data with these assumptions, where we don’t ‘fill in’ holes by averaging the two sets?
What does the last 3 decades look like under these assumptions. Show a range of assumptions and how they change the processing methodologies and weights and produce a range of answers.
BTW, there is no way June was the 15th warmest for the last 31 years and the 9th warmest over the last 129. Just not possible. If your math comes up with that result – it is wrong! I don’t care how you average it. That’s not the point. Instead of thinking about data sets with errors think about having perfect knowledge and running numbers. That can’t happen with perfect knowledge. Either June 2009 is 8th, 15th or higher (if there were some warms spikes before the 31 recent years).
What the data tells me, when you get two numbers like this is the math is wrong. It could be the way the averaging is being done, but it is more likely it is how the measurement error is being handled.
As I said before, Sat data is many orders of magnitude more consistent than a bunch of sparse surface based sensors. If the surface sensors can’t produce the same results as the satellite, it ain’t the satellite that has the source of errors.
Juraj, thanks for that.
Flanagan: “Note also that NOAA had the hottest sea surface temperature EVER”. Saying “EVER” is extraordinarily stupid. We’ve only been recording temperatures a VERY short while. In future, please say, “on record”.
A quick check of temperature here in mid North Carolina shows we were cooler here in May and June 2009 than last year and much cooler than 2004 (mid cycle 23) I have also noticed the daily min and max temp morph upwards by 2 to 5 degrees F by the next day so my believe in the accuracy of government data has hit bottom as my believe in government corruption skyrockets.
As people pull on sweaters instead of turning on the fans and AC they are going to start smelling a rat. Compound that with reports of how Veggies are not growing in the newspapers and they will KNOW theer is a rat. Can you say Cap and Trade?