NASA Aqua Sea Surface Temperatures Support a Very Warm January, 2010
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
When I saw the “record” warmth of our UAH global-average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) product (warmest January in the 32-year satellite record), I figured I was in for a flurry of e-mails: “But this is the coldest winter I’ve seen since there were only 3 TV channels! How can it be a record warm January?”
Sorry, folks, we don’t make the climate…we just report it.
But, I will admit I was surprised. So, I decided to look at the AMSR-E sea surface temperatures (SSTs) that Remote Sensing Systems has been producing from NASA’s Aqua satellite since June of 2002. Even though the SST data record is short, and an average for the global ice-free oceans is not the same as global, the two do tend to vary together on monthly or longer time scales.
The following graph shows that January, 2010, was indeed warm in the sea surface temperature data:
But it is difficult to compare the SST product directly with the tropospheric temperature anomalies because (1) they are each relative to different base periods, and (2) tropospheric temperature variations are usually larger than SST variations.
So, I recomputed the UAH LT anomalies relative to the SST period of record (since June, 2002), and plotted the variations in the two against each other in a scatterplot (below). I also connected the successive monthly data points with lines so you can see the time-evolution of the tropospheric and sea surface temperature variations:
As can be seen, January, 2010 (in the upper-right portion of the graph) is quite consistent with the average relationship between these two temperature measures over the last 7+ years.
[NOTE: While the tropospheric temperatures we compute come from the AMSU instrument that also flies on the NASA Aqua satellite, along with the AMSR-E, there is no connection between the calibrations of these two instruments.]
R. Gates (10:58:18) : “We are also seeing arctic sea ice for January near the low levels we saw in the disasterous year 2007 for sea ice extent…”
Out of curiosity, what “disasters” were caused by the 2007 decrease in arctic ice extent?
@Dan in California
“Is the terminology “sea surface temperature” reading the water temp on the surface, or the air temp above the surface? I’ve heard that the satellite only reads IR down to the lower troposphere and not the water surface. ”
We must NEVER loose sight of the initial point of all this data gathering which is to confirm the CO2 AGW hypothesis. Warmists will try to prove that the world is warming, and then treat that as confirmation. The land and the sea may indeed grow warm or cold, but the key question still remains – Is this provably because of increased CO2 concentrations?
Remember to make this point in all external discussions – the warmists arguments will simply get stronger if we have a hot summer otherwise….
The previous post is telling me the ocean heat content is going down. This post tells me near record temperatures are all about SST. Every other comment on this site is about the cold winter being experienced or that the technology measurng these temperatures cannot possibly be accurate. Other posts are teling me that climate scientists have less moral fibre than British politicians and the journalists who report on them yet lapping up some of their quotes What is a poor, ingnorant but worried person to do? Perhaps I should start reading the agony aunt blogs before I go completely insane.
“john pattinson (11:40:11) :
The previous post is telling me the ocean heat content is going down. This post tells me near record temperatures are all about SST.”
These two are not contradictory. The ocean pumps energy into the atmosphere via El Nino, El Nino is warm upwelling, thus causing a high SST and warming the atmosphere. After this phenomenon you end up with a lower OHC.
The earth is mostly sea, so it goes without saying that the majority influence of the “global temperature” is always from the sea.
The sea surface temperature [SST] does not measure the same thing as the ARGO network of 3,300 deep sea buoys.
ARGO shows deep ocean cooling: click1, click2, click3
SST remains very close to its long term trend line: click
Ray said:
“Very solid argument…. to extrapolate for 2010 from a single data point…”
The whole month of January is hardly a single data point. Now, If it had been a single day that was warm, that would be different. Janauary had 31 data points as days. Last I checked the year was made up of 12 months, and now we are more than 1/12 the way the way through the year and temperatures are still high througout the troposphere from sea level up to 46,000 ft. Now that’s a pretty big “single” data point…
Gary said:
“Out of curiosity, what “disasters” were caused by the 2007 decrease in arctic ice extent?”
Disasterous used in a metaphoric sense, meaning when compared to previous sea ice extents. That’s how I meant it, but from another standpoint I suppose the argument could be made that the record low sea ice was bad news: Record low ice means a positive feedback is being established whereby increased solar energy can be absorbed by the ocean causing more warming causing more melting and more warming and more melting, etc. Eventually, if this continutes, even in our lifetimes perhaps, the arctic will be ice free in be summer. Great for shipping goods via the northwest or northeast passage perhaps, but potentially very bad for the ecological balance of the planet we’ve enjoyed since our ancestors first came down out of the trees.
Like Smokey wrote, let’s not forget that the ocean is very deep with lots of currents and although the temperature at the surface is rising (due to insolation?), the bulk of the ocean can certainly be cooling at the same time.
I am so confused. I just finished reading a very long line of comments on the January record high global UAH anomaly. It seems there were several explanations for this:
Some comments seemed to indicate that this isn’t surprising; that in fact the Earth has been warming for the last 150 years. Is this true? Isn’t this what many climate scientists have been saying?
Other comments seemed to indicate that the warming of the atmosphere was due to heat transferred to the atmosphere from the oceans, but that this meant the heat levels in the oceans were falling. Now this post claims the oceans seem to be heating even faster than the atmosphere. Which is true? Are the oceans cooling as the heat is transferred to the atmosphere?
Finally, the UAH anomaly not only broke the record for January, it smashed it. The previous high of 0.59 was set only three years ago, and now this January the anomaly hit 0.72. Can we explain this big spike up?
john pattinson (11:40:11) :
The whole point is that declaring January 2010 the warmest ever in light of recent events is asking for trouble.
Most unwise and carrying an unwarranted risk with it.
For what?
OT or maybe not – the sea temps in Scandanavia don’t look too warm – it looks like its possible to walk from Denmark to Sweden:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/satellite/index.php
Substantially more investment in research into natural climate variations is needed so we can get off these ridiculous political distortion cycles that track every bump & dip in climate.
The climate, like many of us, is neither left nor right. The common ground shared by alarmists & nonalarmists is a lack of deep understanding of natural climate variations — there is a common priority upon which to capitalize via agreement on the channeling of serious research funding.
Ongoing instability is not the answer …not even politically, as it might not line up with election cycles the way most might prefer – so this is a control risk until we understand natural variation better — note to hyperpartisan clowns: sensible folks might recommend investment in true understanding to supplement the goofy spin.
I would also say that this non-intuitive local weather vs Global temperature raises a question.
Since the oceans have such a large heat storage capacity, wouldn’t using surface station data as a proxy for Global temperature of years prior to numerous open ocean temperature readings were available be unreliable to say the least?
Steve Goddard (11:49:38) :
So basically, the UHI effect has no (of insignificant) impact on global temperatures?
Ray,
UHI has almost no effect on satellite temperatures. Cities make up a small percentage of the planet. They even make up a small percentage of California.
R. Gates (12:03:15) :
[i]Great for shipping goods via the northwest or northeast passage perhaps, but potentially very bad for the ecological balance of the planet we’ve enjoyed since our ancestors first came down out of the trees.[/i]
The ecological balance you speak of has swung from where I am being under a mountain of ice to warming to the point where the Sahara become lakes and grassland. Much of that change (back and forth) long after man’s ancestors left the trees.
As far as I can tell about the ice the JAXA graph seems to not be adding new data for the past day or so as it’s remaining at the same number which would apparently be impossible for Ice Extent.
As for UHI not having a significant effect, the Earth’s surface is 3/4th’s water and there is sense that the majority of the UAH record is because of the oceans.
Ray,
UHI does obviously have an impact on ground based temperatures which are increasingly based in cities. That is one reason why GISS has trended upwards over the last decade, while satellite temperatures have gone down.
R. Gates (12:03:15) :
Try again…. just not convincing… and flawed.
January represents only about 8.4 % of the total 2010 data. It is statistically insignificant.
I’m not really surprised by this result. There has been a huge hot area in the southern Pacific, beyond the ongoing El Nino. And the southern Atlantic has been on the hot side as well.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.2.4.2010.gif
Even though the El Nino is weakening, there is a 3 to 4 month delay on global temperature. And that hot area in the souther Pacific is not weakening, as far as I can tell. I think that we have to expect February and March to be fairly warm also. The good news is that the ocean should be dumping a lot of heat into space right now. When that cycle completes I’m guessing that we’ll see a nice La Nina start up some time in the second half of this year.
Ray (12:18:49) :
What he said was that the majority the effect on global climate is caused by the activity of the oceans. UHI skews the perceived temperature trend in land-based measurements, it was never actually claimed to alter global temperatures.
R. Gates:
A time-lapse video posted on this site sometime last year shows quite clearly that the 2007 loss of sea ice had more to do with the wind than anything else.
BTW there’s no ‘e’ in disastrous.
Just seen the BBC poll results. Now is it just me or is someone at the BBC trying to ‘confuse the decline’ with that top graph?
The top graph shows an 83% to 75% drop in global warming believers – or claims to.
But actually it doesn’t. Take a look lower down and the numbers that have been used are from the lower poll results which asks a rather different question – is climate change happenning? The text also says climate change. They have conflated warming and change to build the graph.
The lower graph seems to be the source of the 83 and 75 (except I make 41+32+8 = 81and 26+38+10 = 74 so they are still exagerating!)
But open the pdf for the real eye-opener. You see a ‘net yes’ (Huh?) and some altogether more interesting numbers – like just 26% of all respondents believing global warming is man made.
Am interested if you can comment on NH vs. SH January temperatures. Were both warmer or did one offset the other? thank you for your work.
Does this mean that the El Nino is causing sea temperatures to go up?
If it does then I wonder what will happen when it ends since temperatures over the land seem not to be very high and if the sea temperature drops then my imagination tells me we are going to get even colder weather in the near future.