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.]
JChristy (09:55:12) :
Gridded datasets are available & Raw data have always been freely available and our publications describe in detail the techniques we use.
Where is it available please?
Ah Bob – you are a goldmine of information. I visit your website regularly but somehow missed that one. Thanks for the links.
anna v (00:48:52) :
…”Heat input and output of course are what determines whether the planet is heating or cooling, and global temperatures cannot be a good proxy for that.
Look at the plot given above http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
the highest anomaly positive is in the arctic and is 14C, the lowest in Russia is -4C. Is there a meaning in averaging these two anomalies in true physics? i.e. heat input and output.?
The more I think of it the more bizarre the whole business is, like a game.”
Good stuff Anna, i too think average global temperature is a lousy proxy for deciding on climate, but even if it was a good proxy expecting to find meaningful trends in a chaotic non-linear system is futile. Climate science has still a long way to go before it can make useful prediction about future direction, let alone try to quantify impacts.
Dr Spencer/Dr Christy
Seem to recall various “?reliable?” comments on the web in the past couple years that temperatures (or perhaps it was ‘climate’) on Mars and/or Jupiter (perhaps other planets as well) have been “cooling”. Can you comment? If so, is there a trend that applies to all (or seems to with the info we currently have)? Is there some website that keeps a graph of such data that we wouldn’t need special access to see? If so can you add it to your response? Many thanks!
@ur momisugly Noelene (22:12:37) : Enjoyed your description of your home and heating methods. I would enjoy a less urban life (I grew up in a small town) but one ends up where opportunities take you – i.e. the “centre of the universe” (sarc) in the Great White North, in my case (otherwise known as Toronto). I would also love to visit your part of the world someday, but income and children don’t offer much hope of this in the foreseeable future. Thanks! Glad also to hear about the weather there – sounds like nothing unusual but I understand the Aussie papers have been trying to make it sound like you’ve had a barbeque summer. Still trying to make sense of the UAH anomoly.
David (16:01:37) and David (08:58:01)
I too have wondered if the snow-cover’s albedo might warm the troposphere twice, both with incoming and outgoing light. Where did you “scratch around?” I’d like to learn more.
Most of the feedback I have recieved when expressing this idea has been negative. Many have told me visable light does not warm the atmosphere at all. I suppose I am a bit stubborn to keep wondering.
People seem to know a lot about how visible light (and infra-red light) effect CO2, but less about how visible light effects H2O vapor. My guess is that H2O vapor must absorb some light, for otherwise the sky would look black, rather than blue.
Also I have to do farm-chores before sunrise, and often I take a bit of time to conduct scientific observations of dawn, (IE: loaf.) There is a short period of time before the sun even touches the highest hills when it touches the clouds, starting with the highest cirrus and moving down therough the various levels of cloud towards earth. Such sunshine is not hitting the earth, and therefore it in many ways qualifies as an experiment involving visible light passing through the atmosphere without the light rebounding back up as infrared light coming up from earth.
One remarkable phenomenon I’ve noticed is a rare but striking increase in cirrocumulous, as the sun passes through that altitude. Often it dries up and vanishes as quickly as it appears. This would seem to indicate some sort of lift is occurring up there, during the time sunbeams pass through that altitude without striking the earth. Admittedly this is only a layman’s observation, but it does explain why I am obnoxious and continue to wonder about the warming effect of visible light, even after people have told me it has no effect, (often with great authority.)
If H2O vapor is warmed at all by visible light, then it would be warmed twice when there is snow-cover’s abedo, first by decending light and then by bounced-back light. Even though the albedo would represent a net loss for the earth’s energy-budget, a short-term rise in temperatures in the troposphere might be noted.
This is another reason why I’m expecting temperatures to “plunge,” (if tenths of a degree can be called a “plunge,”) as the snow-cover melts away.
Thanks Dr Christy. I had a feeling I had read something like that somewhere, but I am struggling with the idea that what you are reporting is actually temperature, rather than a microwave frequency proxy. If it were really temperature, would there be an albedo effect, or are you saying that such an effect does not really exist?
I don’t have a table showing V5.3 in Feb. 1998, but the graph puts it about at about the same level as V5.2, so I am making the following comparison, the first column of temperature numbers being from V5.2 and the second from V5.3:
Feb. 1998 0.760 0.760
Feb. 2010 0.740 0.613
While this difference may be relatively small and hard to see on a 1978-2010 graph, it means the 1998 record high temperature will be harder to break using V5.3
Sorry Caleb missed your post. Apologies to all the grown-up physicists here, but I just looked around on G**gle and found an OU (British public university) primer on albedo, which seems pretty clear that the effect applies to solar energy in the aggregate, and specifically to heat as well as to light. I also looked for information on platinum resistance thermometers (another poster explained that that was what UAH use), which appear to be highly accurate. So I don’t understand why a process that is designed to give highly accurate temperature readings would use a microwave frequency that cancels out what appears to be a real temperature effect.
Very happy to be educated/corrected.
Another reason I’m expecting the UAH temperatures to “plunge” is because it looks like the El Nino is going to fade away. There may be a slight rally as a Kelvin Wave heads east, but if you check out the NOAA CFS model on page 28 of the following site, you see they expect this El Nino to be history by July.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
Usually El Ninos make many Alarmists happy, as rising temperatures seemingly verify their theories. Meanwhile many Skeptics get all morose and sulk, for they figure Alarmists are going to tax their socks off. However a post by Bob Tisdale got me looking at all this stuff a different way.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/02/la-nina-underappreciated-portion-of.html
The single word that grabbed my mind and made it think in new directions was the word “recharging,” concerning the La Nina. This of course suggests the El Nino is “discharging.”
This is quite opposite the way most think about La Ninas and El Ninos. Most assume La Ninas hold less energy, because they cool, while they think El Ninos hold more energy, because they warm. It is fascinating to me that the “cooling event” might indicate an increase in our planet’s “energy budget,” with energy going into a sort of savings account, while a “warming event” might indicate that budget is getting blown.
Also Bob Tisdale’s site has some fascinating animations of sea surface temperatures, and sea surface temperature anomalies. If you ever want to be humbled and also filled with wonder, just watch what the sea does, over the few decades we’ve been able to admire it from outer space. Besides Kelvin Waves, there are other surges of coolness and warmth which no one really understands. I think the truth of the matter is we know next to nothing, compared to what we’ll learn in the next thirty years.
A question I forgot to ask in my previous post:
If the graph is entirely V5.3 data, why isn’t the number for Feb. different than it was in V5.2 ?
Paul Martin,
“The reason why January/February are the warmest months will probably be because the earth’s orbit has its closest approach to the sun (perihelion) in early January.”
They’re not the warmest months, they’re the coldest, and it has nothing to do with the perihelion. December, January and February are colder by about 4C than June, July and August because the southern hemisphere is mostly ocean while the northern hemisphere is mostly land.
The graph is actually a plot of January/February temperatures, so although this winter is the warmest ever, it is still about 4C cooler than the average for June/July.
R. Gates (22:05:34) :
Global warming predictions are already wrong. But you don’t want to see that.
I won’t stop, though I would like to, from believing Chicken Little.
I’m going to be careful to spend my life on better things than that.
NickB. (00:14:53) :
R Gates
…………………………………………………………………….
There is also GIStemp that show warmest year this, warming trend that, etc.
But only GIStemp is showing that. And we all know that James Hansen controls GIStemp. We know he is an environmental activist. Anyone who wants to think with an unbiased mind wouldn’t trust and environmentalist activist temperature set. But maybe some don’t want to be unbiased.
What will RGates be saying when the precipitous drop that always comes after El Nino happens?
Opppps, typo:
aMINO aCIDS iN mETEORITES (14:10:25) :
I won’t stop, though I would like to, from believing Chicken Little.
Should have said :
I won’t stop you(meaning R Gates), though I would like to, from believing Chicken Little.
With all due respect to Drs Christy and Spencer –
I hope at least some of you recall the near-daily updates on satellite temps on this website when they were plummeting to a near 0 anomaly in 2008 (ish).
How quickly the tune has changed now that global temps are up. Everyone is so very curious about the reliability of satellite instrumentation. Just hilarious.
Also, with nary a peep we have scientists retroactively adjusting data, for which they have not provided the code. And yet all seems well on WUWT. Apparently what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander?
I hope the proverbial light has turned on for a few of you. By that, I mean the realization that this is an unrelentingly biased website, almost entirely operated and consumed by non-scientists.
TonyB wrote:
“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”
1937 it seems:
“Since record keeping began in 1937 at Vancouver International Airport the average temperature in January has been 3.3 C.”
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Record+warm+January+Vancouver+2010+Olympics/2491944/story.html
Look at the satellite data as presented here in its entirety. To my eye it seems to indicate a slight warming trend. No surprise here, I think most data points to slight warming over the last 30 years. We also know that temperatures today are similar to the temperatures in the 1930s – NASA GISS methodology indicates 1934 was trivially warmer than 1998. I don’t think any of these observations are particularly controversial so………..Exactly what anthropogenic anomaly are we attempting to explain?
I wonder how many of the problems with the UAH numbers are related to trees and hills.
Consider a dark spherical object suspended in mid-air. Sunlight hits it, it warms up. About half of the IR it emits goes up (above a horizontal line), about half goes down. In addition, it warms the air that contacts it, and warmer air moves upward.
Net effect is that most of warming generated by sunlight is heading upwards. The satellites are measuring lower tropospheric air temperatures, so as they look downward they see (nearly?) all of the heating, even though below the object not even half is noticed.
We do not live in a completely flat world. There are forests, and their dark trunks and branches are soaking up sunlight even when leafless. I can go outside right now and see the difference in snow melt between forest and bare field. We have hills and mountains, and the heating they see does not much reach people where they tend to live in the valleys, which generally take longer to warm up in sunlight anyway.
And while thinking 3D, yes we also have the tall structures of mankind. I can see the snow melting off the roofs of the unheated buildings faster than the snow surrounding them. But forests have much more coverage than human structures thus the latter may be negligible to the big picture.
So we can have heating that the satellites will detect, but we, here on the cold ground, will not benefit much from that heating.
This effect could be checked for by comparing satellite data from forest regions to readings from surface stations that are very close by, near enough to the forests that they should see the same amount of sunlight yet not so close they are influenced by any forest-caused heating. Provided we can trust those surface readings, better select a highly-rated site and insist on the really raw data.
Any thoughts on the hypothesis?
Phil M
I hope the proverbial light has turned on for a few of you. By that, I mean the realization that this is an unrelentingly biased website, almost entirely operated and consumed by non-scientists.>>
Bang on Phil. Stick around for a while. Watch how the real scientists never disagree with each other, never answer any of the non-scientists questions, never admit when they are wrong, never take a good idea from a non-scientist, heck they don’t even do smart things like putting their Phd level draft papers up for comment by the non-scientists because they’re all so dumb that the scientists know in advance that nothing will come of it. Then there’s that whole thing about not allowing name calling and smear tactics and terminology that faintly resembles accusations of crimes against humanity. I’m telling you, its shocking!
Now… back to temperature.
I have an older set of GISS broken down by latitude. One of the things that I noticed is that since the late 1800’s until about 25 years ago, the Arctic and Antarctic anomalies were in opposition to each other. One was always positive when the other was negative. Not enough years of data to spot a recurring trend, but it appears to me that the Antarctic oscillation has a longer wavelength than the Arctic one. Since they’ve now both crossed into positive territory (as have the temperate zones) it seems like warming in the NH is dropping off, but the net of the two is still an increase. We’re seeing nasty temp drops and southward snow extent on the land masses as they fluctuate way more than ocean, so we observe a nasty winter, but the stability of the oceans combined with the rise in the SH temperate and Antarctic zones nets to a warmer global temperature.
Am I on the right track?
Nick B. said:
“What will RGates be saying when the precipitous drop that always comes after El Nino happens?”
Don’t care what happens over six months time…only the longer term. Of course temps will drop following an El Nino, but the point really is, will the peak of temps in this El Nino be stronger than the peak of temps in the 1998 El Nino. this really what starts to show a trend. We also are seeing Solar Cycle 24 starting to rev up, and this will add to temps. But in the midst of all these natural variations, the AGW hypothesis would say we should be able to detect a signal that would indicate that increased CO2 is causing long term temps to increase. If the recent El Nino is weaker than 1998, and we won’t be seeing a peak in solar cycle 24 until 2013, then to what would AGW skeptics attribute a record warm year (based on the modern temperature record). That is, if 2010 turns out to be warmer than 1998 or 1934, to what would the AGW skeptic attribute it? A weaker El Nino than 1998? AGW models give us a reasonable answer…increased CO2.
Phil M (15:01:33) :
Out trolling, are we? OK, I’ll take the bait.
A.) I’m fairly sure this site was the third to report the spike in warming, weeks before Roy Spencer even released the monthly data for January. Roy was first, with the daily data, and Lubos was second. How then, may I ask, is this site displaying bias? (If Anthony was like Gavin, he would not report the temperature spike at all, until he had to.)
B.) As you are so amazingly scientific, and I am admittedly not, will you please explain how a gradual rise in CO2 can produce a dramatic temperature spike? (Either that, or show me a dramatic CO2 spike that matches the dramatic temperature spike.) And, as you explain, please do not mention the unscientific stuff we have discussed here today, starting with the El Nino. It is quite obvious you are so superior to us that you do not discuss the stuff we do, in which case you must have some new and interesting ideas. I personally would love to hear them. (If you don’t produce ideas, I very much fear some people will quietly assume you have none, and some might even be so rude as to suggest your skull is a hollow echo chamber full of parroted “talking points,” and we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we? So give us ideas, brother! Ideas!)
C.) Regarding the “hide the incline” talking-point: I do believe Roy Spencer announced his intent to make this adjustment beforehand, during the process, and now afterwards, and also makes his raw data available. Please ask yourself: Have Hansen, Mann, Briffa, and Phil Jones announced their intent to make adjustments beforehand, and during the process, and afterwards, or did they have to get their arms twisted by FOI requests? Do they make their raw data available? Or did they “lose” it?
D.) Just for the fun of it, go to Realclimate and post a highly critical comment about Hansen failing to provide code and raw data. Conclude it with the statement, “I hope the proverbial light has turned on for a few of you. By that, I mean the realization that this is an unrelentingly biased website, almost entirely operated and consumed by non-scientists.” Then sit back and see if Gavin ever allows your comment to see the light of day.
Then come back and tell us which website is more biased.
R. Gates (19:42:13) :
increased CO2.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Oh, haven’t you heard man! You’re supposed to be say “pollutants, which includes methane, co2, and other pollutants”! You missed out on the latest iteration!
So to recap—you can’t say just co2 is the whole problem now.
Come on, as far as trolls go I can’t give you very good marks.
Caleb (19:59:03) :
Then sit back and see if Gavin ever allows your comment to see the light of day.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Gavin Schmidt is not in the light of day. So he cannot bring any comment to the light of day, not even those he agrees with.
He is in the dark. His world is darkness. Light of day will do to him what it does to Dracula. Gavin Schmidt cannot do what he does in the light of day. He roams in the dark pulling others into the darkness with him.