NODC Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) – 2007, 2008 & 2009 Corrections
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) recently updated its 4th quarter and annual 2009 Ocean Heat Content (OHC) data. The data that was presented in conjunction with the Levitus et al (2009) Paper now covers the period of 1955 to 2009. There have been changes that some might find significant.
This post presents:
1. A brief look at the revisions (corrections) to the data in 2007 and 2008 OHC data
2. A comparison of the NODC OHC data for the period of 2003 to 2009 versus the GISS projection
REVISIONS (Corrections) TO THE 2007 AND 2008 NODC OHC DATA
Figure 1 is a gif animation of two Ocean Heat Content graphs posted on the NODC GLOBAL OCEAN HEAT CONTENT webpage. It shows the differences between the current (January 2010) version and one that appears to include data through June or September 2009. So this is an “Official” correction (not more incompletely updated data posted on the NODC website discussed in NODC’s CORRECTION TO OHC (0-700m) DATA, which required me to make corrections to a handful of posts). I have found nothing in the NODC OHC web pages that discuss these new corrections. Due to the years involved, is it safe to assume these are more corrections for ARGO biases? As of this writing, I have not gone through the individual ocean basins to determine if the corrections were to one ocean basin, a group of basins, or if they’re global; I’ll put aside the multipart post I’ve been working on for the past few weeks and try to take a look over the next few days.
http://i48.tinypic.com/14e6wjn.gif
Figure 1
NODC OHC OBSERVATIONS VERSUS GISS PROJECTION (2003-2009)
One of the posts that needed to be corrected back in October was NODC Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Versus GISS Projections (Corrected). The final graph in that post was a comparison of global ocean heat content observations for the period of 2003 through year-to-date 2009 versus the projection made by James Hansen of GISS of an approximate accumulation of 0.98*10^22 Joules per year. Figure 2 is an updated version of that comparison. Annual Global OHC data was downloaded from the NODC website (not through KNMI). The trend of the current version of the NODC OHC data is approximately 1.5% of the GISS projection. That is, GISS projected a significant rise, while the observations have flattened significantly in recent years. The apparent basis for the divergence between observations and the GISS Projection was discussed in the appropriately titled post Why Are OHC Observations (0-700m) Diverging From GISS Projections?
http://i47.tinypic.com/20kvhwn.png
Figure 2
Note: The earlier version of that graph (with the NODC’s October 15, 2009 correction)…
http://i37.tinypic.com/i6xtnl.png
…shows a linear trend of ~0.08*10^22 Joules/year. The current linear trend is ~0.015*10^22 Joules/year. Some might consider that decrease to be significant.
NOTE: I DELETED THE THIRD AND FOURTH PARTS OF THIS POST…
3. GLOBAL, HEMISPHERIC, AND INDIVIDUAL BASIN OHC UPDATE THROUGH DECEMBER 2009, AND
4. TREND COMPARISONS
…UNTIL I TRACK DOWN DISCREPANCIES I CAN’T EXPLAIN. I WILL REPOST THOSE SECTIONS IN A NEW POST. I BELIEVE I UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCES, BUT I NEED TO CHECK WITH KNMI.
SOURCES
NODC Annual Global OHC data used in Figure 2 is available here:
wayne (05:40:54) :
Having done a lot of work in planetary gravitation where, when simplifying, you let all constants go to one so you don’t have to deal with them at all, as graviational constant, radius of earths orbit, the mass of the sun, they all go to one so you can completely dropped them from all complex equations for simplicity.
Why not use Matlab to help handle complex calculations? Slide rulers are fun but there are better ways. 🙂
Mike Ramsey
tallbloke (05:38:11) :
Please tell more about this ‘amplification’. Don’t know about 7-10x, doesn’t sound real at first, but 30% or so I can see. Might not be for same reason but would like to read about his viewpoint. Do you have a link?
Statistical correlation is a key component to any proposed hypothesis. Small triggers resulting in big changes still have to be correlated with data. To say that the mechanism is there but to not be able to measure or observe it , let alone produce it in the lab, means that you must consider, at the very least, that some other trigger is overwhelming your supposed “tiny trigger, amplified affect” mechanism.
The AGW hypothesis is a case in point. It is hard for its proponents to consider that a larger trigger (and one mundane, innocently natural, easily mechanized, and non-earth shattering) produces the larger share of climate variability. Plus one does not gain notoriety for discovering things that are mundane, innocently natural, easily mechanized, and non-earth shattering. They gain notoriety by finding secrets and break throughs, and the tinier the trigger, the better. No one will win a Nobel Peace Prize by “discovering” the mechanism behind the observation that babies cry when they are hungry and poop after they eat.
It seems that both sides of this debate want the breaking of wind from the tiny gnat’s behind to trigger the tornado.
I seriously doubt the ability to measure OHC since 1955 — the required instrumentation (ARGO) wasn’t in place until after 2000. Data before that are so sparse & unreliable that massaging it can give you whatever you want.
Fig2 above shows ARGO results. It’s the way to go for real OHC measurement. Even that data needs to be monitored by independent analyzers to prevent the usual government-sponsored massaging biases.
graham g: You wrote, “The dip in the chart about 1968 is contary to my observations in Northern Australia.”
I wrote a guest post for Jennifer Marohasy’s blog a year and a half ago about the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies surrounding Australia, (that I failed to also post at my website for some reason) and there was a dip in the late 1960s.
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003344.html
People had been citing the Levitus paper as “proving” that my paper
http://www.ncasi.org//Publications/Detail.aspx?id=3152
was wrong about cooling of the ocean. I am glad to see that my analysis holds up after quality assurance and more data.
tallbloke (05:38:11) :
Nir Shaviv in his article about usings the oceans as a calorimeter. He found a 7-10x terrestrial amplification to the solar signal.
Which still leaves the mechanism in doubt. Would you be as enthusiastic if he had found a 700-1000x amplification?
Stephen Wilde (03:55:52): Thanks for the summary of your beliefs, but as I’ve written before, unless you download data you feel represents your hypotheses, plot that data, post the data, and provide links to the data so others can reproduce your graphs and examine the same data for alternate explanations, what you write here is conjecture.
Anyone know of whether the daily SOI index of below -50 as of today and the westerlies almost off the charts in the ENSO region were even predicted (according to the TAO site)? I wonder if even Tallbloke expected that (considering his model is more accurate than many)
Starting to look likely there could be a 2nd peak which was not even seen in the models, especially if those SOI values don’t start going up real soon.
The recent post by Willis E. on floating islands showed the sea level rise curve inflecting downwards around 2004-2005. Exactly the same time that the above adjusted ocean heat content graph from NODC shows the downturn.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/
Correlation? Causation? Coincidence?
Pamela Gray (06:39:32) :
“It seems that both sides of this debate want the breaking of wind from the tiny gnat’s behind to trigger the tornado.”
I’m an ardent sceptic, and although I’m a layman when it comes to climate science, I have some scientific background in zoology. There are many negative feedback loops in organic systems that help maintain a stable equilibrium. Note: the emphasis is on stability, not instability.
The earth isn’t an organism, but it is a highly complex system that has existed for billions of years, and so it’s not entirely unreasonable to hypothesise that there could be negative feedback control loops. If there weren’t, then I’d imagine it would have long ago destabilised.
This is one good reason why I don’t buy into positive, runaway feedbacks. CO2 might for all I know be involved in some feedback loop or other, but if so, I’d bet my bottom dollar it’s negative rather than positive.
I don’t “want” anything to be other that what it actually is, but it strikes me that if one concentrates on the big and impressive factors and ignores all possibility of subtle, possibly interacting negative feedback loops, then one could be missing a trick. I’m just saying, keep an open mind.
Many things that weren’t at one time measurable in relation to biological systems are now routinely measured and seen as crucial in maintaining stability. For a long time they weren’t observable, as much because no one had thought to look for them, as because they weren’t there.
Craig, do you have any view about the step change at the switch from XBT to ARGO?
Michael Larkin (08:20:01) :
There are many negative feedback loops in organic systems that help maintain a stable equilibrium. Note: the emphasis is on stability, not instability.
I will agree with the above, yet it seems to me that this emphasis on stability is a bit inconsistent with treating the system as something tottering on the brink waiting to be triggered by the tiniest perturbation [which you seem to be thinking: “whereby relatively tiny signals can have very significant control effects”].
Bob Tisdale (01:44:46) :
Stephen Wilde: You asked, “Are you able to exclude internal variations within the oceans as a driver of the events in the atmosphere above that you analyse in such admirable detail ?
… And you continued, “It is that issue which I am trying to resolve.”
And without long-term high-resolution global subsurface data how do you plan on doing that?”
Could the question be framed another way: is the ocean surface interaction between ocean and atmosphere plus sun, the only route of heat entry to and exit from the ocean upper layer? What are the alternatives? There is one that is rarely mentioned – heat exchange between the deep ocean and the upper ocean. At the thermocline for instance. Heat movement at the thermocline must be generally downward due to colder deeper water – at least in tropical and mid latitutes. However in a steady state, a reduction in the rate of loss would be “as good as” a gain in heat.
“What goes down must come up”. The ocean below the thermocline and the deep circulation does have most of the heat of the atmosphere-ocean system. It is hard to imagine that the complex century-scale deep circulation patterns do not result in fluctuation and (speculatively) periodic oscillation on a global scale in the rate of heat exchange at the thermocline.
There are indeed no measurement systems to observe this: however it could be calculated indirectly. Look at the total ocean heat content above a certain depth, e.g 700m. Look at how it changes with time, how much heat must be leaving or entering. Then assess whether all this heat exchange can be accounted for by air-ocean exchange or solar input variation (Leif Svalgaard should help you there – arguing for negligible solar variation).
According to the graph in the article by Bob Tisdale at the top of this thread, OHC can change in one year by around 1*10^22j Can this be accounted for?
I watched the very nice video from one of Bob Tisdale’s above links to the animated ocean temp crossections during the el Nino events. The question was raised – why did some el Ninos cause a step up in (surface) OHC, others not? The answer as far as I could summarise was in terms of Mt Pinotubo’s eruption and ocean surface currents.
In deep ocean the surface and deep currents are quite separate and can be going in different even opposite directions. Unless I missed it there was no mention of deep to surface ocean heat exchange.
phlogiston (09:09:59)
Thanks phlogiston, thats the sort of track that seems to me to be logically unavoidable.
I’m not expressing mere beliefs because there is real data behind each of my suggestions. All I am doing is applying logic and basic physical principles to observed events in a way that is different from the routine approach.
As new data comes to light gaps get filled in and in due course if some predictive ability arises or if significantly consistent explanatory
power is seen then that would be the time to do as Bob suggests and ‘write a book’.
At the moment construction is in progress and I know not where it will lead.
Given the smallness of solar variability and the huge thermal inertia of the oceans none of the ideas relying exclusively on ocean surface interactions with sun and air seem to do the business and that is made all too apparent by the continuing lack of predictive skill.
phlogiston (09:09:59) : There are many things Stephen could do. To account for the deep water temperature variations you raised, he could use satellite-based sea level altimetry data and remove the mass contributions (from glacial runoff, etc) and variations in salinity. The result is thermosteric sea level, which represents the temperature variations from surface to ocean floor. It has been done before. The data and methodologies are available.
wayne (06:14:18) :
tallbloke (05:38:11) :
Please tell more about this ‘amplification’. Don’t know about 7-10x, doesn’t sound real at first, but 30% or so I can see. Might not be for same reason but would like to read about his viewpoint. Do you have a link?
Link here:
http://www.sciencebits.com/calorimeter
Leif Svalgaard (07:40:42) :
Which still leaves the mechanism in doubt. Would you be as enthusiastic if he had found a 700-1000x amplification?
Well, Nir Shaviv managed to convince the Journal of Geophysical Research to publish the paper, so perhaps they were sufficiently impressed with the empirical aspects of the study.
The second half of your comment looks like inflatio ad absurdum, so I’ll leave it be.
tallbloke (14:37:46) :
The second half of your comment looks like inflatio ad absurdum, so I’ll leave it be.
Trying to avoid inconvenient questions…
tallbloke (14:37:46) :
Well, Nir Shaviv managed to convince the Journal of Geophysical Research to publish the paper, so perhaps they were sufficiently impressed with the empirical aspects of the study.
I don’t think you understand how science [and journals] work. What was accepted was that an amplification of 7-10x wold be needed to explain the correlations by causations, not that such causations were established. In fact, the higher the amplification [and that was the second part of my comment] the less likely the purported causation.
Leif Svalgaard (15:06:18) :
tallbloke (14:37:46) :
The second half of your comment looks like inflatio ad absurdum, so I’ll leave it be.
Trying to avoid inconvenient questions…
Trying to avoid unnecessary argument. The data says 7-10x. Why discuss anything but the actual data and it’s error ranges?
I don’t think you understand how science [and journals] work.
I have a degree in understanding how science works. (BA Phil/Hist Sci Joint Hons Leeds 1988)
Your thinker needs oiling.
tallbloke (15:45:09) :
I have a degree in understanding how science works. (BA Phil/Hist Sci Joint Hons Leeds 1988)
Not actually doing science…
The data says 7-10x.
No, the data says, that if the causation is real, then a 7-10x times amplification is needed, not that it actually happens.
Leif Svalgaard (17:11:47) :
tallbloke (15:45:09) :
I have a degree in understanding how science works. (BA Phil/Hist Sci Joint Hons Leeds 1988)
Not actually doing science…
You are long on insults but short on ideas.
the data says, that if the causation is real, then a 7-10x times amplification is needed, not that it actually happens.
Through the calculations I did and presented on this blog, which you examined and verified, I identified an energy gain in the ocean from empirical satellite data equivalent to ~3W/m^2 solar forcing on the ocean heat content between 1993-2003 during solar cycle
23. 3W/m^2=20-30 x the 0.1-0.15W/m^2 you were admitting to when I was keeping a closer eye on you.
There’s the amplification due to reduced cloud/increased solar activity. Exceptional in the case of solar cycle 23 according to SST data. More usually around 7-10 times, exactly as Nir Shaviv tells us.
But you keep going back to your old dogma even when it’s been demonstrated to you that the data says otherwise.
And you tell me I don’t understand how to do actual science, while averting your eyes from it and wiping it from your memory on a regular basis. No wonder you don’t remember the history or understand the philosophy of science.
Leif, tallbloke,
I’d like to see that issue resolved because it is at the heart of whether internal ocean variability is needed to explain periodic SST shifts or whether events in the air and involving solar input/albedo changes are sufficient on their own.
Note that one has to accommodate not only ENSO variability but also PDO phase shifts and the longer term cycling from MWP to LIA to Modern Maximum.
On the basis of what Leif says one really does need internal ocean variability affecting rates of energy release from ocean to air. On tallblokes account maybe still so but not nearly so much.
Bob Tisdale (14:11:24)
I’d love to do just that and lots more besides but I’d need enough funding to ditch my legal practice and devote the time to it.
In the meantime I’ll just work from data that is already available.
Stephen,
What causes ‘internal ocean variability’? During geological timescale epochs, plate tectonics and sea level has caused changes in the relative temperature of big slices of ocean from bottom to top. Are we to believe these work out an equilibrium on such a long timescale that they account for all ocean energy release variability.
I think the solar cause is mediated in the oecean effect at all timescales myself.
If we have steric sea level rise, as evidenced by satellite altimetry, this in itself is proof that energy is being stored into the ocean at decadal timescales. It cannot simply be a readjustment of the heat-energy already in the ocean. Since longwave radiation doesn’t penetrate the surface, and the magnitude of the forcing is beyond what co2 can do anyway, it’s the Sun’s variation and cloud levels, QED.