From this NASA press release I’ll have more on this later. The timing of this release is interesting.
› Play animation (Quicktime) | › Play animation (Windows Media Player)
› Related images and animations
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/ .
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
How much of the CO2 shown is caused by humans burning fossil fuels? 1 % ?
[REPLY – 3% or so per year, supposedly. Around half of that accumulates. So it’s likely that the CO2 increase is anthropogenic. But what effect that has (if any) is very questionable. ~ Evan]
Chris R,
You might find this interesting:
http://www.warwickhughes.com/hoyt/wvfeedback.htm
I love water vapour positive feedback because it defies logic!
Think about it, they claim evaporation causes warming, which means warming must occur if evaporation occurs! Evaporation has been occurring for billion of years yet the world hasn’t boiled to its death! But apparently it will now that man is putting back a tiny amount of CO2 that has been sequestered by plants.
Often these water feedback proof articles forget to compare the increases in water vapour to increases in temp, ie they compare over a period when the earth cools. Increases in water vapour in the upper atmosphere always lead to subsequent decreases in surface temp (due to those cloud things cutting off the energy supply.) I always wonder if these model forget to use the big climate forcing, such as the difference between day and night.
@foinavon 12:07:42
What you have described is not positive feedback. A simple way of describing positive feedback would be with a sampled data system. Consider a system with gain = 1 (to make life easier) and positive feedback P.
On each succesive pass we would then get:
1
1+P
P(!+P)+1 = P^2 + P + 1
P(P^2 + P + 1) +1 = P^3 + P^2 + P + 1
and so on leading to an exponential increase, which is the classic output of a positive feedback system.
All positive feedback systems are unstable this way. Of course positive feedback systems are always controlled in practice by strong negative feedbacks – so the question is what actually controls water vapour so any positive feedback it introduces is in fact nullified by that negative feedback. A desire by scientists to actually understand the climate mechanism and hence detect the negative feedbacks would be beneficial, but it seems there is a strong bias amongst climate scientists to look only for the positive feedbacks which of course then “proves” to anyone with a grasp of what a positive feedback mechanism is that earth is already uninhabitable, and the fact that it appears not to be can only be an illusion.
To answer Martin B… as any geochemist will tell you, average rain water is rather acidic (pH of 5.2) and is very effective in developing Karst topography (holes of sizable dimensions) anywhere the country rock is limestone/dolostone. The carbonic acid contained in the rain is due to absorption of CO2 in the atmosphere, and you’re right–the surface area of droplets in clouds is HUGE, perhaps exceeding the surface area of the ocean. Besides, constant movement among the clouds allows for greater transfer than a relatively static ocean surface, and involves most of the air column over both land and sea.
Rain does scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere as any cave lover would tell you!
Cave formations are formed when rain containing acid CO2 dissolves limestone and redeposits it at evaporation points. I also wonder how much CO2 is absorbed and lost during the transition from snow to ice in glacier formation.
I’ve been watching videos out of COP 15. It looks like a three ring circus over there. Investment advice, Sell everything related to alternative energy and carbon credit trading now.
I’m skeptic on this. Looking at NASA site
the data seems to be highly cherry picked.
It’s mostly data from July, why?
They must have data from January and that would highlight
better maybe northern cities contributions of CO2.
But they’ve focused on July instead, Why, because
there was nothing to see in the North in January ?
Perhaps with July things look better for them to
blend the gulf stream and plant life so they can
try and infere that it equals man made CO2 ?
When the reality of their pictures is showing
something nearing 100% Natural CO2.
What is the relationship between troposphere
temperatures and the NASA CO2 pictures ?
foinavon (12:34:45) :
Martin B (12:22:03)
Yes, you’re right. It’s really a question of timescales. CO2 is pretty well mixed on the annual timescale and rather less well mixed on the monthy timescale. But overall the spatial difference in CO2 levels is small (since CO2 levels mix rather well on the annual timescale!).
— At what altitude does this longer term mixing occur. If the short term accumulations are at altitudes that may matter for climate influence, does the longer term mixing remain at those altitudes or precipitate prior to sequestering. Additionally, do you have a reference to how the global CO2 level is measured (calculated)?
Dr Roy Spencer’s Power Point presentation of his AGU talk on negative feedbacks is available here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/cloud-feedback-presentation-for-fall-2009-agu-meeting/
Is the Pajama still going over there?
First comment on a Senator Kerry article in the Green tab of Huffington post confirms the observation I made yesterday.
This comment from;
freshmind I’m a Fan of freshmind I’m a fan of this user 17 fans
“The world will end if we don’t do something, yet I hardly see any comments in the green section, if the world was really ending you’d think that would be even more important than health care, can’t have health care if the world ends.”
There were 14 comments to this article at time of observation.
John Kerry In Copenhagen: “I’m Just Describing The Reality Of What It Will Take”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/16/john-kerry-in-copenhagen-_n_393980.html
well yes Ryan Stephenson (12:46:56)…
that’s why I said: “It’s perhaps easier to think of the water vapour feedback as an “amplification” of the primary forcing.”
One can’t use semantic “arguments” to attempt to negate real phenomena! “Feedback” is used in a rather straightforward manner in characterising climate-related radiative forcing (a positive feedback is essentially a positive amplification whereas a negative feedback opposes the primary forcing). That may not be the manner in which “feedback” is used in engineering applications, for example, but that’s a matter of semantics…..
“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.”
I would have thought the presence of water vapor would moderate any heating or cooling and is dependent on latitude. Why aren’t record temperatures anywhere that has a high humidity? All record temperatures are in arid locations and in the case of Death Valley it also has the added ‘cooling benefit’ of white salt, which should reflect heat. In addition the presence of water in the atmosphere further North can kill you if you don’t keep dry, as damp air will remove heat faster than dry air, and once the heat has been removed I haven’t noticed damp air want to give it back.
After doing a bit of research (The Canadian Encyclopedia), I found this:
“The droplets in a small cumulus cloud have a total surface area of about 1000 km2. Thus even a small cloud reflects 90% or more of the incident sunlight, making it appear brilliantly white when seen from above or from the side. Viewed from below, however, clouds appear dark, because most of the sunlight that enters them has already been scattered back to space or absorbed by the cloud droplets.”
Who wudda thunk?
Positive feedback – schpositive feedback. Where’s the amplifier?
I see the trolls are returning though.
foinavon (12:07:42) :
“It’s perhaps easier to think of the water vapour feedback as an ‘amplification’ of the primary forcing.
That’s all pretty well established science…”
Except… that over the RAOB era, a period reputedly marked by ‘global warming’,
relative AND absolute humidity as measured by the imperfect but best we’ve got measurements,
indicate a NEGATIVE FEED BACK!
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/GlobalRelativeHumidity300_700mb.jpg
The errors of the water vapor feedback are pretty obvious,
even without the RAOB data falsifying it.
For one thing, the source of water vapor is the surface, namely the oceans,
so subsiding air is largely impervious to additional water vapor.
And by surface area, most of the atmosphere
(by surface area, not mass which must balance) is subsiding.
And rising air is precisely that from which precipitation is likely to occur.
In addition, dynamics drive water vapor. Notice in the animation the ITCZ.
Cold air masses plow humid air back toward the equator, a process that will not cease with CO2.
But the biggest logical issue with water vapor as a positive feedback is the obvious: Why isn’t water vapor a feedback to WATER VAPOR?
Clearly there are times with lesser and greater water vapor.
Why wouldn’t a period of greater water vapor lead to warmer temperatures which would lead to greater water vapor which would lead to higher temperatures, which would…
“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.”
Is it just me or would most people need to analyse more than one storm to get any sound statistical basis for improvements in prediction uncertainty? Maybe even analyse some for which they didn’t know the landfall before they made the prediction…
Barrasso demands independent UN Climategate Investigation
http://www.littlechicagoreview.com/pages/full_story/full_story?content_instance_id=5178645
It would be nice if we could get some data, there is no color scale related to the annimation so its difficult to come to any conclusions.
Steve said:
“Clearly there are times with lesser and greater water vapor.
Why wouldn’t a period of greater water vapor lead to warmer temperatures which would lead to greater water vapor which would lead to higher temperatures, which would…”
Eureka! You may have hit upon the very crux of this entire argument. Kudos!
AK,
The fact is that, as the post above this one show, the temp records are not reliable.
Tamino being a proven partisan hack does matter. Truthiness matters.
AGW promoters have little and diminshing truthiness.
And people I trust, and who have proven themselves to be credible, look at the temps vs. predictions and their analysis shows the emp realities vs. the AGW predictions to be outside the 955 confidence range, which means the predictions are not credible.
You can make all of the cummarizations and dismissals you want. You can ignore the clear corruption in the AGW promotion all you want. that does not mean it is not there.
But to come into a forum of reasonably informed people and just assert everything is Okeydokey with the models and that this pile of poop confirms it is just silly.
Jean Parisot (12:58:03) :
atmospheric CO2 levels are directly measured at a large number of sites around the world:
http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/wdcgg.html
one can make lots of intercomparisons of the data. For example,
compare the two data sets here (Mauna Loa and the averaged sea surface sites):
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
or look at an entirely seperate data set. For example the atmospheric CO2 measure at the South Pole:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/csiro/CSIROCO2SOUTHPOLE.JPG
These differ by very small amounts (less than 1%).
Very small local differences in CO2 are unlikely to be climatically significant. The equilibrium temperature rise from a change in atmospheric CO2 levels is small (it’s somethng like:
Temp rise = ln([CO2]2/[CO2]1)*3/ln2
within the median value of the climate sensitivity), and one can determine that the difference in forcing between a value of 386 ppm and 378 ppm (say) is not very significant.
I don’t know what the altitude depndence of CO2 mixing is. I expect it’s likely to be more efficiently mixed at higer altitudes because the major differences must relate to the CO2 sources which are ground level (apart from methane oxidation to CO2). Once CO2 levels mix, they’re not going to “un-mix”. The climatically relevant altitudes for the CO2 greenhouse effects are the high ones since it’s the average height from which longwave IR is emitted to space that is relevant to CO2-enhancement of the greenhouse effect.
That’s what comes to mind.
Maybe it is my fault but I couldn’t understand the claims of this article. They’ve said the following:
“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.”
If our atmosphere is more humid globally than it was 30-40 years ago please quantify it and support your claims with publicly available observational data.
According to data provided by ISCCP and ESRL the global absolute humidity is going down, with a very prominent decrease at mid-tropospheric levels (500 to 300 hPa). I highly recommend using instrumental data or anything which has an empirical origin instead of ‘magical’ computer models.
Steve (13:09:28) and RockyRoad (13:21:38) :
I answered that point here:
foinavon (12:07:42) :
“If some forcing (solar, greenhouse gas or whatever) results in a 1 oC warming of the atmosphere, and the resulting water vapour feedback adds an additional x of warming then the total warming from the primary forcing+ water vapour feedback is something like 1 + x + x^2 + x^3 + x^4 …
which is 1/(1-x). ”
So water vapour is a feedback (or amplification) to water vapour (that’s where the decreasing series comes from). That’s really straightforward. It would only be the “runaway”-style effect that you insinuate, if the water vapour response to the primary warming produced a warming close to or greater than the primary forcing…but it doesn’t.