From NOAA/NCDC
The July 2009 temperature for the contiguous United States was below the long-term average, based on records going back to 1895, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
The average July temperature of 73.5 degrees F was 0.8 degrees F below the 20th century average. Precipitation across the contiguous United States in July averaged 2.90 inches, which is 0.14 inches above the 1901-2000 average.
U.S. Temperature Highlights
Click for high resolution map (Credit: NOAA)
- An abnormally strong, persistent upper-level pattern produced more than 400 record low minimum temperatures and 1,300 record low maximum temperatures (lowest high temperature) across the nine-state area that make up the Central region.
- Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania experienced their coolest July on record. Kentucky, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Michigan each had their second coolest July on record, while Minnesota and Tennessee had their third coolest July on record.
- Death Valley, Calif., set a new monthly average maximum temperature at 121.3 degrees F. Temperatures in Death Valley reached 120 degrees F or higher for 22 days, beating the old record of 19 days.
- Several western locations recorded their all-time warmest July. Seattle-Tacoma Airport had an average July temperature of 69.5 degrees F, which was 4.2 degrees F above average. Seattle’s high temperature of 103 degrees F on July 29 is an all-time record. Alaska posted its second warmest July, Arizona had its third warmest, while New Mexico and Washington had their ninth warmest.
- Based on NOAA’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index, the contiguous U.S. temperature-related energy demand was 13.3 percent below average in July. Much of this can be attributed to cooler-than-average conditions in the heavily-populated Northeast.
In a related note, UAH has produced this map which not only shows a cooler than normal eastern USA,but many other cool spots around the globe. Oddly, Antarctica appears to be the major contributor to above normal temperatures and the 0.41C global temperature anomaly jump in July 2009.
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John Luft (08:48:48) : “And of course, the projection of the map makes the “warm” areas (whether they exist or not) look much larger than they really are.”
Good point! This refers to the second map – world view – not the one of the USA lower 48. It looks like the world view uses a “Miller Cylindrical” projection (scroll down here):
http://egsc.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/MapProjections/projections.html
within which distortion of areas and shapes in high latitudes is extreme.
gtrip (04:24:23) : At the same time, the gravitational force (no one out there can explain that can you?), has lessoned on our planet and we are starting to see the effects in the earthquakes that are happening.
Just be quiet about that, would you gtrip? If the Alarmists get a hold of this news, they’ll declare a gravity crisis and the gummit will force us to wear ankle weights.
Tie me kangaroo down, boys, tie me kangaroo down…
A maximum temperature of 30.9 °C was recorded at Heathrow (Greater London) on the 1st.
What a shock!
An enormous airport, surrounded by prodigious expanses of tarmac, with constant movements of vehicles, ground handling equipment, and airliners up to A380 size, plus heavy air conditioning for passenger terminals and administrative buildings, gets hot even in an otherwise cool summer.
Who knew?
Chris Thorne (12:48:09):-
It’s been pretty hot at Paddington Railway Station as well.
Mind you, that may have something to do with the enormous glass roof and relatively few apertures …
I don’t ascribe much significance to the United States temperature record as an index of global warming. It is a small percentage of the world’s land area.
It turns out that the global average temperature anomaly for this july is 60, which is the second warmest July since the record started in 1880, surpassed only by the big El Nino year of 1998. This comes on top of a June anomaly of 64m, which is also the second warmest.
These numbers are high, despite a neutral El Nino and an inactive sun.
I consider this a more significant statistic than the US temperature.
arch stanton (11:13:11) :
“the anomaly is mostly over the Antarctic continent and not over the southern seas.”
Sort of. The area of the largest positive anomaly appears to be over the continent, but the positive anomaly in the Southern Pacific appears to extend well beyond the coast, as it does in the Southern Atlantic and Southeastern India Ocean.
Ignoring the hump in the NSIDC chart, it seems that Antarctic Ice Extent in July increased at an about average pace, while the UAH map seems to show that a large part of the Antarctic coast experienced either above average or average temperature anomalies. Understanding that ocean temperature also has a significant impact on ice formation, I can see that this is plausible, but I am still skeptical.
Jimmy Haigh (09:36:25) :
From http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/20/polar-albedo-feedback/
Ric Werme (13:58:29) :
That’s not a Mercator projection, in fact, it’s not a projection at all, just a cartesian plot of latitude and longitude and is the most common sort of climate map we see. I see no reason to take Basil to task for referring to that sort of a map. A Mercator projection cannot cover the whole world, as the poles
have to take up infinite area. In this cartesian map they just get stretched out into a line.
See http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/gif/unproj.gif
vs http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/gif/mercator.gif
Personally, I think the “Sinusoidal Equal Area” map would make the most sense for us. http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/gif/sinusoid.gif
All links came from http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj_f.html
eric (13:17:07) :
Don’t believe in those oranges and reds. Think: The souther hemisphere is currently at winter time so it will take all the color inkjet they have to counterbalance low temps.
“It turns out that the global average temperature anomaly for this july is 60, which is the second warmest July since the record started in 1880”
If you back out the “adjustments” I believe you would find that not to be the case. The data you are looking at is bogus. I believe that is quite well established at this point.
Lots of map varieties available, but I think what would be useful for most folks would be a few Google Earth overlays (kmz files ) , perhaps real time, that are built from this sort of data. Reason is it allows one to “rotate” the globe in any direction, zoom, etc. Anybody out there know how to do this?
crosspatch (14:44:14) :
wrote:
“Eric:
“It turns out that the global average temperature anomaly for this july is 60, which is the second warmest July since the record started in 1880″
If you back out the “adjustments” I believe you would find that not to be the case. The data you are looking at is bogus. I believe that is quite well established at this point.”
This is only established in the minds of those who believe that there is a conspiracy to fool the public about global warming. They use the same logic that leads to the conclusion that Bush is responsible for planning and executing 911.
The main difference between Hadcrut and GISS is that Hadcrut ignores areas where there is a lack of surface stations and GISS interpolates to cover these regions. Since the Arctic lacks surface stations and is the fastet warming region of the globe, GISS shows a slightly larger warming trend than Hadcrut. The adjustments are a legitimate algorithm to deal with equipment changes and urbanization.
A favourite gardening book of mine (courtesy of good old Readers Digest!) gave maps for the onset of the seasons and such useful information and always reminded me that in Scotland August was to be considered an autumn month.
This year for the first time for many a year that has been true from the beginning.
It’s not only to do with temperature as such; it’s the quality of the air and the light and the wind and just something in the general behaviour of plants and (especially) birds that says “it’s autumn”.
How you test scientifically for that I wouldn’t know but in my part of Scotland at least autumn has come early this year and every gardener (and allotmenteer) I’ve spoken to has said the same.
And I suspect a hard winter is set to follow.
RE: Are you becoming an astrologist or just a realist?
Sadly, it is the latter. We are digging the hole deeper and deeper.
RE: It’s not only to do with temperature as such; it’s the quality of the air and the light and the wind and just something in the general behaviour of plants and (especially) birds that says “it’s autumn”.
How you test scientifically for that I wouldn’t know but in my part of Scotland at least autumn has come early this year and every gardener (and allotmenteer) I’ve spoken to has said the same.
Same here in Northern CA. Autumn appears to be here now. We even had our (typical of late Sept / Oct) “Indian Summer” weather pattern a few days ago. Multiple species of trees are turning. Etc.
“”” E.M.Smith (23:18:07) :
I’ve been playing around with GIStemp and with “Global Average Temperature” calculation issues for a while now. This posting is full of references to the average temperature. The good news is that the US temperature series is fairly complete, so this is probably a decent conclusion.
The sidebar is that the world temperature series is very spotty. We start with ONE thermometer in 1701, ramp up to 9000+, then drop to a few thousand today. IMHO, the side effect of this on the temperature record is what we call “AGW”. I think I’ve pretty much showed that there is no AGW if you hold the number of thermometers relatively constant (with using the 3000 longest lived thermometers with the most records):
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/co2-takes-summers-off/
and the short lived thermometers seem to be largely in warm places and that seems to be the reason we have “global warming”: adding thermometers in places like Brazil and Australia:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/well-theres-your-global-warming-problem/
But I’m still left with a ’sour taste’ in the mouth over the whole issue of a “global average temperature”. I call the GAT a “global average of thermometers” since I think that is more accurate… but I’m still not very sure just exactly what does it mean to average a bunch of thermometers together over time and over land…
I *think* that the average of thermometers ought to be lower in cold times and higher in warm times, but I’m just not comfortable calling it a temperature.
The thing I’ve found is that the “global average temperature” is more a function of where you’ve stuck the thermometers than it is a function of changes in the earth systems (or of GIStemp processing – but more on that in future postings…) so I’m left wondering about this article:
Where in the USA has NOAA stuck Carmen Sandiego’s thermometers?
It really is, at it’s core, a question of the number, quality, and placement of all the thermometers. Put more in, oh, Saudi Arabia, and the global average temperature goes up. Put more on frozen mountain tops and it goes down.
It really is that simple. “””
E.M. I thought you would be more up to speed by now. Calculating the mean surface temperature of the earth is very simple; an 8th grade science class could do it in an afternoon.
First you place one thermometer in the center of each square metre of the earth’s surface, that being the standard of distance measure. So not you can sample the surface temperature for each square meter of the earth surface (it’s a sampled data system).
Now you blow a whistle or ring a bell, and the students read all the thermometers all at the same time, and write down the temperature sample for each square metre of the earth surface. Then you multiply the temperature sample by one square metere, to get the area weighted sample of temperature foir that location. Then you add up all the values registered from all the thermometers, and then divide the total by the surface area of the earth. The result is the global mean surface temperature for the earth at the instant of time when the students read the thermometers.
Next you repeat the process for each second of time; that being the SI unit of time, and you record all those mean global temperatures for each of the pi x 10^7 seconds in a year; so that you have data samples for each of the seasonal variations that one expects on a planet such as ours.
Then you add up all the global mean surface temperature averages for each second, and divide by pi x 10^7 which is the number of annual second records you have written down. The answer is the annual mean global surface temperature.
See I told you it was easy; but it does use a lot of thermometers, and a lot of 8th grade students too.
You can try various AlGorythms to reduce the number of thermometers and students. since the sun moves about 400 metres per second max across the surface you can try spacing the thermometers further apart, so the sun doesn’t jump so many in a single bound. One thermometer in the middle of each square km would be a good first reduction that would cut the number of thermometeres and students by a million factor; which is a worthwhile saving of precious mercury.
Actually, there’s a general theory that explains just how many thermometers you really need. A long history of weather measurements shows that the temperature on 3rd avenue and the temperature on 4th avenue, at 42nd St is always pretty much the same. In fact the whole global temperature map has its up and down cycles at any instant, some small (high frequency) and some large (l;ow frequenc). In the SF bay area the temperature goes through an up and down cycle in as little as 10 km distance. Some places may cycle in less distance.
The rule is; whatever the highest frequency of a cyclic change in the temperature with distance, anywhere on the whole earth, you have to place one thermometer everywhere that is separated by no more than half that complete cycle distance. So if one cycle of temperature difference over 10 km is the fastest change with distance then you have to space the thermometers no more than 5 km apart. Wow that would reduce the number of thermometers by another factor of 25, not to mention the 8th grade sstudents.
Well now you can see how easy it is; so long as the temperature never makes more than 1/2 cycle of temperature change between thermometers, then you will get the correct result.
Now the one second change between readings is also a bit fast, since the sun takes 24 hours to go around the earth, giving us the diurnal temperature cycle we are all familiar with; but there are faster changes with time as well. Since the surface heats up faster than it cools when the sun goes down, the tediurnal temperature cycle is not time symmetric, rising faster and falling slower, so there is a ferequency component that is at least as fast as once every 12 hours. And that is ignoring clouds which will make the temperature cycle up and down even faster than once every 12 hours.
You can be sure that planet earth takes note of these faster cloud cycles, and correctly integrates the incoming solar energy even with the cloud changes. So really you should take the mean global temperature more than a couple of times a day if you want to get an accurate annual average. The earth is absolutely guaranteed to get an accurate value.
The frequency rule is pretty strict; if you fall short of the proper sampling frequency by only a factor of two, you will find that the errors introduced will make it impossible to correctly recover the average temperature, and the whole exercise will have been for naught.
Now compare that simple process with the elaborate one that Hansen uses where sometimes he has his thermometers 1200 km apart, and thinks that is a hiogh enough sampling frequency. Remember they can’t be any further apart than one half cycle of the highest frequency; not the lowest frequency.
The don’t have to be evenly spaced; but no two nearest neighbors may be further apart than the minimum distance; so a non uniform spacing actually requires more thermometers; so there is no advantage to non uniform spacing.
So even thoguh it is a simple problem we actually don’t have anywhere near enough thermometers around the earth to get an accurate value for the earth’s mean surface temperature, even if we only wanted to get it for one instant.
Consequently Dr James Hansen is engaging in an exercise of self flagellation; which will never reveal the global mean surface temperature of the earth.
Here, 50 miles north of San Francisco, the Pepper trees have started to turn in the last couple of weeks. This is usually the first sign of fall coming, but is about three weeks early this year.
Ric Werme (14:23:59) :
Thanks for putting me right and for the mapping links Ric.
x33 (18:04:11) :
I was in Lake Tahoe in September 1993. The guys there told me that the snow comes on October 10th every year. I don’t know if that is a fact or not but it will be interesting to see when the snow arrives this year.
Did someone here mention that the reason that Antarctica is all reds and oranges is because the printer ran out of blue ink half way down the plot? I like that!
Even in a warming trend, aren’t average monthly temperatures over a given region going to be below average almost half the time?
Isn’t this kind of like saying that average temperatures do vary?
So, in order for the globe to be warming, according to this site, every cherry picked month has to be above average, for every cherry-picked region on the globe?
Mary Hinge,
You might want to revisit where in cycle 9 things were during September 1845 when late blight was devastating potato crops in Ireland.
The cycle started during July 1843 and was 12.4 years long.
Grace,
I’ve already pulled and baged 30 plants. From the looks of things I’ll be pulling and baging tomorrow.
George E. Smith (17:48:30) :
You are missing the point regarding temperature measurements aimed at detecting climate change. The purpose of the measurments is not to measure the average temperature, but rather to measure the temperature anomaly, i.e. the change in average temperature over time. Measurement of the change in temperature will require fewer data points than measurement of the actual average global temperature.
eric:
“You are missing the point regarding temperature measurements aimed at detecting climate change. The purpose of the measurments is not to measure the average temperature, but rather to measure the temperature anomaly, i.e. the change in average temperature over time.”
I guess I’m missing the point, too. How do you measure the “change in average temperature over time” without knowing what the average temperature ever was?
And as to E.M. Smith’s point, how does one get a believable anomaly figure when the measuring “instrument” (the collection of thermometers) changes from month to month and year to year? E.M. held the measuring “instrument” constant by using the same 3000 stations and found nothing to get up about. Please explain the error of his ways. It would be illuminating.
George E. Smith (17:48:30) :
Seems to me satellite measurements could fulfill the criteria, with much fewer but graduate students.
La La La the temperature is going down, ice is increasing. You only have to look at the weather to know it is getting colder.
The world shows a clear warming trend. It does.
The. World. Shows. A. Clear. Warming. Trend.
the reason it does this is because the CO2 in the atmosphere has increased since we started burning fossil fuels.
Sticking you fingers in your ears and going la la la doesn’t change that.
Regards
SteveSadlov (17:16:52) :
150 mi. north of SF and you can see, feel the fall in the air. The animals know it too. The daily high temps are deceiving, they get there in the space of half an hour and drop rapidly before the sun get truly low on the horizon.
The most striking change, though, is the apparent lack of brightness to the day.
Started a week ago.