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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lowercasefred,
“It’s IF temperature rises, THEN water vapor rises and that still does address other feedbacks.”
I think we are becoming fixated on half the story. We all know that as temperature rises, water vapour increases (Clausius-Clapeyeron). You hinted at other feedbacks, and that is entirely the point that is being missed.
Lindzen, Spencer and others have explained that there are convection and cloud formation processes that occur which are entirely missing from GCM’s. It is perfectly consistent with that view to have water vapour increasing without having a net positive feedback, if the water vapour feedback (positive) is cancelled by cloud and convection feedbacks (negative).
This tells us nothing that we don’t already know.
fabius 14:05:53
“I was wondering how the atmosphere responds to differences in pressure, temperature and volume. Does altering one of these parameters have any effect on interactions of greenhopuse gases, cloud formation etc.”
Pressure, temperature and volume are all interrelated (PV=MRT), these things do not relate linearly by this formula in open atmosphere, but they do still relate and they affect almost any other physical or chemical process.
Problem is that we do not know the all the processes well enough to quantify the effects.
Per oneuniverse’s note:
Pierce D. W., T. P. Barnett, E. J. Fetzer, P. J. Gleckler (2006), Three-dimensional tropospheric water vapor in coupled climate models compared with observations from the AIRS satellite system, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L21701, doi:10.1029/2006GL027060.
A remarkable achievement to only predict 100% higher water than measured. Only two more orders of magnitude improvement needed in modeling to approach the 0.5% relative uncertainty of CO2 measurements!
This really is alarming; Dessler has form; David Stockwell did a nice rebuttal of Dessler’s 2008 paper claiming a +ve feedback due to increasing water vapor;
http://landshape.org/enm/dessler-zhang-and-yang-fail-significance-tests/#more-1772
David notes;
“Using data on water vapor and temperature fluctuations between 2003-2008 collected by the NASA satellite AIRS, Dessler et al. 2008 claim independent confirmation of a strongly positive feedback in the specific humidity parameter λq of 2.04W/m/K. However, they did not calculate an uncertainty for this value, raising the question of whether the results are distinguishable from the null hypothesis of no water-vapor feedback.”
This is a key issue and one should remember that Paltridge et al have examined the AIRS data and found a completely opposite finding to what Dessler’s team have. Then there are clouds; Ramanathan found that clouds have a net cooling effect using ERBE back in 1989;
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/243/4887/57
And then there is the issue of the decline in pan evaporation. Dessler’s results are very suspect.
Some of you loons should read the scale on the NASA map/activation before rabbiting on stupidly about “no CO₂” over this part or that part of the world.
The variation is only ∓ 1% from the median. That means, for most purposes, CO₂ is very evenly spread around the earth.
Ranting how this shows there can be no AGW because bits of the earth are missing CO₂ coverage just makes you look like an idiot.
From this study a few things are not clear to me:
1. That more warming means more water vapour is nothing new and a very obvious effect of warming. Warming causes evaporation and warm air holds more moisture.
2. But water in the atmosphere changes phase and can form clouds also. Does more evaporation form more clouds? It should – the same logic as more waming means more water in the air.
3. The study says “AIRS measurements of water vapor reveal that water greatly amplifies warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide.” Of course but where is the study which directly links more CO2 and more water vapour? Its not there is in that article anywhere.
4. Adam Soereg (13:32:17) : has pointed out that the global absolute humidity is going down, with a very prominent decrease at mid-tropospheric levels (500 to 300 hPa).
here: http://www.climate4you.com/GreenhouseGasses.htm#Atmospheric%20water%20vapor
and here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/
So observations dont even match up with what should logically happen
5. the staudy states that “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,..” – there is absolutely no evidence of that. In fact the temperature trends fall outside the ±95% uncertainty intervals, on the lower side, of the IPCC projections.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/gisstemp-for-november-0-68-c/comment-page-2/#comment-28299
All in all this doesnt add up.
Water vapor as feed back? It was but a few months ago warmists were claiming water vapor was responsible for that devilish cold that seem to be attributable to AGW.
Olle (11:27:18) :
http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2009/12/14/another-defection-from-warmism-un-ipcc-coordinating-author-dr-philip-lloyd-calls-out-ipcc-fraud/ hello!!!!
You have to read this!!!
Is it saying what its really saying???? And this is written BEFORE “climategate”!
URL corrected
Ryan (12:13:44):
The Earth glows in mid-Infrared because it’s a few hundred Kelvin. How did it get a few hundred Kelvin to glow in mid-Infrared in the first place? Sunlight. Almost all of sunlight’s energy is visible light (~1/2), UV and near-Infrared (the rest). CO2 AND water vapor just happen to be /transparent/ in light and much near-Infrared (just like all the other atmosphere gasses) while blocking much mid-Infrared. I see that you are in control of my dial. I like /my/ greenhouse effect firmly between ‘Ice Age’ and ‘The Ocean Is In My Pantry’ thank you.
Read about blackbodies and greenhouse gases.
And some food for thought: Metros/subways and trains make 10 times less emissions per person than cars. And by 2020 China will be kicking our ass. You will be able to go on thousands of miles of 220mph high speed rail – the first thousand kilometer line opening next week. I don’t want China kicking our ass while they’re still a not developed-yet country!
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 cause warming of our climate
Of course, Dessler thinks it does:
warming produced as carbon dioxide levels rise will be greatly exacerbated — in fact, more than doubled — by water vapor
And, of course, the RAOB data, suspect as it may be, indicate a half century
of DECREASING humidity.
@richard (14:41:13) :
Here is a paper that Dr. Spencer presented to the same AGU panel that shows that you can see Higher temps make more clouds and that reduces temp from Satellite Data. Here is the link to his paper:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/satellite-and-climate-model-evidence/
And here is the PP presentation from the Fall 2009 AGU meeting:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Spencer-Forcing-Feedback-AGU-09-San-Francisco-final.pdf
Michael (10:59:49) :
In case you hadn’t noticed Michael. Peter posts here under his real name.
DaveE.
As someone who lives in a tropical area a few hundred metres from the sea, I have always been puzzled by the theory that more water vapor causes higher temperatures. Is it a coincidence that the major centres of science don’t appear to be by the sea, but inland? Do these scientists have no practical knowledge of what actually happens?
This is my experience, but it can be validated simply by comparing the daily temperatures of seaside areas with corresponding latitude temperatures of inland areas.
The seaside areas usually have quite even temperatures within a smaller range between cold and high. In our area, summer and winter, there is not much difference. Lowest temperature is about 14 deg, highest about 30 deg celcius.
Yes it can be knee bendingly humid at times. However, after a week of cloudy skies, and high humidity, the temperature does not get hotter, it actually gets cooler! When the cloud goes and the sun shines directly, there is a day or so of even higher humidity, as the sun dries out the land, and then it settles back into normal tropical just hot n humid.
But take a look at the inland temps of towns at the same latitude. They get much hotter during the day, and much colder during the night.
Absence of water vapour means higher temperatures, and higher extremes.
That’s just my take on the whole science of the amplification feedback theory … and I am not on the payroll of anyone, just retired.
RE: oneuniverse (14:05:36) :
How did NASA come up with that?
This NASA page on AIRS findings shows 3 papers finding that the models disagree with AIRS observations w.r.t. water-vapor, and 2 papers (including Dessler’s) finding that the models agree well with observations:
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/science/major_findings/climate/
It also has another paper finding that “the apparent good agreement of a climate model’s broadband longwave flux with observations may be due to a fortuitous cancellation of spectral errors.”
The most comprehensive seems to be Pierce et al. 2006, which finds that the models significantly overestimate upper-tropospheric water vapor, and underestimate it for the lower troposphere.
_____________________________________________
So that gets us back to the old “our methods might be crap but we get the right results so this makes good science” argument. Correlation of net effects from complex models does not make good science… according to the Wegman Report at least 🙂
Steve (14:57:55) :
A doubling of the primary warming by the water vapour feedback is perfectly consistent with empirical and theoretical understanding and observation.
If the water vapour response to 1 oC of atmospheric warming is 0.5 oC, then the total feedback (amplification) is 1/(1-0.5) = 2 oC. In other words a doubling as Dessler indicates. If it is 0.6 oC then the net warming from a 1 oC pimary rise with feedbacks is (1/(1-0.6) = 2.5 oC.
This doesn’t lead to a “runaway” effect, obviously.
I suspect that the RAOB data (which I’m not familiar with; can you clarify a source for this please) concerns relative humidity and not absolute humidity. There’s pretty incontrovertible evidence that absolute atmospheric humidity is risen dring the last several decades. In fact it rises and falls as the atmospheric temperature rises and falls (e.g. it’s decrease is measured following major volcanic eruptions); see references in my post [foinavon (14:17:30) ]
taxtrumpet (11:22:29) : “Is the greenhouse concept a bad model for thinking about the atmosphere?”
The Earth’s atmosphere is pretty much the opposite of a real greenhouse. The inside of a greenhouse is warmer than the outdoors because the building inhibits the mixing of inside air with outside, i.e. the process of convection.
Our atmosphere, however, is turbulent, always on the move, constantly transporting heat energy from warmer to cooler areas. The so-called “greenhouse” gasses don’t warm the atmosphere by inhibiting this mixing, but by slowing the radiation of heat energy to space. The radiative effect of a real greenhouse is negligible, as can be shown by making one out of materials that don’t block infrared radiation.
The only thing the so-called “greenhouse” gasses have in common with a real greenhouse is that the net effect of both is warming.
To see the effect of a “real” greenhouse on a model planet, see Willis Eschenbach’s “Steel Greenhouse” article here on WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/
OT but Sir David King was just on BBC Newsnight in front of a small audience to try to convince them of the science, given that polls show 50% of UK people are unconvinced.
Someone asked him about CRU emails, and his reply was words to the effect, “you have to ask yourself their motives, as these emails go back 10 years so someone was gathering them all this time, only to release them now… and also bear in mind this was a highly sophisticated hack, so who did it, a highly skilled foreign service.. ?”
I don’t know what I found most insulting to the audience’s intelligence, his cock and bull story that CRU was hacked 10 years ago and their communications have been monitored ever since, or the scientist who came on to prove global warming using two plastic bottles with water, one with and one without CO2, being heated by a couple of lamps.
Anyway, the way Sir David King avoided the question and spun a yarn about highly sophisticated hacking by foreign secret services…. my wife said he came across as sinister.
And furthermore, it is because seaside areas have such benign climate, that there is a large movement of the population to these areas, called “The Seachange Syndrome” in Australia, with TV series devoted to illustrating this trend, and much social commentary on it. People are called “Seachangers” and so on.
Australia is a good country to study the differences between seaside areas (plenty of water vapour) and inland areas (totally dry with no humidity), as it does not have hugely high mountain areas as the US and other countries do, and the countryside is about the same level wherever you go inland.
@foinavon: 13:04:08 ” positive feedback is essentially a positive amplification”
No, positive amplification means that the input is made greater by some factor to produce a greater output, but is not fed back to the input again. Positive feedback means that the output is returned to the input in such a way as to aid the original input to make a larger output which then feeds bacxk again to the input to make a yet larger output thus becoming unstable. That is exactly what is being suggested with the water vapour. Warming causes the oceans to evaporate which releases more water vapour, water vapour is a greenhouse gas so more warming occurs (that isn’t actually what a greenhouse gas does but nevermind), this causes more evaporation which then causes yet more water vapour causing more warming causing yet more evaportation until the whole thing becomes unstable.
It doesn’t actually matter in a positive feedback system how big the positive feedback is – because the effect will simply rotate around the feedback system getting bigger and bigger until it was first noticeable and ultimately disastrous.
However, since the logic of this would hold equally true without CO2 involved, then the earth’s climate would already have hit an unstable point which would have wiped out life on earth. Since this has not happened we can clearly see the presence of a positive feedback mechanism involving water vapour can be dismissed, and since this has held true over a long time and with a variety of different climatic conditions since the over millions of years we can futher suggest that water vapour impact on climate must be inherently stable and thus must introduce a negative feedback mechanism – i.e. any increase in water vapour is likely to produce an effect that opposes the effect that originally caused the increase in water vapour.
The fact that neither you nor the subject of this thread can appreciate the lack of logic in the concept of water vapour having a positive feedback effect says a lot about the knowledge of both of you. Biologists understand positive feedback, so to physicists, mathemeticians and evolutionists. So why do climate scientists sturglle with this simple concept?
Stefan (15:22:42) :
I just watched David King on newsnight too
He neither said that the emails were hacked 10 years ago, nor did he he “spin a yarn about highly sophisticated hacking by foreign secret services”.
perhpas you should go back and re watch on your IPlayer
On the conjunction of NASA and Andrew ‘Positive Feedback’ Dessler. A year ago Dessler was calling for the removal of NASA chief administrator Michael Griffin for some incautiously skeptical remarks about climate change:
http://www.grist.org/article/What-to-do-on-day-one/
Shortly afterwards Griffin was gone, replaced by Obama’s appointee.
Well this is getting tiresome. Read Wentz et al SCIENCE July 7 2007, “How Much More Rain will Global warming bring ?”
Bottom line a 1 deg C rise in mean global surface (lower atmosphere) temperature gives a 7% increase in total global evaporation MORE WATER VAPOR DUMMIES, and a 7% increase in total atmospheric water; MORE WATER VAPOR DUMMIES, and a 7% increase in total global trecipitation. MORE WATER DUMMIES.
Wentz et al didn’t say so in their paper, but where I grew up, we had a bsolutely perfect climate so none of this mattered much; but we still had a tradition that when we got precipitation such as rain hail, snow, sleet etc, we had a high preference for having clouds at the same time; so wouldn’t it be amazing if a one deg C temp rise a la Wentz et al also caused an increase; like how about 7% +/-7% in precipitable cloud cover, to go along with the 7% increase in precipitation.
Water vapor caused greenhouse warming will cause more water vapor; even in the total absence of CO2 or any other GHG.
So get off this water vapor feedback kick. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, that can cause warming, and it can cause cooling too, and it can form clouds to cut off the warming if it gets too much.
And I still believe it is true that water vapor always exceeds CO2 in the atmosphere, so water vapor is a PERMANENT CONSTITUENT OF THE ATMOSPHERE, just like CO2 is.
Give credit, where credit is due; water vapor causes greenhouse warming; and it doesn’t have to answer to CO2 to do that.
@ur momisugly Jason: “The Earth glows in mid-Infrared because it’s a few hundred Kelvin.”
Sure is. Which is roughly were it stays. About 293Kelvin, day or night. Whereas the moon varies between 3Kelvin and 400Kelvin depending on whether the sun is shining on it or not.
Thank goodness for those greenhouse gases! Now tell me why I should be so concerned about getting precisely the RIGHT sort of greenhouse gases? Oh – you believe in the great celestial thermostat where exactly the right types of gases in exactly the right proportions have been carefully mixed t make life on earth possible for eons. Get down on your knees and pray my son – you’ve just seen God’s signature written in the stratosphere. Funny, he’s not usually so obvious….
By the way trains don’t really emit less CO2 than cars unless….
you are comapring diesel trains to petrol cars.
the train is full both going and on return
you really want to go from C to D and not from A to B.
You forget that the first carriage of a train needs to be built to take the strain of the following carriages which is why….
… they are really very heavy and the ticket is strangely expensive compared to taking the car.
You know, you really ought to write down some of these myths you believe in Jason. I reckon they’d make a good yarn if you joined them all together.
a leading greenhouse gas and a key driver of global climate change
To NASA, dogma is more impotant than science. It’s a dead give away.
This data seems to raise more questions which deserve analysis rather than an early conclusion that it supports the AGW models.
I don’t see how this shows anything “significant” at all. Surely no one believes that the atmosphere immediately mixes CO2 uniformly as soon as it is emitted. Didn’t the AGW models take account of wind. I think it’s been around for a few decades, at least since records began… at least long enough to build it into the models.
If the AGW models assumed it was uniform then surely that is a major weakness, especially given that latitude is a very significant factor in radiated heat impacting the earths temperature. But seriously if I half filled my bathtub with cold water and then turned on the hot tap and swished the water around while the tap was running would I expect to get the same temperature across the whole bathtub? No, I get hotter temps near the hot tap (which is why I move my ass to the other end of the tub!) but the general temp will be pretty close i.e. it’s not icy at one end and scorching at the other – there will be a temperature gradient. So surely the question is “what is the CO2 concentration gradient that we would expect to see around the earth?”. Then this could be used to see if that CO2 gradient per the model was correct.
They state “the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.”
The CO2 ppm range shown is 382 to 389 “with a sensitivity of 1 or 2 ppm” – a difference of less than 2% a relative;y low gradient I would have thought. The use of red and blue suggests a much steeper gradient. Is a 2% variance between the high and the low concentration really all that dramatic given that the industrial nations that are emitting most CO2 underpin the higher concentration areas, so one would expect to find a higher concentration there? Is it “lumpy” or is it not? What is the benchmark. Uniformity is not a very scientific benchmark .
Seems to me the “scientists” don’t really know what this shows or what causes CO2 dispersal let alone where the ‘sinks’ are.