WUWT readers may recall last week that we had an excellent guest analysis by Bob Tisdale titled:
Ocean Heat Content: Dropping again
Easy come, easy go. The data has been changed. Read on – Anthony
NODC’s CORRECTION TO OHC (0-700m) DATA
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
I was advised today (Thanks, Fred) that the NODC has revised their Ocean Heat Content data. A quick check of the KNMI Climate Explorer News webpage…
http://climexp.knmi.nl/news.cgi?someone@somewhere
…reveals that it was revised on October 15, 2009 at KNMI.
And a check of the NODC data…
…shows that it was corrected on 10/15/09.
Dr. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh writes, “There was an error in the last 3-month data point of the NODC ocean heat content dataset, as anyone who made a map of the data could see. The problem has been fixed at NODC (thanks Gavin, Tim).”
Apparently the NODC hadn’t bothered to plot the data prior to posting it on September 14, 2009, or hadn’t thought there was a problem until…
Here’s a gif of the correction
http://i36.tinypic.com/2coomlw.gif
NODC CORRECTION
Thanks, Gavin and Tim.
Hmm, I’ll have to go back and update the “ENSO Dominates NODC Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Data” post to make sure the ENSO-induced step changes are still there and verify the “North Atlantic Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Is Governed By Natural Variables” hasn’t changed, too.
H/T to Fred.
############
UPDATE (October 15 @ 5:40PM):
After I posted the above, I found that Dr. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh had emailed me to notify me of the correction. I have received his permission to reproduce his email:
Dear Bob Tisdale,
please note that NODC discovered that they had accidentally posted the wrong version of their last file (apr-jun2009), a preliminary version with most data still missing had somehow made it to their web site. A quick look at the map for that quarter showed that there were hardly any anomalies visible and big anomalies in the North Atlantic and Pacific did not persist from the previous quarter, so the data were clearly suspicious. This mix-up has been fixed tonight (Dutch time) at NODC and in the Climate Explorer. A corrected version of the average heat content is attached, the value of apr-jun2009 is now more in line with the values of previous quarters.
Greetings from chilly Holland,
Geert Jan
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So just what is the current el nino status? It really concerns us here down under.
This past May the Southern Hemisphere had record cold weather, I wonder if November will produce record cold weather in the Northern hemisphere.
Add to that list Canadian Geese that decided to summer in No. Calif. instead of flying north. Add the birds flocking in the No. Sacramento Valley in the early part of September.
The animals are great predictors. They know.
Blueridge (21:36:29) :
That has been the pattern, leapfrog winters, each successive one doing a “top this” act.
Worse than we thought!
(The Data. Not even to mention the “Science”)
Adam from Kansas (17:44:45) :
It’s also getting obvious to me that Unisys is not in total support of the AGW agenda, SST’s on their map are still going down from the recent high.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
Their data is showing the oceans noticably cooler than what NOAA’s data shows.
Also note the graph I saw on the last thread on OHC that sometimes it almost looks as if SST’s lag OHC or OHC lags SST’s, it’s not clear which leads which if you look at the whole thing.
——————————-
Neither has to lead if they are influenced from the outside and are merely the effect to a cause. Especially if they are negatively correlated.
Konrad (20:44:35) :
————-
That was just brilliant! Are you the anti-Maher?
DaveE (17:25:38) :
“What a lot of people miss is that the warming is in Winter. The LIA Summers were often as warm as now but the Winters were brutal and longer! Then the Winters warmed, then cooled, then warmed then cooled, then warmed again.”
“This however is one of the fatal flaws in the AGW process. We won’t fry because it’s not the Summers that are changing, it’s the Winters.”
Yes indeed. If the so-called global warming is due to the increase in CO2, why are only the winters warmer, but not the summers?
What does the ocean heat content mean? Is the correction a good or bad thing?
99% of the heat in the Earth’s climate is in the oceans due to the much greater heat capacity of water versus air. Therefore the only valid measure of whether Earth’s climate is warming or cooling is the heat content of the oceans.
Prior to 2003/4 the OHC data is dubious and IMO pretty much worthless (buckets thrown over the side of ships and a thermometer thrown into the bucket when it is hauled on deck). Post 2003/4 is data from the Argo project set up specifically to measure OHC. The Argo data shows no warming.
The significance of the correction is that the OHC data no longer presages a fall in atmospheric temperatures (ocean temperatures drive atmospheric temperatures). Rather it indicates atmospheric temperatures will neither warm or cool significantly over the next couple of years.
regards
Oh boy!
Please notice the last line from Geert Jan:
Greetings from chilly Holland,
Ecotretas
Blueridge
The climate reporting in Australia is so pro AGW that presenters don’t bother asking alarmists for proof. It seems getting the truth out there is only possible through these blogs which most people don’t read. True anyone in Govt employ are not going to go against the grain although the moment they retire they start telling the truth. Too late.
I suspect a far more effective method of grabbing the common folk by the scruff and indirectly deflecting our great leaders from their destructive anti CO2 legislation is to go for the hip pocket. I’m sure that when people know the real cost of ETS etc they may be less supportive of the URGENT need to reverse GW. They might even start to ask questions. Now that could be interesting especially when they eventually find that they have been hoodwinked.
This graph is new to me so I do not know the history of the sudden jump in 2003 however it looks like they made an adjusment at this time that they forgot to do when they issued the last set of data. If I have done my sums right the 0.2GJ /m2 increase in 2003 is equivalent to an extra 7 watts per m2 every second of the day. I don’t buy that as something that happened in one year and then stayed. I can see that this sort of change can happen as an oscillation (with a balancing loss in deep sea energy) but not as a permanent shift. This implies an implausibly sudden and unique net energy gain by the climate system.This looks fishy to me. Incidentally if such an energy gain was real it would make a nonsense of the AGW arguments since we know that the physics of the greenhouse effect could not support such a huge forcing. We would therefore have to look for another natural cause and accept that the greenhouse effect is tiny in comparison .
Michael Bishop:
Not so cold up here mate- in fact bloody hot! Cool mornings, but hot days (because South winds are dry). People forget Australia has (at least) 3 climates. Same everywhere- climate is REGIONAL not global.
I’ve posted the correction to the post that compares the NODC Global OHC data to the GISS projection.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/nodc-corrections-to-ocean-heat-content.html
Did the correction eliminate the divergence between the OHC observations and the GISS projections?
NO!
http://i37.tinypic.com/i6xtnl.png
Thanks again, Gavin and Tim. You’ve allowed me to draw attention to the divergence again.
Cue post from Joe Romm in 3….2….1…
I’m thinking it’s the other way about. Maybe the incorrect preliminary data was put out as a teaser to get the ‘denialosphere’ buzzing, then correction comes and the warmista can take pot shots at us for being unscientific and jumping the gun.
The official bodies which publish the data make too many of these ‘mistakes’. Sea ice satllits sensor data, GISS repeating previous month’s values, OHC…
In any case, I notice from Bob’s blink comparison that OHC is down, just not by much. A fall is still a fall though.
David (23:11:51)
I’m guessing you mean Bill Maher, but being in Australia I don’t know his work. I could check the wikipedia entry but…
Lawrie Ayres (00:52:11)
I feel the blogs are having a significant effect. While the Australian MSM maybe choosing advocacy journalese over journalism, readers comments in response to newspaper and online stories are showing a different picture. I am constantly amazed and encouraged by how scientifically literate and informed the increasing number of skeptical commentators are. Skeptics in Australia seem to increasing at an unprecedented rate, it could be worse than the MSM thought.
Blueridge (17:47:42) : How many people will have to starve to death before people wake up to reality?
I’d put it at about 100,000,000.
We regularly have tens of thousands die each year and don’t notice. At the 100,000 to 1,000,000 level you get global normal diseases and we don’t notice. In the 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 range we get pandemics and world wars. Then people notice and start to change their thinking.
At the 1,000,000,000 range we have truly horrid pandemics and catastrophic global events. Folks won’t notice then either, as they will either be dead or trying really hard not to be dead and will not be thinking of others…
Deanster (19:50:48) :
DaveE …
You say the Globe has warmed .. PROVE IT!
You can’t use the Thermometer data … it’s contaminated with land use issues and UHI effects.
And GIStemp fabricates it into a broken fantasy. But if you select only the most stable thermometer records, there is no warming. It is only in the short lived thermometers that the winters “warm”. That those thermometers were added at airports in the topics is just a coincidence, I’m sure /sarcoff>
You can’t use Satellite .. though, it’s likely more accurate than thermometers, it’s little more than a bunch of calculations on satellite data that measure slices of the troposphere.
I’ve been looking into this. Not enough yet for a posting, but it looks to me like the satellites all use radar to measure various things (ice, temperature, clouds, rain, …). Now maybe I’m being a bit paranoid here, but it just smells like there is plenty of opportunity for a radar pulse to be reflected off, oh, nano-sized ice or water particles from cosmic rays and be interpreted as ‘heat’ or something else instead. Like I said, I need to finish the work on this, but it just looks rife with opportunities to screw up badly. Especially as particle sizes become small.
Granted, I’m being a tad cantancorous [sp .. and no I’m not going to go look up the correct spelling of that word] …
When in doubt, just paste a word into Google and click search. Their spell checker will give you the right spelling and with hardly any effort at all:
cantankerous
I keep a Google search page open most of the time just as a very easy spell checker 😉
I guess there is some place on earth that has experienced severe global warming ..
None that I can find.
and as such, it is what is driving all those “measurements” up so we have global warming.
The measurements are being driven up by putting more thermometers at warm airports and fewer of them in Siberian snow fields. Really.
But for the life of me .. I think the majority of earth is just status quo! … the same ol same ol.
You got it. With a 60 year ripple up and down. And since most folks are younger than 60, they think “this time is different and special”. It isn’t.
savethesharks (18:43:12) ,
re: Morner…gotta problem with him. He may be dead right but thanks to his background in “dowsing” he’s not credible.
If you’re making a case for no real sealevel rise, and you use him as a reference, someone is going to laugh you out of the debate. See randi.org for the challenge.
Hokum just doesn’t have a place in science.
Maybe Daly’s work is better, though not peer reviewed.
Raven has a point. That is an interesting step change around 2003.
And I’ve just updated the post that showed the OHC data for the individual ocean basins.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/nodc-corrections-to-ocean-heat-content_16.html
E.M.Smith (03:46:00):,
“You got it. With a 60 year ripple up and down. And since most folks are younger than 60, they think “this time is different and special”. It isn’t.”
I think many of the over 60 crowd went through this same problem in the 60s and 70s. The big difference was the science was medical research. One scare story after another was propagated. In addition, you saw predictions of cures for major diseases in 5-10 years. We now know it was all wrong, but at the time most folks believed it.
I see the AGW scare as another infact science repeating history.
Adam from Kansas: You wrote, “It’s also getting obvious to me that Unisys is not in total support of the AGW agenda, SST’s on their map are still going down from the recent high.”
I believe what we recently saw was an unusual early warming (venting) in the NINO areas on top of the seasonal signal. Some of the decrease you’re seeing now is a result the normal seasonal component in the Northern Hemisphere anomaly data. It peaks during July and August each year.
Regards