With the recent announcement from NCDC that June 2009 – second warmest on record globally I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at some of the older NCDC announcements.
Many commenters have questioned how NCDC arrives at some of the temperature anomalies on this NCDC graph:
Here is what NCDC says in their official announcement.
As an aid to investigation and understanding, I have compiled all such NCDC global temperature anomaly maps that I could find and made them into a flipbook animation. NCDC only made this map style back to May 2007, and I’ve captured every month up to June 2009.
You’ll be able to watch it after clicking through, please be patient, it is a 1.4 MB file and will take bit to load.
For those that like a slower animation, click the image and a larger one at the original resolution (not scaled for blog width) will pop up with 4 seconds between frames.
I’m beginning to think that tracking anomalies may not be providing a complete picture.
This HAS to be the “second warmest on record” … there is important legislation pending in Congress that has billions of dollars for these people in the balance.
The anomaly will go away after the fate of the bill is known.
Anthony do you have any info whether NCDC take into account the map projection exaggeration effects at higher latitudes when constructing these anomaly maps.
Eurasia seems very dominant in terms of +ve anomalies, yet the grid spacing of the “anomaly dots” is regular right across the globe. This would mean that a “dot” in Siberia is covering an area about 3 to 4 times the same size “dot” near the equator.
Is NCDC just counting the “dots” and weighting them or are they taking into account the exaggeration of latitude? Couldn’t find from their site.
I am struck by how many of these alarming anomaly presentations use nonrepresentative base periods, which would seem to be justifiable only if the intent is to maximize a chosen trend.
The map has the total sum value of “Eat at Joe’s” at 2am in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
Mostly continent sized splotches of molten lava thrown at the canvas from 3 paces. Siberia has long been reduced to a rock-strewn pile of ash.
There are stations in places strung across Greenland where no foot has been placed in 20,000 years.
Dave Wendt,
The choice of base period doesn’t affect the trend. It’s just a constant offset. On a time graph, it determines where you put the zero axis, but the shape of the plot remains the same.
For these color dot plots, they have chosen to change from red to blue at the zero anomaly. That is a real visual effect, and you could argue for a different color scheme.
Why do we have temperature anomalies in 2007 in northern Greenland but not in 2009? I see other areas of the globe like this as well from the maps presented. You’d think that since Greenland is an area of specific interest for the the study of climate we would be increasing observations there, not decreasing them. Are that many stations dropping out just in the last couple of years?
Our future obviously is RED.
And I’m getting the blues.
And what about that horrible winter in Alaska that started in September?
The temps in the Fairbanks AK area plunged to -19 F as soon as the Arctic Sun dipped on the horizon in late Sept. Never looked back for months on end. There surely was no heat wave anomaly in the Yukon, either, as wretched cold caught many unprepared, conditions so bad rescue was impossible.
So, where did those red dots come from?
Super Gorio Bros. dropped bombies on the ice releasing the lava monster.
Oh, I almost forgot, Godzilla breathes fire, and he got loose from the movie set. They haven’t caught him yet.
Anything is possible on a computer game.
It is just many weather spots changing. If they were climate then they would keep the same along time…
Or this is just a free screensaver from noaa
With the downtick on UAH only lasting one day and temperatures going higher AGAIN, I’ll take a wild guess we’ll see the media exploding with stories of how we’re all doomed and why we should lose all hope and give up on our dreams.
Strangely enough it doesn’t feel like the warmest July ever here in Wichita, we’d need like an average of over 100 degrees or so to have that.
3 I’m baffled by the very lurid and large red dots in Siberia during the winter months. Is this a measurement of released “heat” or an actual and significant delta?
I think is fairly disingenuous using an artificiality by manufacturing the 1961-1990 temperature record as a basis to measure against.
That graphic is about as useful as an accordion on a fighter jet.
There is something that doesn’t add up. I live near Montreal, Qc. The graph show that the temp for June were higher than normal.
Yet the reality is that June had only one day that temp reach 30 C, and 3 or 4 days that were between 25-30, the rest was cold, low high teens, low twenties at daytime and about 10 at night. Only this week did night were hot enough for me to remove my jacket while distributing the newspaper. This was similar for the entire province where people complained of the cold (and rain).
Maybe NCDC knows something that we in Québec don’t know.
Ok, look at things this way … NCDC’s Contiguous US data agrees with the satellite data in direction … “Most Recent 12 month period” here shows that the most recent 12-month period is the 89th warmest since 1985 (0.66 degrees above average) with cooling the past 3 years. The month of June was 67th warmest since 1885 (0.25 degrees above average), also cooling the past three years.
So whatever is causing the NOAA data to heat up isn’t coming from the contiguous US. US data “agrees” with satellite data in direction. NCDC’s “base period” for average in this case is 1901 to 2000.
Base Period-
Eliminate the notoriously globally cold decade of the 1960`s…
with a more recent(and representaive) 1971-2000 base period.
The big red anomalies simply disappear.
Its a “hat” trick.
Nick Stokes (16:49:05)
Trend was indeed a careless word choice. As you indicated “visual effect” would more accurately have conveyed the point I was trying to make. Selecting a lower zero point exaggerates the positivity of the anomaly and the lurid color choices only serve to compound the exaggeration. In these trying financial times I suspect, if it were possible to find a commodities future play that covered the constituent components of hooker red inks and pigments, there would be a significant killing to be made, given the alarmists’ well established proclivity for laying it on with a trowel in virtually all their recent offerings.
There may be a silver lining in this black cloud since, if they are able to convince the world that we are indeed in the midst of a profound warming, the large segments of the population of the developed world that are experiencing extended periods of below normal to normal temps right now might finally begin to question what has for me always been the weakest part of their argument i.e. that any warming that occurs will be necessarily catastrophic.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/challenge-to-climate-change-skeptics.html
Dunno what to say to that Nate is a brilliant dude. I am floored by his statistics that he does on many different levels.
Siberia, unlike Alaska, has 50% ice up against the Arctic Ocean for most of it’s length. Makes no sense.
sorry for repeating me, but I think my message hasn’t arrived yet.
Besides the known warming bias of NOAA, there is another problem with these maps. They do not match with the NOAA average values !
Look at June 2009
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2009/jun/map-blended-mntp-200906-pg.gif
and try to average the anomaly, do a bit of counting, trade off the few blue points with the red ones, put higher weight on the low lattitude points and the average will be somewhere between 1° and 2°.
NOAA however gives a global mean of 0.7°.
I wouldn’t be surprised, if the map average is exactly at 1.7°, and NOAA just made an error with the assignment of the dots to the temperatures. Maybe, sombody could do the counting,
A difference of approx. 1° everywhere is also supported by comparing the NOAA map with this australian map:
http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/SeasonalClimateOutlook/SeaSurfaceTemperature/index.html
Nick Stokes (16:49:05) :
Dave Wendt,
The choice of base period doesn’t affect the trend. It’s just a constant offset. On a time graph, it determines where you put the zero axis, but the shape of the plot remains the same.
For these color dot plots, they have chosen to change from red to blue at the zero anomaly. That is a real visual effect, and you could argue for a different color scheme.
It is not only arguing about the color, though there could have been two neutral ones.
In color maps the 0 is important for the visual effect.
Since there has been some warming since 1961, about 0.1 or so per decade , taking the 0 anomaly from 1961 to 1990, allows for reddening by 0.25 or so degrees on average, so the plots will always be red since that is the third in size dot in their scale.
Hmm this is wierd, for the last few days I have been checking the historic data for 68137 on the weather channel to see if they would include the new record loes we just set. Well tonight there was a change in the data, but not the new record low. Instead all of the records seem to be now within the last 50 some years and the avereage high for mid July miraculusly went from 88 to 86. WUWT??
rickM (18:27:54) : “…I’m baffled by the very lurid and large red dots in Siberia during the winter months. Is this a measurement of released “heat” or an actual and significant delta?…”
Well, there are at least two things about Siberia you have to keep in mind: (1) during the Communist regime in the USSR, stations may have had financial incentives to report low temperatures–reporting -40° below may have gotten increased fuel budgets, etc. (2) the base temperature for most of Siberia is very low, anyway, making, say, -10°C into a red dot based on average temp of, say, -15° for that time of year.
More important, if a place has greater snowfall than usual, the heat released by the freezing of all that water can show up in the atmosphere as a higher temperature for that month. Overall, the place may be cold as Hillary’s tent*, with snow six feet deep and net heat content much lower than average, but the reported anomaly could be positive, since air has less heat capacity than water.
* Sir Edmund Hillary, of course.
What I find more interesting is that the graphic doesn’t seem to correspond to the local [Michigan] anomalies that I track.
Monthly variance °F
Feb-08 -4.3
Mar-08 -4.9
Apr-08 1.3
May-08 -4.3
Jun-08 0.2
Jul-08 -1.7
Aug-08 -1.8
Sep-08 0.1
Oct-08 -3.5
Nov-08 -3.1
Dec-08 -3.9
Jan-09 -10.1
Feb-09 -1
Mar-09 0.3
Apr-09 -0.1
May-09 -2.3
Jun-09 -2.9
I’m sorry to be a nuisance, but what do the actual temperature measurements show?
Never mind averaging and adjusting them against this and that, never mind anomalies. In terms of real measured heat at ground level, was June the second warmest ever across the whole planet?
Russia’s red spot.
Apparently Russia is redefining the cold war. How do we know these stations aren’t being over-reported?