Guest post by Steven Goddard
http://www.dontmesswithtexas.org/
Dallas, Texas broke their all time record snowfall record this week. How does this compare with earlier Februaries in Texas? February can be a very warm month in Texas. San Antonio hit 100 degrees on February 21, 1996. December and January can also be very hot, with San Antonio reaching 90 degrees on Christmas Day 1955 and 89 degrees on January 30, 1971.
Brenham, Texas is a relatively rural area (population 13,500) centrally located between San Antonio, Houston and Dallas. They have a good temperature record extending back nearly 120 years. According to USHCN records, Brenham was at least as warm 100 years ago as it is now.
Dublin, Texas is another good rural site west of Dallas (population 3,700) which also shows no warming over the last 100 years. Note the big drop in temperatures for both sites around 1960.
Temple, Texas (near Waco) is more of an Urban Heat Island with a population of 60,000 but still shows a similar pattern. The UHI effect is clearly visible over the last 30 years.
Do the Urban Heat Islands of Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio show warming? Absolutely. Does UHI skew the overall temperature data for Texas? Absolutely. San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the US. Houston is the fourth largest city in the US and Dallas is the eighth largest city in the US.
CNN warned yesterday “More Snow Is Coming South” Alarmists blame this on global warming. What would they say if it hit 100 degrees this week in February, like it did in 1996? What do readers think?
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MJK (06:03:08)
Australia experienced very hot weather in late Autumn and into early December.
That was when the Jambaroo at Copenhagen was held.
Since then it has been a very mild, humid and wet summer over much of Australia, with flooding in many areas.
Several places experienced more rain in a few hours than usually falls in a whole month.
The weather patterns and the rainfall are very similar to that which we experienced 60 odd years ago, when the previous cyclic climate cycle peaked.
I remember it well.
A C Osborn (08:06:13) :”…As to Satellite temperatures, they do not even reflect reallity, showing Hot Spots in the Northern Hemisphere where there is Currently Ice & Snow with some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded.”
The formation of ice and snow involves the release of latent heats of vaporization and freezing. The solid water falls to the surface; the heat remains in the atmosphere, creating higher temperatures at the elevations monitored by satellite.
I was looking at mean temp graphs around the Upper Midwest region (MN, WI, MI) using the USHCN site, and I noticed step changes in the means. 1931, and 1998 initiated upward step changes around 1degF(on average). Very interesting.
Thanks to Henry chance and the link to Climateprogress.
I browsed through the site that is full of doomsday predictions, and found the following link: http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/12/australia-southwest-global-warming-drought-wildfire/
I started feeling sorry for myself living in Australia – hey we won’t even have enough water to drink and we will have to drink only beer. Tough. But then confirmed that rainfall in Australia is on an upwards trend:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rain&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=T
For most of Australia the chances of more than average rain in the next 3 montsh is 50% or better (the lower probablity is in the very wet areas that are NOT drought affected):
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/rain_ahead.shtml
In the last week we had:
Floods in Brisbane: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/rain_ahead.shtml
Floods in Sydney: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/flood-warning-from-bureau-20100213-nyen.html
Floods on the NSW South Coast: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/south-coast-farwest-are-disaster-zones-20100216-o3xm.html
nd in the last month we had quite a bit of water in the Darling River which flows into the Murray
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/floodwater-to-quench-lakes-at-murray-mouth-20100119-mj6q.html
MJK (09:38:53)
West Australia is not the whole continent.
Joshua Hedlund (05:37:09) :
You were asking about published papers about snowfall trends.
I’ve got one, at least:
Changnon, et al, “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States”, JOURNAL OF APPLIED METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY, 45:1141-1155 (2006).
There is no simple take-away message. They report a slight increase in US snowfall over the 20th century, with complicated spatial patterns and a great deal of variability.
Mike C in NS (10:58:04) :
The 6th Grader UHI video, once again! 😎
____________________________________________
can anybody dispute this finding:
The 20th century reported warming is entirely an UHI phenonena.
There is no factual basis for the call to restrict CO2 emissions.
Oops.. messed up the link to the floods in Brisbane in my previous post. This is it:
http://media.smh.com.au/national/national-news/brisbane-suburbs-in-flood-1129336.html
Steve Goddard (12:36:48) :
Steve, that is really an impressive piece of work you did with the area projection through google maps. I could argue with your assessment of the results some more but let’s call a truce for the time being. signing out.
best
mjk
Corey (13:31:51) :
Simply listing a bunch of locations, and saying they were warm at some point in a 400 year span isn’t good enough. One has to combine them and get an actual global record over time. In any case, the whole thing isn’t that significant, anyway.
AusieDan (14:51:21) :
I hadn’t seen that video before. Has anybody got a written list of all the stations they used? I’d have used a lot more rural stations, but it’s still an interesting approach.
Surely the good doctor does not deny the H-bomb (and the mechanism by which it works)?
Follow-on Q: Does not the H-bomb provide experimental basis for understanding how fusion processes obstensibly take place in old sol?
.
.
Oliver K. Manuel, my first clue to the truth of the climate scandal was the tone taken by the participants. The sun may be a ball of iron, but you are not persuasive.
========================
Carrot Eater, and Tom P, risks being the last casualty in ‘All Quiet on the Climate Front’, along with other members of their squad. Forget it guys; Dano’s marked out the honor for himself.
==============================
Steven,
It seems like determining the global temp is quite complicated and fraught with sensor issues. Why not rely more on ocean levels? The ocean is a natural integrator of planet energy and it is relatively simple to measure the ocean level.
Histogram (with Normal Curve) of 1946-2008
Mann-Whitney Test and CI: 1890-1945, 1946-2008
Years #Samples Median
1890-1945 612 68.000
1946-2008 803 67.400
Point estimate for ETA1-ETA2 is 0.400
95.0 Percent CI for ETA1-ETA2 is (-0.700,1.600)
W = 438746.0
Test of ETA1 = ETA2 vs ETA1 not = ETA2 is significant at 0.4742
The test is significant at 0.4742 (adjusted for ties)
This is taking the data off the NOAA Climactic Data Center. Putting it in MiniTab.
Running a Mann-Whitney Test
Since significance << 0.05, the chances that these two data periods are "significantly different" on a statistical basis is virtually ZERO.
Thus there is NO statistically significant difference between the first 1/2 of the 20th century and the last 1/2.
I find similar results from my 190 years of temperature data for Mpls/St. Paul.
The fact that NOAA and the rest of these RASCALS can't do BASIC statistics, (non-parametric because the temps are not a NORMAL distribution.) Means they are HOPELESS! Can we get PHD's removed on the basis of incompetency?
There is a graph at the end of the following post elsewhere, if you skip to the end (not to do with this) it might be interesting. Shows a variety of time series for the gridcell in Texas.
Crutem3 (from 1874)
Hadcrut3
GHCN RVose
RSS tlt
UAH tlt
http://daedalearth.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/take-stock/
Looks like Texas has decided to take on the EPA: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1661844120100216
Ref – Oliver K. Manuel (04:35:50) :
“Climatology is not the only science that has been terribly disgraced by consensus “group science.” Since the return of Apollo with the first lunar samples in 1969, the same consensus “group science” has taken control of our most prestigious journals (Nature, Science, etc) and research institutions (NAS, NASA, DOE, Cal-tech, Harvard, University of Chicago, University of Bern, etc) and reduced astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, solar and space sciences, nuclear and particle physics to popular fairy tales (to wit) Earth’s heat source is not a ball of Hydrogen (H), it is not heated primarily by H-fusion, solar neutrinos do not oscillate away to preserve fairy tales, neutrons repulsion powers the stars and the cosmos, nuclear matter is dissociating rather than fusing together in our vibrant universe, etc., etc.”
________________________
Maybe I’m stupid, but I didn’t read the above to insult anyone except the “group science mob” that are represented by people like Mann in many fields and the “science journel” mob that are out to sell magazines and NOT to publish serious research findings and updates.
If I’m wrong, let me wallow in my ignorance.
The data Goddard shows in this post confirmed something I have sensed in my mind this winter: that it has been the coldest and snowiest winter here since 1983-1984. Very interesting data.
I have also wondered why Dallas has not had a significant tornado hit within the main part of the city since 1957. Could the urban heat island have something to do with that? Downtown Fort Worth was hit hard by a tornado in 1998 (a storm that came all too close to my own neighborhood in Arlington then), so maybe not. But I have always wondered about that, since downtown Dallas is so much larger and more concentrated.
The more I read about “global temperature” the more I associate it (and the problem it presents) the same way as when we talk about weather and climate –getting a “BIG” picture from a zillion or less little pixel readings). I also wonder how we’d do it on any other planet or if we lived on the Sun. Adding up all the hotspots and coldspots and doing some old fashioned division I don’t think would give us the same answer we have for what we say the temperature is for any of these other heavenly bodies when we measure it millions of miles away.
Still think we need to put a satalite or two out there, say 50 million miles away, and measure it as if Earth were a speck in the universe. That’s the only way to be sure. Right?
Maybe that Mars Rover that’s stuck would look up and give us a reading or two every so often. That would be cheaper.
Steve Goddard,
I just now got to this post. Very interesting. I have graphed the data for Hadley CRUT3 data that they released a couple of months ago, and have San Antonio in that dataset. see tinypic below.
The data follows almost the exact shape as yours for USHCN, but something is strange. The Hadley CRUT3 is about 2 degrees higher, on average, in the early years (around 1900), compared to the USHCN. The final years are more closely matched. Thus, far less warming shown for San Antonio.
http://tinypic.com/r/96gt1u/6
I also have the CRUT3 graph as a png file.
Roger
“AusieDan (13:44:53) :
MJK (06:03:08)
Australia experienced very hot weather in late Autumn and into early December.
That was when the Jambaroo at Copenhagen was held.
Since then it has been a very mild, humid and wet summer over much of Australia, with flooding in many areas.
Several places experienced more rain in a few hours than usually falls in a whole month.
The weather patterns and the rainfall are very similar to that which we experienced 60 odd years ago, when the previous cyclic climate cycle peaked.
I remember it well.”
I fully concur here in Sydney. The last couple of days the weather has tried to be summery, and today is very nice, warm, not hot, and usual humidity which is quite confortable ~60%. We’ve had so much rain Lake George actually has water in it now.
However, there have been none of the severe bush fires that were predicted after the bush fires in Victoria and New South Wales last year. I think even the arsonists (Who start most of the bush fires here in Australia) appear to have taken a break (Or maybe the “authorities” started doing their job this year?).
“Speaking of global warming, does anybody know the average temps for Vancouver?”
Yes, I have the data from all the stations in BC. Victoria is in the second video. I you want graphs of the area I can provide the data. I plan to write a report on BC with more detail.
Want to take a guess at the trend? Yep, no increase in the summer temps, almost all flat since 1900, but the winter cold is warming. Thus a narrowing of the variability.
carrot eater (12:54:29) :
I’ll go 1980 to current, in USHCN data (not GISS; these stations stop in 2006 in GISS)
Linear trend, Raw, deg C/decade
Boerne +0.27
San Antonio Airport +0.30
Linear trend, adjusted, deg C/decade
Boerne +0.28
San Antonio Airport +0.44
If you were thinking Boerne was a good UHI-less station, then there was real warming there in the last ~30 years. It’s there in the raw data, it’s there in the adjusted data.
San Antonio Airport shows a similar trend in the raw data, and a bit stronger in the adjusted. Go figure, but it can happen. I’d have to check how much of that was TOB, and how much of it was homogenisation.
=================================================
Where to start?
I have analyzed the temperature datasets for the South Texas Region, 16 ways to Sunday: Raw vs. “value added”. Urban vs. Rural. Annually, monthly, Tmax, Tmin. 1885-2009, 1905-1940, 1942-2009, etc. Throw in wind and precipitation.
The San Antonio station had 2 major moves in 1940 & 1942, with significant changes in both latitude and elevation, moving from a growing downtown, north to a (then) rural airport (at a higher elevation).
Boice et al (1996), using urban San Antonio and rural Boerne, New Braunfels, and Poteet (1946-1990), showed a San Antonio UHI of 5.4° F / Century.
Boerne was an oddity in that study, showing some signs of UHI.
Growth of SA is mostly to the NW, N, and NE.
Boerne is NW of SA.
Wind in SA is from the SE to the NW, 3+ months a year.
Using urban San Antonio and rural Boerne, Beeville, Llano, Blanco, and Luling (1942-2009), my results showed SA UHI ≈ 3° F / Century.
And there is no UHI stagnation in SA. Recently completed freeway widening (to 10 lanes each), a new cloverleaf interchange, and an under construction 3rd terminal (all near the airport sensor), ensure that SA UHI continues to increase.
All 5 rural sites showed cooling. Average = 1.2°F/C.
Boerne was again an outlier, showing less cooling than the other 4 rural sites.
Results got strange trying to analyze Tmin and Tmax trends by month.
Steve Koch,
One problem with using sea level as a thermometer is that it is affected by other factors like glacial melt. Another problem is that it reflects local water temperatures rather than air temperatures. Se level trends vary a lot from place to place. In some locations sea level is falling and in other places it is rising.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml