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.]
Need answers (12:05:49) :
There are a number of metrics one can look at.
Sea Surface temperature doesn’t necessarily have much to do with ‘Ocean Heat Content’ as the surface is effected by evaporation which is effected by winds.
Our understanding of how Oceans give up their heat isn’t very complete. The Argo buoys have only be operational for a few years.
In all the discussions about ‘global warming’ there has always been a problem with ‘The Missing Heat’.
What does the January 2010 AMSR_E Global sea surface temperature anomaly for 60 degrees S to 90 degrees S look like?
Mike Ramsey
Gary Hladik (11:36:53) :
“”Out of curiosity, what “disasters” were caused by the 2007 decrease in arctic ice extent?””
I think I broke a nail.
R. Gates (12:03:15)
“”but potentially very bad for the ecological balance of the planet we’ve enjoyed since our ancestors first came down out of the trees.””
You do realize that spring can come early, or late.
Summers can be wet one year, dry the next, extremely hot one year, and cool the next.
Winters can be long or short, warm or extremely cold.
One year at a time, several years together, etc.
Got it R. Gates?
Our “ecological balance” is not that delicate.
We’ve been through a few mini ice ages, mini heat strokes, since we came out of the trees.
Even with the worst most hysterical disaster predictions,
we have a few centuries to back away from the water.
This is not Goofy Gores movie.
SJones (13:03:56) :
“Boy, this is confusing!
But if the heat is a result of an El Nino – what’s that got to do with CO2? The heat is released by warming in certain parts of the oceans (and which then subsequently warms the atmosphere) – but what has that got to do with AGW? Is anyone saying CO2 causes El Ninos?”
That is the point.
CO2 caused Global warming is only one of several theories. It is just that the Mass Media, Politicians and Money grubbers have ignored the other theories because they are not as useful when trying to herd the human cattle in the direction they want (more taxes, more regulations, forced purchase of expensive products)
Anyone else find it curious that hurricanes down, ocean temps up?
All this heat in the ocean was explained by Hansen’s “heat in the pipeline”. He works at NASA you know.
I still say that spatial aliasing is the chief suspect here.
An aliased sample signal can look highly plausible, trying to interpret aliased data means you are most likely fooling yourself. See these two short videos I posted on the earlier thread:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVwmtwZLG88&feature=related
The first video makes the very important point that in a practical system, you have to sample at 5 to 10 times the absolute theoretical minimum. And if a practical system is sampled at only a small multiple of the theoretical minimum, we are still likely to get a higly misleading impresstion (referred to as a “modulted signal” in the video).
But maybe I’m wrong, and it is easy to show me I’m wrong.
Before we sample a system for a real practical purpose (like controlling it) we carry out a survey to assess its bandwidth. That allows us to design a sampling strategy which avoids aliasing.
So please refer me to the detailed survey of the temporal and spatial field of the Earth’s surface temperature (or at whatever elevation) which would allow me to conclude that aliasing is not a problem.
If nobody can do that, we are wasting our time trying to interpret trends in this type of series (not just the AMSU series, but all of them).
This is not a question of statistical sampling error. It is a question of discrete signal processing.
REPLY:This is a good point. Sat sampling is a different time domain from surface sampling. FYI this video is even more amazing
– Anthony
Now you got me. How does this square with the graph of Ocean Heat Content in the previous post, and especially the “Annual Ocean Heat Content (0-700) & Linear Trends”, aka Fig. 2? I assume temperature is a measure of heat content.
Many people are now wondering how much colder this global warming can go. Install a auxiliary fireplace? Buy additional heaters? Personally bought two for this winter and am glad I did! OT: And who is the guy in the back room at Houston Control fiddling with the voltage and calibration knobs? 🙂
Seriously, good job Dr. Spencer, enjoy your posts. Seems to me you just receive the data sent down from the satellites, you don’t control the satellites, that is by another NASA division, right? People wonder such things.
Peter (13:13:44) :
Is the Earth a big Stirling engine then?
PETER:
Peter (12:28:20) :
“R. Gates:
We are also seeing arctic sea ice for January near the low levels we saw in the disasterous year 2007 for sea ice extent
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.”
Peter, you’re right on both counts. Spelling, yes. Wind, yes. The year 2007 was the first since 1934 that Russia was unable to use the North East Passage to service its arctic ports (Archangel et al). Reason? The wind had blown more ice into the White Sea and adjacent areas than icebreakers could handle.
About that warm pool in the south Pacific. Might this have somethign to do with it: http://www.iceagenow.com/Undersea_volcanic_eruption_in_Tonga_heating_the_water.htm
roger (12:47:42) :
Can we rely implicitly on satellite instrument recordings? For example AMSR-E was last updated on 1st Feb and has had other problems in the recent past.
For those Trolls gloating over the AMSR-E trace of 2009/2010 ice rebuild, try this link which compares 2006/2007.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=02&fd=05&fy=2007&sm=02&sd=04&sy=2010
Roger, is it my imagination or does it look like the ice this year is much more concentrated than in 2006/2007? I also randomly checked several other years from the past. I didn’t find any year that showed the ice so concentrated. Do you see the same thing?
What many people don’t seem to consider is that the thermal capacity of water is orders of magnitude greater than that of air. So it’s quite feasible to have very cold temperatures over most of the earth’s land area, together with a relatively small ‘pool’ of slightly warmer sea surface, with little or no change in the amount of energy in the whole system.
That’s just one of the things that’s wrong with the whole concept of global average temperatures.
Roy W. Spencer.
“But, I will admit I was surprised.”
I don’t know which regions you should look at first, but take a look at ‘ocean surface relative humidity’. NH January = low air temp = little water vapour support. The ocean finds it hard to evaporate into a saturated atmosphere. Another thing to check would be the diurnal timing of the data capture.
Best regards, suricat.
Ray:
I suppose that could count as a loose analogy
Roy Spencer – “Record January warmth is mostly sea”
Ole Humlum – Climate4You
“The storm Grote Mandrenke (Great Drowning of Men) strikes the Netherlands in January 1362. Hurricane-force winds with enormous waves and a considerable sea level rise (a storm surge) due to the combined action of push by the wind and lifting of the sea surface because of low air pressure flooded extensive areas of the Netherlands, killing at least 25,000 inhabitants. This number should of cause be seen in relation to the much smaller population at that time than now. The storm also flooded and eroded large land areas in western Slesvig, Denmark, whereby sixty parishes is said to have disappeared totally. Also southern England was severely hit by the storm, with much damage on buildings and infrastructure.
“The 1362 storm resulted in severe coastal erosion, contributing to the opening of a pre-existing topographical low in the Netherlands towards the North Sea. This process was already initiated by previous storms, and after a disastrous flood in 14 December 1287 (St. Lucia’s flood) the name Zuiderzee came into general usage for this 120 km long pocket-like extension of the North Sea. The 1287 flood is the fifth largest flood in recorded history, and is believed to have drowned somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 people.” *
* http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndHistory%201300-1399.htm#1362: Grote Mandrenke and the opening of the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands
———-
In the 14th Century we didn’t have a watch on global temperatures. And it was “cooling” then too.
Hi,
Just a little nitpick. Sorry to be pedantic Dr Spencer , but when you said in your second paragraph “Sorry, folks, we don’t make the climate…we just report it.” ..didn’t you mean to say “weather”.
Gaz.
Peter (14:22:55) :
I have brought this up several times in the past. Leif asked if I would still hold the view that the overall energy hadn’t changed much if the temps dropped.
I actually said, truthfully, yes.
What I didn’t say is I might crow about the temp drop to annoy the alarmists.
DaveE.
So the ocean has beltched some heat and is therefore is cooler as a result (a least a little anyway). This heat is now in the air, but will be quickly and largely lost to space ( I assume), or at least melt some of that record snow. So the nett result for February is the earth has less heat/is cooler(?). Where will we see this, in the air temperatures? Will we see a fall to negative anomalies this month, that would show no nett heating would it not?
Others might want to read D. Ch. (13:31:18) comment under http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/05/more-on-ocean-heat-content-and-recent-revisions-to-the-data/ . Seems there are controlling parameters under the control of authorities uploaded to the instruments on the satellite that basically tell them what temperatures they should really be ‘seeing’. And this process has some questionable uncertainty. Interesting read.
“”” Jordan (13:40:58) :
I still say that spatial aliasing is the chief suspect here.
An aliased sample signal can look highly plausible, trying to interpret aliased data means you are most likely fooling yourself. See these two short videos I posted on the earlier thread: “””
Very cool video Jordan. Of course sampling theory predicts that if you sample at the correct Nyquist rate, that you can (in theory) exactly reconstruct the original continuous function. But that really requires that the original samples be of zero time duration, and also that the correct impulse resonse be used for the replacement of the samples, in the reconstruction. Your use of a 10 Fn sampling simplifies that reconstruction process.
You should do this video experiment again at around half Nyquist or slightly less to show people that at half Nyquist, the aliassing errors now corrupt the zero frequency signal which of course is the average of the continuous function; so you only have to infringe Nyquist by a factor of two to make the average unrecoverable.
This happens in the twice daily min/max temperature readings for these Stevenson screen stations and the like. With the 24 hour diurnal temperature cycle, twice a day sampling is only adequate if the daily temperature cycle is a pure sinusoid; but if it has a fast morning rise, and a slow evening fall, indicating at least a 12 hour second harmonic component, then min/max recording fails the Nyquist criterion.
And of course the spatial sampling is a cruel joke, compared to what is required.
But it seems that a lot of “climatologists” are really statisticians, and know nothing of the general theory of sampled data systems.
And unfortunately the central limit theorem, will not buy one a reprieve from a Nyquist violation.
Richard Tyndall (11:14:08) : You asked, “How does this measurement tie in with the previous thread about dropping ocean heat content. My first instinctive reaction as someone who is ignorant of this subject is to think the two conflict with each other. Is this right or am I misinterpereting what the ocean heat content measurement is saying?”
An El Nino releases heat from the tropical Pacific. The tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Content does show a drop this year, as one would expect:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2nut183.png
The drop during this El Nino so far is not as significant as comparably sized El Nino events of 1986/87/88 and 1991/92. It may wind up being more in line with the quick drop in response to the 2002/03 El Nino, which was also about the same magnitude.
Re: Dave in Canada (Feb 5 13:27), Yes Dave, I do, as well. As catastrophe insurance underwriters, we had a crude database of hurricanes going back to about 1900, and for many years we were worried by the idea that with AGW, which we then believed in, hurricane activity would increase because of the greater extent of warm seas in the Atlantic/Gulf areas. What appears to have happened is that hurricane damage was worse in the 1950s when global temperatures were flat to down, and again in 2004/5, but the 1980s and 1990s were very quiet years.
My guess is that if there is any truth in the GCMs then the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles flattens as the earth warms, and this leads to fewer intense storms. However there are interesting correlations with the El **** deleted as commercially sensitive….
Fred from Canuckistan (11:20:20) : You asked, “So if the oceans are giving off heat/cooling and the heat is going to to the atmosphere where it in turn will give off heat/cool to space, should we be getting ready for a prolonged cooling period?”
Nope. An El Nino (the discharge phase) can be followed by a La Nina event (the recharge phase).