Guest post by Richard Keen, Ph.D.
To paraphrase Led Zeppelin, “It’s been cooling, I ain’t fooing…”
December was a chilly month across much of the U.S., and at my site (the NWS co-op station for Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado, NW of Denver at an elevation 8950 feet, or 720 millibars, December was the coldest December (and the coldest month of any name) in 27 years of record. The average of 16.5 was 0.8 degrees colder than December 1983. Over the entire record, nine months averaged colder than 20F; of these, five occurred during 1983-1990, none during 1991-2005, and four during 2007-2009. It appears that he warm spell of the 1990’s and early 2000’s has ended.
Here’s a chart of the past decade of annual temperatures
updating my post from a year ago. The recent cooling trend continues, with 2009 coming in at 38.9F, colder than 2008 and a full 3 degrees F colder than 2003. The “Tipping Point” in 2003-2004 is clear on the updated graph.
The longer record at my location
(Click to see animation)
shows the Tipping Point more dramatically through the miracle of animation. The added trend line is from a special “best fit Hockey Stick” code I found in some downloaded e-mails last month, although I had to alter the code to change the angle of the blade.
After last January’s post, someone commented on “Watts Up With That?” that (s)he “didn’t really think [Anthony Watts] couldn’t scrape up any less significant data”. I was heartbroken with the thought that my 10,059 daily max and min temperatures could be the least significant atmospheric observations ever made. So allow me to put the record from my particular station in perspective.
The site is about 60 miles from the geographic center of Colorado, and a couple of thousand feet higher than the average elevation of the state. The aerial photo of the site (marked by the red asterisk) looks to the northwest.
Following is a table of correlation between Coal Creek Canyon annual means and measurements of annual temperatures for the entire state of Colorado.
Correlation R between Coal Creek Canyon and:
0.92 NCDC Statewide Divisional average
0.89 GHCN and Hadley gridded temperatures (the two were so similar they were averaged together)
0.91 NCAR-NCEP Reanalysis gridded temperatures
0.95 Average of all three
These correlations are much better than those of any Bristlecones with that other Hockey Stick. Although there’s bristlecones a short hike from my house
I leave them alone. With a correlation R = 0.95. the Coal Creek station is pretty representative of the entire state of Colorado. Colorado, in turn, is in the Rocky Mountain and intermountain West, a region projected by the IPCC to have the greatest warming in the “lower 48” states – about 4C, or 7F, over this century.
According to the IPCC models, greenhouse gas warming should be greatest over continental interiors and in the middle troposphere, so Coal Creek Canyon is an ideal “global warming” monitoring site. How, then, is the projected 0.7F per decade warming coming along?
Since 1985, the overall trend has been +0.3F per decade, about half of the IPCC projection. Since 2000, the trend has been -3F per decade – four times greater than the IPCC projection, and in the opposite direction!
This is an example of how one station’s data can be significant for assessing climate change, but only if the station is carefully installed and maintained, is in a location relatively free of non-climatic influences, has records that are diligently kept, and, above all, does not have its records mysteriously altered. It would be instructive to see records from other observers who have quality records of long duration.
Richard Keen, Ph.D.
Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado
Dr. Keen,
I found your station listed at NOAA here:
http://www4.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-win/wwcgi.dll?wwDI~StnSrch~StnID~20004000
and the given Lat-Lon puts the station in the middle of a forest according to Google Earth. Is the location correct?
Also, I note that NOAA wants to charge for downloading any data. I clicked on the data links and they wanted $10 to $70 to download data which was surprising since I thought the data was now available for free.
pat 17:35:01
Tried to post a comment at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/labor-seizes-on-temperature-figures-as-evidence-of-global-warming/story-e6frg6xf-1225816209762 but it timed out. Perhaps they have server troubles and that’s why no comments.
The interesting thing is the use of an average from 1961-1990, and the use of Australia averages to prove global warming. I bet if a skept Are the 2009 average global statistics out yet? Does anyone know where to get the average Australian temps for the last 100 years, instead of a cherry picked 29 year period?
Australians need this info to combat the noise about to be eminating from the Labor party PR department.
“pat 17:35:01
Tried to post a comment at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/labor-seizes-on-temperature-figures-as-evidence-of-global-warming/story-e6frg6xf-1225816209762 but it timed out. Perhaps they have server troubles and that’s why no comments.”
It is interesting they still use the 1961 – 1990 average to compare. So what about the 20 years from 1990 to 2010? I guess that would expose the decline.
David Ball (19:24:18) :
Absolutely true, Population has doubled, actually, more than that! the area around me has grown considerable too. The Calgary Airport trend though is similar in respect to Okotoks, in that the last 3 years have also declined. However, there is no catastrophic warming going on, and the trend is slightly on the rise, however, time will tell what actually occurs here. I plan on contining my oberservations to see what trends occur.
Squidly (21:38:38) :
Meanwhile, in Al Gore’s home town, it was 9F this morning
It’s supposed to warm a little on Tuesday and Wednesday but by Friday it’s supposed to be even colder than today.
Wish we had cheaper electricity.
>>hotrod (22:37:13) :
Just for grins I pulled a little data from the links Dr. Keen gave me above.
REPLY>>
The Wunderground station KCOSUPER7 seems to have problems today (with the 68.0 max and the -4.0 min), and KCOLAFAY9 stopped recording at 7 am. So if you drop those stations the range of max temps is 46.5 F to 35.0 F and lows range from 23.7 F to 8.8 F. Of course, we’d have to see which ones have good siting. The Mesowest stations are all opertional grade, I think.
>>Richard Henry Lee (22:49:30) :
Dr. Keen,
I found your station listed at NOAA here:
http://www4.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-win/wwcgi.dll?wwDI~StnSrch~StnID~20004000
and the given Lat-Lon puts the station in the middle of a forest according to Google Earth. Is the location correct?
Also, I note that NOAA wants to charge for downloading any data. I clicked on the data links and they wanted $10 to $70 to download data which was surprising since I thought the data was now available for free.
REPLY>>Hi Richard,
Those Lat-Longs only pin the place down to a square mile. The site has forest to the north and meadow to the south (see the red star on the photo), There are some trees (aspens and small lodgepole pines) close enough to partially shade the shelter off-and-on in the morning and evening, and a nearby ridge exceeds 5 degrees elevation. The site is probably a 2 or 3 on the CRN scale, but it is quite representative of the montane environment.
Yep, NOAA charges civilians for some of their data. You can download it free from a .edu or .gov domain, so maybe you can find a university, school, or library to work from.
You guys are all missing the bigger picture here. Didn’t you see the animated hockey stick graph? It proves runaway global cooling even more than Mann’s proved runaway global warming! We’re all going to freeze to death, sometime around 2020!
And it’s all mankind’s fault too, though I haven’t yet worked out how we caused it. But I’ll figure out how to blame man soon enough. I’m an environmentalist!
Yes in noticed the KCOSUPER7 is highly suspect with both the high and low temps for the entire group, there are probably several in that group that should be tossed but only after doing a little research.
It is unfortunate that the general public has no appreciation about how much surface temperatures can vary over even relatively small areas like this sample. Not to mention site quality issues, instrumental precision issues and all the other considerations, such as smearing heat island corrections over hundreds of Km of ground to infill synthetic data were no real station data exists.
Your comments about the satellites possibly getting confused because their sample level happens to have big pieces of rock sticking up into it in mountainous areas only adds one other possibility that needs to be evaluated. If they have systematically removed high altitude reporting grounds stations and then might accidentally be reading sun warmed rock faces and trees instead of cold mountain air in the high altitude areas of the world, could be a major issue if it checks out. That would seriously skew high altitude temperatures to the warm side I would suspect.
The low correlation with ground truth is bothersome to me. Are you aware of any investigations into the possibility that they are seeing ground clutter temperatures rather than the lower troposphere air temperatures with the satellites ?
Larry
Damned weather here in England! We had -10 deg c here in Bournemouth last night – which is a popular summer beach town usually! We’ve got predictions of up to 10 inches of snow later today. Not good…
The Telegraph headline today: Met Office chief receives 25 pc pay rise
The head of the Met Office, the national weather service which has been heavily criticised for getting its forecasts wrong, is now paid more than the Prime Minister, after receiving a 25 per cent pay rise. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6931584/Met-Office-chief-receives-25-pc-pay-rise.html
A Met Office spokesman said Mr Hirst’s total pay had jumped because a “performance related bonus” from 2007/8 was paid in 2008/9. There was no underlying increase in salary, she said.
She said: “John Hirst’s salary reflected the need to bring in, and appropriately reward, skills to meet the significant opportunities and challenges in our weather and climate business.
So the worse your performance in the UK public sector the higher the bonus you can expect. Happy times. Note the “weather and climate business” bit. I actually used to think their primary role was to provide reliable weather forecasts as a public service. How times have changed.
eg Real Science: Aeronautical Science. Aeronautical engineer ensures principle of wing lift (higher pressure below wing and lower pressure above wing) is adhered to. Consequences: Passenger flies from A to B in one piece. eg Shit Science: Climate Science IPCC brand. Hopelessly biased commentator issues bulletin declaring a positive temp anomaly where there is in fact a negative. Consequences. IPCC BS agenda is advanced. Wantonly gullible general public further conned. Question: What be the consequences if the aeronautical engineer declared that wing design now promotes higher pressure above the wing instead of lower? Not going to happen. No smoke and mirrors to exploit here. Back to the BS brand of IPCC climate science where the revenue rip off is ripe for the picking.
btw: re SH summer. As our kiwi friends attest, NZ is having below average temps (There have been several mountain snowfalls) Australia has experienced High pressure belts across the central part that have driven north to north east winds into Perth and north winds into Adelaide and Melbourne to an extent. This migration of NT and desert air elevates temps in Perth and Adelaide, Melbourne as it always has. But the average Ozzie mug falls for the agw alarmist line that the above average temps in Perth et al are due to agw. The notion of low and high pressure driven wind, and how it carries heated air (simple as that concept is) as the real cause is not known to these people. No wonder the BOM has started the alarmist talk of runaway high temps, at the behest of every vested interest that wants to rip off a compliantly ignorant general public. btw: the eastern seaboard of Oz has been quite cool this summer. I tip a bumper ski season here with a breaking up of these stubborn blocking highs allowing some intense low pressures and cold fronts to dump a lot of snow in our mountains this winter.
Here are some headlines from the “You Could Not Make It Up” department.
Britain freezes in 2010
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240629/At-mercy-deep-freeze-Schools-shut-firms-hit–6-inches-snow.html
World freezes in 2010.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240319/As-Britain-told-expect-snow-10-days-rest-world-coping-Arctic-weather.html
2010 will be one of the warmest years on record?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1103094/Next-year-set-warmest-record.html
Methinks the media is becoming irrelevant.
.
Richard Keen & Alan Blue
“Don’t know why that is, but, for example, the el Nino year 0f 1998 was the warmest of the MSU record for the Colorado grid point, but for Coal Creek it was quite average.”
Still suspicious of the apparent step change in temperature in ’99 coinciding with the station location change. It the temp rise is an artifact of the location change, would a downward adjustment improve the correlation with MSU?
Also wondering about the sudden downward trend in 2004 coinciding with the change from min-max to MMTS measurement. Do these instrument changes generally agree without adjustment?
>>It looks like we must have gone overboard with the
>>fluorescent light bulbs and stuff…
In Britain we have. We have given out 200 million for free, due to a quirk in government Eco policy. Because I changed supplier, I have 50 sitting in a cupboard. Now how economical and Eco friendly is that??
http://www.google.nl/search?q=%22daily+mail%22+low+energy+light+bulbs+free&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Our government has tried to recreate the USSR’s command economy – telling us what is best for us – and they have delivered the same inefficiencies and stupidities if the USSR’s system. The latter, of course, collapsed in economic ruin.
.
>>They turned the air conditioners around & cooled
>>outdoors, simultaneously heating indoors! (not so far-
>>fetched if you look at the physics).
Its called a heat-pump, and many businesses use them. Most of the heat is just recycled (outside to inside and back again), but it could make the area around a building a degree or two cooler than ambient.
.
John Peter. Disgusting, and so typical of the UK today. Where my wife works, people get promoted when they’re incompetent because they don’t know what to do with them and can’t sack them. To stop them causing any more damage they shift them to a job (always up a peg) where they can’t cause any harm by their incompetence. I love England, but I really do think it’s rapidly going down the drain. We seem to have lost the plot. Even our football is imploding – watch teams go bust within the next year due to ridiculous wage bills. The Met Office are grossly incompetent, and completely indicative of the way things are going.
Not up on the UK Advertising Standards Authority site yet (it’s DB of decisions is updated each Wednesday), but according to
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/times_asa_wrong/
The Times has just had its knuckles rapped for false AGW advertising.
A general question: is anyone collating the averages of temperatures across the whole of a day? It seems to me that oftentimes a day which is a moderately warm 21C but for one brief maximum of 29 will be recorded as a hot day, and demonstrably warmer than a day which is consistently 25 from mid-morning to late arvo and which accordingly feels warmer.
“News” shows here in Australia are consistently telling me that last year was the hottest recorded: I doubt this, but it may be true (if I believe the BOM, as reported) that the recorded maxima have indeed been the highest.
I mangled my earlier comment. What I meant to say was : imagine if skeptics presented cooling in Australia as evidence of global cooling. There would be a lot of protest because it’s a region specific measuremen, and changes in the global average is what is measured. Yet warming in Australia is evidence of global warming, with no reference to the overall global temp for 2009.
I knew it wouldn’t take long…
before some bozo linked the current cold weather to “Global Warming”.
“Guo Hu, the head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, linked this week’s conditions to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article6975867.ece
OT:
More heavy snowfalls in the UK and on the BBC 1pm News Paul Hudson was allowed a whole 20 seconds to remind us that the Met Office’s forecast for this winter was as wrong as last winter’s and last summer’s.
Things must be getting really fraught backstage if even such a mild rebuke was aired.
See all the global warming in the US from yesterday 1/4/10
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/yesterday/us.html?c=maxtemp,mintemp,lowmax,highmin,snow
More weather is not climate news: High temps here have been 20f(~10c) below normal for a week, and appear to be continuing that for the next week. Low temps have been 10F(~5c) below normal as well.