Bob Tisdale shows us that GISS is once again, “way out there” in 2009 compared to other global temperature data sets. It is not surprising, we’ve come to expect it.
Was 2009 The Warmest Year On Record In The Southern Hemisphere?
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
Figure 1
http://i50.tinypic.com/alq6wy.png
Figure 2
The annual NCDC Land+Sea Surface Temperature anomalies from 1982 to 2009, Figure 3, also do not show the record levels in 2009, but the NCDC does not infill with the 1200km smoothing like GISS.
http://i45.tinypic.com/2h2ghdy.png
Figure 3
GISS has used OI.v2 SST data since 1982. Figure 3 is an annual graph of SST anomalies for the Southern Hemisphere, and it illustrates that 2009 was not a record year for SST anomalies. That leaves the GISS land surface temperature anomaly data as the culprit.
http://i50.tinypic.com/2eceu74.png
Figure 4
Hadley Centre data is still not available for December, and they’ve been running late recently. The NCDC and GISS data through KNMI Climate Explorer data should be updated within the next few days, so we’ll be able to do some comparisons and try to determine which of the continents is responsible for the new record GISS Southern Hemisphere temperatures.
SOURCES
OI.v2 SST anomaly data is available through the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite
The GISTEMP Southern Hemisphere Land Plus Surface Temperature data is available from GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/SH.Ts+dSST.txt
The NCDC Southern Hemisphere Land Plus Surface Temperature data is available here:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_ocean.90S.00N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
The UAH MSU TLT anomaly data was retrieved from the KNMI Climate Explorer:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
Posted by Bob Tisdale at 9:06 PM
JC (23:33:37) :
“Can someone explain why Niwa (NZ) has been saying since 1999 that the 1990s was the warmest decade ever in NZ.”
Not me, but even though there was a slight burp upwards in about 1990, it didn’t last, and overall temps have been dropping ever so slightly.
New Zealand temperatures from NZWN (Wellington International Airport), reported by Wolfam Alpha fit this DECREASING linear regression curve…
-0.019 deg F/y+-0.02 deg F/y
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+zealand+temperature
I think Terry Jackson (21:46:03) is as close as anyone to what the source is, BOLIVIA! Sing it with me now, OH HOW HOT DOES IS IT GET IN BOLIVIA…?
Stumpy
you are bang on the money mate. 2009 was not the coldest year in my 52 years in New Zealand, but the proxy data that I collect showed it to be a significant cold year, and a very long way from being the hottest year of the past three decades. The most ground frosts in the 1980-2009 period. Dr Jim Renwick of NIWA announced in 2007 that with rising global temperatures we should see a significant drop in frost numbers, even on the central plateau of the North Island (m.s.l. 600m/2,000ft). On that basis, down here near sea level on the Manawatu plains we shouldn’t even have frosts, and yet we had 36 last winter/spring. Mountain snowfalls in this region also hit a new record for the 1980-2009 period. Locally last Monday was the first day with a maximum above 25C. This is the fifth latest date for such an event in the last 55 years, and based only on T-Max 2009-10 is on track to be the 6th coolest summer here in that period.
So if the S.H. has just experienced the hottest year in the past 30, it was due to somewhere other than N.Z. By comparison with the north the S.H. is mostly ocean. When we look back over the SST Anomaly charts for last year some of the hottest parts in the S.H. were in the emptiest part of the Pacific below French Polynesia where there aren’t even any small islands.
What I really want to know is what do the people at GIS take to sleep well at night. As long as it is not toxic they should share it with the rest of us and keep their graphs to themselves!
Just finished reading AJStrata’s clear and clever post. This has filled in the gaps in my suspicions of what is actually wrong with the AGW theories. As a person who admittedly struggles with maths in the abstract, something about the methodology of collecting data from the earth’s surface seemed terribly wrong, apart from choosing to use data from weather stations heated by tour bus exhausts, air conditioner exhausts, etc which is a fraud in itself. When I became aware of the sampling method being progressively rigged to accept mostly warmer sites and leave out the cooler sites, my suspicions increased to near certainty that the entire surface temp-sampling methodology is plainly ridiculous.
Strata’s work, brief as it is, makes it crystal clear that AGW, let alone CAGW is a fraud. The amount they claim the planet has warmed is actually less than the noise in the data!
Even a Sixth Form student from the most dubious sort of college would not be allowed to proceed with a survey as badly designed and structured as this.
As a Kiwi temporarily domiciled in the UK, nobody I correspond with at home would agree that New Zealand has recently been warmer than usual and one of them remarked a couple of weeks ago in an dmail that the idea of any global warming from whatever cause is pretty to hard sell down there.
Good to hear some discussion of signal to noise in this thread. When you consider, hundreds of readings all subject to equipment and operator error, rounding errors, and to local changes such as urban heat effect, new buildings, airport runways etc. Then you consider that all these are “adjusted” as Anthony has demonstrated many times in the past, then they are averaged…
… and not an error bar in sight on any of these “average temperature” plots, no mention of what the standard deviations are, or the P values.. My PhD supervisor would have slapped me for producing a graph with no error bars. You would struggle to get a paper published in mt field (biological sciences) without a discussion of the P value i.e. what is the probability that this data was the result of chance?
Ian Cooper 00:18:44
You really don’t want to take what they are taking, as it clearly causes significant loss of cognitive ability….
Anthony,
You write –
“UAH by necessity uses a baseline starting in 1979, when data gathering first started.” I hate anomaly data, but that’s a personal preference.
Question: As the global number of reporting stations has dropped, did they also drop out the corresponding stations in the baseline period so that the anomaly changes each time there are more drop-outs? Or are they merely using a constant temperature subtraction year after year? The latter would be so, so wrong for the march of the thermometers.
Ah heck, I’m wrong again. I mean the land based global stations, not UAH satellite. Used the wrong part of your quote. Sorry, Geoff.
Veronica (01:26:14) :
Good to hear some discussion of signal to noise in this thread. When you consider, hundreds of readings all subject to equipment and operator error, rounding errors, and to local changes such as urban heat effect, new buildings, airport runways etc. Then you consider that all these are “adjusted” as Anthony has demonstrated many times in the past, then they are averaged…
Agreed!
People are freaking out day to day about the shocking headlines they read in the papers. No one realizes that the actual data these headlines are based on is so far within the margin of error that its just as likely to be noise as it is to be a detected temp change .
We had one such headline from NIWA ‘warmest decade on record’ a few weeks back. It turned up on the front page of all the main media outlets…. None mentioned that NIWA was talking about less than ONE TENTH of a degree C.
ajstrata (19:47)
Interesting post but misguided. Your blog correctly states that it is not possible to get an accurate global surface temperature from current data. In fact that is well understood by Climate Scientists. That is why they do not measure the absolute temperature at all, they measure the temperature change or variance.
Provided the methodology is consistent from month to month then you can accurately see how temperatures have changed over time. You do not need to calculate an absolute temperature at all.
There are lots of further questions over how their estimates of variance are calculated (data adjustments etc) but they are not addressed in your blog post.
Your final idea is a good one though – comparing surface temperature measurements with the satellite data. There are lots of papers on this subject if you care to Google a bit. In fact all the data is publicly available and it is very simple to calculate a variance from the satellite data and compare it with a variance from the GISS data – since 1979 at least.
They actually correlate pretty well, although the satellite trend suggests it is warming a touch slower than the surface stations but not so much that it invalidates the GISS methodology.
Graphs and links to data here:
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20surface%20and%20sattellite%20temperature%20estimates
I think the sceptic community needs to get over all this controversy with the surface station data. There are other much bigger and more important questions – in particular whether the climate sensitivites included in the IPCC models are correct. These are largely calculated from paleoclimate studies so the data from surface stations is irrelevent.
A recent study by some eminent climate scientists led by Steven E. Schwartz, including one from the NASA team, highlight the problems titled:
“Why Hasn’t Earth Warmed as Much as Expected?”
(good question!)
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2009JCLI3461.1
If you dig around you can find links to the full report – one in a comment here if I recall correctly.
This paper is remarkably clear of AGW spin and points out the urgency of finding more accurate estimates for the effect of Aerosols (air pollution) which are usually blamed by the modellers for the global cooling that happened 1940 – 1970. If the effect of aerosols turns out to be too insignificant to account for this period of cooling then the paper states that the climate sensitivity in the models must be too high.
Of course this is only one among a ton of papers on the subject, however it is refreshing that some climate scientists are prepared to stick their necks out and ask the question the rest of us have been asking ourselves for some time!
brc: You wrote, “The southern hemisphere is sparsely populated (compared to the NH) and about 50% ocean.”
Oceans occupy about 70% of the global surface area and about 80% of the Southern Hemisphere.
Peter of Sydney (19:02:12) : Is it just me? All these rises and falls in temperatures of mere fractions of a degree. So what?… If the temperature had risen by say 4 C over the past 100 years…
——————–
I agree. It would be interesting to see a poll asking the general public, unprompted, by how much the planet has supposedly warmed in the last century.
I suspect that the average response would be several whole degrees, assuming (quite reasonably) that fractions of a degree wouldn’t merit all the panic.
I don’t think that even someone who is fairly well-informed about world news generally but who hasn’t taken a particular interest in the temperature trends has a clue, let alone anyone else.
RE: GISS/UAH SH ‘discrepancy’
Are you sure that the ENSO lag is not playing some part in this, i.e. satellite readings don’t respond as quickly to El Nino development.
The surface temperatures started to rise much earlier in the year. UAH readings for the 6 months since July have been at record levels – higher than the same period in 1998. The SH surface (GISS) temperatures seem to have moderated while it’s not clear that has happened with the satellite temperatures. I think we need to look at the Jan/Feb numbers before jumping to conclusions.
This issue came up some months ago (June??) when UAH was recording near zero anomalies while GISS and Hadcrut anomalies were rising. I reckon there’s a good chance that by May or June, UAH will have recorded it’s warmest ever 12 month period (SH and NH).
ajstrata (19:47:43) :
“Hey folks, just finished a post which I believe provides proof (or at least a clear way to prove) the AGW theories are mathematically invalid.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/12246
Comments welcomed!
Good piece of work which illustrates the problems caused by our deterministically chaotic climate, even for such an apparently simple thing as measuring GMST.
Too few thermometers and too many assumptions = information not fit for purpose.
Your article needs a wider circulation.
boballab: You wrote, “I would hazard a guess and say it’s Africa since just about the entire middle section of that continent is devoid of data.” And you included a link to your video:
I would tend to agree over the past 30 years. I compared GISS land surface temperature anomalies to UAH MSU TLT anomalies back in June:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/part-2-of-comparison-of-gistemp-and-uah.html
Of the areas I was able to check, Central and Southern Africa had the greatest difference between the GISTEMP and UAH MSU linear trends:
http://i40.tinypic.com/1hb5sm.png
But in that comparison I extended the data across the equator, so it’s not exclusively Southern Hemisphere.
PS: Thanks for the link to the video.
John Finn: You asked, “Are you sure that the ENSO lag is not playing some part in this, i.e. satellite readings don’t respond as quickly to El Nino development,” then clarified that satellite data meant TLT.
Note the difference between the GISTEMP and NCDC data.
Also, this was a quick post, and with the differences in base years, I didn’t create any comparison graphs. There appear to be a few “shifts” in the GISTEMP data that don’t show in the other datasets. I’ll be looking at them in more detail in a follow-up post when KNMI updates.
Regards
You can check out the animated global weather patterns for the past
ten says here:
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/comp/cmoll/cmoll.html
Four frames = one 24 hour period.
This gives land & sea temperatures. Note how rapidly the day temperatures change as the sun warms the land. This is
especially obvious across Australia, the southern part of the
Indian subcontinent, Africa and South American.
I also thought that last winter here in South Africa was a bit longer and colder than usual, e.g. compared to the last 5 years. Most recently we are experiencing a lot of clouds and cloudiness, and cooler weather.
Just for interest sake: what is the margin of error for reading temperature, does anyone know?? And how did the margin of error develop of the century?
Ajstrata, I’m afraid there are some serious flaws in your article. For example,
“…The standard deviation in percent temperature change was 38.5%!… ”
No ! to do this correctly you have to first convert to the Absolute temperature scale, on which zero is -273.15 degrees C. This would make your percent SD much smaller.
Also, I am not at all sure about your statistical reasoning. In principle, it is perfectly valid to use the average temp for a cell, as long as the same method is used to find the average for each cell.
This is what statistics is all about, picking out trends and patterns from noisy data. That’s it’s whole purpose in life.
It’s true that the noisier the data, the less the confidence level of the calculated trend. But nevertheless a trend line CAN be calculated, and a confidence band put on it.
It’s also true in these records, as you point out, the SD of an individual point is greater than the effect supposedly being measured. However, if there are a sufficient number of points (cells) the statistical calcs take this into account automatically. It can even weight points inversely relative to their uncertainty.
For those interested in a proxy record of “global” temperatures since mid-1979 up until a couple weeks ago, the following link should give a fair picture of Earth’s heat and cooling status. It even has an anomoly graph:-) Again, I said proxy (we’re not talking degrees *F or *C). Simple minds love simple answers –
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Oefinell (02:45:04) :
“That is why they do not measure the absolute temperature at all, they measure the temperature change or variance.”
“Provided the methodology is consistent from month to month then you can accurately see how temperatures have changed over time. You do not need to calculate an absolute temperature at all.”
A couple of questions:
(1) What were all of those mercury thermometers of yore measuring? How were they calibrated? Were they all calibrated regularly and consistently (especially those highly accurate bucket thermometers used by the scientifically-trained sailing crews upon which we base a large portion of the historical ocean surface temperature data)?
(2) Does the absolute temperature matter? Thermodynamically, of course, it does (e.g. in evaluating equations of state, thermophysical properties of gases and liquids, freezing/melt points, etc. etc.). But is climate science somehow exempt from this?
(3) Is the metric of a “world averaged temperature anomaly” thermodynamically meaningful? That is, does it accurately imply anything about the heat content of the air-ocean-land system?
GISS is a joke.
Look how bad they messed up Charlotte, NC temperature for July 2009.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/work/gistemp/STATIONS//tmp.425723140001.1.1/station.txt
^^^ There June-July-August average of 25.7 means they “gave” July a temperature of 26.5
Actual temperature in Charlotte for July was 24.98
So 24.98 became 26.5 according to GISS. Good job GISS, you do us Americans proud.
If you can mess up Charlotte, NC that bad then what are you doing with temps out in the middle of the ocean that none of us can confirm?
@ur momisugly ajstrata –
Good job.
btw, Firefox browser has a built-in spell checker, which is wy my spelling is always perfect.
Mike
humble grammar n*zi
Once again from the simple answers department, for those interested in a proxy record of “Southern” temperature anomolies since 1979 up until a couple weeks ago.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg
I haven’t read through all the comments (in hurry this morning) so I apologize if this was already covered. A question to:
boballab (18:59:57) :
I would hazard a guess and say it’s Africa since just about the entire middle section of that continent is devoid of data.
Thanks for the work you did! It seems the middle Africa section dearth of data is for the recent years, with some decades prior coding in the yellow range which was about the same as large parts of the rest of the earth. What would cause the “dropout” of sensors for Africa in recent years??
Dan
New Jersey, USA
I am beginning to wonder if the entire concept of relying on monthly or daily anomalies to determine if the world temp is heating or cooling is a useful tool.
Hansen’s mental contortion to claim that we have just finished the hottest decade on record seems contrived, at best.