UAH global temperature posts warmest January

The interesting thing to me is that the 13 month average has not dipped below 0 ( apart from the volcano event) since the 1980’s. It still doesn’t show any inclination to do this either.
As an aside, sceptics don’t like to be called denialists, but when someone comments on this thread
“Will we see a continuation of the rise in monitored temperatures yet the world freezes over as the world continues to cool?”
we shouldn’t really complain should we when they do.
Andy

Neven (19:33:05) :
“Where on this planet Earth was the correspoding massive heat to offset the colder winter to produce the warmest global January ever recorded?
Where?”
This is nonsense. “Massive heat” should actually be described as deviations above normal in the Arctic…..but it is all relative dude.
Still well below freezing there.
Point and click. http://www.athropolis.com/map2.htm
Every time the heights around the top of the Earth are this high with a well-developed block, then the cold air is forced southward.
And voila….you have the epic winter of 2009 – 2010…to the major population centers of the NH.
There is NO “massive heat offset”, except the difference/spread of what normally occurs within the realms of natural variability.
No big deal.
This is not 1998. It may be close….but we are on a different area of the slopes of the Planet’s cycles this time. So….let’s see what lies ahead….
Also, 32 years does not make a trend. It barely makes one revolution in the AMO.
So much that we do not know….
CHRIS
Norfolk, VA, USA

http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/02/preliminary-january-2010-sst-anomaly.html
If we CAN extrapolate the trend of the PAST TWO YEARS to 2010, we’ll be 15 degC WARMER!!!!

Here is a great example, a case-in-point, of natural variability.
The record low and high for this date for ORF, is within a few years (and they were in the late 1800s).
Record (KORF) 77 °F (1890) 4 °F (1886)
Obviously, Krakatoa, 3 years before 1886, may have had an effect.
Regardless…such temperature spreads on the same day only a few years apart..deserve a little attention.

SNRatio (18:52:24) :
Now natural, skeptical, questions would be: Disregarding IPCC, warmists etc. Are the overall pictures from the temp series
A: Consistent with each other?…
D: Consistent with Svensmark’s hypothesis?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’d say yes to A and D.
For A: In 1999, the year following the ’98 El Nino, notice that there were four months with negative UAH temperature anomalies. In 2008, following the unusually high global temperatures in 2007, there were eight months with negative UAH anomalies.
For D: notice the significantly lower neutron monitor counts from all stations in the last half of January, 2010:
http://leif.org/research/Neutron-Monitors-Real-Time.htm
Coincidence? Perhaps not.

YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 12 +0.288 +0.329 +0.246 +0.510
2010 01 +0.724 +0.841 +0.607 +0.757
———————————-
CHNG +0.436 +0.512 +0.361 +0.247
This make you feel worse. North hemisphere warmed the most? Could possibly be due to extreme condensation, warmer clouds keeping below toward surface warmer and also radiating more upward to space. If so, would be setting up for a large drop later if both types of readings are actually accurate.

Adam from Kansas (18:43:19) :
{i}If the daily SOI index continues at the current rock bottom levels, we could end up seeing another big Kelvin wave and El Nino Modoki picking up again despite the trades not being as weak as they have been. (according to TAO).
Could this El Nino actually drop OHC farther than the one in 97/98 if this means we see this event going on a bit longer than that one? I guess then whether it goes back up depends on what ENSO will do afterwards?{/i}
A WWB is in progress for sure, but given the Western Pacific is cooler then the Central Pacific and the stronger-than-normal Peruian current, I am indeed confident that the current El Nino is peaked, and I believe that this El Nino will not linger into boreal summer. It should also be noticed that Eq 160W to 120W have cooled for almost 1 degree over the last 3 weeks, a big amount given the time of the year!

“Tom T (18:25:40) :
Mike J. 17:42:45 That is one of the silliest things I heard in quite some time. When you buy a thermometer do you calibrate it to all the other thermometers in the world or to you trust that the factory calibrated it when they built it. Your thermometer does not care what the thermometer at your neighbors house says.”
magicjava’s web page seem to say that satellites calibrate to 1) empty space 2) higer reference temp measured from reference source built into the satellite 3) from other satellites
Thus temperature measurement from troposphere is adjustes between space (2,7K) and reference “warm” source, and result is calibrated with data coming from other satellites + ground data.
So satellites are very different from household thermometers..

NH being so warm is quite surprising, considering the North Pacific has been cold, North Atlantic not warm either – AMO index just 0,135 and here were no huge positive anomalies above ground, rather negative ones.
In the meantime, El Nino seems to be gradually replaced by cold water from the east and the huge hotspot east of NZ looks to decompose as well.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
In the past, 600mb temperatures followed SST with several months lag and maybe this is the same case.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2005/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2005
Ground based measurement will not come close to the record, since UAH seems to react on Nino/Nina/volcanic events much more readily than ground stations:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/plot/uah/from:2002
On the bright side, the UAH anomaly can get only lower in the future 😀

anna v (23:37:48) :
“it is the heat gain and loss and not the temperatures…”
I perfectly agree. Have learned much in last six months. My views have evolved. I’ve tried to get others to grasp the scale on the energy topic. Air is feeble to water when speaking heat, therefore temperature. Simple condensation is 500+ times conduction for instance, and other realizations as such. Sometimes it is easy to look at the small process, thinking you are looking at a large process, and visa-versa! As you said, all the talk about temperatures but the energy flow is the key because mass and specific heat come into play.

D. Ch. (21:46:21) :
“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.”
I think you have a workable hypothesis here. Instead of the cold air being trapped at the north pole, some change causes it to drop south resulting in an overall drop in the energy stored in the total atmosphere.
It will be interesting to see how the MSM handle the January anomaly, as here in the UK we’re heading for the coldest winter for 20 years should the Dec/Jan pattern continue into Feb.
The public are going to ‘know’ the data is untrustworthy if the CAGW brigade try to make to much of this. Here’s the info from the infamous Met Office:-
December 2009
“Overall, it was a very cold month with mean temperatures 1.5 to 2.0 °C below the 1971-2000 normal over England and Wales, 2.0 to 2.5 °C below over Northern Ireland and 2.5 to 3.5 °C below over Scotland. Provisionally, it was the coldest December over the UK since 1995.”
January 2010
“Overall, it was a very cold month with mean temperatures 2.5 to 3.0 °C below the 1971-2000 normal over England and Wales, 2.5 °C below over most of Scotland and 2.0 to 2.5 °C below over Northern Ireland. Provisionally, it was the coldest January over the UK since 1987 and equal eighth coldest in a series from 1914.”
This is how they define winter and calculate the mean:-
“Calculate the monthly mean value at each station based on all available data (stations with too many missing observations are excluded)
Interpolate the mthly station data to a 5km grid (taking into account topography etc)
Calculate a regional average by taking the mean of all grid points within a geographical area
How we calculate seasonal averages – we take an average of the regional values for the three months that constitute the season e.g. for winter it is an average of the Dec, Jan and Feb values. Included in this final step is an allowance for the different lengths of each month i.e. slightly more weight is given to Dec and Jan (because they have 31 days) than for Feb (28 or 29 days, depending on the year).”
We experience weather, not climate.

Well, for 1998 NINO 3-4 dropped 0,2 degrees in January. This time around we have dropped 0,6 degrees.
For 1998 February dropped 0,7 degrees it was then UAH had one peak, then in April and Mars after a 0,3 and a whooping 1,2 degrees drop we had the second peak.
Since this El Niño started dropping early (January instead of February) this was expected.
And remember, after removing the heat from the El Nino. It is hard for it to reclaimed it.
/Sven

Robert of Ottawa (17:31:54) :
Mike Ramsey (16:49:21) :
I am skeptical of the “theory” of most warming occuring at the poles. I think this might be, possibly, because that is where the AGWers’ charts show most red. But, we also note that the fewer thermometers, the larger the red.
I am uninterested in the cooked numbers that Hansen and company produce out of GISS but rather in what the satellite data is telling us.  Are the satellites telling us that the pole’s got warmer in January or that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation was responsible for the spike?
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/01/is-antarctic-warming-real-or-%E2%80%9Cmann%E2%80%9D-made-a-note-from-fred-singer/
Mike Ramsey