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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rediculous that they claim to be able to reach any conclusion about the net water vapor feedback without accounting for clouds. Are they completely ignorant of what other scientists are doing?
“”” Ryan Stephenson (15:32:05) :
@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. “””
I have no idea where @foinavon ends, and Ryan Stephenson begins in the above, but positive feedback does not just keep growing and growing without limit regardless of the amount of feedback but it can.
If I have a positive feedback amplifier with a loop gain of 0.1, and I input a +1 Volt step, after a propagation delay, the feedback will return a +0.1 Volt step which will add to the input Volt; so after a further propagation delay, that will return an additional 10mVolt step to the input, which will subsequently give a 1 mVolt addition. Eventually after an infinite time, the total effective input will be 10/9 Volts, and the amplified output will be 10/9 times what it would be without the feedback, and the whole thing will be perfectly stable.
And water vapor does that to keep the earth at around 288Kelvins, instead of 255 or whatever the presumed black body equilibroium temperature is at the earth’s orbital distance from the sun. and moreover it would do that even in the complete absence of CO2 from earth’s atmosphere. The average amount of global cloud cover would likely be different without the CO2 but the average temperature won’t be much differnt from what it is now.
Water vapor is a green house gas; all greenhouse gases can cause warming, and global warming can produce increased amounts of water vapor, and also CO2 due to ocean outgassing.
So CO2 is also a feedback component just like water vapor is claimed to be; but both are permanent components of the earth’s atmosphere, with H2O always in excess of CO2 by a long way, and doing much more LWIR absorption by a long way,a nd much more atmospheric heating by a long way.
On the Positive feedback loop issue please look here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/04/when-is-positive-feedback-really-negative-feedback/
According to the good Doctor positive feedback in climate speak /= positive feedback in the engineering world (where the term originated). In the climate world a positive/negative feedback equates to an amplification/suppression of an expected effect (ex: an expected 1 deg increase would become 2 from a positive feedback, or .1 from a negative)
Tom Fuller (10:33:53) :
“But I missed something here. Exactly how does AIRS validate assumptions about water vapour acting as a positive forcing?
Are they measuring quantity? Distribution? Temperature of water vapor? The press release doesn’t say…”
Good questions. I haven’t had time to review the commentary, but I’d sure be interested in Roy Spencer’s comments on this study.
I wonder if this is another “science by press release” story. If so, has it been peer reviewed?
Ryan Stephenson (15:32:05) :
Not really Ryan. It doesn’t matter what you call it, the phenomenon exists. If one raises the atmospheric CO2 levels the atmospheric and surface temperature rises (all else being equal), and the atmospheric water levels will rise yielding an amplification (due to a feedback of the form T2 = T1 + (x/1-y), where x is the CO2-induced primamry warming and y is the water vapour feedback (T1 and T2 are the initial and final equilibrium temperatures). We can measure this in the real world.
This doesn’t cause an unstable system. The system just evolves towards a new equilibrium temperature (around which it fluctuates due to cyclic and stochastic variation in the climate system). One could also factor in albedo feedbacks due to sea and land ice melt which casues a further amplification and pushes the new equlbrium temperature a tad higher.
Of course one has to factor in natural variation that introduces interannual noise into the system. But persistent changes in forcings from whatever source (solar, greenhouse) with their associated feedbacks is expected to shift the earth’s temperature to new equilibrium temperatures (warmer or cooler), without inducing instability in the system.
I’m going to challenge this as being distinctly wrong headed.
What is the BB efficiency of atmosphereic gases vs the surface of the earth?
Seen an IR satellite image recently (pick your band/wavelength)?
An awful lot of you put way to much faith in the veracity of NASA science. NASA has been promoting fraudulent science for many years. Remember the ozone hole? NASA is just another organization of fraudulent government hacks that should be shut down. The EPA is another one.
I know some of you are going to say they do a lot of valuable work. Yes they do, but it could be done cheaper and more effectively in the private sector. NASA’a time came and went a long time ago. Shut them down. That includes GISS and every other part of NASA.
Just had a thought:
If the CO2 is distributed unevenly about the globe as per the graphic above what does this say about the levels of CO2 in the Antarctic and Greenland Ice cores? (sorry if someone has mentioned this as I have not read all 192 comments!)
This cannot be simply reproduced. Given the aims of this site, these data need to be interpreted. So, what does it mean? How does it make/unmake your point?
If $50 billion is offered to prove Man Made Global Warming, you gotta go for it.
If global cap and trade is introduced it will only be Other People who suffer.
The choice seems simple!
If that is CO2 over NA, then why is NA experiencing such a cooling?
Couple of questions:
1) I assume “blue” is lower concentrations of CO2. The blue region seems to be coincident with the extents of the tropical vegetation belt around the earth. Can one assume that this region depletes the atmosphere of CO2?
2) Assuming “red” is high concentrations of CO2, the northern and southern hemisphere yellow and red belts seem to be above 30 degrees latitude. Prevailing mid-troposphere winds are westerlies at these latitudes so how does one account for the highest CO2 concentrations being over the Atlantic, east of the US Atlantic seaboard and particularly, west of the Mexican Pacific coast? The troposphere has strong vertical mixinig to the surface so I would assume CO2 concentrations should be just east of their origin.
The biggest red blob is over the US desert southwest, stretching from Arizona to Oklahoma, a region that isn’t exactly a nexus of heavy industry. The map outline is a bit tough to read. Is there an animated sequence of these pictures? Maybe Mexico’s red blob is due to northeast trade-winds?
“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.”
This may be an indication that C02 is not long lived in the atmosphere. If it was, it should be more evenly distributed.
Is 3 to 7 miles above the Earth low level? As in low level clouds.
I would put no stock in the water vapour claims until we see the data. Nice water vapour animation (what is the scale and why didn’t they quote at least one number).
Dessler’s 2008 study (funded by NASA GISS) found declining relative humidity when temperatures declined (as a result of the 2007 La Nina) when relative humidity is supposed to remain more-or-less constant. Furthermore, the different trends in different levels of the atmosphere were also exactly opposite to that predicted in the models in this situation (but the fact that humidity levels changed at all were trumpeted as consistent with global warming but they were opposite to that expected).
I like the CO2 animation though. It does show there are a few more things going on than predicted.
foinavon,
Help me with understanding this: If water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and given it’s far more plentiful than CO2, why does one need to concern themselves with CO2’s minuscule contribution to positive feedback? Why can’t the system be entirely described using only water vapor as a first order approximation?
It just doesn’t sit well with me that CO2, a minor constituent gas of relatively mediocre greenhouse properties, can influence the behavior of the dominant greenhouse gas.
Please excuse my perspective. I’m an EE so I’m used to using positive and negative feedback as terms in understanding things in my world instead of “forcing”.
A ? for you foinavon:
Why would CO2 cause water vapor to be more plentiful but not other greenhouse gases, like say, water vapor?
Also, is the whole of the greenhouse effect logarithmic? Or just CO2?
If NASA doesn’t trust use satellite temperature why would they trust their CO2 machine?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!
I don’t believe anything NASA says anymore, they’re all a bunch of lying scum bucket socialists with their own agenda. That’s what they get when they cry wolf as much as they have in the last several years.
Steve Hempell (16:26:06) :
Just found the scale on the graphic.
“If the CO2 is distributed unevenly about the globe as per the graphic above what does this say about the levels of CO2 in the Antarctic and Greenland Ice cores?”
Not an issue.
I apologize if someone has posted this comment. But between the two hemispheres, the fact that far more land mass is in the Northern rather than the Southern hemisphere adequately explains the abundance of CO2 in the former. One does not need to add, or in this case trumpet alone, “population” as an explanation for CO2 differences between hemispheres. Any geologist understands this basic land mass premise. The article uses “population” as a spin term, not a scientifically valid explanatory term.
Further, if humans were not here, the CO2 wafting about would be even greater (when the oceans are warmer of course). We really are a rather puny species compared to other CO2 producing life.
The entire article can easily be dismissed as political spin. Too bad. An unbiased analysis of natural climate and weather components compared against AIRS CO2 data would be most valuable. I doubt anyone in NASA’s climate department has the guts to go there. After all, the folks that land there were rejected by NASA’s space program because they puked in the centrifuge. How’s that for spin!!!!!
Apparently, volcanic activity explains most of the carbon spots around the globe. It is rather odd the Northeast US has practically no CO2 over it, even though one fourth of the US population lives in the upper corner. These are seven year averages. Contrast the US Northeast to the tightly constrained and highly concentrated CO2 over the Gulg Stream in the North Atlantic Ocean. Any skeptic would have to question whether the warm ocean currents are the source of the carbon dioxide.
Also, the carbon dioxide distribution over the rest of the planet seems related to either active volcanoes known to be emitting large quantities of CO2, or over warm ocean water. For example, the CO2 concentration off the coast of Mexico coincides almost exactly with warm ocean waters.
To be consistent with the Warmers religion, they would simply blame humans for the CO2 without attempting to prove its origin. The Warmist logic seems to be that if there is CO2, it must be humans who are responsible. Yet any climatologist knows anthropogenic CO2 is only 5% of the world carbon budget. Nature is providing the other 95%, as is clearly seen in the CO2 distribution.
Better stop watering the lawn and irrigating the fields. And, since transpiration dominates the introduction of moisture into the air, I guess we should cut down all the trees as well.
I sorta feel like the drunk in “Independence Day” when the aliens finally show up. “I been sayin it and sayin it! CO2 is a globby substance that does NOT mix well!”
Pamela Gray (19:09:29) :
I didn’t puke in the centrifuge, but I did spray my drink from my nose reading that. Spin indeed!!