January 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update +0.72 Deg. C
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
UPDATE (4:00 p.m. Jan. 4): I’ve determined that the warm January 2010 anomaly IS consistent with AMSR-E sea surface temperatures from NASA’s Aqua satellite…I will post details later tonight or in the a.m. – Roy
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 01 +0.304 +0.443 +0.165 -0.036
2009 02 +0.347 +0.678 +0.016 +0.051
2009 03 +0.206 +0.310 +0.103 -0.149
2009 04 +0.090 +0.124 +0.056 -0.014
2009 05 +0.045 +0.046 +0.044 -0.166
2009 06 +0.003 +0.031 -0.025 -0.003
2009 07 +0.411 +0.212 +0.610 +0.427
2009 08 +0.229 +0.282 +0.177 +0.456
2009 09 +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 +0.288 +0.329 +0.246 +0.510
2010 01 +0.724 +0.841 +0.607 +0.757
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record.
The tropics and Northern and Southern Hemispheres were all well above normal, especially the tropics where El Nino conditions persist. Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998.
This record warmth will seem strange to those who have experienced an unusually cold winter. While I have not checked into this, my first guess is that the atmospheric general circulation this winter has become unusually land-locked, allowing cold air masses to intensify over the major Northern Hemispheric land masses more than usual. Note this ALSO means that not as much cold air is flowing over and cooling the ocean surface compared to normal. Nevertheless, we will double check our calculations to make sure we have not make some sort of Y2.01K error (insert smiley). I will also check the AMSR-E sea surface temperatures, which have also been running unusually warm.
After last month’s accusations that I’ve been ‘hiding the incline’ in temperatures, I’ve gone back to also plotting the running 13-month averages, rather than 25-month averages, to smooth out some of the month-to-month variability.
We don’t hide the data or use tricks, folks…it is what it is.
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]
===============================
NOTE: Entire UAH dataset is here, not yet updated for Jan 2010 as of this posting
Sponsored IT training links:
We guarantee 100% success in real exam with help of 642-384 prep materials including 70-643 dumps and 70-536 practice exam.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Here an interesting bit from Sweden:
http://www.iceagenow.com/Coldest_January_in_Sweden_since_1826.htm
magicjava (19:17:28) :
Dr. Spencer releasing his source code would solve the issue one way or another.
You want to slap him with a FOI-request? Just like we all do to CRU and Mann and Co…
[Quote John Whitman (19:22:11) :]
Yours is for satellite data, correct?
I would like to see a master chart of satellite, ocean bouys, land, ice, etc etc.
[/quote]
Yes, mine’s for satellites. GISS drives me up a wall. 🙂
If you look at the blog roll here, you’ll see entries for Lucia’s The Blackboard and The Chiefio – E.M. Smith. Those two do a lot of work with GISS and should be good sources.
Beyond that, I’d say looking at the NOAA site would be the place to go.
I didn’t comment on the OHC content graph from Bob Tisdale yet, apparently according to the update there it looks like the rise in OHC preceded the 97/98 El Nino if you carefully count the lines that mark each year, the OHC looked like it was rising through 1995 and 1996 before the big release in 97/98.
I wonder what that means with this newest data and ENSO?
[quote Leif Svalgaard (19:42:48) :
magicjava (19:17:28) :
Dr. Spencer releasing his source code would solve the issue one way or another.
You want to slap him with a FOI-request? Just like we all do to CRU and Mann and Co…[/quote]
I was hoping that me repeatedly posting requests to release his source code would work.
But if not….
Jerry (15:44:18) :
Nonsense From
MJK (15:00:11) :
===============================================
MJK is the on who started the 25 month smoothing lie.
MJK does not use his real name. MJK must be a coward.
Take a hint from the PR antics of the “true believers” and flip it on its head, boys and girls! Your headline should read, “Global Cooling Causes Global Warming”.
So what? Its “weather, not climate”. ;#)
So, we had the coldest January since 1938 or so in the UK, well below average temperatures in the rest of Europe, Russia was as cold as ever, China was the coldest it has been in a long time, the central and Eastern US was positively frigid, central Canada was even colder then the central US. Have I got that right so far? Then we have cool temperatures in California and Oregon, and a less then really cold January in Eastern Canada, perhaps even above average. And that is over ½ of the land mass of the planet.
Also I understand that the overall Ocean temperatures have been dropping for the last few years; that would be most of the rest of the planet.
We add all these numbers up, and we get the warmest January in the last 32 years.
Is it possible that the increase in cosmic rays due to lack of sunspots passing through an increased atmospheric density is having an affect on the machine?
Is it at all possible that this satellite is equipped with Pentium V processors?
If they print in any newspaper in the Northern Hemisphere that “Last January was the warmest in almost 40 years”, I think people will simply say; “Just how stupid do they actually think I am” or “I thought they were fudging the numbers, now I am sure they are”.
Am I missing something?
Daniel H (18:26:03) :
I loved Chris Farley. He could never come to terms with his appearance. What a loss his death was.
Why shouldn’t the recovery from the Little Ice Age still be ongoing?
If sunspots are the driver, there may be a huge lag. A couple of years of surprisingly low sunspots isn’t enough (yet). It could take a few solar cycles for the effects to accumulate to a significant level.
People who staked a claim on global cooling didn’t play their cards well. The alarmists needed a break and we may have given them one. Be smarter next time.
magicjava (19:17:28) :
An El Nino isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about global warming. The believers will still be believers and the skeptics will still be skeptics.
——————————————
I think that most people have heard the term ‘El Nino”. But if they were to see the graphs of its effect it wouldn’t mean anything. And if they saw the this January warm spike in UAH it wouldn’t mean anything either.
What does mean something is there’s been longer winters all over the world for 3 years in a row. Florida got froze for days on end. Europe is freezing. China has huge snow. And this year could be another year of record snow in the US.
The average person may be saying “What global warming?”
I don’t think what scientists have to say—or what a trolls in comments on a blog are saying—means anything to them.
Andrew30 (20:18:06) :
I think the difference is between surface temps and satellite temps. Satellite doesn’t measure at the surface.
I think in months to come there will be a rapid drop in satellite temp reading. There won’t be a high anomaly like January was.
Did you bother to read the NOTE that you provided? It explains the “to what they are calibrated” and it isn’t surface temperatures. Seems to me you read the first sentence, rejected it and went on to postulate your theory.
You can get the detailed explanation from Dr. Spencer at:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/01/how-the-uah-global-temperatures-are-produced/
On my previous comment the first clause of my third sentence should read:
Seems to me you read the first clause in the first sentence…
clause will get you every time. 😉
magicjava (18:43:10) : ..It’s possible the satellite readings are wrong.
As it travels around the Earth, the AMSU (the instrument used to read what becomes UAH temperature anomalies) reads 30 scans in in the direction perpendicular to its orbit. Two of these scans are directly below the satellite and the each of the other 28 get progressively farther and farther away from the satellite in both the port and starboard directions. The further away from the satellite, the larger the error in its temperature readings.
Note that I didn’t say possible error. There’s no question at all these other 28 readings are wrong. The amount of error can be as high as 30 degrees Kelvin.
These errors are corrected via software. For each channel, the software checks the two neighboring channels and previous readings. This procedure is called a “Limb Adjustment”.
So then I take it that 2 scans are correct and 28 scans are “adjusted”.
Dr Spencer I would like to ask you a direct question. Assuming that the temperature readings are only the 2 perpendicular scans – what do these “unadjusted” temperatures show?
Can you carry out such an excercise on the data, just as a matter of interest?
If there is a discrepancy between the perpendicular measurements and the “slanting adjusted” measurements – then maybe, just maybe there could be a bias in the adjusting software.
Neven (19:33:05) :
In the Artic. When looked at from above the pole, the landmass of 3 continents swamps the Arctic. 3 to 1, 4 to 1??
By all means, while the credibility of Climate Science hangs by a strand of the thinnest silk, let’s see if that line will hold up the piano’s weight.
So, Arc + NAm + Eur + Asia + NPac + NAtl = X/?
Ant + SP + SAtl + SAm + Indn + IndOc = 7/?
Jan ’10 = (X+Y) / 2
Something like that. With weights of area to each Cont/Ocean.
Surely you have paid enough attention to the events of the last 2 years to understand the need to deliver a message that is believable as well as
straightforward.
I do notice that on the AMSU chart that at 56000′ and above the atmosphere appears to be very close to 20year low temperatures.
Could this be a result of Svensmarks’s theory and the clouds are trapping the heat at the surface?.
I hope any warmist who agrees that the trend is up and/or that a record year in 2010 is “likely” will hustle over to Intrade and take advantage of the great odds skeptics there are offering (via Intrade’s bid/asked market mechanism) for a variety of bets on those propositions. Here’s the link: https://www.intrade.com . Check under Markets –> Climate and Weather.
Here in South Africa (inland) we had overcast conditions in January almost all the time. – I have not had the air conditioner on once. So this result puzzles me a bit, especially with all that cold weather in the north.. I think Australia had some warm weather?
Ripper (21:19:22) :
I do notice that on the AMSU chart that at 56000′ and above the atmosphere appears to be very close to 20year low temperatures.
Could this be a result of Svensmarks’s theory and the clouds are trapping the heat at the surface?.
No it’s due primarily to depletion of ozone there.
Actually, it occurred to me that the unusually cold temperatures this Jan across the Northern Hemisphere (as recorded by land based weather stations) suggests that an unusually large amount of cold air pushed south in the very lowest layers of the atmosphere. The relatively warm air that is usually there has to go someplace — any weatherman will tell you that the cold air displaced the warm air, rather than mixing with it like hot and cold air inside a car — so what may well have happened is that the warm air that is normally there got pushed up to 14000 feet for the satellite to measure. Once there it will cool off more than it would had it stayed near the ground, and the heat content of the atmosphere as a whole will be that much less.
Umm, can someone explain to me why running averages of 13 or 25 would be used? I understood (although stats is not my main area), that running averages of 12 or 24 months should be used, as then there is an equal number of each period in the average, ie one/two Januarys, one/two Februarys, etc.
Earle Williams – I’m just talking about trend, not predictions. Cheers.
This UAH data is useful as I’ve been wondering for the past month or so if Western Australia is the hottest land mass on the planet, at least when compared to the icy temps seemingly reported from everywhere else.
Each month my site maintains data showing the last 12 months of min and max temps at 32 locations across Western Australia compared to their averaged Bureau of Meteorology records at the beginning of the 1900s…
October 08 to September 09
min .44 C above the early 1900s
max .60 above the early 1900s
November 08 to October 09
min .39 C above the early 1900s
max .60 above the early 1900s
December 08 to November 09
min .53 C above the early 1900s
max .92 above the early 1900s
January 09 to December 09
min .59 C above the early 1900s
max 1.09 above the early 1900s
February 09 to January 2010
min .54 C above the early 1900s
max 1.16 above the early 1900s
Beginning in November, the maxima in particular went through the roof in Western Australia and the BoM notes that January had the second hottest mean temperature on record at 1.2 C above the long term average. The January maxima at some locations was up to 4 degrees C above the long term average. The UAH data above also shows a sharp jump in November for the southern hemisphere, although December doesn’t sync with the Western Australia results.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/wa/summary.shtml
The BoM summary for January confirms that the surge in maxima coincided with well below average rainfall in central and west-south-westerly areas of Western Australia that heated the most, as was the case for the previous couple of months … i.e. it’s probably a fair assumption that the daytime temps went up because of a prolonged lack of cloud cover – along with above average SST in the Indian Ocean.
The heatwave stopped about a week ago, since when the temps have been well below the historic February averages with similar low temps forecast for the coming week.
From a broader perspective, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology monitors 26 locations across the 2.5 million square kilometres of Western Australia as part of its “high quality” (corrected) data set that is presumably the official Aussie land surface temp feed to GISS and other international organisations.
It’s worth looking at decadal averages for the same 26 locations extracted and averaged via Excel from the BoM’s “high quality” data set from 1910 to 2009:
1910-1919 – 19.56018445
1920-1929 – 19.6552
1930-1939 – 19.8408
1940-1949 – 19.7776
1950-1959 – 19.85069231
1960-1969 – 19.90246795
1970-1979 – 20.21713846
1980-1989 – 20.34732308
1990-1999 – 20.54858462
2000-2009 – 20.54797177
My reading of the BoM data is that 2000-2009 was marginally cooler than 1990-1999 across Western Australia. The BoM has nominated 2000-2009 as the hottest decade ever in Australia.
So the western half of Australia is one of the reasons the global temps were up in January despite what everybody thought was a cold northern hemisphere, but we’re not to blame for any warming over the past decade 🙂
http://www.waclimate.net/1979-2009.html