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
Alessandro (17:36:04) :
Leif, I maintain there is no single, definite trend in the temperature data. If you want the world to believe there is one, and even a catastrophic increase, no less, then the burden of proof is on you.
All I’m saying is that it is bad practice to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Tilo Reber (15:13:14) :
There was a large change of GCRs before 1951.
Indeed, as this graph shows: http://www.leif.org/research/CosmicRays-GeoDipole.jpg
Trouble is that the temperature graph doesn’t look like this. You can, of course, postulate that the oceans introduce a 23456 year lag [a very BIG kettle, indeed]/
Bart (18:53:05) :
I’m not getting all of the complaints about a 25 month running average.
Any amount of smoothing will result in a reduced trend. How about a 1,000,001-month trend?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology points out in its announcement re 2009 being the second hottest year ever that “An unusual winter-time heatwave occurred during August over large parts of inland Australia and resulted in Australia’s warmest August on record.”
See … http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20100105.shtml
August was also the month that the BoM web data suffered a “bug” that needed an upward correction of almost .5 degrees C for all its land station temperatures in Western Australia and, as far as I can ascertain, the other half of the country as well. Allow me to indulge by copying some of my post on WUWT several weeks ago:
Last week while updating my website (http://www.waclimate.net) with temperatures for November, I noticed something peculiar about August 2009 on the BoM website. The mean min and max temps had all gone up by about half a degree. Below are the min and max temps for the 32 WA locations I monitor, with the BoM website data at the top as recorded from Sep 1 to Nov 17, and below them the new figures since then …
August 2009
Albany
9 16.2
9.4 16.6
Balladonia
5 20.7
5.5 21.1
Bridgetown
5.7 15.7
6.2 16.1
Broome
14.6 29.2
15.1 29.7
Bunbury
8.2 16.7
8.7 17.2
Busselton
8.7 17
9.2 17.4
Cape Leeuwin
11.8 16.2
12.2 16.6
Cape Naturaliste
10.5 16.7
11 17.1
Carnarvon
11.4 23.2
11.8 23.6
Derby
15 32.7
15.6 33.2
Donnybrook
6.7 17.2
7.2 17.6
Esperance
8.3 17.7
8.8 18.1
Eucla
7.9 21.5
8.4 21.9
Eyre
4.3 21.6
4.5 22
Geraldton
9.5 20
10 20.5
Halls Creek
16.1 32.6
16.6 33
Kalgoorlie
6.8 20.3
7.2 20.7
Katanning
6.1 14.7
6.5 15.1
Kellerberrin
5.3 18.6
5.6 18.9
Laverton
7.5 22.4
7.9 22.9
Marble Bar
13.8 31.1
14.3 31.5
Merredin
6.1 17.7
6.5 18.1
Mt Barker
6.8 15.6
7 15.8
Northam
6.2 18.4
6.6 18.7
Onslow
13.8 27.7
14.3 28.1
Perth
8.8 18.5
9.3 18.9
Rottnest Island
12.4 17.3
12.9 17.7
Southern Cross
4.6 18.1
5 18.6
Wandering
5.3 16.1
5.6 16.6
Wiluna
7.5 24.8
7.7 25.2
Wyndham
18.3 34
18.8 34.4
York
5.6 17.9
5.9 18.3
I’ve questioned the BoM on what happened and received this reply …
“Thanks for pointing this problem out to us. Yes, there was a bug in the Daily Weather Observations (DWO) on the web, when the updated version replaced the old one around mid November. The program rounded temperatures to the nearest degree, resulting in mean maximum/minimum temperature being higher. The bug has been fixed since and the means for August 2009 on the web are corrected.”
I’m still scratching my head because the bug only affected August, not any other month including September. Also, there’s no change to the August data on the BoM website and they’re still the higher temps. So if anybody has been monitoring any WA locations at all via the BoM website, be aware that your August temperature data may be wrong, depending upon whether you recorded it before or since Nov 17, and it’s not yet known what’s right and what’s wrong.
BoM data now shows that across Australia the August 2009 mean was 2.47 degrees C above the 1961-1990 average they use as a baseline, the previous high being in 1998 when August was 1.49 degrees C above the average. July 2009 was 0.78 degrees C above the average (9th warmest since 1960) and September 2009 was 1.22 degrees above average (11th warmest since 1960), so August was outstanding.
Based on these homogenised figures from BoM, August was the hottest its been since 1910 across Australia, but it should be noted that the August data originally had a bug that had to be corrected with an increase of about .5 degrees C – presumably with a small influence on the national annual average as well.
Incidentally, since the bug was fixed in mid-November, average maxima at all Western Australia locations have been very high.
Leif Svalgaard (19:54:18) :
Any amount of smoothing will result in a reduced trend. How about a 1,000,001-month trend?
should have been [for the nit-pickers] the trend in a 1,000,001-month running average.
I hope that someday we get back to the times where talking about the weather is small-talk.
RobP:
Ocean Heat Content (OHC) – important enough to have its own acronym – is a hot topic.
The ocean stores approximately 1000x more heat than the atmosphere.
In terms of movement of heat from the equator to the poles, they (atmosphere and ocean) both move about the same amount of heat – surprisingly enough.
The Argo fleet of 3000+ sensors measures the temperature and salinity around the world’s oceans down to a depth of 2km. But they have only been in place the last few years, the first of them were deployed in the late 90’s.
And below 2km there is still little data.
Roger Pielke Sr has often commented on his blog about ocean heat so a good place to go looking.
Two recent comments on ocean heat:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/guest-weblog-by-leonard-ornstein-on-ocean-heat-content/
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/12/29/comment-from-josh-willis-on-the-upper-ocean-heat-content-data-posted-on-real-climate/
You can’t play this month-to-month game with UAH data, when we know that there’s a confirmed annual instrument signal in the UAH data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/19/christy-on-questions-about-uah-seasonal-signals/
JER0ME (19:33:08) :
“Roy Spencer is not an AGW alarmist pft. Those temperatures are the most accurate that he can produce.”
I thought he was using their numbers. “In fact, Dr Roy Spencer has just posted the December anomaly from UAH:”
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/?p=2705
Which means, I believe, that Spencer did NOT “produce” them. He is therefore constrained to work with the numbers they provide, and it is that data that I don’t trust. I in no way mean to criticize Spencer, as should have been clear from what I wrote, and the fact that he is using already processed data, thereby not being responsible for whatever errors it may already contain.
Just to play skeptic of skepticism …
Every anomaly in 2009 (global/tropical/extratropical sh & nh) is positive.
With the sun as quiet as it has been for as long as it has been, wouldn’t it be reasonable to see some negatives posted if there is nothing to AGW?
Fun headlines: click.
It’s not climate change, it’s only weather… everywhere.
Webcam from the good ole’ south in North Carolina.
You have to appreciate the geography of the SE to understand how hard, in our modern warm period, it is to get this to do at such a low latitude.
Granted, this shot is from 5000 feet…but this cold outbreak is producing some remarkable constant upslope snows for many days now.
And relatively frigid temps. Current? 7 degrees F.
This is a “ski” resort where I learned to ski in the late 1970s as a kid.
The weather they are getting now is similar to the winter weather patterns of that same time period….ones that gave the SE US “ski resorts”, despite the steamy balmy Gulf of Mexico to the south, an opportunity to blossom.
Shades of the late 1970s??
http://www.highcountrywebcams.com/webcameras_Beech_Charlies.htm
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
RobP (13:50:40) :
Good insight Rob, back to core physics! You might be a late comer but your questions are very welcomed here.
Quoting Mann O Mann (20:55:23) : “….
Just to play skeptic of skepticism …
Every anomaly in 2009 (global/tropical/extratropical sh & nh) is positive.
With the sun as quiet as it has been for as long as it has been, wouldn’t it be reasonable to see some negatives posted if there is nothing to AGW?..”
True, there does seem to be a modest increase in “global” (however measured) temperatures. Why is this so?
is it urban heat island?
energy spill from increasing prosperity (as evidenced by the increases being virtually ALL confined to the northern hemisphere)?
noise?
general trend from the end of the little ice age as part of long term cycles that govern climate?
one thing it does not appear to be is CO2.
From about 1997 onwards, if this was a stock chart, you could make a case, based on technical analysis that this stock is headed lower. It is routinely making lower highs and lower lows. 1998 was the first high, with end of 2006/beginning of 2007 making a lower 2nd high, and the end of 2009 making a 3rd lower high. The low hit at the beginning of 2008 was lower than the low hit in 2004.
re: MY LAST, yonason (20:25:46) :
O.k., I see that Dr Spencer is actually responsible for the numbers, after all.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/about/
OK, I trust his honesty, but not most of the others. Still, that doesn’t mean I necessarily trust the instrumentation, especially when it disagrees with ARGO measurements.
Also, temperature isn’t a measure of latent heat, so just because something is hot (e.g, the 6000K space cloud we are passing through) doesn’t tell us enough information to know how much heat a region contains.
The average temp of earth is a meaningless concept for that and other reasons, and as honest as Dr. Spencer is, I still don’t trust numbers that don’t necessarily mean what they appear to mean.
Dan (15:35:32) :
Pretty soon, Chicagoans will see a white bear coming ashore from off the ice, and his name won’t be Brian Urlacher.
—————————————————-
Will it be the new offensive coordinator?
Mann O Mann (20:55:23) :
Every anomaly in 2009 (global/tropical/extratropical sh & nh) is positive.
Nope NZ December -0.3c giving a 2009 negative trend of -0.41c clearly Austral -pacifc trends are not ubiquitous
Bart (18:53:05) :
I’m not getting all of the complaints about a 25 month running average. The monthly data are plotted along with it, so nothing is being “hidden”. What’s the beef?
—————————————————-
Good question: where’s the beef?
What I am wondering is not about the validity of the beef as it can be seen there is no validity.
What I am wondering is what is the motivation for the beef?
———
I am also wondering (just wondering, so no one read more into it than that, please) if Roy Spencer put out the 25 month as a curve ball to see what people’s reaction would be. I’ve noticed in the past he likes to do things like that as with his satire web site The ecoEnquirer.
http://www.ecoenquirer.com/
does something smell like The Onion?
PA Seeks To Have Water Vapor Classified As A Pollutant
http://www.ecoenquirer.com/EPA-water-vapor.htm
pft (17:20:15) :
“… Thermometers on board can not direcly measure surface temperature.”
Is it actually “surface temperature” they are measuring? If so, that’s not going to tell you what the atmospheric temperature is. On a hot summer day the surface will be a lot hotter than the air. Go barefoot on the beach sometime, and then try to tell me the air is just as hot.
Also, how do they measure temps at different altitudes? How do they subtract out background, or even decide what “background” is?
Does anyone know of a good online ref., for how they do those measurements? It seems it doesn’t make much sense to debate the merits of something without knowing how it works, except that there do seem to be inconsistencies between the method when compared to others that suggests there may be significant problems that are being ignored. That may not be the case, but without a more detailed knowledge I feel perfectly justified in being suspicious, based on what other problems have been shown to exist, and yet which those charged with keeping the data are denying.
maz2 (19:46:33) :
BTW, Liberal Iffy is in Provence, France, sipping ice whine.
“And with a new low-pressure system — rather incongruously dubbed “Daisy” — set to move in”.
————————————————-
Well daisy if you do
scienceofdoom (20:11:14) :
Lets see.
A mole of water is about 18cc, while a mole of air is about 22.414*1000=22,414cc. That’s a factor of 22.414/18=1245.
BUT, the specific heat of water is about 4 times that of dry air, raising the number to 1245*4=4981 (about 5000 times greater)
For moist air that’s about 1/2, or 2500 times.
summary – the oceans store from 2500x to 5000x more heat than the air.
No?
Wouldn’t these readings be affected by changes in the inversion layers in the atmosphere. especially since 80 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water? Could the loopy jet streams be playing a role in changing the inversion layers?
Do you folks who think an incline is being hidden honestly believe it is getting warmer?
Look out the window.
Then send a box of used books to a pensioner in the UK.
Then start waxing your skis for those longer skiing seasons that Australia and New Zealand have been having.
Then go to the Andes in Peru and talk to the indigenous folk about the longer winters they’ve been getting the last four years.
Then go to China and dig out a snowed-in motorist.
Then go to Russia and talk some sense in to Putin about him wanting to stop all snow coming to Moscow—tell him to look out the window like you did.
Then go to the US Midwest and ask the farmers about last summers growing season.
Then go to Seoul and see the largest snow storm ever on record.
Then look at this map:
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/7day/us.html?c=maxtemp,mintemp,lowmax,highmin,snow
etc, etc
CORRECTION
” yonason (22:40:30) : Your comment is awaiting moderation
summary – the oceans store from 2500x to 5000x more heat than the air.”
I meant, of course, per unit volume.
And while I’m at it I should mention a little caveat, in that there is about 38,000 times as much air by volume (before correcting for density); so after correcting for volume, and albido, and density, as well temp., and humidity gradients, etc., etc., that it’s not something that lends itself to easy estimation.