From this NASA press release I’ll have more on this later. The timing of this release is interesting.
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WASHINGTON – Researchers studying carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas and a key driver of global climate change, now have a new tool at their disposal: daily global measurements of carbon dioxide in a key part of our atmosphere. The data are courtesy of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft.
Moustafa Chahine, the instrument’s science team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., unveiled the new product at a briefing on recent breakthroughs in greenhouse gas, weather and climate research from AIRS at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. The new data, which span the seven-plus years of the AIRS mission, measure the concentration and distribution of carbon dioxide in the mid-troposphere–the region of Earth’s atmosphere that is located between 5 to 12 kilometers, or 3 to 7 miles, above Earth’s surface. They also track its global transport. The product represents the first-ever release of global carbon dioxide data that are based solely on observations. The data have been extensively validated against both aircraft and ground-based observations.
“AIRS provides the highest accuracy and yield of any global carbon dioxide data set available to the research community, now and for the immediate future,” said Chahine. “It will help researchers understand how this elusive, long-lived greenhouse gas is distributed and transported, and can be used to develop better models to identify ‘sinks,’ regions of the Earth system that store carbon dioxide. It’s important to study carbon dioxide in all levels of the troposphere.”
Chahine said previous AIRS research data have led to some key findings about mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide. For example, the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.” Until now, models of carbon dioxide transport have assumed its distribution was uniform.
Carbon dioxide is transported in the mid-troposphere from its sources to its eventual sinks. More carbon dioxide is emitted in the heavily populated northern hemisphere than in its less populated southern counterpart. As a result, the southern hemisphere is a net recipient, or sink, for carbon dioxide from the north. AIRS data have previously shown the complexity of the southern hemisphere’s carbon dioxide cycle, revealing a never-before-seen belt of carbon dioxide that circles the globe and is not reflected in transport models.
In another major finding, scientists using AIRS data have removed most of the uncertainty about the role of water vapor in atmospheric models. The data are the strongest observational evidence to date for how water vapor responds to a warming climate.
“AIRS temperature and water vapor observations have corroborated climate model predictions that the warming of our climate produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas.
Dessler explained that most of the warming caused by carbon dioxide does not come directly from carbon dioxide, but from effects known as feedbacks. Water vapor is a particularly important feedback. As the climate warms, the atmosphere becomes more humid. Since water is a greenhouse gas, it serves as a powerful positive feedback to the climate system, amplifying the initial warming. AIRS measurements of water vapor reveal that water greatly amplifies warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide. Comparisons of AIRS data with models and re-analyses are in excellent agreement.
“The implication of these studies is that, should greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course of increase, we are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century, unless some strong negative feedback mechanism emerges elsewhere in Earth’s climate system,” Dessler said.
Originally designed to observe atmospheric temperature and water vapor, AIRS data are already responsible for the greatest improvement to five to six-day weather forecasts than any other single instrument, said Chahine. JPL scientists have shown a major consequence of global warming will be an increase in the frequency and strength of severe storms. Earlier this year, a team of NASA researchers showed how AIRS can significantly improve tropical cyclone forecasting. The researchers studied deadly Typhoon Nargis in Burma (Myanmar) in May 2008. They found the uncertainty in the cyclone’s landfall position could have been reduced by a factor of six had more sophisticated AIRS temperature data been used in the forecasts.
AIRS observes and records the global daily distribution of temperature, water vapor, clouds and several atmospheric gases including ozone, methane and carbon monoxide. With the addition of the mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide data set this week, a seven-year digital record is now complete for use by the scientific community and the public.
Animation of the 3-D transport and distribution of water vapor as measured by AIRS from June through November 2005. Image credit: NASA › Play animation (Quicktime) | › Play animation (Windows Media Player)
enlarge imageFor more on AIRS, see http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
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@ur momisugly Joel Shore
I have no idea what your point is . I am just pointing out some basic mathematical facts . The Stefan-Boltzmann E = sb * T ^ 4 relationship for gray ( flat spectrum ) bodies says bodies in our orbit will be about 1/21 the effective temperature of the sun , regardless of how light or dark gray . ( If it were not so , we would have been trapped in a “snowball earth” . ) And we are in the nbd of just 8c above the value calculated given our current measured value for the sun’s effective temperature . If someone can supply an averaged , lumped spectrum for the earth as seen from space , I could calculate how much more of that 8c could be accounted for . That leaves very little room for any “tipping points” or non-linearities between 0 and our current temperature . Stefan-Boltzmann and Kirchhoff’s 19th century quantitative insights hold .
Any non-linearities or “tipping points” are in the saturation of spectrum of H2O , of course , and I think it would be useful to calculate what the equilibrium temperature for a pure H2O spectrum would be in order to calculate what the extreme limits of its effect might be .
Bob: I guess I was giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that your statements were less confused than I now know that they are after had read your website. Does the concept of an emissivity or absorptivity that depends on the wavelength of the radiation mean anything to you? Because frankly it blows that nonsense on your website all to Kingdom come.
Martin Lewitt says:
I have personally found it to be a hallmark of bad science (or, more precisely, bad interpretation of good science) that one uses scientific papers selectively to come to very different conclusions than the authors themselves come to.
Joel Shore:
Like Mann’s use of the Tijander series?
jeez: I tend to stay away from the climate proxy arguments because that is not the part of the science that I find that interesting or compelling, but since you brought it up, I’ll comment from my state of semi-ignorance of the subject. As I understand it, Mann et al.’s paper used an automated procedure for screening the proxies through calibration and validation. It would probably have been inappropriate for them to start eliminating proxies for other reasons. However, post-hoc, they did then look at the effects of removing various series from the reconstruction. And, in particular, in the case of the various Tilijander series, they looked at the effect or not including them exactly because of discussions in the original paper by these scientists:
( http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2008/09/02/0805721105.DCSupplemental/0805721105SI.pdf )
So, what about this approach do you find problematical?
@ur momisugly Joel ,
Once again I don’t know what you are talking about . I think I make it quite explicit that my few lines of the array programming language K only implement the gray body case , altho they do implement the actual spherical geometry which is necessary properly model differences in absorptivity/emissivity in , eg , different latitudes . I think I make it quite clear that I would like to “unfold” the spectral dimension , but have not been able to justify the time , not so much for elaborating the few involved lines of code , but in finding the full , not just IR , spectra of interest , eg , the spectra of the earth’s surface , the lumped surface + atmosphere , CO2 , H2O , SO2 , etc .
So given that I can calculate any values for any gray ball , even anisotropically shaded , I made the cogent comment that our measured mean temperature leaves only about 8c higher than a gray body in our orbit which is a far more physical assumption ( 0th order term ) than the common assumption that we absorb with a coefficient of about .7 and emit as a black body with a coefficient of 1.0 . That leaves as a second term the ratio of the correlation of the object’s spectrum with that of the sun versus the rest of the sky . If somebody points me to the relevant full spectra , I’ll calculate the SB&K temperature implied .
Again , I can’t even figure out what side of the debate you are on , tho I take it you live in a Rochester . I lived in Rochester NY in the early 80s and in fact some of my first thoughts about all this were presented in a MidWinter Party invite using Buffalo’s temperature as a proxy : http://www.cosy.com/views/cg84invt.htm . It’s main point is how little heat is stored in the atmosphere as indicated by the fact that temperature lags insolation by only a couple of weeks . That makes notions that changes in the atmosphere may take decades to have an effect rather incomprehensible .
Joel Shore,
Too many people check their brains at the door and fail to read the peer review literature critically. It is often as if the peer reviewers haven’t read the papers themselves, and it is not unusual to find errors in the papers many months after it is too late to really follow up in the peer review literature. Editors like this to be within one or two issues or months.
Now the Liebert paper obviously takes the Wentz results seriously. It proposes that the models under represent precipitation, not because their internal physics is wrong but because more of the recent warming that was attribution to CO2 should really have been attributed to a reduction in aerosols, i.e., global brightening. But this is a hypothesis, supported by model studies showing that model precipitation is more sensitive to aerosol warming than to CO2 warming. But obviously, the hypothesis that the model parameterizations of the physics is wrong is still out there. Papers must be seen in the context of what we know about the science and the models. The models don’t represent the CO2 radiative coupling to the ocean realistic. The CO2 portion of the spectrum penetrates mere microns into water, and instead of modeling the complex surface, models simplify things by coupling CO2 forcing to the whole mixing layer of the ocean as if it penetrates 10s of meters just like shorter wave solar radiation.
Furthermore, models have to make difficult parameterization of precipitation and mixing of air masses within the practical limits of resolution. Pierrehumber in his 2005 paper “On the Relative Humidity of the Earth’s Atmosphere” pg 39, described a mechanism by which low resolution GCM studies such as the ERA40 analysis, may be deficient in dry air due to excessive mixing or leaking of moisture from saturated air. He speculated that this may be endemic to “low resolution” GCMs. As always, we have the issue of how much resolution is enough. This is another mechanism by which the models may under represent precipitation and the negative feedback of the water cycle.
I admit that the explanation for the model failures is unresolved, but that hardly inspires or justifies confidence in the IPCC AR4 conclusions.
Bob,
My point is that this page is completely incorrect: http://cosy.com/Science/TemperatureOfGrayBalls.htm Your claim that “The most heating this greenhouse theory could predict is raising the temperature back to the black body temperature” is wrong. Your notion that Venus is hot due to some internal source of heat rather than due to the greenhouse effect is wrong. And, your statement that “I do not understand how James Hansen could possibly have claimed that Venus’s mean temperature could be due to heat trapping of any sort” is only true in the strict sense. (I.e., it is true that you do not understand how this is so, but this is a limitation of your own understanding, not that of Hansen or the peer reviewers.)
Joel Shore (18:43:05) :
Joel is correct that the internal source is unlikely, but he cannot prove it is not simply due to PV = nRT. Chicken and egg, Joel, that you simply can’t get around: which came first, an increase in pressure, or an increase in temperature?
Mark
I wonder if this shows that both the models and Michaels and McKitrick were right? That warming tends to follow human economic activity?
Mark T: Satisfying the ideal gas law does not get you around having to also satisfy the First Law of Thermodynamics. Put simply, in the absence of a huge internal energy source, a planet like Venus simply cannot sustain a surface temperature such as Venus has if the atmosphere were not IR-active: The Steffan-Boltzmann Equation would imply it radiates heat away much faster than it absorbs heat.
The ideal gas law is certainly relevant in determining detailed aspects of the temperature structure. However, it does not get you around limits imposed by basic thermodynamics.
Joel ,
I added caveat to my warming page warning that before July 2008 I may have made a comment to the effect that the black body temperature was as hot as a radiantly heated object could get because I did not yet understand how to calculate the effect of non-flat spectra .
But , I see the comment you quoted is about the green house theory as commonly presented by , eg , Wikipedia . The impression that uniform changes in albedo , which is intrinsically a gray-body term , will change the equilibrium temperature of body is far too ubiquitous and I think influenced by the clumsiness of the common one-dimensional “cold-earth” derivation . Certainly it was impossible to get the controller of the relevant Wikipedia pages to understand the issue . Even in the presentation by Richard Alley , http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml , which is the strongest paleogeological case I have seen for CO2’s causation of planetary temperature , and in various comments about SO2 changing the planet’s albedo , I continually see the false notion that changing albedo in and of itself will change an object’s temperature promulgated . In fact , the extent to which the reflectivity of the portions of a sphere , like the poles , radiating to cold space rather than back towards the sun is increased , the effect will be to increase the mean temperature . This fact makes me suspicious that Alley’s estimates of the influence of the sun may be too low . Given that the earth is less than 3% warmer than a gray body in our orbit , clearly any non-linearities are quite small .
In any case , I think my repeated comments about the need to extend my implementation to full spectra to get equilibrium temperatures for all relevant spectra shows I understand the correct physics .
With respect to the temperature of Venus , I’ll admit I don’t understand the vertical structure of planetary atmospheres . However , the common contention that its high surface temperature can be explained simply by high pressure leaves me cold because while compressing a gas of course heats it , that heat will then dissipate . All any insulation of any sort can do is slow the rate . I have never found any quantitative explanation for how the internal temperature of an externally radiantly heated sphere can exceed its surface temperature . I would think some sort of divergence theorem argument would prove that the interior cannot be hotter than the surface without an internal source of heat . In any case , once again , I ask , show me the physics .