December 2009 UAH Global Temperature Update +0.28 Deg. C
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly fell back to the October level of +0.28 deg. C in December.
The tropics continue warm from El Nino conditions there, while the NH and SH extratropics anomalies cooled from last month. While the large amount of year-to-year variability in global temperatures seen in the above plot makes it difficult to provide meaningful statements about long-term temperature trends in the context of global warming, the running 25-month average suggests there has been no net warming in the last 11 years or so.
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers carried on the satellite radiometers.]
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 2 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 3 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 4 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 5 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 6 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 7 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 8 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 9 +0.422 +0.549 +0.294 +0.511
2009 10 +0.286 +0.274 +0.297 +0.326
2009 11 +0.497 +0.422 +0.572 +0.495
2009 12 +0.280 +0.318 +0.242 +0.503
Tom P
“The much cooler temperatures of 2008 will now continue to contribute to the smoothed trend line for another year.”
So why not stop your babbling, Tom, and do an ENSO correction on the UAH data set since 1998, run a linear trend line through it, and show us what is really going on.
Tilo Reber (13:38:25) :
You seem to be reluctant to place a bet one way or the other on Svensmark.
I have many a times opined that Svensmark’s theory [there were actually people before him with the same] does not match the data.
Two reasons:
1) the Earth magnetic field is a much stronger modulator of the GCRs than the Sun, and has varied a lot in the past, without matching temperature variations
2) direct measurements since 1951 show no long-term trend in GCRs
Svensmark et al. counter by positing that their cosmic rays are of such a special nature that their variations do not follow that of ordinary GCRs. Special pleading is a negative in my book.
But, the jury is still out, and we will have to wait for his experiment to disprove the theory.
Invariant (13:38:39) :
Thus, the minimum in temperature may come 2.78 years after the solar minimum….
Do you agree Leif?
No, but it takes too long to explain why. Unless we have special thread for this.
Paul Vaughan (12:20:00) :
Here’s a clue for MJK
Too lame to drop ‘clues’. Explain yourself, clearly, if possible.
Nick Yates (13:56:13) :
Dr Svalgaard, sorry if you’ve answered this elsewhere, but what interval would you use?
Stick with his 13-month interval, but do it the same way as sunspots are smoothed: average over one year, then over another year starting one month later. Then average those two averages. That gives only half weight to the months that are 13 months apart.
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2010
kwik (14:00:10) :
Aha, now I see it. Instead of plotting all years from 2003 on left side to 2010 on right side…..as was done at first…its now suddenly plotted on top of each other. My mistake.
Very, very nice stuff! Thanks, UAH.
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2010
Paul Vaughan (14:00:43) :
Murray (13:05:07) “[…] cute curves. Could you provide some labelling so us less gifted guys have some idea what they are trying to tell us?”
Think of it [very loosely speaking] as an index of radial acceleration of the ‘inner’ solar system relative to the ‘outer’ solar system, as viewed from a reference point at the north pole of the sun. Btw: This has nothing to do with TSI, sunspots, solar activity, etc. – this is about EOP (Earth orientation parameters). You can quickly derive the curve from NASA Horizons (online software) output. See the Russian literature, particularly Barkin & Sidorenkov for related ideas – note particularly Barkin’s challenges of conventional modeling assumptions that simplify math to make it tractable and Sidorenkov’s ideas about the hydrologic cycle (in the context of the Russian school of thought on zonal vs. meridional circulation regimes).
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2010
King of Cool (14:00:58) :
Regardless of the Australian numbers and disregarding Jo Nova’s raw data v BOM adjusted data, Tony Abbott is still correct in that there has been no discernable global temperature rise in a decade. If the WMO is still working where 2009 ranks globally presently at +0.44 deg anomaly plus or minus 0.11deg, I would say that after the NH December freeze that this number will go downwards rather than upwards.
But I guess after the Copenghagen debacle and the current NH weather Rudd is getting desperate to be able to hang his hat on something.
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2010
DirkH (14:08:17) :
“RobP (13:50:40) :
I think I am missing something here, but all this jumping around from month to month worries me. Temperature is only a measure of energy ”
Consider for a moment that a temp. of say 0 deg C is about 273K, so when it goes up by a degree that’s about a third of a percent.
For the radiation emitted into space, the absolute temperature is decisive. Seen this way, it’s not much jumping. It’s of course a colossal amount of energy nonetheless due to the sheer size of the planet. If you divide the radiated energy by the area of the surface it gets more manageable again; hundreds of Watts per square meter.
Shouldn’t make you worry all that much.
MJK (08:00:13) :
yaaaawn
What is the rationale when choosing what constitutes the “normal” temp. time period ? This is confusing to me. Why choose say 1961-1990 (instead of any other time period) ? and say “this year (whatever the year) “is the warmest since (whenever) compared to the “normal”.
It would be ineresting to see the results when using different “normals” and compare, will it produce different temp. trends?
Sorry that the rest of my post after:
“5
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2010
kwik (14:00:10) :
Aha, now I see it. Instead of plotting all years from 2003 on
”
was posted by mistake. Will a nice moderator perhaps help out?
UK is in a grip of freezing cold, but an expert from the Met office on the BBC news said : You HAVE to believe in the Global Warming (note: not climate change but GW). Even the Met’s own data shows that last couple of summers were at the level of those of 1770s (yes 1770s! ), average summer temperatures have risen by only 0.05 degree C / century, or measly 0.15 degrees in over 300 years. However winters have become considerably warmer (unfortunately not this one), increasing by nearly 0.4 degree C / century, or about 1.2 degrees.
Year Wnt Sum
1772 2.9 16.4
1773 3.8 15.9
1774 2.9 15.6
…………………
2007 6.4 15.2
2008 5.6 15.4
2009 3.5 15.8
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETt.htm
Any further warming in the winters could be only beneficial to the UK population by reducing heating bills and consequently less carbon consumed. It is ironic even if the ‘AGW’ was real, any reduction of carbon footprint, which HM Government intends to legalise, would be more than offset by necessity of increasing burning of fossil fuels for heating in the winter months.
syphax (08:09:50) :
Be careful not to eat one of your own in the frenzy.
How’s Phil Jones tasting?
Are the trolls really trying to tell us it’s getting warmer?
I’m keeping an eye on the great lakes, looking forward to watching them freeze over this year.
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/webcams/
OT but fascinating – saw this comment on James Delingpole’s blog
“Just got my Jan 2010 ecopy of Physics Today and I won’t be burning this one. It has an article on the “Hacked Climate Emails.”
To appreciate the significance of what they report, understand two things: (1) Physics Today is the flagship publication of The American Institute of Physics, an association of 10 academic societies, whose main reason for being is to promote public funding of academic research and (2) AGW is the biggest cash-cow they’ve ever seen.
They lead with a report of a conversation with a PR operator for one of the world’s leading environmental organizations who didn’t want to be quoted. He said he believed that they were on the verge of convincing the general public that they needed to make sacrifices in order to stop AGW, but all that ended on Nov. 20. “The e-mails represented a seminal moment in the climate debate of the last five years, and it was a moment that broke decisively against us. I think the [Climatic Research Unit (CRU)] leak is nothing less than catastrophic.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100021420/how-to-keep-warm-this-winter/comment-page-1/#comment-100123939
I have to admit, that I am totally non-plussed by either the 13 month running average, or the 25 month running average.
Consider the following simplistic situation:- The Earth goes around the sun in a 12 month cycle, and that annual trip results in a variation in earth temperatures, simply because of the radial runout of the orbit.
So let’s assume that there is no other weather/climate influencing effect. One might then expect the temperature to vary perhaps in some roughly sinusoidal cyclic fashion, and if one subtracts off some baseline reference to get anomalies, it too would seem to have an annual sinusoidal variation (remember we now have no other climate/weather effects.)
So now my anomaly curve is a fixed sinusoid, that repeats year after year.
So if I now take the annual average of those monthly numbers, I get exactly the same number each and every year, or month, so my graph is a horizontal straight line, If I take a 12 month average, and also if I take a 24 month average, so absent any weather/climate other than sun TSI, I have a perfect zero anomaly curve that never changes.
Ok, so now we change to a 13 month or for that matter a 25 month running average, instead of 12/24.
Well now the set of data points contains a single data point added to a full year or two years of data, and that single data point we added, itself is known to have a 12 month sinusoidal amplitude variation, so about 1/13 or 1/25 of the monthly cycle deviation, is now added to our former flatline, and we now obtain a sinusoidal looking cyclic variation, that is a small fraction of the original annual cycle due to TSI variation (or whatever).
So taking a 13 or 25 month running average has now introduced an apparent signal that does not in fact exist. My anomaly graph is a dead flat line, and now it has grown a spurious sinusoidal noise; for no other reason than the period of my running average, not matching a known cyclic variable interval.
Now throw in real climate/weather variations, and use the same asynchronous average, and that spurious noise has to still be there fouling up the true climate/weather signal.
Or am I simply all wet again ?
I don’t get it.
Watts widget rocks.
Hey trolls, go out on main street and start telling people it’s getting warmer. What do you think the reaction will be? Tell them skeptic scientists are hiding the warming by manipulating data to make it look like the earth cooling.
Go tell those pensioners in the UK who have been dying from cold in the winter in increasing numbers over the last two years that they’re wasting time buying books and burning them. Go tell the people in India and Bangladesh they can sleep outdoors and everything is fine. Tell the Florida farmers to sleep good at night and not be busy trying to save their crops from freezing. Go tell the farmers that had a short growing season this past summer. Go to New Zealand where winter lasted extra long this year. Go to the mountains for Peru where winters have been longer over the last 4 years and increasing numbers of people are dying from the cold.
You shouldn’t be hanging out here because your comments are useless here. We are listening even less than all the people I just listed. We’ve seen the data and we know what’s really going on. But maybe that’s over your heads to understand.
Ralph (11:10:19) :
Wind Power.
And don’t expect wind power to keep you warm when we get these cold events. This is a record of the wind speeds in the Irish Sea (where many of the UK’s windelecs reside) for the last 7 days (when it was bitterly cold).
http://coastobs.pol.ac.uk/cobs/met/hilbre/getimage.php?code=5&span=2
Any wind speeds below 5kts will not produce any appreciable power. So with Gordon Brown’s new push for wind power, we would all be freezing and dying by the thousand.
Are these politicians just stupid or deliberately evil??
Why use “or” – could be “and”.
Tom P (13:38:12) :
As to to the more important question of why Dr Spencer suddenly changed from a 13- to 25-month average, as I wrote yesterday:
“The much cooler temperatures of 2008 will now continue to contribute to the smoothed trend line for another year.”
Or as Leif Svalgaard more explicitly put it today:
“Changing to a 25-month smooth will henceforth be known as ‘Roy’s trick to hide the increase’ …”
Why don’t you ask Leif to show you how to drive the ‘R’ package you downloaded from Steve McIntyre’s site so you can do it right? 😉
I find it amusing that those who always complain about cool-heads using short term trends to show cooling, now want Roy Spencer to go back to 13 month averages to show that last itzy bitzy bit of warming before global temp plunges to a new decadal low, which it surely will once el nino abates, given the loss of ocean heat content and the high outgoing LW situation.
AdderW (14:35:34) :
What is the rationale when choosing what constitutes the “normal” temp. time period ? This is confusing to me. Why choose say 1961-1990 (instead of any other time period) ? and say “this year (whatever the year) “is the warmest since (whenever) compared to the “normal”.
It would be ineresting to see the results when using different “normals” and compare, will it produce different temp. trends?
Possibly because it covers the peak period when the baby boomers were young, free, and in love… of the glorious salad days of their youth when all was right with the world… who would want to return to such days of peace and joy…
Vukcevic. Re the UK winter temperatures: Like a lot of what passes for climate science these days it all depends on where you start counting from. The Met Office are little more than a bunch of liars, I’m afraid, because they don’t tell you the whole story. Take a look at this for example http://climate-graphs.co.uk/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=4 It shows that the past 20 years of UK winters shows a flat line in temperature, 20 years! What I’ve done is to cherry-pick a start date, but that’s all everyone does.
That link doesn’t quite work, so go on to CET, then type in 1989 to 2009 on HADCET (under Series) and Winter (under Scope)
Leif:
2) direct measurements since 1951 show no long-term trend in GCRs.
I’m sure that you know that when you turn the heat to a certain level on a kettle of water that the water will continue to warm for some time after you have introduced the heat – even if you keep the heat level. And I’m sure that you know that the oceans are a very big kettle of water. There was a large change of GCRs before 1951. So why couldn’t the oceans take some time to catch up with that change. The whole thing also being modulated by PDO of course.
“But, the jury is still out, and we will have to wait for his experiment to disprove the theory”
You seem to be fairly certain that it will be disproven. So I think we have your bet down for the record. You think that poor Svensmark doesn’t have the talent of a group of expert solar physicists producing solar cycle predictions that are all over the map.
Here’s another clue:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/fSAM_fAAO..png
Maybe I’ll elaborate if the funding comes through…
How about some error bars on that pretty graph?!
tarpon wrote: “The tropics are warm … that’s laughter you hear … in SWFL, we been freezing cold the last week with a hard freeze predicted by the weekend locally.
Send some global warming our way, Floridians are not used to below 40F weather. The orange growers are going nuts trying to harvest crops.
The gulf water is getting so cold, fish kills are eminent.”
So does this mean a cooler gulf stream over the next year? If so we are presumably looking at a colder western Europe and more Arctic Ice, i.e. less summer melting during 2010. If I was an alarmist I would start talking about feedback mechanisms and how we are all doomed.
It’s so cold in Chicago Lake Michigan is starting to freeze over.
Pretty soon, Chicagoans will see a white bear coming ashore from off the ice, and his name won’t be Brian Urlacher.
If Mount Mayon erupts and ejects a significant amount of ash high enough, Lord, it could get cold.
UAH annual ranking update, 2009 is 7th warmest:
1998 #1
2005 #2
2002 #3
2007 #4
2003 #5
2006 #6
2009 #7
2001 #8
2004 #9