Here’s the plot from RSS – October is 0.282°C
The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for March 2009 was published yesterday and has dropped after peaking in January. The change from September with a value of 0.476°C to October’s 0.282°C is a (∆T) of -0.194°C.
Recent RSS anomalies
2009 01 0.322
2009 02 0.230
2009 03 0.172
2009 04 0.202
2009 05 0.090
2009 06 0.081
2009 07 0.388
2009 08 0.270
2009 09 0.476
2009 10 0.282
RSS (Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa)
The RSS data is here (RSS Data Version 3.2)
A divergence developed in the Feb 09 data between RSS and UAH, and opposite in direction to boot. UAH was 0.347 and RSS was 0.230
I spoke with Dr. Roy Spencer at the ICCC09 conference (3/10) and asked him about the data divergence.
Here is what he had to say:
“I believe it has to do with the differences in how diurnal variation is tracked and adjusted for.” he said. I noted that Feburary was a month with large diurnal variations.
For that reason, UAH has been using data from the AQUA satellite MSU, and RSS to my knowledge does not, and makes an adjustment to account for it. I believe our data [UAH] is probably closer to the true anomaly temperature, and if I’m right, we’ll see the two datasets converge again when the diurnal variations are minimized.”
It certainly looks like the data sets are converged now, with a scant difference between UAH and RSS in October of .002°C and that Dr. Spencer was right.
Read the details on the October UAH data here.
Four Yorkshiremen
They were lucky
Also, sea surface temperatures are not a good proxy for air temperature or ocean heat content. They are a proxy for wind speed.
You have water with air that is 25C and still (no wind) over it. Measure the temperature of the water at the surface and at 10 meters depth. Now increase the wind speed to 3 meters/sec and measure the ocean temperature again. You will find the surface temperature has dropped but the temperature at 10 meters is the same. The air very close to the ocean surface is also a little cooler but the air at 100 feet is still 25C.
A place in an increased sea surface temperature anomaly is generally more reflective of a change in wind speed and/or direction than it is a reflection of heat in the system. Show me a place with a high sea surface temperature anomaly and I will show you a place with a wind anomaly.
Cover the bulb of a thermometer with wet gauze in still air. Record the temperature. Now turn on a fan and blow air on the gauze and note the temperature drop.
Fill a bathtub with water. Place one thermometer at the bottom of the tub, place another at the surface and one more in the bathroom in air. Allow them to sit for 24 hours and record the temperatures. Turn on a fan so that it blows across the surface of the tub near the surface thermometer. After 10 minutes, record the temperature again. You will likely note a decrease in temperature on the surface thermometer, no change in the one at the bottom of the tub, and no change in the one in the air of the bathroom.
Sea surface temperatures are important for storms because storms operate on convection. The greater the difference between the temperature at the surface and the temperature at altitude, the stronger the storm intensification. This is why storms at sea strengthen at night and storms on land strengthen in the day.
At sea, the water is about the same temperature both day and night but the air aloft is cooler at night and the cloud tops are not warmed by the sun. This greater difference between surface temperature and the temperature aloft causes increased convection.
On land, the surface is warmer in the day. In some places this difference may be 20F to 40F warmer. The difference in daytime surface temperature is greater than the difference in the nighttime temperature aloft. As the land heats up, the air begins to convect and by afternoon, storms begin to appear. As a general rule, after the sun sets, the land begins to cool and as the cooling progresses through the evening the air becomes more stable and storms decrease in strength and dissipate. The preceding does not apply to storms caused by the interface of two air masses of greatly different temperature.
It isn’t the absolute temperature that matters so much as it is the DIFFERENCE in temperature between the ground and the cloud tops. So it isn’t the fact that the sea surface temperature is high so much as it is that the temperature aloft tends to be more stable year on year. The temperature at 50,000 feet is likely to be pretty much the same this year as it was last year. But the surface temperature can vary greatly from one year to the next and when you have lower trade winds and higher surface temperature, you get greater convection and stronger storms.
Looking at that graph, I’m struck by a couple of things: The range is from .9 to -.5 C, and the data shows great variation with detail within that narrow range (just barely 1.4 degrees in total). If anyone thinks that temperature data is gathered with that amount of precision, they are crazy. Classic example of the output of a bunch of data manipulation steps resulting in greater precision than the output steps – i.e. it’s just noise. I took the liberty of taking that graph and mashing it down into the context of the temperature range of the place I live – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It can get as hot as plus 40 C in the summer, and as cold as -40 C in the winter here.
http://planets.shacknet.nu/images/rss_oct09_perspective.png
I was probably generous with the scaling – if I went any farther, the blue line tended to vanish. In that context, the data looks like statistical noise to me…
We are going to have to watch the El Nino very closely for awhile now. There are some significant changes happening.
Equatorial Upper Ocean Temperature Anomaly moved into Super-El Nino territory in the last week.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/anim/wkxzteq_anm.gif
Correlation with this and the ENSO over time.
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/7098/ensovseuoha.png
The latest SST anomaly animation shows there was considerable movement of Pacific Warm Pool water backwards into the ENSO region in the last few days.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anom_anim.html
The Trade Winds have been very weak and going west-to-east in some cases lately but then they jumped back the other way to very high levels in the last few days. So, we’ll have to see.
“Before 94, most of the october anomalies were negative. That would place 09 as the 7th warmest”
I dont get that, if we are measuring here what are October anomalies above the 70-90 October norm, then about half of the anomalies should of been positive.
DaveF (08:05:33) :
Bill Tuttle (01:15:02:) and others:
We were lucky…..
Luxury (^____^)
But already beaten by mr. White.
And a quick look at UAH shows that temperature at 56,000 feet varies about 1/2 of a degree F year-round. Temperature at 56,000 feet is currently about 2 degrees F below the 20 year average. That means that we might see stronger storms IF they get strong enough for cloud tops to reach that altitude. This would not be due to surface warming but due to high altitude COOLING. This makes the temperature difference between surface and altitude greater which drives more convection.
Dropping down to 46,000 feet, temperature varies about 1 degree F over the course of the year (that is much less than the surface varies). Down at 36,000 feet we see about a 2 degree F variation over the course of the year and temperatures have varied less than 1 degree F over the past several years.
So my initial “gut instinct” is that all things being equal, we should see about the same number of moderate sized storms but once a storm gets “big” and its cloud tops pass 55,000 feet or so, they are probably stronger than they were 20 years ago because temperatures at that altitude are now colder than they were allowing more updraft.
I can’t help but wonder if solar activity has an impact on temperatures at >55,000 feet altitude. If you look at the atmosphere as a refrigeration system with water as the working fluid, the sea surface is the “evaporator” and the air aloft is the “condenser”. Like any other radiator, if the condenser is in a colder ambient temperature, more heat can be radiated away. If air temperatures aloft are colder above 55K feet, then storms reaching that altitude might be radiating more heat to space than they were. The significant drop from the average appears to have really started in earnest in 2005 when temperatures at 56,000 feet were some 1.5 degrees below “average” according to UAH. This is when we had a lot of large storms (Katrina, etc) as we had a weak Bermuda High allowing high surface temperatures combined with colder air aloft. Temperatures at 56K feet at about the time of Katrina were about 1F below average. As convection operates by a difference in temperature, decreasing temperature at altitude is the same as increasing temperature at the surface; doing either one increases the difference and results in greater convection.
As there has been no great change from the long term average for temperatures at middle altitudes, I would expect the number of storms to be unchanged or reduced as temperatures in the lower troposphere are slightly warmer, it might be more difficult for storms to “get started”. But once they do grow beyond 50,000 feet, maybe they are stronger than they used to be. So … fewer strong storms but the ones we do get being stronger.
So my curiosity would be to see if that is backed up with any real data. Fewer storms overall but the big storms being more powerful than, say, 15-20 years ago is what I might look for.
******
Robert Wykoff (22:17:10) :
It must have been ridiculously cold all the time in the good old days. With 100 year old cold records set seemingly everywhere, what does it take to get a negative anomoly?
******
Gotta remember — it’s only ~30 yrs data. We don’t know what sat-based temps would have been if they were observing during the whole 20th century — might have been surprisingly close in 1900 to today’s temps. Or not.
Comparing station-based records w/sat is apples & oranges.
I think looking at the graph, since 1979 there is a clear warming trend in the last 20 or so years , but the trend is not huge. The first years since 1979 saw either a stationary or a drop in temperature— this would be when many industrial countrys would have been producing huge amounts of CO2. Later on there is a clear warming pattern , but still the increase is very small– far less than you could programme a domestic air conditioning or heating unit to be sensitive to. Whilst any given measurements are subject to error mutiple measurements tend to flatten out this problem– especially when taken over many different locations. That said if the programme has been adjusted to include a certain bias this could produce trends etc.
Best guess is CO2 has a very small effect and not worth spending trillions on to correct. Far better to put this money into fusion research which could in the future provide us with cheap clean energy from a totally renwable source.
If we start working and spending hard with this goal in mind we could get there.
Just a funny note about a weather report on a Sydney TV station run on the 9th November. They state that this is the hottest November in 100 years…and they can be sure of that by the 9th! This new breed of astrologer/meteorologists and their supercomputers are certainly earning their keep.
No mention of the coldest Sydney October in 17 years though.
Regards
Michael
It’s a funny remark about the old days being colder. BUT!!!! As a kid in the 50s I would look at photographs from around 1900 taken in my hometown on the Connecticut River. There were pictures of grandstands filled with people watching horse races on the frozen river. The river rarely froze over when I was a kid. But 50 years early they held carnivals and horse races on it.
I would think we would need some very cold temps to approximate those days.
Wait, we could have another Super-El Nino?
That’s it, game over for the skeptics, expect all life on Earth to perish in 5 years O.o
Just kidding for that, but considering the situation here…
I have made a fit of the average of UAH and RSS satellite temperature data using my 3 box model that seems to fit the recent plateau in temperatures fairly well despite using GISS forcing parameters:
http://moderateclimate.blogspot.com/
The climate sensitivity corresponding to this fit is pretty low: 1.2K
“”It was cold and dark,” he told AFP**.”
“Polar bears are in decline, alright, but not everywhere*. (H/T TORedStar)”.
For more AGW “insight”, go here*.
…-
“**Canadian teen survives Arctic ice floe, polar bears
OTTAWA — Canadian air force paratroopers on Monday rescued a teenager adrift overnight on an Arctic ice floe and threatened by polar bears, an official told AFP.
The 17-year-old boy and an older friend had been hunting near Coral Harbor, Nunavut when they became separated and lost on Sunday.
The teen, who was not immediately identified, was rescued Monday after a night in frigid temperatures with two polar bears on an ice floe that drifted into the Arctic Ocean, said Captain Michael Young.
“This young man had quite a journey,” Young said by telephone from the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, in Ontario.
“It was cold and dark,” he told AFP. “And there was apparently a couple of polar bears on the ice floe with him too.””
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gBfaOng5FxopKKBo9cWhYidPlJ2A
*http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/722760–the-bear-facts-about-the-polar-bear-hunt
Regarding what I said of seeing Super-El Nino if those anomalies work their way up to the surface I would like to say something
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/jsdisplay/plots/gif/Dep_Sec_EQ_5d.gif
Assuming the trades get stronger and pushes the warmer water back to the west we could see these anomalies disappear, as you see it doesn’t neccesarily show a profile where you have warmer water below cooler water. We may need new terms, like the temp. gradient changing so it appears you have positive anomalies working their way up, even though it’s not warmer water below cooler water. Seeing this map before I’ve seen positive anomalies go down in place without getting to the surface because of these gradient changes.
If the trades start pushing back the slope of the thermocline to the west those anomalies may start going down in place.
crosspatch (10:49:33) :
Also, sea surface temperatures are not a good proxy for air temperature or ocean heat content.
I disagree; SST copies HadCRUT or UAH pretty well and gives hint 1-4 months earlier where the air temperatures will go.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/plot/uah/from:2002
EL NINO is strengthening
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/11/el-nino-is-strengthening.html
jlc (05:52:37) :
I am an aging engineer and I am prepared to state categorically that global temperature and GT anomalies cannot be determined with a precision better than ±0.5°C. Even that is a bit of a stretch…..Few people these days, including scientists and engineers, have any concept of orders of accuracy.
I definitely agree. I’m often driven to tear out what little hair I have left by the casual acceptance, even here among those who seemingly realize what a crock this all is, of the tacit assumption that because all this nonsense is offered up with numbers indicating dazzling precision, that precision somehow supports similar levels of inherent accuracy.
We get global temps quoted to a thousandth of a degree, sea levels quoted to a tenth of a millimeter, climate proxies constructed by folks contemplating their samples of mud, ice, rock, tree rings, or whatever other variety of planetary detritus they can come up with, all artfully graphed with dramatic gyrations all plotted to a hundredth of a degree. In response, we engage in endless arguments about whether or not they have properly applied the appropriate statistical jiggery-pokery to achieve their results while completely ignoring the rather obvious point that, although our scientific technology has advanced tremendously in recent decades, it is still miles away from being able to reliably produce data with this kind of accuracy.
Well, we just had the second coldest October on Record,according to NOAA of Pendelton, Or. Snow is forecast this week end for parts of NE Oregon. What I fear is
Warm Ocean cold Airmass,I have a weather eye on that Polar jet..
(and lot of fire wood..)
“SST copies HadCRUT or UAH pretty well and gives hint 1-4 months earlier where the air temperatures will go.”
Well, yes and no. I mean, it really depends on more than just the temperature at the very surface. Now if generally warmer water moves into an area, yes, the surface will be warmer for a given wind speed. But by the same token, for a given water temperature the surface temperature will vary with wind speed. So it is a combination both.
But more generally speaking, if I see a large area of above normal surface temperatures in the tropics, it is a VERY good indication that something abnormal is going on with the trade winds.
When you have weaker pressure gradients, you have higher surface temperatures but variations in the temperature of the entire water column will change surface temperature, too.
To put it another way, if I raise the temperature of the water in that bathtub I used above by 1 degree, then the surface temperature will go up one degree. But if I don’t warm the water and simply decrease the speed of the fan blowing on it, the temperature will also go up a degree.
Changes in wind speed happen much more often and at a faster pace than changes in the temperature of the entire amount of water at depth. Yes currents vary somewhat and meander a bit but it is difficult to get that much water to change its temperature over the course of a month. Wind can do it in a day.
ARGO has noted practically no global ocean temperature change over a period of several years yet surface temperatures can change dramatically.
The temp. is dropping despite the El Nino – it is still going isn’t it? Imagine the drop when El Nino decides to disappear, just in time for any UN ETS discussions next year.
Another normal year for US temperatures.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/11/09/another-normal-year-for-us-temperatures/
To: Johnny Honda
Enjoyed the parody.
The entire Homogenic Global Warming scenario – for and against – is overwhelmingly based on Computer Modeling, with very tweakable spreadsheets.
And as we all know ‘Put rubbish in and get rubish out’.
Johnny Honda
I too enjoyed that parody.