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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CO2 is denser than air. Gravity at equator slightly less than the poles because of equatorial bulge exacerbated by further reduction due to centripetal effect. So would not the denser gas tend to migrate to where gravity is stronger ie away from the equator. Now the equator is warmer so more outward IR but less CO2 to stop it. Whereas the CO2 tends to concentrate where the earth is cooler so less outward IR and hence less effective in global terms as a greenhouse gas than if uniformly distributed.
Models previously did not consider such transport. I’d vote this a negative forcing relative to previous models.
The thing I wonder about with positive feedback loops, is whether there is evidence of them in the past?
If positive feedbacks are real, wouldn’t the temperature record show a series of rapid swings in global temperature caused by small temperature change?
A large volcano eruption would cause a cold year, which would then lead to an ice age.
Does it makes sense that the world would still be habitable today if it exists in a sensitive equilibrium that can be easily pushed over the edge into extreme temperatures?
Although this news release follows the pattern for the carbon scam, I sense voters are getting numb to the message, possibly because of record cold temperatures.
Science, however, is our most effective defense against the carbon scam. Commentators at this site, and others I am sure, are already demanding quantification and empirical evidence for this claim.
Slightly off topic 😉
With just days to reach a deal, the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen has erupted in chaos.
At least 240 protestors were arrested on Wednesday when they tried to get past the perimeter fence at the venue, Bella Centre.
Danish police in riot gear were firing teargas.
Turmoil also marked the talks with Danish environment minister Connie Hedegaard stepping aside to allow the prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to take over as president of the conference.
Ms Hedegaard says the move is procedural.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister and UN development programme head Helen Clark is in Copenhagen. She says it’s a very unusual conference.
Miss Clark says it’s been described as “WTO meets Woodstock”
Copyright © 2009 Radio New Zealand
Jim (10:17:31) :
Hmm … it looks like most of the water vapor is where the highest concentrations of CO2 aren’t.
There’s no scale to this, either.
There is also no C02 over the Himalayas, so there goes the excuse for global warming melting the glaciers.
I love how they color the CO2 concentrations in their animation brownish “smog” color to give the impression of CO2 as a pollutant.
To mee it seems that the global column of water vapor has decreased over the past 10 years. I refer to the following page http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/products/browseatmos.html where it is possible to exmamine the content of water vapor in the atmosphere in many different ways.
“The timing of this release is interesting.”
I’m deeply suspicious about why someone would time the introduction of a cool new earth-related dataset with, I don’t know, an AGU conference.
I continue to be intrigued by how this community approaches new information with an open, inquisitive attitude.
My cousin, a horticulturalist, tells me that a big problem corn farmers face in the midwest is windless days–as a consequence, the corn plants quickly reduce the CO2 content in the air around them below uptake threshold and they just quit growing.
I’d say the low CO2 concentrations seen over deeply forested areas are the result of continuous uptake as abundant plantlife there grows…these should be considered carbon (CO2) sinks. Deserts, on the other hand, have little plant life compared to deeply forested areas, hence are not carbon sinks–perhaps there are factors there that would cause release of CO2? Anybody have information on this possibility?
JayWiz: Engineers Rule… they put the data scientists find to beneficial use.
O/T – the Climategate story just got a whole lot bigger –
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/sheeet.html
This is SERIAL!
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/AIRS_CO2_Data/
The scale ranges from 382 to 389 ppm.
I’d call that “pretty well mixed”.
Raw data here: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/AIRS/data-holdings
Interesting…
How were Mann and his cohorts able to get a mean CO2 value for the entire globe before this data was available?
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/ and others say CO2 varies by the time of day, the season and, probably has a lot of other variations too.
Seems the very basis of alarmism has eroded to nothing.
Looks like this is the paper they are using to make the claim:
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2008b.pdf
Yes I also noticed that clouds are not mentioned, however Dr. Spencer is supposed to do a presentation that started at about 2pm EST at AGU on Feedbacks from clouds with Satellite evidence. Will be interesting to see what happens after that.
Hmmm… Nothing in the article nor the animations actually substantiates the water vapor feedback evidence. The water vapor animation depicts but 90 days from summer 2005. How to rectify with the raob data which actually
indicate ANTI-correlation ( that is NEGATIVE feedback for water vapor)?
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/GlobalRelativeHumidity300_700mb.jpg
Jack Green (10:32:24) :
We need hundreds of years of data.
Wave those arms any harder and you might take off.
The short record of the aqua data is the reason the Lindsen used mixed data sets to do his analysis last summer. However even his analysis uses much less than 100 years of data.
True, Lindsen’s analysis is weakened by both the (still) limited length of the record and the mixing of more than one data set, but it is still a better analysis that what a press release can provide.
I did find it it interesting that who evever wrote this had to go outside of NASA JPL to get a quote that supports climate models and positive feedback.
And also interesting they do not mention Lindsen, while clearly adressing what he claims. Kinda like RC and their never mentioning McIntyre by name.
Tom Fuller (10:33:53) :
I don’t get it either. You’d think they would explain what specific mechanism(s) they observed that confirmed the CO2->Water Vapor feedback relationship in the climate models.
Hell, even if it was just an observed correlation (up-trend in water vapor observed alongside up-trend in CO2) a *little* explanation to the implication that this supports or validates in some way the model predictions would be nice.
It almost seems like they observed a correlation in temperature delta and water vapor delta… which doesn’t really prove anything about CO2
Dear Andrew
““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.”
Respectfully
B.S.
Supporting models that are already disproven by the actual temperature data doesn’t suggest they are right. It suggests your method is crap.
Look at channel 510, CCTV, China, and you will see the occasional outside shot showing quite severe smog. I would have expected that to show up on the AIRS data.
WUWT
– At 5 to 12 kilometers, the water vapour concentration must be very low.
– Are the two pretty pictures animations taken at the same time of year?
– Maybe the measurements at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, are useless.
– Can someone match the temperature distribution during that time, at that altitude… was there a hot spot?
– Could it be the other way around? The increase of water vapour (due to SUMMER warming) displaces the CO2 in those bands, making their concentration go up at those latitudes? The warmer the water in the ocean gets the more CO2 that degases, the more CO2 that get displaced by water vapour to those locations?
How does all that correlate with volcanic activity?
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114703
“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.”
What does that mean to the Holy CO2-measurements in Mauna Loa? Are they lower or higher than the global average? What about earlier chemical measurents? Can we now assume some validity for them.
How important impact that mixing has to the results of the climate models? Is the science settled or not?
This picture makes me wonder about the whole greenhouse analogy. A greenhouse has glass walls and a glass roof. If there are holes in the glass, heat escapes. The picture of the globe with CO2 plumes shows a very uneven distribution. If the greenhouse analogy held, then the areas without the CO2 plumes are the equivalent of holes in the greenhouse. I would think that the heat (if any) in the areas with higher CO2 would escape through the “holes” where the CO2 is low. Is the greenhouse concept a bad model for thinking about the atmosphere?
Juraj V. (10:30:04) :
Does not look like this at all
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2009/10/20091030_ibuki_e.html
(scroll down)
The difference between the JAXA CO2 map from 2009 and NASA animation are quite profound, suggesting that CO2 distribution is not only non uniform, but subject to nearly as much chaotic variability as the atmosphere. I would note also that the measurements displayed seemed to indicate that the 388 ppm number in Anthony’s widget is hardly representative, by my eyeball avg. I’d say at least 15 to 20 ppm on the high side.
It seems a more appropriate headline for this PR would have been “New Data Shows GCMS to a Complete Crock”.
For perspective, Leroy et al. 2009 observe:
Testing Climate Models Using Infrared Spectra and GNSS Radio Occultation2009 S. S. Leroy, J. A. Dykema, P. J. Gero, and J. G. Anderson, Springer