February 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update: Version 5.3 Unveiled
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature remained high, at +0.61 deg. C for February, 2010. This is about the same as January, which in our new Version 5.3 of the UAH dataset was +0.63 deg. C. February was second warmest in the 32-year record, behind Feb 1998 which was itself the second warmest of all months. The El Nino is still the dominant temperature signal; many people living in Northern Hemisphere temperate zones were still experiencing colder than average weather.
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 0.213 0.418 0.009 -0.119
2009 2 0.220 0.557 -0.117 -0.091
2009 3 0.174 0.335 0.013 -0.198
2009 4 0.135 0.290 -0.020 -0.013
2009 5 0.102 0.109 0.094 -0.112
2009 6 0.022 -0.039 0.084 0.074
2009 7 0.414 0.188 0.640 0.479
2009 8 0.245 0.243 0.247 0.426
2009 9 0.502 0.571 0.433 0.596
2009 10 0.353 0.295 0.410 0.374
2009 11 0.504 0.443 0.565 0.482
2009 12 0.262 0.331 0.190 0.482
2010 1 0.630 0.809 0.451 0.677
2010 2 0.613 0.720 0.506 0.789
The new dataset version does not change the long-term trend in the dataset, nor does it yield revised record months; it does, however, reduce some of the month-to-month variability, which has been slowly increasing over time.
Version 5.3 accounts for the mismatch between the average seasonal cycle produced by the older MSU and the newer AMSU instruments. This affects the value of the individual monthly departures, but does not affect the year to year variations, and thus the overall trend remains the same.
Here is a comparison of v5.2 and v5.3 for global anomalies in lower tropospheric temperature.
YR MON v5.2 v5.3
2009 1 0.304 0.213
2009 2 0.347 0.220
2009 3 0.206 0.174
2009 4 0.090 0.135
2009 5 0.045 0.102
2009 6 0.003 0.022
2009 7 0.411 0.414
2009 8 0.229 0.245
2009 9 0.422 0.502
2009 10 0.286 0.353
2009 11 0.497 0.504
2009 12 0.288 0.262
2010 1 0.721 0.630
2010 2 0.740 0.613
trends since 11/78: +0.132 +0.132 deg. C per decade
The following discussion is provided by John Christy:
As discussed in our running technical comments last July, we have been looking at making an adjustment to the way the average seasonal cycle is removed from the newer AMSU instruments (since 1998) versus the older MSU instruments. At that time, others (e.g. Anthony Watts) brought to our attention the fact that UAH data tended to have some systematic peculiarities with specific months, e.g. February tended to be relatively warmer while September was relatively cooler in these comparisons with other datasets. In v5.2 of our dataset we relied considerably on the older MSUs to construct the average seasonal cycle used to calculated the monthly departures for the AMSU instruments. This created the peculiarities noted above. In v5.3 we have now limited this influence.
The adjustments are very minor in terms of climate as they impact the relative departures within the year, not the year-to-year variations. Since the errors are largest in February (almost 0.13 C), we believe that February is the appropriate month to introduce v5.3 where readers will see the differences most clearly. Note that there is no change in the long term trend as both v5.2 and v5.3 show +0.132 C/decade. All that happens is a redistribution of a fraction of the anomalies among the months. Indeed, with v5.3 as with v5.2, Jan 2010 is still the warmest January and February 2010 is the second warmest Feb behind Feb 1998 in the 32-year record.
For a more detailed discussion of this issue written last July, email John Christy at christy@nsstc.uah.edu for the document.
[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.]
What makes this area of science very confusing is that it is suppose to be the average around the planet.
So anamolies like hot over here and cold over here are blended.
Taking land surface temps and averaging can create quite a massive mess by the placement of where these temps are taken (like the airplane runway that the exhaust hits it).
But I mean is that our planet is exteremely complex and trying to get away with the simple will not work. The flow of weather is not straight left to right. It is like an oscillation flow which keeps changing with the input of colder or warmer currents, evaporation cycles, rotation (night and day), etc.
Anthony was quick to note this spike back in January, but gave credit to Lubos for being first to point it out. We’ve had many interesting discussions about it since then. So lay off, you Alarmists. It’s not like we are pretending it isn’t happening.
Back in January I had some questions about how much latent heat was released by the conversion of vapor to liquid, and the conversion of liquid to solid, which occurs when the sub-tropical jet sweeps moisture up from the Pacific and turns it into snow cover plopped down onto North America.
As far as I know, the only person to play around with this idea was Lubos, in his posting: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/01/warming-induced-by-latent-heat-of-snow.html
It’s pretty amazing how much heat is released creating snow cover. Of course, all this released heat will be gobbled up, because it will take an amazing amount of heat to melt the snow.
Also amazing is that it takes even more heat to dry up all the puddles.
This in some way may explain why the world often is warmer during a northern hemisphere winter. The northern hemisphere has much more land, and therefore can hold a far greater area of snow cover. (Also the earth is closest to the sun in January, but that is another matter.)
(I do fairly well, when it comes to asking questions, and inventing theories. The problem is that I spent all my math classes studying clouds out the window, and calculating the chances school would be cancelled. Therefore I depend on people like Lubos to do all the dirty work, and point out where my math is ridiculous. He’s got more understanding of math in his little finger than I have in my entire life, and if you don’t believe me, ask my banker.)
(William Connolley likely didn’t much like Lubos pointing out an error in his math, back on September 20, 2005, because apparently William under-rated the ability of the frozen north to suck up latent heat, as a so-called “heat-sink,” by a factor of 1000.) Check out: http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/latent-heat-ii.html. (Remember, as you read, that the year is 2005, and how Skeptics were treated back then.)
In the end the release and re-absorbing of latent heat adds up to around zero, but I think it may play a part in the creation of peaks and valleys in our temperature charts. I expect a pretty big valley, as the northern hemisphere snow cover melts, and the puddles dry up.
That spike beginning in late 2008 is unbelievable! Just how does (and how often) NASA check the calibration of their satellite sensors. Can’t this type of thing happen again, only with the infrared sensors?
NSIDC: satellite sea ice sensor has “catastrophic failure” – data faulty for the last 45 or more days.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/18/nsidc-satellite-sea-ice-sensor-has-catastrophic-failure-data-faulty-for-the-last-45-days/
El Nino weakened the entire month of Feb.
Feb 1: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.2.1.2010.gif
Mar 1: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.3.1.2010.gif
It is not at all clear to me how the SSTs can go down that much, yet anamoly is almost the same. Does not compute…..
Mikael/Mooloo,
Please, please stop pointing at lack of snow in the Winter Olympics’ host city as a sign of global warming. They have seen absolutely normal weather conditions for an El Nino year.
Re: MattN (Mar 6 05:41),
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100303_Figure4.png
It is the arctic that has “heated” because of the circulation that brought the cold down to europe and the US and took the southern warm air north.
I think anomalies are not worth the bits they are displayed with.
To be fair: William Connolley stated he corrected his error without any help from Lubos, back in 2005.
http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/09/arctic-sea-ice-is-not-really-heat-sink.html
It sure is fun to go back in time and see the level science was at, and the attitudes people had.
So what happens with the 0,12 degrees that was cut off the january anomaly? Is it added on to the months later this year? Is the version 5.3 adjustments going to be applied for earlier months (and earlier years) as well? In case it is, how far back in time ?
The discrepancy between GISS and satellites is important. If it were the other way round, people would be screaming bloody murder. Much of the Northern Hemisphere has been very cold in January and February.
We really need an explanation why satellites are showing this big spike.
Does it have to do with the elevation which TLT is measured (14,000 ft?)
Nick B,
January was a record high in Vancouver, is that “absolutely normal weather conditions for an El Nino year”?
Record warm January for Vancouver
Montreal, Feb 2, 2010 (AFP) – Winter Olympic host city Vancouver saw its warmest January on record, marked by a lack of snow and daffodils in bloom just days before the start of the Games, the Meteorologist Service of Canada said Tuesday.
The mean temperature reached 7.2 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit), up from a norm of 3.3 degrees for the month, meteorologist Matthew MacDonald, reached by telephone at the Vancouver airport, told AFP.
The previous record high of 6.3 degrees was reached four times, most recently in 2006. 2″
http://www.nbcolympics.com/news-features/news/newsid=404682.html
tata,
El Nino years in Vancouver are dry and mild. The lack of snow, in particular should not be a surprise to anyone. The temperature, well, this year probably should be in the top 10 percent anyway… so is it climate or weather?
Call it a hunch as well, but I’d bet with all the people in town for the Olympics there might have beena little uptick in UHI as well.
Just the same way that the recent NH snow, as much as we do make tongue and cheek Al Gore jokes about it, was also weather… both sides of the conversation (the level headed ones at least) should look very critically at attribution of short term weather phenomenon to climate.
Running around chasing every new high temp record, vs. us running around pointing out every new low temp record just adds to te noise. If there is solid evidence that Vancouver’s winter is, in fact, extreme/unprecedented/unusual then lets see it… but news reports that Vancouver is warm and dry during an El Nino year, AFAIK, should not come as a surprise and that was what I was trying to get at.
Cheers!
It doesn’t the AQUA satellite’s sensors measure surface temperature it measures the air temperature in the lower atmosphere, the lower tropospheric temperature. It does that by comparing the radiation in the microwave regions in the microwaves emitted by a platinum resistance thermometer at a known warm temperature and the Microwaves from outer-space a known cold temperature. The surface temperature and the atmospheric temperature tend to follow each other but they are not in lock-step with each other.
It doesn’t the AQUA satellite’s sensors measure surface temperature it measures the air temperature in the lower atmosphere,
Should be:
It doesn’t measure surface temperature, the AQUA satellite’s sensors measures the air temperature in the lower atmosphere,
Gee I wish this site had a preview button LOL.
Same here Paul – and it would save the mods from my incessant failure to /b too 😀
Does anyone know what year (or month) the UAH temperature series switches from using MSU-data to AMSU-data, and thus the point to which the v5.3 adjustment is applied?
When the children have stopped playing with their colouring sets, take a look at a grown up rendition of SST’s
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
Then take a look at an area where few people ( apart from Catlin expeditionaries and their ilk)
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Am I bovvered?
For an open source project, IMHO a truly non-proprietary and portable language should be used, such as C++.
Being an old FORTRAN programmer converted into C++ programmer, some years ago I wrote this. The last couple of years I have also worked with C#. Based on extensive professional experience using all 3 languages, my opinion is that C++ is by far the most suitable language for an open source climate project.
I haven’t seen an answer to my question, so I have scratched around and it looks like the answer must be “yes”. If heat is reflected from the unusually large area of snow cover – from mid-December to mid-February for much of the US, Europe and Asia, we would expect to see higher than normal troposphere temperatures in spite of lower than normal land surface temperatures, if the PRTs are extremely accurate tools for direct measurement of temperature rather than any proxy from which the effect of albedo could be eliminaated.
Drs Spencer and Christy could clarify this by giving more subdivisions of the global anomaly data, so we could see whether we are just getting carried away extrapolating from the 15% or so of the globe that has been well (measured in whole degrees, not tenths) below normal this winter.
The “problem” is the use of ’79-’98 average.
paul jackson (07:41:07) :
(…)
Gee I wish this site had a preview button LOL.
Get Firefox (similar Mozilla-based browsers often also work).
Go here at the Climate Audit site. Follow directions for first installing the Greasemonkey add-on, then the CA Assistant script that will run on Greasemonkey.
Then you will have a Preview button, as well as some other nice features.
Caveat: On the new toolbar you will get for the comment window, there are many nice formatting options, and they will show up nice in the preview. However, not all options are enabled on the WUWT site, so the posted comment may look different from the preview. If you see the formatting used by other people, then it should be good for you to use. Besides CA and WUWT there are other sites CA Assistant runs on, and they may vary as well.
“Nick B – Vancouver’s winter is, in fact, extreme/unprecedented/unusual then lets see it… but news reports that Vancouver is warm and dry during an El Nino year, AFAIK, should not come as a surprise and that was what I was trying to get at”
Nick, let me try to help here:
Here is yesterdays data from Envirocanada. It has been back to normalish values since about midway through the Olympics. I think the problem is that people look at a map and just infer that being further north of their location, we must be colder. Forgetting that we have a huge ocean influence.
Take for example Prince Rupert, much further north then Van, yet has very little “snow days”. So much so that billions of dollars have been sunk into developing a huge deep sea terminal there for containers, oil exports, etc, because Prince Rupert is one full day by steamer (love that antiquated word!) closer to Asia then any other west coast port. The rail links are abundant also. This will save billions for the ecomony. Think OCEAN, huge heat sink.
Yes the temps here were “record” high, but don’t forget we had “record” lows just last winter…..
Yesterday
Max: 10.7°C
Min: 2.8°C
Precip: 0.0 mm
Normals
Max: 10°C
Min: 3°C Today
Sheesh!
Tata
Perhaps you would like to reveal when the records began in Vancouver then we can all see that the record suddenly doesn’t look that impressive.
Tonyb
Quick Answers:
All: Many answers are found in our several publications.
dp: zero line is the 1979-1998 average
many: NH and globe very warm due to El Nino warming of tropics and subtropics. If you throw a random dart at the globe, it would hit a warm anomaly.
David: In this microwave frequency, the snow and other solid ground have similar emissivities – so no real impact. Gridded datasets are available
Jim N, 4 Billion, Skeptic: in v5.3 Eight months are now warmer – Apr-Nov, Four months are now cooler – Dec, Jan, Feb Mar. There is no incline being hidden – as noted the trend doesn’t change.
“PG”: Sensor receives weak microwave emission from atmospheric oxygen near the 60 GHz absorption band.
tata: Previous years’ monthly anomalies back to 1998 are affected when the first AMSU was merged. MSU and AMSU overlapped from then to 2002 in UAH data. After 2002, AMSUs only.
Goddard: El Nino
gtrip: monthly precision is about +/- 0.08 C (see papers on this).
DaveH: Satellite senses bulk atmosphere emissions, so UHI does not affect this.
NickB: RSS is using the AMSU from NOAA-15 (i.e. since 1998) along with the MSU on NOAA-14 (through about 2004). At present, RSS does not use the stable AMSU on AQUA (launched in 2002).
magicjava: Our plan is to have the code written to certified federal standards for public use on a federal system – takes time and money (not ours because we don’t have funding to do this). Raw data have always been freely available and our publications describe in detail the techniques we use.
I’m 50 miles due south of Vancouver………….I love El Nino years. Didn’t like the fact that I had to mow my lawn in Februrary, but that beats shovelling snow.
Warminsts….when your models can account for ENSO, PDO, Clouds, Stratospheric water vapor, etc. start making predictions. Til then realize your undertakings are utter folly and will always be wrong. Well maybe not always….there is that saying about the broken clock…..
Peter Plail (01:41:38) said:
“R Gates
I seem to be missing the evidence of smaller and smaller amounts of ice in the Arctic and have also missed your response to my pointing out that the UK Met Office has pointed out the the UK winter has been significantly drier, especially in Scotland, despite the massive amounts of snow this year.
I could have sworn that you said that an accelerated hydrological cycle was responsible for the snow.”
I think one of the best charts of arctic sea ice, to see the longest reliable set of data, showing any meaningful trend is this one:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Related to the specifc weather in any part of the world– no single storm or season or short period can be proven to have anything to do, or not to do with AGW…only longer term effects. Yes, an intensification and acceleration of the hyrdrological cycle is part of AGW models. Wet areas will tend to see very intense downpours AND snowfalls, and deserts will see even more extreme dryness…as longer term trends, but also, there will be some shifting and expansion of certain regions, both wet and dry.
Finally, the 2007-2009 solar minimum and La Nina period combined to give a slowdown to the upward march of global tropospheric temperatures, but already we’re seeing record and near record tropospheric temps as the solar minimum has given way to increase solar activity. Sure, a good portion of this tropospheric anomaly comes from the El Nino activity, but this El Nino is not as strong as the 1998 episode, yet 2010 is likely to become the warmest year on instrument record, and the solar maximum is still several years away. AGW theorists would say this is one more bit of evidence for validation of their models.