From the NOAA press release, just in time for Copenhagen. Of course the satellite record for August tells another story that is not quite so alarming as NCDC’s take on it.
AMS Fellow and CCM, Joe D’Aleo of ICECAP has this to say about it:.
Icecap Note: to enable them to make the case the oceans are warming, NOAA chose to remove satellite input into their global ocean estimation and not make any attempt to operationally use Argo data in the process. This resulted in a jump of 0.2C or more and ‘a new ocean warmth record’ in July. ARGO tells us this is another example of NOAA’s inexplicable decision to corrupt data to support political agendas.
– Anthony
Global surface temperature anomalies for the month of August 2009. Temperature is compared to the average global temperature from 1961-1990.
Visualization of world’s land and ocean surface temperature.
High resolution (Credit: NOAA)
The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest for any August on record, and the warmest on record averaged for any June-August (Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern Hemisphere winter) season according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The preliminary analysis is based on records dating back to 1880.
NCDC scientists also reported that the combined average global land and ocean surface temperature for August was second warmest on record, behind 1998. For the June-August 2009 season, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was third warmest on record.
Global Highlights – Summer
- The June-August worldwide ocean surface temperature was also the warmest on record at 62.5 degrees F, 1.04 degrees F above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees F.
- The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for the June-August season was 61.2 degrees F, which is the third warmest on record and 1.06 degrees F above the 20th century average of 60.1 degrees F.
Global Highlights – August
- The worldwide ocean surface temperature of 62.4 degrees F was the warmest on record for any August, and 1.03 degrees F above the 20th century average of 61.4 degrees F.
- Separately, the global land surface temperature of 58.2 degrees F was 1.33 degrees F above the 20th century average of 56.9 degrees F, and ranked as the fourth warmest August on record.
- Large portions of the world’s land mass observed warmer-than-average temperatures in August. The warmest departures occurred across Australia, Europe, parts of the Middle East, northwestern Africa, and southern South America. Both Australia and New Zealand had their warmest August since their records began.
- The Southern Hemisphere average temperatures for land and ocean surface combined were the warmest on record for August.
Other Notable Developments
Current sea ice extent as measured by NOAA’s GOES, POES, and DMSP satellites.
High resolution (Credit: NOAA)
- For the year to date, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature of 58.3 degrees F tied with 2003 for the fifth-warmest January-August period on record. This value is 0.99 degree F above the 20th century average.
- According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Arctic sea ice covered an average of 2.42 million square miles during August. This is 18.4 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent, and is generally consistent with a decline of August sea ice extent since 1979.
- NSIDC data indicated Antarctic sea ice extent in August was 2.7 percent above the 1979-2000 average. This is consistent with the trend during recent decades of modest increases in August Antarctic sea ice extent.
Watch NOAA’s visualization of the world’s land and ocean surface temperature.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.
So if the ARGO and satellite data sets were included, what would the number be? And are they comparing this month without those data sets to previous years that did include them?
I can’t speak for the ocean temps (I only walk on the beach, I don’t go in), but August in Connecticut was very pleasant but not exceptionally warm. September has been very pleasant, too, but the leaves started changing late last week, almost a month early for this area. I didn’t think it was cool enough to do that yet…
Global ice increased as sea-surface temperature hit a high! You can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time!
“For me the hottest year ever in the UK was 1976”
I remember that year. The year of the century for continental white wines. In 1980 or so I was in a K-Mart in the US and found a bottle of 1976 Mosel Spätlese just sitting there on the rack. My eyes about popped out of my head.
It is almost enough to make one cry to think about how much of that stuff we put away back then just sitting around shooting the breeze with friends. Brings back fond memories.
HadSST2 must be in the conspirators chamber too I suppose. Their August global anomaly figure is also 2nd warmest on record, starting 1850.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadsst2gl.txt
Phillip Bratby (22:11:16) : If “NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun”, then surely it could replace all those bureaucrats with a couple of archivists and a software support engineer. Samantha knows a couple of old archivists! (for those in the UK)
I know a good software support Engineer 😉
Sekerob (23:39:48) : HadSST2 must be in the conspirators chamber too I suppose. Their August global anomaly figure is also 2nd warmest on record, starting 1850.
It doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to have “group think” and folks sucking their own exhaust.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/gistemp-pas-dun-coup/
Perhaps if Hadley would publish their code and methods we could see just how much is directly lifted from the methods of Hansen et. al. and thus subject to the same errors:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/agw-and-gistemp-issues/
If nothing else, since they are using the same thermometers and those have been by and large located near the tarmac at airports, they are feeding on the same broken data:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/gistemp-islands-in-the-sun/
crosspatch (23:28:24) :
“For me the hottest year ever in the UK was 1976″
I remember that year. The year of the century for continental white wines.
But surely all the wine-growers tell us that the win will lose it ‘soul’ if the weather gets a degree or two hotter. Obviously you must be mistaken about ’76 being a great year!
But seriously, I recall ’76 in the UK very well. It was a fantastic summer, and my folks had just bought a house with a pool in the UK. Probably the only year it was worth having one there!
Now I live in Sydney, and I’m still waiting for temps like we had in 2001/2. The temps seem to go down year by year, despite all this Al Gore Warming….
Not to forget that in October 1941, the HadSST anomaly was higher than in April 2009. Its just a peak.
Why would they include ARGO data? The ARGO floats are only on the surface once every 10 days. The rest of the time they are subsurface.
And there are other float systems throughout the oceans.
hmmm group think… there’s something about huge pots and kettles springing to mind and the black body effect when something is covered in snow or ice versus open water or bare land and disappearing glaciers. Must all be going by itself.
Can you produce any actual August data set not corroborating, resoundingly and not by the 5th decimal, this besides speculation and the usual UHI distortion story? Maybe Dr. Roy & John have something that disagrees with the group-believe. Dr. Roy last month though did a re-analysis of his analysis and concluded what exactly?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/31/spencer-always-question-your-results/
So, why not ask Dr. Roy to do another run at this one? Maybe he realizes that Group Think is actually generating new and supportable ideas, in the long run and not one that changes with the wind direction.
Didn’t we go over the NOAA record after the July figures were released. There were a number of interesting contributions from Roy Spencer. Eventually, it was decided there probably had been a record in July.
Pieter F (22:01:37) :
Didn’t we just read that June-August 2009 was the 32d coldest for that period at 0.4°F below the 20th century average? …..
…. for the US. The US makes up ~2% of the surface area of the earth.
How can that be? How can the UAH measurements show a 0.19°C anomaly for August and this new NASA report show a 0.723°C anomaly?
UAH is measuring the temperature of the troposphere above the ocean. NOAA are measuring the Sea Surface Temperatures. In any case, the anomalies are relative to different time periods so it’s a meaningless comparison anyway. I keep trying to show this with the GISS v UAH comparsions, i.e. using the same base period, the GISS anomaly is often cooler than the UAH anomaly (e.g. July 2009) but, because the GISSanomaly is calculated relative to the cool 1951-80 period, the GISS numbers are higher. Since the early 1990s there is very litte difference in the trends.
Stephen Skinner (22:48:04) :
We absolutely, definitely did not have above average temperatures in August in the UK. For me the hottest year ever in the UK was 1976. I was in the sea everyday for the entire summer holiday. I went in once this year, in August. It was cold.
For the UK, as a whole, temperatures were about 0.6 deg above the long term (1971-2000) average. There was a rough East/West split. In the West, temps were near normal while in the East they were generally above.
Lack of sunshine does not necessarily mean low temperatures – particularly at night. Though the amount of sunshine was about average for August. 1976 was not an average summer, so any comparison here might be misleading.
The warmest August for the UK was actually in 2003. The warmest month was July 2006.
@ur momisugly Kevin (21:50:52) :
(From a previous post of mine last week:)
For those of you interested in the possible relationship of AGW and hurricanes, I suggest this article:
Vecchi, G.A., Swanson, K.L., & Soden, B.J. (2008). Whither hurricane activity?. Science. 322, 687-689.
I am currently looking into this question and here is what I have found so far (there are literally <hundreds of articles in the past 5 years about this question):
I see no conclusive evidence that AGW, by itself, is causing an increase in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes. It appears that ENSO and NAO are still the major factors controlling frequency.
I do see mounting evidence that increasing SSTs can cause more intense hurricanes (more wind, greater precipitation). Keep in mind that the power of wind increases as the cube of the wind speed. So the question then becomes how much higher are SSTs due to AGW, if at all? That question is very debateable.
@ur momisugly To everybody:
Tamino did an estimate of how the year 2009 might end up regarding climate:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/crystal-ball/
His estimate is that 2009 will end up being the 5th warmest on record.
Australia looks to be generally overheated in the above image. Actually it is more localised in the centre. http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/temp_maps.cgi?variable=maxanom&area=nat&period=month&time=latest
If you go to this site and go back 3 months the effect diminishes. It is odd as nearby Lake Eyre, normally a dry salt lake has been filling. This interior ‘hot spot’ produced produced abnormal heat to the eastern states in August. Not sure of the cause of this,I do not think it is part of general pattern.
Combining land surface temperatures and sea surface temperatures is a particularly meaningless metric, because SSTs measure the rate at which heat is transferred from the oceans to the atmosphere.
As is repeatably pointed out here, GHGs have no effect on ocean temperatures. So increasing SSTs, along side increasing atmospheric temperatures, means the oceans, and hence the Earth’s climate, is cooling.
Increasing land surface temperatures without increasing SSTs would be the signature of GHG warming.
What we are seeing is the Earth’s climate cooling for reasons we don’t understand.
I don’t know what concerns me more, the implications of a cooling climate or the willful collusion of scientists and political activists to manufacture the opposite perception.
This follows what I have suspected for a long time. As I watch the ENSO region SST values from week to week I have long wondered why NOAA regularly has anomaly values so much higher than Unisys. I also wondered about the old trick of using yellow as zero on a graph that warms toward red. Now they are cherry picking data on this by ignoring ARGO and sat data and using a ’79-2000 basis. I am loathe to question anyone’s honesty, but here we are heading that way.
Since we have seen so many agencies get onto the AGW bandwagon at any cost, is it unreasonable to ask for unfiltered raw ARGO and satellite data prior to the potentially biased gate keepers ‘adjustments’ ?
crosspatch (23:28:24) :
A K-Mart Spätlese? That is in a weird place between funny and shocking. ( K-Mart employee, ” A nice Mosel Spätlese? Sure it is right by the Gewürztraminer and the Piesporter Goldtropfchen, in the aisle right past the plastic stack up patio chairs…” )
Surely now the pseudoscience spouted here that low sunspot numbers result in lower temperatures can finally be put out of our misery? Sunspot numbers go down…temperature soars….hmmmm.
I know you may think it but the USA is not the whole world, just a small piece of it.
As above but the UK is a much smaller piece!
There are other factors in determining hurricane frequency, the prediction earlier this year for the North Atlantic was a low count due to developing El Nino conditions and the resulting increased wind shear. The Asian Pacific has has a number of large Typhoons, most recently typhoon Choi Wan which reached category 5 and is now at category 4 http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/wp200915.html
If it is all so wrong then why are the same results being shown by AMSU-A for the lower troposphere? http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
Can’t explain them with bad placement or UHI can you?
Hmmmm…. The facts don’t seem to support your mini rant do they? http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg. Anomolous global sea ice area would seem to be over a million square kilometers below the 1979-2000 mean…hmmm and continuing lack of sunspots should mean lower global temperatures…hmmm
Hmmmmm, let’s look at some quotes on this post….
I guess those politicians are going to do whatever they want anyway.
magically NOAA has high records…..
…but perhaps honesty isn’t the objective.
Sadly, too much of our government is being aligned to support political agendas ….
When weather forecasting becomes subject to politics….
Maybe now the markets are recovering it would be agood time to invest in tin foil milliners!
vg writes “BTW I believe the owner of Solar 24 is definitely not a skeptic ”
Kevin, the owner of http://www.solarcycle24.com, has NO views on AGW so far as I am aware. What happened was that he opened a message board to discuss HAM radio. It got flooded with people commenting on AGW. So he split his message board, with specific instructions that AGW must NOT be discussed where he and his friends talk about space weather and radio communications. With respect to AGW, he just lets anyone discuss what they like, with virtually no moderation.
NOAA is turning out to be about as reliable as ACORN.
Mary Hinge (03:42:23) :
As above but the UK is a much smaller piece!
Of course, but in the animation it is shown as above average.
The NOAA record high SSTs are only for their ERSST.v3b data.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/record-sea-surface-temperatures-are.html
The NOAA OI.v2 (satellite based) and Hadley Centre’s HADSST2 are not at record levels.
Hmmm?
Mary Hinge ,
(is that an anagram?)
“Surely now the pseudoscience spouted here that low sunspot numbers result in lower temperatures can finally be put out of our misery? Sunspot numbers go down…temperature soars….hmmmm.”
Do please pay attention to this thread. We were shown, right at the beginning that the satellite data does not show this warming. We also know that the data excludes the Argo dataset, and I suspect that would also show a divergence.
People are right to be cynical. If this is reported in the MSM as “NOAA sea surface temperatures show the warmest July and August readings of all time, BUT satellite data disagrees AND ARgo data has been excluded.” I won’t complain.
But will they? Will They?
Can a government agency be charged with RICO violations because James Hansen and GISS certainly being doing “criminal” activities to extort monies from the government research pool.
Mary Hinge,
“If it is all so wrong then why are the same results being shown by AMSU-A for the lower troposphere?.”
Because the same results aren’t being shown. NOAA stated, and I quote, “The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest for any August on record.” Now, when I look at the AMSU-A data you so kindly provided, I notice that higher temperatures were recorded in 2005, 2006.
Hmmm, as you would say.
So the Argos tell us the oceans are cooling.
the heat/energy has to go somewhere . . . is it any wonder the surface temps, that boundary layer between ocean/air is warm ?
Kinda makes sense to have a warmer boundary layer.
[snip]