NASA GISS a temperature outlier again – this time for the southern hemisphere

After reading Roger Pielke Sr’s post Reality Check On Science Magazine’s Claim That 2009 Was The Hottest Year on Record in Southern Hemisphere, I plotted Annual GISTEMP Southern Hemisphere Land+Sea Surface Temperature anomalies from 1982 to 2009, Figure 1, and the Annual UAH MSU TLT anomalies for the same period, Figure 2. There’s nothing surprising with those graphs based on Pielke Sr’s post. GISTEMP is showing record 2009 combined surface temperatures for the Southern Hemisphere, while the 2009 TLT anomalies are far from record levels.

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Figure 1

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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.

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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.

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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