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.
Somewatt Off Topic
You may now already, but Mr. Watts, you have been mentioned in Scientific American August 2009 issue, page 9 “Stumbling Over Data”. It states “. . . bloggers such as meteorologist Anthony Watts. His blog, Watt’s Up with That? . . ”
Good Job
I too am baffled by the red dots over Scotland, where apart from a few short periods in the last couple of years (April to mid May 2008, mid March to mid April 2009, May 28 to June 4 2009, and a week in late June 2009) we have had noticeably colder then average temperatures. This is weather, but yesterday at 2pm it was only 12C in Tyndrum, (credit to the Met Office for the forecasts over the last few days, they have been very accurate and geographically precise – Aberfeldy had rain but Rannoch stayed mostly dry). But even the Met Office forecaster commented that these temperatures are not warm for the time of year. And apart from the week of blue skies from May 28 and the warm/humid week in late June it certainly has not been the warm summer we were promised by the Met Office’s long range team.
AndrewP – they’re probably including within our landmass the SSTs all around the UK by some artificial smoothing.
I’ve noticed that before, and that is the stock excuse, despite the numerous problems with it.
Another dreadful July for us once again. Lovely BBQ Summer isn’t it?
Andrew P (21:47:32) :
I too am baffled by the red dots over Scotland, where apart from a few short periods in the last couple of years (April to mid May 2008, mid March to mid April 2009, May 28 to June 4 2009, and a week in late June 2009) we have had noticeably colder then average temperatures.
The red dots are inevitable by the choice of the 0 in this plot. It is a visual statement that there has been a bit of warming since 1990. The 0 has been calculated from 1961 to 1990. Assuming it will be sitting in the middle of this interval , 1975, this gives two and a half decades extra warming at your choice, 0.1 per decade or 0.2 per decade. This moves all points by two or three settings towards the red. I am surprised any blue has been valiant enought to show up with this PR trick.
Andrew P (21:47:32):
I agree. England seems to be mainly a red dot, with often a big red dot. Yet the temperatures for the last 2 years seem to have been pretty much below par from my experience of the last 40 years of weather here in the countryside. Ten to one it’s the UHI they’re measuring in the CET (central England is one big and growing urban heat island).
Jeff Id (21:34:02) :
“Russia’s red spot.
Apparently Russia is redefining the cold war. How do we know these stations aren’t being over-reported?”
There also seems to be a hot spot over the Middle East, China is trending redder and Bangladesh has a positive anomaly for essentially the entire series. Western governments are making gigantic financial decisions based on temperature data provided by countries that are seeking economic advantage and may desire the demise of our system of governance. I’d be interested to see “global warming”/ NCDC monthly anomolies broken out by country. I wonder if there is a correlation between temperature increase and a countries’ likelihood to benefit from the limitation of developed nations’ anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.
“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.”
I’d agree with you about the “trend”, but these charts are not designed to show a “trend”.
They are taking the current June, comparing it to all of the Junes in the record (IIRC, about 125 years or so), against a “standard” base period.
From that, they say that this June was the second warmest, which means there were about 123 years in which June was cooler than the current month.
By their choice of an averaging period of 1961-1990, they ARE selecting the 0 degree anomaly. They still can’t explain why another period can’t be used, especially since the WMO suggests using a period that ends in the latest decade (1971-2000).
It didn’t creep higher than 17C here yesterday and the temperature seems fit to not creep much higher today. Most of the previous week has shown little signs of summer with temperatures more fitting to autumn. Apart from a brief, anomalous heatwave back in 2003 the weather in the UK has consistently failed to exceed warmist and Met Office expectations.
It seems that the NCDC chart is being rather over-optimistic about global temperatures too, especially the most recent ones in my part of the world.
To be taken with a large pinch of salt perhaps?
If it wasn’t for Russia manipulating the data, there would not have been so much warming, I think.
Russia wins both ways by inducing a warming trend. Firstly, frightening the USA into joining Kyoto will bankrupt much of US industry. Secondly, Russia was issued with millions of Carbon Credits (CCs) to cover its old industries, many of which are gone already. Without the USA in the Carbon Credit scam, those CCs would be nearly worthless. But now the USA needs to purchase CCs on the open market, to cover any new industries, the price of Russian CCs will rise enormously.
This Siberian issue looks like they fill it with big red spot when nobody looks. Station coverage is rather sparse, not speaking about their quality (protection from UHI). After USSR collapsed, they abandoned many rural stations and kept only those in urban areas, which are easier to reach and maintain.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/russian_met_stations.png
It looks like a serious job for Steve McIntyre.
Check to see what countries have an economic interest in the US curtailing production and energy consumption compared to the temperatures they report to NOAA. If a nation has an interest in seeing the US enact regulations that curtails production, they might be tempted to manipulate the reported data.
Henry,
There’s a very good reason why organisations like NOAA don’t change their basis. They have a big accumulation of published records, in print, graphs and electronic, using that basis. As soon as they change, people have to make conversions whenever using older data. There will be lots of confusion and errors. There are many copies out there which the NOAA doesn’t control. And in terms of the numbers, there’s no reason to change.
For plots like this, they could change their color scheme.
Six issues here, perhaps, all together making unlikely red spots in the Heat War.
(1) poor baseline – too far away from now – this really gives us no feeling for the way the temperature is trending right now
(2) the wretched UHI advance
(3) poor use of adjustment factors
(4) station siting problems
(5) the ongoing effect of loss of many rural stations around 1990
(6) big red spots From Russia With Love – their district heating
How can we, as a team, do an “engineering quality” report on this? Isn’t this what the Surface Stations project is meant to help start to crack?
Just my two
centspennies worth.Manfred (20:35:33) :
I just realized, that NOAA data points in the map are not rounded to the closest integer. The map average could then be lower than my estimate.
The coverage is utterly weird particularly at high latitudes.
Antarctica was apparently abandoned at the end of 2007. In Greenland there were apparently stations right across the icecap in northern Greenland in 2007 but only on the southern icecap after that (in fact there is only one weather station on the icecap, Summit, and that is in the north).
For some odd reason there is one dot out in the middle of the Fram strait between Greenland and Svalbard, but none on Jan Mayen, Svalbard, Björnöya, Hopen or Franz Josephs land (which all have one or more weather stations). That single dot might be Jan Mayen, but if so it is displaced about 1000 km to the north.
Further there are apparently no weather stations along the Siberian coast or on Novaya Zemlya, Severnaya Zemlya, The New Siberian Islands or Wrangels land, nor in most of the Parry Archipelago.
On the other hand they have 100% coverage of the Sahara Desert, which is more than anybody else has. There is no coverage in Angola, which might be true, but why no coverage in Madagascar, or northern Namibia?
Looks like they never bothered corrected the reporting of sept 2008 figs again in oct 2008 for large swathes of Russia.
The sequence is interesting for watching the lingering la nina and for the speed of progression of large warm and cool areas round the globe in the higher latitudes.
rbateman (17:00:38)
“Anything is possible on a computer game.”
In the words of the late Prof. Auer:
“Play Station climatology.”
I like that impressing ret dot above Hungary, while June 2009 was actually below normal for most of the country.
You can see the anomaly map for June 2009 here (from the Hungarian Weather Service): http://www.met.hu/data/mmTr/mmTr20090601_0000+1.jpg
The base period used by our NWS is 1971-2000, but last June would be below normal with respect to the 1961-90 period as well.
Szia Adam, June in Slovakia and Czech republic was under 1961-1990 baseline as well.
I haven’t been able to get the animation. Either I’m stupid or my software is not working properly. I get a few seconds of the download “circle” animating then nothing. Any suggestions? (not on correcting my stupidity please!)
Look at this map, I really believe that the higher temperatures are a result of either sensors in less than ideal locations or old, failing sensors. I will give you an example. This past week, the official sensor at the Raleigh-Durham airport was twice abnormally high. Friday, “officially” the high was 97, a record. However, that was 4 degrees warmer than any other nearby sensor. This happens so much that the meteorologist I watch lamented about the sensor being up to its “old tricks again”. Those were his words, not mine. Usually the sensor is fine, but twice in one week indicates a quality control issue. Will it be replaced or serviced? Unless it was reading cold, it won’t.
So the question is, how many of these sensors are reporting faulty data? How many times does the NWS know the data is faulty and yet do nothing about it? Why is nothing being done to get the most accurate data possible?
Lets figure this out a step at a time.
An anomaly is a difference from an average value.
If the average value is taken from all the available data, and the anomaly plotted in red and blue dots, then there should be as many red dots as blue dots and the plot(s) would be neutral.
If the plot is predominantly red, then it means that the “average value” is not an average value including all the data, but only some.
Since we know that we are coming out of the little ice age, if we took as average value the values of the 19th century, we would be all deeply red, the closer to our time the redder, until 2000, and then a small shade less red from 2000 on.
The choice of taking the average of 1961 to 1990, as the value against which temperature has become deviant, is just another way of showing that there is a trend showing heating at something like 0.1 to 0.2 per decade, except it can be used for PR purposes to claim “overheating” since the ten year global temperature hiatus has no chance to be seen against this color scale.
I am confused. From my vantage point, June was a rather pleasant month. June seemed below average in terms of high temeperatures, except for the beginning of the month. I have no data to back up these perceptions, but I am nonetheless skeptical about the red dots over Egypt. I am wondering out loud about this: Where might one find historical weather station data for Egypt?
We have seen that as climate datasets get revised, the adjustments tend to raise the recent temperatures and lower the older temperatures, thus raising the observed warming trend.
I wonder if as they release the new maps, they have recalculated the 1961-1990 baseline temperature as well? This would also increase the amount of red on more recent maps.
To me the most meaningful chart is the one shown below . After 100 years of global warming we are almost exactly where we started.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl