There is a lot of wailing an gnashing of teeth today over this Associated Press story title:
Please take a moment to read that story above as I can’t post it here. AP has declared war on bloggers.
First a few caveats:
- Yes (as mentioned about the northeast USA beach water temperatures in the AP article) we have some very warm sea surface temperatures this summer, we also had the coolest summer surface temperatures on record in many places in the USA.
- The AP story is written by Seth Borenstein. Seth tends to report the warmest side of things in the worst way, so take the story with a grain of salt. For example, Portland Maine also set a new record low for July Temperatures, see here. I don’t think Seth covered that one nor the -50°F all time statewide Maine record low on January 16th, 2009 seen here. One should also note that NOAA reported “July Temperature Below-Average for the U.S.” How quickly we forget. I’m not trying to pick a weather -vs- climate food fight, but simply pointing this out for balance. We’ve had some cold events this year also.
- Sea temperature spikes like this have have happened before. More on that later.
In the story Seth says: “The result has meant lots of swimming at beaches in Maine with pleasant 72-degree water.”
To check that out, I utilized the Rutgers SST satellite page here. This image showing coastal Maine from NOAA-15 on August 18th seemed fairly representative and was one of the few that was almost completely filled with SST data. As you can see on this summary page, there is a lot of missing data. With this much missing data, one wonders if SST data averages are accurate.
I’ve annotated the image to give you landmarks and cities. Our warmer buddy “Tamino” lives in Portland, I wonder if he’s taking a dip. As you can see, indeed there is some 72 degree water around Portland. But up in the Bay of Fundy and tip of Nova Scotia, there’s some pretty cold water also, and it is in the 45 to 55 degree range.
A wider view SST of the northeastern US shows the reason for this juxtaposing of opposite ends of the sensing range:
I’ve also annotated this image to give you landmarks and cities.
Note the prominent tongue of warm water and the eddies and swirls. That is the warm water of the Gulf Stream mixing with the cold water of the north. In the middle mix, pleasant swimming temperatures. The earth is doing what is has always done, transporting warm water northward via the Gulf Stream. Yes it is a little stronger this year and maybe a little closer to the coast than usual.
Here’s a view of the source in the Gulf of Mexico, Oh…wait…I had to use a different source since the NOAA/Rutgers imagery was missing so much data in the Gulf – see for yourself here
This Weather Underground plot of buoy based sea temperature measurements shows that indeed the Gulf is warm and around the 90 degrees indicated in the article.
But the question is: is this warmth an event to be concerned about? From the Rutgers map above, it appears that the Gulf Stream has come closer to shore than it normally does, which of course makes it more noticeable to people recreating in the water.This of course generates attention, and reporters naturally pick up on these things. The question is: weather or climate?
Here’s a NOAA Ocean Explorer SST image from a 2005 article that shows how the Gulf Stream tends to hang off the coast a bit more.
And of course, we have an El Nino going on, so a warmer Pacific is certainly not unexpected.
Note the the temperatures above are anomalies, not absolute measurements.
As the AP article mentions, the last time we saw ocean temperature this high was in 1998 during the super El Nino.
What I find most interesting though is this NOAA Hovmoller graph as pointed out by Paul Vaughn in Bob Tisdale’s thread:
Hovmollering the SST: T-shirt tie-dye design or climate science?
Just looking at the 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 SST spikes, it does seem like we are due for another at the bottom doesn’t it?
The point I’m making here. Yes the ocean is warm, it has gotten warm before. Should we panic? No.
A couple of closing points. The AP article that I referenced at the beginning of this post makes no references as to sources other than generally mentioning NCDC.
However I did find a more in depth NPR/AP article that did reference the NCDC sources which you can read here.
The two sources listed were:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?reportglobal&year2009&month7
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/dsdt/cwtg/all.html
But there is no mention of this on either source:
“The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center”
The latest summary NCDC offers ( which AP referenced: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?reportglobal&year2009&month7 ) is for July 2009 where they say this:
The global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record, 0.59°C (1.06°F) above the 20th century average of 16.4°C (61.5°F). This broke the previous July record set in 1998. The July ocean surface temperature departure from the long-term average equals June 2009 value, which was also a record.
So that makes me wonder, did NCDC give Seth Borenstein some inside information for the middle of August that the rest of us aren’t privy to? Or, could it be a misprint or C to F conversion error?
I simply don’t know, but I do find it odd that I can’t find a NOAA or NCDC press release or data table that has that 62.6 degrees mentioned in it. If anyone knows where that figure came from, please post it in comments. Google is saturated with so many news stories with the keyword combination of NCDC and 62.6 that I’m unable to locate the original source. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but if it does, I’m sure our WUWT readers will find it.
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NOAA it appears no longer uses satellite data in their ocean temperature measurements based on a paper last year coauthored by Tom Peterson. It appears because it measures skin temperatures they found it has a cold bias especially in the southern hemisphere (I don’t know why since in the roaring 40s and furious fifties, the water is well mixed and so measuring the skin temperature is probably pretty much accurate). That colod water over such a large expanse was keeping the SH cold.
I was told they also do not use the ARGO data in real-time – presumably for the monthly assessments. It appears they have reverted to the Hadley ships at sea and islands to populate the ocean grids? Claiming the buoys are for long term assessment and they don’t have the budget.
Maybe a year ago, Phil Jones noted that maybe there was more warming to be found in the ocean they were not using. That kind of statement and Peterson’s efforts to first remove UHI in USHCN v2 and then satellites and claim they don’t have the budget to use ARGO data real-time, suggests an agenda driven not science driven effort just in time for Cap-and-Trade and Copenhagen.
I would like to contact NCDC and confirm these facts. If true, another travesty as far as I am concerned.
Our local weather guy, with eye brow cocked way high, says we are expecting a cold front tomorrow to push down to the Florida peninsular and maybe as far as Jacksonville. I wonder what will the hurricanes do?
As most people know, cold fronts don’t generally hit Florida in August.
Got to feed the hoax, anyway they can.
So my line: Pay more in taxes to the government, so government scientists can pretend to control the weather — Appears to be true. Too bad real science is pushed off the table.
Adam Grey (01:08:02) :
Now that I’ve finished laughing I can comment.
If anyone else checked your links, they’d find stories like: “Hyundai Motor America Reports July 2009 Sales” counted. And skimming through a few that actually talk about weather/climate, many of what you call “cooling stories” are in fact “warming stories” with the word “cool” somewhere in the story. And some stories are counted BOTH places and multiple times in the same search.
Before you go spouting your “Google Searches” as evidence, perhaps you should actually check the data that’s returned and be certain it demonstrates what you think it demonstrates. Yours is as meaningless and methodologically flawed as Mann’s “Hockey Stick”.
Sorta like understanding the difference between temperature and heat content and how meaningless terms like global average temperature (land or sea surface) are…stuff like that.
Could it be that overall the global ocean heat content is just exhausting its stored energy? Ot is July just an anamoly? I think back in January of this year there was an unexpected spike in global temperatures. For a few weeks this anomaly generated quite a bit of excitement; however, no one really came up with a good explaination. Things quited down a bit after that.
I do think it is fair to say that GHGs do not force ocean temperatures to rise (that honor belongs to incoming solar radiation). It could be awhile until someone is able to measure the amount of stored energy in the oceans and compare it to , say, 2005. If the top of the oceans are warming, and if the total amount of incoming solar radiation has decreased these last 24 months, where is the warming coming from? Or perhaps sunspot activity is not quite the perfect proxy for climate, afterall. These are interesting times.
My guess is that July was an anomaly. El Nino will continue to increase SSTs in the Eastern PAC, but I wouldn’t be surprised if overall things quiet down this autumn. And by late Winter El Nino will begin to wane.
I am a translator and a music composer, not a climatologist, and I may be wrong about this but…
I notice that NCDC, in their introductory note on their site, warn that they arrived at the numbers that allow them to claim record warm ocean surface temperatures in July by using a NEW set of data, from which they EXCLUDED all satellite data, despite these data being most reliable, because, as they admit, the satellite data “show a bias toward cold.”
As a reason for this exclusion of the satellite data they cite the “convenience of data users.”
Is something funny going on here?
P.S. I see that the previous poster (“Red Neck Engineer”) also noticed this strange admission by NCDC of not using the satellite data. So it seems I am not the only one scratching my balding head about this.
Red Nek Engineer (03:48:54) :
There are more indications if we have a look at this publication from icecap.us:
Aug 17, 2009
Who is Really Making Up the Facts
By Joseph D’Aleo
In a Time/CNN story by Michael Grunwald “Steven Chu, A Political Scientist” on Chu’s mission to China, attempting to convince them to cooperate on emissions reductions in the December Copenhagen UN conference to discuss the next step after Kyoto (the Chinese are laughing all the way to the bank because they know our pain would be their gain).
Grunwald noted “When I asked Chu about the earth-is-cooling argument, he rolled his eyes and whipped out a chart showing that the 10 hottest years on record have all been in the past 12 years and that 1998 was the hottest. He mocked the skeptics who focus on that post-1998 blip while ignoring a century-long trend of rising temperatures: “See? It’s gone down! The earth must be cooling!” But then he got serious, almost plaintive: “You know, it’s totally irresponsible. You’re not supposed to make up the facts.””
I agree with the very last sentence. NOAA, NASA GISS and Hadley though are guilty of exactly that. They have created or enhanced man-made global warming by careless and possibly fraudulent methods. They started by dropping 80% of the world’s stations from their calculations, most rural, by not ensuring the instruments are not improperly sited (90% of the approximately 1000 surveyed and photographed by Anthony Watt’s team of volunteers do not meet the government’s own published standards), by not adjusting properly for the urbanization warming that has taken place as the world’s population rose for 1.6 to 6.7 billion people since 1900 (in the case of the US data, actually removing a very good urban adjustment), by employing and using instruments not really meant for precision temperature measurements or with warm biases, and most recently by eliminating ocean data sources like satellite or not using promising new sources like the Argo buoys because they are showing a cold ‘bias’ or cooling when the goal is to show warming in agreement with the models and their forecasts.
With the data they perform then an homogenization adjustment that blends the good with the bad (a little like the toxic assets in the mortgage crises). Though this may improve some of the bad data, it degrades the good data. This is a little like mixing pure spring water with sludge, the sludge is a little less disgusting, but the result is not potable.
Even the prior CCSP found that most of the warming is with the minimum temperatures in higher latitude cities and in winter, all classic characteristics of the urban heat island.
Dozens of peer review papers have been published and new ones appear monthly showing that the local factors like urbanization are responsible for an exaggeration of the warming longer term by 20 to 50% or even more.
LAST CENTURY OF “WARMING”
The last century of temperatures from the UK Hadley Center shows the upward trend used by the IPCC. I have added the 60 year cycle that is evident in the data set. We have just begun a leg down right about on schedule.
We have posted other stories by Roger Pielke Jr. Anthony Watts, Timothy Ball, and Steve McIntyre recounted some of the adventures attempting unsuccessfully to date to get access to the raw data and adjustments from Hadley using official channels. We won’t get into that here.
With more stability of the United States with respect to the rural data, you sere a much smaller upward trend longer term and again warming confined to relatively short 20-30 year intervals even as CO2 rose. The rate of warming from the 1910s to 1930s was actually greater than that from 1979 to 1998.
When you correct for the issues discussed above, the recent decades fall down in comparison with the 1930s to 1950s when most of the heat records were set. You reduce the 10 of 10 to maybe 2 to 5 in ten warmest years. The data sets all show a 60 year cycle and one would expect years near the peaks would tend to rank among warmest and the minimums rank among the coldest.
1930S THE WARMEST DECADE?
Looking at the record highs one gets the clear impression we are dealing with cyclical changes and that the warmth in the 1930s to 1950s exceeded that of the recent decades. This decades almost ended, has fewer heat records than any decade in a century.
The all time state record highs show the dominance of the 1930s (24 of the 50 records).
GLOBAL STATION DROPOUT
You can see the coverage difference between the stations on this GISS analysis of the NOAA gathered stations from 1978 versus that in 2008. You can see the stations grow then suddenly disappear in this animation from John W. Goetz here. See in this John Goetz post 1079 stations worldwide contributed to the GISS analysis, 134 of them being located in the 50 US states. Many, many hundreds of stations that have historically been included in the record and still collect data today continue to be ignored by NOAA and GISS in global temperature calculations (in 1970s the number of stations totaled well over 6000). Data is available in the large holes in places like Canada and Brazil and Africa, but NOAA appears not to be accessing it. The last year has been very cold in Canada.
FIXING OR IGNORING THE COOLING OCEAN PROBLEM
Also they in the last year made changes to the ocean temperature data base removing the satellite data that they claimed was giving a cold bias to the data especially in the southern hemisphere. The oceans now are shown to be warm just about everywhere and in June was the warmest of the record. See NOAA’s map below. Note most of the world’s ocean were warmer than normal (for the oceans it was the warmest June on record).
This is true even though the 3342 NOAA ARGO floats worldwide are showing cooling. Plotted data (graph courtesy of SPPI) from the ARGO buoys by NOAA’s Willis and Loehle (2009). It appears there is no effort being made to use this in monthly global assessments.
So Secretary Chu, as science advisor who claims to care about being responsible, may I suggest you do an investigation of this data debacle. I assure you that those of us who have worked with it for many years care about it more than you could ever imagine. I have a few names you start with. See more complete analysis here.
Dr. Vincent Gray’s New Zealand Newsletter just out covers some of the the same territory here.
Take a look at the original publication for the links and the graphs.
Red Neck Engineer and Alexander
Below is the executive explanation of changes and reconstruction of existing figures from 2008- which now excludes satellite data.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/papers/merged-product-v3.pdf
This is the detailed document from which the executive statement comes.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/papers/SEA.temps08.pdf
It must be remembered that Historic global SST data is even more sparse than surface global temperatures. Both have their genesis in James Hansens’ 1986 document which sems to have aquired a factual scientific basis from which fractions of a degree are calculated.
We may know SST from extremely localised locations for a few decades, but it is misleading to pretend this is a finely tuned science, and when historic data is adjusted (whichever way) we need to ensure we are comparing like for like.
tonyb
2 comments:
1) If this is the warmest the oceans have been since the 1998 super el nino, then it is very interesting that the air temps are as low as they are – compare the 1998 air temp spike to where we are at now:
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/UAHMSUglobe.html
2) By the tone of the article, you can see where this is going – ocean temps are going the to be the new global warming … err climate change …. err ocean warming, yeah…. that’s it, ocean warming ….. very scary.
Sorry for my ignorance down here in Oz, but is it cherry picking season in the USA? It must be very pleasant for you all to be able to have a nice warm swim given all the record low July temperatures we have been hearing about. Living as we do on the beach next to the Pacific I can tell youse all that warm and cold waters come and go all the time. Why is that nowadays such a conceptual challenge? We live in different times..
Adam Grey
You have to use the proper code try adding “ing” to warm and then do a comparison
Also as Agst noted the satellites measure the skin temperature. But I believe NOAAs claim that the cold bias is worst in mid to high latitudes of the southern hemisphere is bogus. The winds in the roaring forties and furious fifties, keep the water well mixed much of the time and the skin temperatures should be representative. The persistent cold in the SH oceans seems to have been like the MWP, an inconvenient fact that e3fforst needed to be made to address.
Steve McIntyre’s friend Phil Jones of the Hadley Center last year (menitoned on CA) remarked perhaps there was more warmth to be found in the oceans.
Peterson (who had engineered the removal of the UHI from NCDC USHCN) and NOAA took on the challenge and removed the satellite and do not use the ARGO data real time. Reverting back to the old Hadley ship and island to fill in the global grids approach led to sudden leap up of ocean and thus global temperatures given that 70% world is ocean. This last fact almost guarantees every month will rank somewhere in top 5 warmest ever.
Just in time for Cap and Tax and Copenhagen.
Maybe there was a lot of cold weather in July.
Every year, globally and regionally, there are hot and cold records broken in various locations. All this tells us is that weather is variable, which isn’t news.
The July anomaly for the continental US was near to the 1901 – 2000 baseline. Meanwhile, there were warm and cool events reported all over the nation.
Anthony put it that the news is skewed to warm stories. I tested that for the month of July, the temporal parameter of the post at the top of this thread, and for the continental US. If there was this outrageous bias towards warm stories Anthony is positive is going on, I would have expected to see that reflected in a search of weather for the US July 2009.
So I just now chose a warm month for the continental US at random. July 2005.
Googling under search terms “news america warm weather temperature july 2005″ I got 146 thousand hits.
Googling under search terms “news america cool weather temperature july 2005″ I got 1.3 million hits.
Googling under search terms “news america hot weather temperature july 2005″ I got 124 thousand hits.
Googling under search terms “news america cold weather temperature july 2005″ I got 117 thousand hits.
This was for a hot July in the US record (then the 12th hottest on record).
Intrigued by my discoveries – I haven’t done these searches before – I have now removed any date from the search string.
“news america warm weather temperature” = 290 thousand hits.
“news america cool weather temperature” = 8 million hits.
“news america hot weather temperature” = 1 million hits.
“news america cold weather temperature” = 773 thousand hits.
Most of the continental US anomalies have been above the baseline since internet reporting began, so I’d expect to see a few more warm stories – generally, it’s been warmer than ‘normal’. Add bias to that and I’d expect to see – what? – twice the number of warm or hot stories. I’m not seeing anything like that, and indeed the reporting rather seems to clearly favour cool stories. And for the ‘average’ month July 2009, there have been far more cool/cold reports than otherwise.
Anthony pointed out the dearth of coverage on the Landsea paper. That’s a fair call, but I don’t agree with the generalization.
“. . .That’s because water takes longer to heat up and doesn’t cool off as easily, said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia.”
Quite. Water takes longer to heat up. So how in the name of God does water temperatures manage to shoot up multiple degrees in a single month?
It has not of course. You’ve already spotted the obvious flaws. These are 1) Surface temperatures 2) Non global.
I would only be interested in what the argo network tells us and I am pretty sure this will be unchanged from the previous month otherwise we will have to rewrite the laws of physics.
I lean towards the view that heat has been transferred from other areas. Sometime in the future we make get the reverse situation. I wonder if Seth will be reporting that?
jeez (03:27:56) : in response to Adam Grey:
You beat me to it Jeez.
“news america july 2009 temperature cold weather” – 17 million hits
news america july 2009 temperature hot weather” – 10 million hits
I didn’t expect such a big discrepancy. ”
The discrepancy is probably entirely due to the fact that the weather in the US in July 2009 was (drum roll) – cold!
Every claim ever made by AGW promoters turns out the same:
False.
Not using the satellite data verges on fraud, because it is a comprehensive and presumably accurate measure of SST. Nothing else comes close. I don’t believe Argo measures SSTs. To exclude it because it shows a warming bias is simply denial of the best data we have. And so the corruption of science goes on.
As Red Neck Engineer points out, their ‘new’ data is probably Hadley’s inaccurate and highly non-random ship’s intake data, which shows warming compared to the even more inaccurate buckets over the side of ships data.
Alexander Feht (04:33:56) :
So their basing their present number on a different source than previously? Oh great. It’s going to be hard to do site survey’s on ship inlet valves and buckets, Anthony.
I seem to remember there was just a paper on ocean heat content (Dr. Pielke?) showing it hadn’t increased recently. If the oceans are warming we should be seeing increases in sea level. I’m going to bet that we won’t see sea level data for awhile because the numbers may go down.
It seems to me that the el niño is fading already.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
Anthony
You have obviuosly gleaned some information from Mr Grey’s email address to which we are not privy. It is very unusual for you to be soooo expressive but I did LOL.
Anthony, the Borentein article is factually incorrect in places and it raises alarmism to ridiculous levels in others. It’s tough to find that area of the Arctic Ocean that’s10 deg F above average.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/08/borenstien-sea-surface-temperature.html
It looks like we have another cooking the books episode going on – publish a paper justifying a new process/algorithm – programmers implementing the new process take the high side of each assumption that must be made – viola, out pops another record.
Meanwhile, everyone comments how the weather is unusually cold right now – you feel a little embarassed about putting a coat on in August when all these records are being set.
Another interesting point is that, in July 2009,
– the average Ocean surface temperature was 16.4C;
– the average Land surface temperature is 14.3C;
So the ocean surface is warmer than the land (I think this is the case throughout the year, not just in July).
– some of this will be due to the higher altitude of land;
– the oceans cool off down to 1.5C as one goes deeper so, in total, the oceans are cooler than the land and the atmosphere at the surface;
– but it is difficult to see how the oceans are sinking away greenhouse effect warming when they are warmer than the land and atmosphere on average.
Stephen Wilde: You wrote, “SST measure the rate at which the oceans release heat to the atmosphere.”
Wrong. You’d need to include a change in time to measure rate. SST in and of itself is a snapshot of an average temperature for a given month or week or day.
You wrote, “Once the heat is in the atmosphere it is lost to space fairly quickly.”
The rise in Northern Hemisphere Mid-to-High Latitude TLT anomalies that resulted from the 1997/98 El Nino lasted at least until the El Nino of 2002/03, which bumped them up again, so “fairly quickly” needs to be clarified.
Cooling = natural variation.
Warming = climate change = anthropogenic
Everyone should know that by now.
A source for ocean data:
http://climate4you.com/
The article begins with an anecdote about Maine’s coastal waters, and it conveys a false impression. Shallower waters along Maine’s coast can get into the low 70s if the sea is calm and there’s a heat wave going on, two factors that were both operative over the last week up that way. When Hurricane Bill passes and roils the waters in the coming days, the water temperature at the beach will drop by 5 to 10 degrees in 24 hours. None of this is in any way unusual.
What is unusual is the next “fact” in Borenstein’s story, that the water temperature in Ocean City last week was 88 degrees. It was not, never has been, and never will be. I’m a surfer, and I know something about the spread of ocean temperatures along the East Coast. I looked at several buoys to confirm what I already knew and, for good measure, phoned a surf shop in Ocean City. The water last week there varied between 76 and 78 degrees.
Here’s a link to the nearest buoy to the Delaware shore:
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=44009
Bear in mind, too, that the temperature of 78 degrees that the buoy shows is influenced by being farther out into the warm Gulf Stream; the ocean surface is actually cooler right up against the coast.
Please note that the top of Borenstein’s article, the part he was using to grab people’s attention, had two factual errors. This is not a matter of cherry-picking.