We should all thank AP’s Seth Borenstein for this, IMHO. Without his article on July SST’s being the hottest ever and it not making much sense, people such as Dr. Spencer may not have been immediately motivated to figure out what was going on with the SST’s. – Anthony
—
Spurious Warming in New NOAA Ocean Temperature Product: The Smoking Gun
Dr. Roy Spencer August 27th, 2009
After crunching data this week from two of our satellite-based microwave sensors, and from NOAA’s official sea surface temperature (SST) product ERSST v3b, I think the evidence is pretty clear:
The ERSST v3b product has a spurious warming since 1998 of about 0.2 deg. C, most of which occurred as a jump in 2001.
The following three panels tell the story. In the first panel I’ve plotted the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) SST anomalies (blue) for the latitude band 40N to 40S. I’ve also plotted SST anomalies from the more recently launched AMSR-E instrument (red), computed over the same latitude band, to show that they are nearly identical. (These SST retrievals do not have any time-dependent adjustments based upon buoy data). The orange curve is anomalies for the entire global (ice-free) oceans, which shows there is little difference with the more restricted latitude band.
In the second panel above I’ve added the NOAA ERSST v3b SST anomalies (magenta), calculated over the same latitude band (40N to 40S) and time period as is available from TRMM.
The third panel above shows the difference [ERSST minus TMI], which reveals an abrupt shift in 2001. The reason why I trust the microwave SST is shown in the following plot, where validation statistics are displayed for match-ups between satellite measurements and moored buoy SST measurements. The horizontal green line is a regression fit to the data. (An average seasonal cycle, and 0.15 deg. C cool skin bias have been removed from these data…neither affects the trend, however.)
I also checked the TMI wind speed retrievals, and there is no evidence of anything unusual happening during 2001. I have no idea how such a large warm bias could have entered into the ERSST dataset, but I’d say the evidence is pretty clear that one exists.
Finally, the 0.15 to 0.20 deg. C warm bias in the NOAA SST product makes it virtually certain that July 2009 was not, as NOAA reported, a record high for global sea surface temperatures.
UPDATE: Dr. Spencer has an update to this post here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/31/spencer-always-question-your-results/
Somewhat related to the above peculiarities; but today started out as a good day for some climate research. it was somewhat humid last night, and this morning as I was getting into my car, the sun was quite low in the south east, over the San Jose hills. Despite the low sun angle, the sun immediately hit me as hot, and that was while standing on the front lawn under a tree that shielded me from most of the high sky. There was a lovely high patchy white cloud layer overhead; at least 50% area coverage; but then almost none of that could see me. I guessed that the higher humidity was preventing me from cooling from evaporation so the full direct (though low angle) heat from the sun (solar spectrum) was being felt.
So by lunch time today, that high very patchy (pots of small pillows) cloud had come a bit lower, and turned into larger areas of still white clouds, with roughly the same coverage area as the morning clouds. Even though the clouds were a bit lower they were still pearly white indicating not a whole lot of solar spectrum absorption.
So I walked to my luncheon source, across grassy lawns, and black tar parking lots, and concrete roads, which included on th4e way, lots of small decorative trees, some located so they completely blocked the sun from me (in their shadow) but still left pretty much the entire cloudy sky visible from the tree shadow. These tree were to be found on lawns, and parking lots, and side walks, so I could stand in a direct sun shadow on a variety of surface terrains; and be fully visible to a 505 roughly cloud covered sky.
Without exception, as soon as I stepped into a tree shadow, on any knind of surface; that “heat” effect shut off, and It felt decidedly cool; and there was NO discernable wind anywhere.
When crossing a black tar parking lot (retarred two weeks ago), the surrounding “heat” was intense, and seemingly hitting me from every direction; yet when I stepped into the shadow of a small decorative tree barely large enough to shadow me; still on that black parking lot surface; the heat shut off immediately, and it was pleasantly cool in the direct sun shade.
Well so what ? Well here is what I surmise. The torrid heat that I experienced, both in the morning, and at lunch time, was coming from direct solar spectrum radiation hitting me directly, or it was being emitted from the black (or other) ground surface which also was being struck by direct solar spectrum radiation. Even though in all these situations, my body, and the ground, was directly visible to the vast majority of the cloudy sky, there was no discernable “heat” either directly on me or arising from the ground surface, due to absorption of any long wave IR emissions from the atmosphere, including the prominent cloud layers. The black tar surfaces immediately adjacent to direct sunlit areas, but in the tree shadow, had quickly radiated themselves down to a much cooler temperature; despite the significant presence of green house gases, water vapor and the ever present CO2, and those clouds.
So don’t try and con me into believing that those ethereal vapors including high clouds are doing much in the way of warming the surface. Even the blackest of black surfaces cools in the absence of direct solar warming radiation.
And no I am not silly enough to say there is no LWIR coming down from the atmosphere (and clouds); but it pales into insignificance compared to the upward LWIR being emitted from the solar irradiated blacktop; or even grassy surface.
It alwo points out that the earth is cooling at its most efficient rate from the hottest of hot UHIs and in the heat of the afternoon sun; the earth does not wait till nightfall to cool.
George
John Finn (04:54:16) : Data is here:
Can you tell me what the headings of each collumn are? For example
2009/06 0.500 0.515 0.484 0.610 0.389 0.500 0.500 0.611 0.388 0.611 0.388
The first is June 2009 but what are the rest of the 11 figures?
Bob Tisdale (11:02:09) :
There once was a guy named Flanagan
Who mounted an attack to question the fact
That the seas were cooler than 98 again
His reasoning was salty but his maths somewhat faulty
Now he’s planning another shenanigan
Re: Richard (14:29:05)
The trick whenever you run into this problem is to chop pieces off the end of the website-address.
In this case, this leads you to:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadsst2/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
…which, if you look for the monthly series format info (scroll down), will lead you to:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadsst2/diagnostics/time-series.html
Paul Vaughan (15:07:47) :
Thank you for that. Collumns 1 and 2 would be all that I would be concerned about then.
Well after reading Dr Spencer’s latest report above, I see he did exactly what I asked if he could (was able) to do; namely match his +/-40 lat data with just that same coverage areea data from the other record.
So thanks Dr Roy; not that I expect you did that in response to my question; I figure that you could see to do that all by yourself. And so the comparison of like coverage data sets is very comfortable; In my book they are identical.
Meaning anyone who would claim a difference betwen those two plots would probably also tilt at windmills.
So now I have to read the rest to figure out just what you are saying about where the glitch in the system has occurred.
But I’m still leery of the microwave radiometry; all those corrections and fudge factors give me the heeby jeebies; I’d like to see something with any or all of the folowing letters in it (c, h, k) .
Speaking of which, in a past life I wrote somewhere that the energy (heat) in a system was kT per particle.
More pedantically, the “equipartition Law” says that the thermal energy is equally distributed among the degrees of freedom in a system; and the amount assigned to each is kT/2, and NOT kT which I assert before; but it is per degree of freedom, and a single atom has three degrees of fredom (x, y, z displacements), so the energy of a monatomic gas is 3kT/2), and 5kT/2 for a diatomic gas, which has two more rotational degrees of freedom that a mono gas doesn’t have. Rotation about the axis joining two atoms of a diatomic molecule, is not an energy storage mechanism that is excitable from an external stimulus. Tri and polyatomic molecules have 3kT per molecule since they do have the full three rotational degrees of freedom; now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
These global data sets that are the subject here are interesting, but I’m not sure why, because in the end; they don’t really relate to the control physics of the earth system, and its temperature regulation; which I believe is simply the ocean evaporation cloud formation precipitation cycle.
That’s what needs to be quantified and modelled; not the arbitrary ststistics of surface temperature, which in the end tells us nothing about the radiation balance of the total earth surface.
is this sst data included in NOAAs or somebody else’s global temperature data
and if so, is the step function visible there as well ?
George, it’s true that the surface temperature by itself is just a small part of the story. But the surface is where most of the sunlight is absorbed, and it is where people live. Huge energy exchanges are occurring there, and of course, we’d like to know what those energy exchanges are (and especially how the vary over time) on a global basis. But that’s just not possible with very much accuracy.
So, we have to make do with whatever information we have. And if we can figure out that for a certain radiative forcing of the Earth system, that the surface will warm or cool by x.x degrees, then that is very valuable information…even if we do not know all of the energy exchanges that went into the temperature change.
a few points of clarification (based upon comments I’ve seen):
1) the TRMM satellite can not observe poleward of 40 deg latitude…it’s the TROPICAL Rainfall Measuring Mission.
2) the base period used to compute anomalies have very little effect on the resulting trends. In other words, it doesn’t matter what numbers you add or subtract from the time series. As long as there is no long term trend in what you add or subtract, it WILL NOT change any conlusions about spurious drifts.
Flanagan, R.R.: One final note. The NESDIS SST anomaly maps you keep referencing are described under a webpage titled “NOAA Coral Reef Watch – Methodology, Product Description, and Data Availability of NOAA Coral Reef Watch (CRW) Operational and Experimental Satellite Coral Bleaching Monitoring Products.”
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/methodology/methodology.html
What’s so special about this dataset? It uses only NIGHTTIME SST data. Why? The answer lies within the description of the data.
http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite/methodology/methodology.html#sst
“Nighttime-only satellite SST observations are used to eliminate diel variation caused by solar heating at the sea surface (primarily at the ‘skin’ interface, 10-20 um) during the day and to avoid contamination from solar glare. Compared with daytime SST and day-night blended SST, nighttime SST provides more conservative and stable estimate of thermal stress conducive to coral bleaching.”
The OI.v2 SST data I’ve posted in the comments above use both nighttime and daytime SST measurements.
And here’s what the webpage has to say about high latitudes of the “Coral Reef Watch” SST dataset: “Note that these anomalies are somewhat less reliable at high latitudes where more persistent clouds limit the amount of satellite data available for deriving both accurate SST analysis field and climatologies.”
NOAA’s OI.v2 SST anomaly data on the other hand goes to special lengths to fill in the high latitude SST anomalies. Refer to page 7 of the Reynolds et al 2002 paper “An Improved In Situ and Satellite SST Analysis for Climate.”
ftp://ftp.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/cmb/sst/papers/oiv2.pdf
It reads, “A large potential error occurs near the sea ice edge where in situ observations tend to be sparse because of navigation hazards and satellite observations tend to be sparse due to cloud cover. Thus, using sea ice data to generate simulated SSTs in the marginal ice zone (MIZ) helps fill in a region with limited data.” They then go on to describe those adjustments.
So what does the additional step the NCDC takes to infill the high latitude SST data do? Apparently it lowers SST anomalies in the Arctic. Here’s an OI.v2 SST anomaly map for the week centered on August 17, 2009:
http://i29.tinypic.com/154d646.png
Note how there are few areas in the Arctic with SST anomalies in the 3 to 3.5 deg C range, but the “Coral Reef Watch” dataset shows large areas of the Arctic with SST anomalies in the range of 4.5 to 5 deg C. Here’s the “Coral Reef Watch” SST anomaly map for August 20, 2009:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2009/anomnight.8.20.2009.gif
And the map for August 17, 2009:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2009/anomnight.8.17.2009.gif
Note also how the “Coral Reef Watch” maps use yellow, a warm color, for their 0 to 0.5 deg, giving the appearance of elevated SST anomalies for much more of the global oceans.
Roy Spencer (16:09:02) “the base period used to compute anomalies have very little effect on the resulting trends. In other words, it doesn’t matter what numbers you add or subtract from the time series. As long as there is no long term trend in what you add or subtract, it WILL NOT change any conlusions about spurious drifts.”
If you are talking about, say, n greater than 30, I might agree to loosely agree here. However, (just an example) working with small n around a year like 1998 might be reason for extra caution.
“”” Roy Spencer (16:00:26) :
George, it’s true that the surface temperature by itself is just a small part of the story. But the surface is where most of the sunlight is absorbed, and it is where people live. Huge energy exchanges are occurring there, and of course, we’d like to know what those energy exchanges are (and especially how the vary over time) on a global basis. But that’s just not possible with very much accuracy.
So, we have to make do with whatever information we have. And if we can figure out that for a certain radiative forcing of the Earth system, that the surface will warm or cool by x.x degrees, then that is very valuable information…even if we do not know all of the energy exchanges that went into the temperature change. “””
Thanks for the comments Professor; I hope/wish/whatever, that you guys can (to your satisfaction) measure by some means the exact “skin” temperature of the ocean surface, since by all that is holy; that ought to be the very source of what should be damn near pure black body radiation (LWIR) from the ocean, since it can’t really propagate from any subsurface radiative source (LWIR), and that in concert with some slightly subsurface (-1 metre) temperatures should give some handle on the surface evaporation. I presume that somehow Frank Wentz at RSS can do something like that too.
And I do hope that when you say sunlight is absorbed mostly in the surface, that you are meaning down to some tens of metres, since the 500 nm peak sunlight easily penetrates that far; in clean open ocean waters.
Hey we appreciate whatever you can dig up Dr Spencer; because without information/data; you can only achieve so much with a stick in the sand on a desert island.
Thanks for thrashing this one out; when you goof, and then figure you did, it is doubly satisfying to figure out what was really going on.
George
July 2009 SST anomalies using a different map projection:
NH:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?ctlfile=monoiv2.ctl&ptype=map&var=ssta&level=1&op1=none&op2=none&month=jul&year=2009&proj=nps&lon0=280&dlon=50&lat0=-60&dlat=60&type=shaded&cint=.5&white=0&plotsize=800×600&title=July+2009&dir=
SH:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?ctlfile=monoiv2.ctl&ptype=map&var=ssta&level=1&op1=none&op2=none&month=jul&year=2009&proj=sps&lon0=280&dlon=50&lat0=-60&dlat=60&type=shaded&cint=.5&white=0&plotsize=800×600&title=July+2009&dir=
[Note: The titles suggest “1 jul” – that’s a software glitch. The charts are for the the month of July 2009.]
These & other maps can easily be made via:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh
Note that the “lite”/”easy” version, in contrast to the “full” version, has less options:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite
This incisive article shows three clear things:
1. That different sensor systems do not necessarily yield the same Sea Surface Temperature results over a 10 year period.
2. That plotting year-on-year comparisons is essential monitoring work to evaluate reliability of different measurement methodologies to ensure that any disagreements which may emerge can be resolved scientifically rather than through media-driven mud-slinging.
3. That ensuring that novel sensor-based mechanisms accurately represent temperature when compared to traditional methods using buoys.
It amazes me that this is considered ‘beyond the intelligence of Joe Public’ or ‘not in the public interest’ when the subject of ‘climate change’ is discussed in the ‘media’.
It’s rather like saying that condom manufacturers shouldn’t test their barrier functions, that if it is found that they are faulty that they shouldn’t rectify the error and that even if it is faulty it’s not the business of Joe Public to be raising the matter (it is because they buy the damn things and it is in the case of climate change research because they fund the damn work!)
Is this where climate change communities had descended to before the more forthright and trenchant arguments of 2008/9?
If so, the more articles like this that are published in future, the better…..
Roy Spencer (16:09:02) :
…..
2) the base period used to compute anomalies have very little effect on the resulting trends. In other words, it doesn’t matter what numbers you add or subtract from the time series. As long as there is no long term trend in what you add or subtract, it WILL NOT change any conlusions about spurious drifts.
Exactly: Once again: “As long as there is no long term trend in what you add or subtract, it WILL NOT change any conlusions about spurious drifts.”
That mean the opposite to:
“As long as there is long term trend in what you add or subtract, it WILL change any conlusions about spurious drifts.”
“George E. Smith (15:21:57) :
More pedantically, the “equipartition Law” says that the thermal energy is equally distributed among the degrees of freedom in a system; and the amount assigned to each is kT/2, and NOT kT which I assert before; but it is per degree of freedom, and a single atom has three degrees of fredom (x, y, z displacements), so the energy of a monatomic gas is 3kT/2), and 5kT/2 for a diatomic gas, which has two more rotational degrees of freedom that a mono gas doesn’t have.”
It depends on the temperature of the diatomic gas. At low temperatures it does not rotate, but at high temperatures it also oscillates. Movement and potential energy result into 2 more degrees of freedom (7kT/2). For Hydrogen the temperature-limits are about 100K and 2000K.
Hi all-
NOAA is full of scientists, just doing their jobs, that continue to maintain that July was indeed a sea surface temperature record:
What NOAA is saying doesn’t match what Dr. Spencer is saying.
What’s up with that?
Should I believe the thousands of NOAA scientists and the huge preponderance of evidence, or should I believe Dr. Spencer?
Decisions, decisions…. 🙂
REPLY:” This is dated August 14th, so of course it doesn’t match what Spencer is saying. Spencer didn’t discover the error until August 27th.
Until such time that NOAA responds officially to the error, none of your hand waving and post bombing with noise like this is going to make any difference. Go waste somebody else’s time – Anthony
Leland Palmer (17:22:50) : Blah Blah Blah … What NOAA is saying doesn’t match what Dr. Spencer is saying.
The only thing of that huge piece you have copied and pasted that doesn’t match what Dr Spencer is saying is this bit: “The global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record, .. This broke the previous July record set in 1998.”
This Dr Spencer has shown is due to a spurious error and SS temperature July 2009 is not in fact the warmest on record.
Should I believe the thousands of NOAA scientists and the huge preponderance of evidence, or should I believe Dr. Spencer?
The number of scientists involved in making the data, and hence the error, that accounted for that statement, could be counted on the fingers of one hand, probably with about 3 or 4 fingers missing.
The evidence that Dr Spencer has presented for his claim can be read above, this has to be weighed against the evidence from NOAA on this matter, which is at the moment zero.
Your decision is thus obvious, the huge preponderance of evidence that you allude to lies in Dr Spencer’s favour, and you must decide accordingly.
There now do you feel better?
When is Seth Borenstein going to retract his story?
REPLY: Only if NOAA admits to the error, and then the retraction will be weak, and will get 1/10th the coverage as the original. – A
this appears to be a(nother) major error from NOAA.
wouldn’t it be a good idea to let the experts at climateaudit audit dr. spencer’s computation (input data + code) ?
So the coverage will be…probably as weak…as the press coverage [or lack of it] of the newly established benchmark of 50 day no-sunspots.
Pathetic. The ones who suppress the truth are worse than the suppressed truth itself.
They have no backbone….and NO scientific method…that’s for damn sure.
Let them show their true colors I don’t give a —-.
Enough about them.
Keep up the good work, Anthony!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
More pedantically, the “equipartition Law” says that the thermal energy is equally distributed among the degrees of freedom in a system; and the amount assigned to each is kT/2, and NOT kT which I assert before; but it is per degree of freedom, and a single atom has three degrees of fredom (x, y, z displacements), so the energy of a monatomic gas is 3kT/2), and 5kT/2 for a diatomic gas, which has two more rotational degrees of freedom that a mono gas doesn’t have. Rotation about the axis joining two atoms of a diatomic molecule, is not an energy storage mechanism that is excitable from an external stimulus. Tri and polyatomic molecules have 3kT per molecule since they do have the full three rotational degrees of freedom; now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
To be even more pedantic you’ve forgotten about the vibrational modes so a diatomic gas has 3 translational, 2 rotational and one vibrational, the rotational and translational modes each contribute kT/2 whereas the vibrational contribute kT (both PE and KE). Rotation is excitable by an external stimulus provided that it is a heteronuclear diatomic.
Roy Spencer (16:09:02) :
a few points of clarification (based upon comments I’ve seen):
1) the TRMM satellite can not observe poleward of 40 deg latitude…it’s the TROPICAL Rainfall Measuring Mission.
2) the base period used to compute anomalies have very little effect on the resulting trends. In other words, it doesn’t matter what numbers you add or subtract from the time series. As long as there is no long term trend in what you add or subtract, it WILL NOT change any conlusions about spurious drifts.
Isn’t the point that NOAA changed the base period in 2001 in accordance with WMO practice and that accounts for the step which you noted. Shouldn’t the anomalies prior to 2001 be adjusted for the change in mean?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/papers/xue-etal.pdf
NastyWolf (10:57:20) :
RR (08:14:11) :
“I guess calculation of the global average SST from the 44% of the earth that lies between 40° NL en 40° SL is scientifically sound and convincing?”
I think you should check your math. Area is much smaller near the poles. Quick calculation reveals that +-40 degrees is about 64% of the surface area.
Yes, basically 100*sin(lat) for a symmetric case like this.
A note to Leland Palmer.
Just give it a rest. When NOAA responds so, can you, in the meantime I’m growing just a bit weary of your commentary style and the tendency to dominate every thread here with very long posts.
Take a time out for awhile.