It's the blob (anomaly)!

What are the odds this is from using one thermometer for a huge grid, and something has changed that that location?

An interesting aspect of this is that the warm anomaly occurs near an area of the ocean which is important to the thermohaline circulation.
The area between Greenland and Canada, particularly the southern portion, is an area where the surface water cools, grows denser and sinks. That allows warm water from the south to flow northward and do the same (the “conveyor belt”).
If that area is relatively warm then there may be less cooling and less sinking and less conveyor belt activity this year. Perhaps this is part of the cyclical slowdown of the thermohaline circulation. and its associated net heating of the atmosphere.

UEA launches staunch defence of staff salaries
“The University of East Anglia (UEA) said last night it needed to pay well to “secure people of the highest calibre” as it was revealed that 18 members of staff were paid salaries of more than £100,000 last year.”
http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/edp24/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=NOED19%20Mar%202010%2009%3A53%3A23%3A743
What? The Highest Calibre (laughing uncontrollably) The whole public sector in the UK is facing pay cuts and these bankster-like academics from the University whose only claim to fame is Climategate think they deserve more money!

Steve Schaper,
“What are the odds this is from using one thermometer for a huge grid, and something has changed that that location?”
Zero. These are satellite readings.

Steve Schaper (09:43:40) : I’d say Zero given that it’s satellite data.

What is even crazier is that the bias a flat map creates towards the poles make the anomoly look much larger than it is.

Looking at the chart for February, most of the earth’s lower troposphere was warmer than the seasonal norms, with some parts much warmer.

Thanks Smokey. I was looking for a site that has up to date global coverage rather than software, but it appears this software will do that.

If you make the GISS map for the same month, using the same baseline, the patterns look about the same. At least in the NH. The colorbar resolution in GISS doesn’t let you see all the contours at the top of the ‘blob’, but you could check the numbers to see that.
I don’t know why this is surprising. The Arctic Oscillation has been talked about all winter long.
I agree that regional effects are important to look at. So look at them. Look at the global trend map over the same time period. The odd patterns of one winter’s extreme AO event are not representative of the trends over the last 30 years.
Not sure how stable this URL will be – global trend map, GISS, 1979-2009.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=2&sat=4&sst=1&type=trends&mean_gen=0112&year1=1979&year2=2009&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg

Fear of “the Blob” …
This isn’t some kind of indirect mockery of Al Gore, is it?

Mike Haseler (10:15:31) :
“Scotland, the windiest waviest country in Europe – with the windiest waviest politicians in the world”
I think they may have been shopping here:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160411602416#description

I’m a bit surprised to hear this. I keep hearing that although the northern hemisphere had the coldest winter this was more than compensated by a much warmer southern hemisphere summer.

I live in one of the orange bands in Northern Ontario. February was rather warm. March has been phenominal. Sure we are having a possible drought (I have not looked up the exact definition, but we have received little precipitation), but March sure has been well above average for us. The past couple weeks saw several days where the overnight low was near or above our normal high.
Winter is the best time to have a drought. Last summer we saw way too much rain. I hope we do start to get rain by May though. Our forests are going to be mighty dry.
John M Reynolds

Pearland Aggie (09:58:24) :
“I wonder what that temperature anomaly graphic would look when plotted in a perspective other than Mercator (which tends to severely distort the polar areas).”
There’s distortion all right, but this is not Mercator. More like equirectangular projection.
For equal areas for eyeballing you need something like Gall-Peters, but then that just ‘looks’ wierd.

[/quote]
I am still extremely suspicious of the Satellite derived temperatures, they go through too much mathematical conversion compared to a simple thermometer.
[/quote]
I’m guessing you haven’t spent a lot of time studying how thermometer temperatures are created.

My daughter, who lives in Alaska, reports that this situation (of higher than usual Far North temps & lower than usual temps further south) is known as the Pineapple Express & happens every few years — probably as a result of an El Nino event. She has noted that they had a comparatively warm Jan./Feb. Pineapple referring, of course, to a current of warm air up from the general direction of Hawaii.

I like the red. It leaves the impression that minus 38 degrees is blistering heat.
As I see it, strong winds that dumped frigid temps and snow on New England could have traveled northeast with their 10 degree F winds and really warmed up the region.

Pearland Aggie (09:58:24) :
I wonder what that temperature anomaly graphic would look when plotted in a perspective other than Mercator
———————————————————-
Using Mercator projection maps has for this kind of display has always been a pet peeve of mine. Over at AccuWeather blog I commented that using a Mollweide projection would be more informative (visually).. later, I noticed that they had changed from a Mercator to what I believe was a Mollweide.

David Smith (09:47:40) :
On the other hand the Norwegian sea, the other main area of thermohaline sinking in the northern hemisphere has been exceptionally cold this winter. Perhaps more warm water than usual going into the Irminger Current and less into the main Gulf stream?

Anthony:
You and your readers should know that global temperature anomalies are calculated using a weighted average. Not only Canada and Greenland were warmer than usual – note also equatorial Africa and most the southern Hemisphere experienced temperatures above average. Even if the map projection is changed, it doesn’t change the calculated anomaly.
Your final point about weather being a product of the regional anomalies is essentially correct, but this is just noise around the increase in global average temperature.

Re: David Smith (Mar 19 09:47),
Contrawise, more cooling and sinking will draw warmer surface water into the area where the cooling occurs. Since there’s been more sea ice extent this year, this could mean that more water sank and thus had to be replenished from further south. Since there are only a few areas where the warm water can enter the Arctic Ocean, they would thus tend to be hotter. But who really knows? We need to see a plot of how much cold bottom water is flowing out of the Arctic Ocean to decide.

I must respectfully disagree. There will always be large “blobs” of temperature anomalies in the both the atmosphere and the oceans, for that is the nature of these dynamic systems, and it is the averaging together of these “blobs”, taken over many years that give us the important trend lines that climate change is all about. These “blobs” represent real heat (or lack thereof) and are important pieces of the overall energy balance of the planet. Afterall, would we really expect some kind of homogeneous rise in temperature in such a dynamic system? From this perspective, you could just as well say that the ENSO cycle is nothing but big blobs of warm water and low and high pressure…yet we know this is an extremely important part of the weather patterns of earth, and if we saw a gradual increase (or decrease) in El Nino “blobs” of warm water over a period of time, this would be meaningful.
Undoubtedly, the “blob” of warm air over Canada and Greenland this winter has been related to the AO index being so negative, and this event is significant and must be taken as part of the overall temperature of the planet.
Right now, every day in March at many of the levels of the troposphere have been above the 20 year record high, so March is likely to equal or exceed Jan & Feb. in terms of record tropo temps. No doubt, “blobs” of heat rising off th oceans from the ongoing El Nino event play a major role in this heat, but, no matter the source, (as the sun is the initial source anyway), if we see this El Nino year of 2010 ultimately hotter than the El Nino year of 1998, and this heat has shown up as a series of “blobs” of heat in the ocean or in the atmosphere, it is still a significant event, and harder to discount in light of the deep and long solar minimum we’ve just passed through, where AGW skeptics would have predicted that there was no way we’d see the kind of warmth we are, El Nino or not…

Sorree, not Mercator but it is one that exaggerates polar regions.

Re: David Smith (Mar 19 09:47),
Contrawise, more cooling and sinking will draw warmer surface water into the area where the cooling occurs. Since there’s been more sea ice extent this year, this could mean that more water sank and thus had to be replenished from further south. Since there are only a few areas where the warm water can enter the Arctic Ocean, they would thus tend to be hotter. But who really knows? We need to see a plot of how much cold bottom water is flowing out of the Arctic Ocean to decide.
—————————————————————-
Add this to the point which I made further above “Re: fusion heat” – and you may have a winner.

Although there is small positive sst anomaly in the region, I wonder if the anomaly isn’t related to the deeply dipping jet stream related to the negative arctic oscillation which has allowed moisture laden low pressure cells to drop their snow load in the US after which the resultant dry air masses are heated from the latent heat of fusion as water vapor turns to snow and adiabatic heating from descending air masses as the low pressure cells arrive near Greenland from the southwest.

John Galt:
The calculated trends are independent of the reporting baselines used. But if you really want to compare the actual magnitudes of anomalies from source to source, that’s straightforward as well.

Sou?
What are you looking at? most of the world is normal with below average areas appearing larger than above average. Even with the large polar exaggeration it doesn’t look anything like “most of the earth’s lower troposphere was warmer than the seasonal norms”
Seriously, what the heck? Is this some of that post normal reality stuff? Are you trying to be ironic or do you need to see a specialist?

richcar 1225 (11:52:59) :
Although there is small positive sst anomaly in the region, I wonder if the anomaly isn’t related to the deeply dipping jet stream related to the negative arctic oscillation which has allowed moisture laden low pressure cells to drop their snow load in the US after which the resultant dry air masses are heated from the latent heat of fusion as water vapor turns to snow and adiabatic heating from descending air masses as the low pressure cells arrive near Greenland from the southwest.
—————————————————————-
Exactly my sentiment.
The latent heat from the freezing ice at the polar ice cap may add to that effect, too.

The huge differences in anomalies in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are no surprise to me living in Norway. The thing is, the colder the temperature, the greater it swings within a day or night or week or month. In the summer, the air is more full of water vapor and the less the temperature varies. In the winter, the air is cold, its relative humidity is very low and large swings are common – more than 20 degrees Celsius in a few hours is not unusual at all, but common most days in January and February given relatively cold nights. As the sun comes up the day warms up tremendously.
So I am actually not affected by the huge anomalies, I think it is semantically wrong to mark them by huge red spots, and I seriously doubt them as showing anything at all except – yes – temperature differences. If one were to show something meaningful, one should show something consisting of temperature anomalies relatively to relative humidity. The lower the relative humidity, the larger the possibility of a huge anomaly, so this should be compensated for.
As it is now, it is as misleading as the global warming modelling in the IPCC reports I just downloaded – the large red areas show differences in average temperature from for instance -30 to -35 and that these should be comparable to differences between +20 to +25. I don’t have a solution to what should be shown instead.
A metaphor to the global temperature chart might be that you are shown two charts, one that shows how a young boy runs 100 yards faster every year as he grows from 5 to 20 years of age and another that shows the world champion’s results every year from let’s say 18 to 33 years of age. One would vary greatly, the other would not vary very much, yet they obviously show the same thing.
In this case, the global warming community would draw the conclusion that the young boy in a few years will run the 100 yards in half the time of the world champion.
Another question with regards to satellite measurements – are the measurements continuous with regards to measuring at least 100 times a day or what? Please tell, I am eager to know.

The UK Metoffice has issued it’s own graphic on the phenomena.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/bbc2.jpg

Mercator or whatever, it still leaves unanswered whether such a localized anomaly has much or any effect on global or even other region’s temperatures.
I think it also leaves unanswered whether a similar phenomenon occurred in the 1940’s when the last warming episode ended.
A re-analysis of the mid 20th century temperature records might shed some light on the transition from warm to cold regimes. We are promised this will occur by the Met Office – I’m not holding my breath, but not ready to dismiss yet.

The blob can be viewed as an indicator of additional cooling. There was a movement of thermal energy to high latitude in the NH winter, therefore additional heat energy should have been dispatched off to space.
By the same argument, the opposite ought to have been happening over western Europe and central Russia.
On balance (and without trying anything numerical), there would be compensating changes and this should reduce the temptation to claim anything special in the overall picture.
(And when you look at those sharp edges in the monthly average I am still concerned about aliasing)

One thing we don’t know is the RH of the blob.
If it’s very low, there may not be much energy there at all.
DaveE.

Mogamboguru (10:46:03) : “Oops: ‘residual heat’ = fusion heat. I am sorry to be german sometimes…”
What you meant was perfectly clear in context.

boballab (12:16:10) :
The blob is weather. Natural variability. Heat being moved around in different ways, around the planet.
Look up some month with an AO index that was extreme in the other direction. Maybe you’ll see different looking blobs.
It tells you nothing about the trends. For that, look at a trend map. The above is not a trend map.

Stephen Skinner (11:41:34) :
“Considering that the bedrock of AGW is CO2 then this would be interesting overlayed with CO2 distribution.”
Exactly!
Doesnt NASA have an AGW Satellite up there? Do they see a great CO2 BLOB ???
I dont believe in the great CO2 BLOB.

That’s where Superman lives

The following map seems to show to show a vertical wind velocity anomaly over the blob at a 700 mb elevation.
http://www.weatherimages.org/data/imag155.html

Erik (11:20:54) :
OT:
Oh noooo…. the birds are shrinking!
Climate change ‘makes birds shrink’ in North America:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8560000/8560694.stm
Erik, you just picked the wrong study. Depending on how you interpret this headline from the BBC, maybe climate change isn’t all that bad!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7390109.stm
Great tits cope well with warming.

AMSU Channel data from satellite data
Data from:
discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Note that all data is used (there seems to be none before 1998 for these channels
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/1151/amsuamar2010.png
near surface is warming at 1.21C/day=4.4C/century
3300ft data (now discontinued) was warming at 12deg/century
sea surface is slightly cooling but only 8 years of data.
No problem their then!

Actually, this is a fun game. Look up a chart of the AO index. Pick out extreme values, both positive and negative. Then look at the map for the corresponding month, and look at Northeastern Canada/Greenland. The AO index isn’t a perfect predictor of what you’ll see there, but it seems better than random guessing.

jose (11:23:40) :
“Anthony:
You and your readers should know that global temperature anomalies are calculated using a weighted average.”
&
“Your final point about weather being a product of the regional anomalies is essentially correct, but this is just noise around the increase in global average temperature.”
I appreciate your attempt to educate the ignorant, but you have completely missed the point. Do you actually believe that anyone here didn’t already know that?
Discussing the regional anomalies is a fabulous approach to learning about what ACTUALLY drives climate. If you stay stuck on the weighted average, then how would you be able to get to the bottom of the temp rise? Do you care to explain how this regional anomaly fits into the AGW hypothesis? While you are content to label the scientific process as ‘noise’, I personally appreciate the effort.

carrot eater (11:56:20) :
John Galt:
The calculated trends are independent of the reporting baselines used. But if you really want to compare the actual magnitudes of anomalies from source to source, that’s straightforward as well.

Analyzing trends is no more useful than trying to calculate the average global temperate of the 15th century using tree rings from a handful of trees in a handful of sites. People start looking at trends and then they start trying to convince everyone the trend will go on until infinity.
Tell me what’s causing the anomaly. Come up with a testable hypothesis and see if it correctly predicts the temperature in the future.
Here’s a trend I do find useful: Compare the GISS model predictions to the actual measurements. If the model is accurate, the trend will be a flat line. Anything else indicates the model is probably incorrect.

@Mike Haseler (10:15:31) :
Is this a lampoon or is it for real? It sure reads like a comedy skit. If it is, its awfully funny.

By the way, the area around the “blob” (Baffin/Newfoundland) has been responsible for a large fraction of the negative artic ice anomaly in the last few months in Cryosphere today’s maps. Last year it was essentially zero for jan-march.

R. Gates
OT for this thread, but if you recall our conversation around macro effects of UHI you might find this interesting. Would appreciate any corrections you (or anyone else for that matter) might be able to offer.
Regards!

Anybody complaining in West Greenland?

Who Author ?

OK, so what’s the real temperature around the big red blob? Minus 10 rather than -20? Since the cold was pushed far south this winter, is it surprising that the north was warmer than usual?
Do the white areas mean no returns or normal temps?

Well R Gates how do you explain this one?
succintly put by Stephen Skinner (11:41:34) :
“{Considering that the bedrock of AGW is CO2 then this would be interesting overlayed with CO2 distribution. it could be that CO2 is really lumpy.”

Those Canadians must be cooking up something. 🙂

Weather is not climate. Hmm… that sounds familiar…

I believe the blob results from a temporary (winter 2010) cell of rising moist air masses over the eastern US that resulted in unusual amounts of snow coupled with dry warm descending air masses over Quebec similar to the Hadley cell in the tropics where the corresponding dry, warm descending air creates deserts across the world. The driver was the southwest -northeast trending jet stream and the anomalously moist, low pressure cells brought in from the subtropics due to the negative AO.

For two years in a row I’ve cross country skiied here in Manitoba right up to the first of April. This year it ended the first week in March. Also the river ice is breaking up about a month early. Give me back my snow.
Can this be blamed on Al Gore? Did he take all my snow to Washington?

Mosher: There’s no thermometer in the map above, but maps using surface thermometers have roughly similar patterns for Feb 2010.

In Melbourne Australia the BoM and also the AGW crowd are proudly quoting the record run of now 101 days above 20 degrees C. I’ve heard it said that this record is an obvious sign that CO2 emissions are the cause.

The map is misleading. The tropics provided the most sigificant contribution to the Feb anomaly. The area between 23.4N and 23.4S represents around 40% of the total surface of the earth. The UAH Feb anomaly for the tropics was +0.81. RSS use the area between 20S and 20N. The RSS Feb anomaly for this region was +1.015.
The ‘blob’ probably offset some of the NH mid latitude cold but it wasn’t the main reason for the high anomaly.

Re: Smokey (Mar 19 10:04),
But, but, but SkepticalScience says “The Science SaysR” OHC in the upper 750m is sooo old science. Now it bypasses that region and heads straight for the bottom where presumably it awaits the command to rise from the deep and fry the surface. 🙂
So, there’s no sense in falsifying a hypothesis when there’s always an out to save it. That’s the beauty of an irrefutable hypothesis.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm

For a comparison of the satellite anomaly above with the February surface temperature anomaly on this page for the continental US, try this URL:
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/maps/current/index.php?action=update_daterange&daterange=Last1m
It looks like they track pretty well, although the surface temperatures are offset to the southeast somewhat.

Okay folks, I’ve put up the three UAH Arctic polar plots for February and this gives a far better idea of what is really there. Is done equal area.
http://daedalearth.wordpress.com/
Could just as easily do RSS, all four layers. Is much the same but would be impolite given the article here.
I could do with some help otherwise this work is going to stall, it has already, I am weary.
Ideally I want to make this thing accessible cross platform to all. It is more or less there but a lot remains to be done. (those plots took a few seconds)
The whole thing works from a common format series of databases of gridded data, over a dozen so far. Is just a few Lua scripts, sqlite and gnuplot.

This information has restored my faith in satellite measurements.
If you want to measure overall global temperatures then satellites are the way to do it. They are not subject to the kind of issues that afflict land based measurements, and they see the whole globe directly. The only problem for climate purposes is that the satellite measurements don’t go back very far.
However my belief in the efficacy of satellite measurements took a bit of a dent over this last year when they were proclaiming a record high February while Europe and the US were experiencing their coldest winter for a long time, and while nobody in the southern hemisphere seemed to be having an unusually hot summer.
Now the mystery is solved and my faith in satellites as a much better way to measure temperature is restored.
The location suggests a link with polar ice. As we know ice cover has increased significantly this year recovering from the wind driven cleanout of the ice pack in 2008. The specific heat released by ice formation is thus a very likely candidate for this hot spot.
If this is true then we should expect this hotspot to disappear completely over the summer (when ice does not form), and if the ice cover is back to normal levels next winter (as I expect it to be), we should not expect a repeat.
I wish they had released such a map at the same time as the earlier pronouncements about a record high February. I don’t understand the reason for the delay as the geographic information as to the distribution of temperature would have been available instantly. I would not have had cause to doubt the efficacy of satellite measurements if this data had been released at the time.

The hot blob correlates with increased ice cover of the Arctic in the same area. So heating causes sea-ice to grow.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100303_Figure1.png
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

carrot eater (12:36:34) :
boballab (12:16:10) :
The blob is weather. Natural variability. Heat being moved around in different ways, around the planet.
Look up some month with an AO index that was extreme in the other direction. Maybe you’ll see different looking blobs.
It tells you nothing about the trends. For that, look at a trend map. The above is not a trend map.

LOL!
What do you think the “trend” maps are made of?
To get an anomaly trend map you first need anomalies and what you have here is an anomaly map made from the numbers that are used to make the trend maps. Your postiton is just look at the cake, it looks good, quit looking at the ingredients. Hate to tell ya this but you can’t make a good cake out of bad ingredients.

C. James said:
“…the global temperatures have NOT exceeded those of 1998, and as I mentioned, should begin to cool slowly again…”
Well, with the Met Office (and myself) predicting that 2010 will be the warmest year globally on instrument record, then we’ve all laid down the gauntlet so so speak. And this is going to be a good test, and really the first of several watershed years for AGWT ahead. Some interesting things to watch:
1) Even if El Nino fades early this spring, will 2010 still eclipse 1998 (or 2003) as the warmest on record? If it does, how will the AGW skeptics account for this wamth, especially in light of the recent long and deep solar minimum. AGWT says the solar cycles play less of a role in climate than GH gases, so the next few years will really start to show the differences.
2) Will arctic sea ice ever go above the long term year-to-year avergage, into a positive anomaly range. I actually thought we might this winter with the deep solar minimum, but it is getting to be a race against time now with the spring melt season starting. If the arctic continues it’s long term negative anomaly, and even approaches the 2007 low this year or next, what does that say about the role lf the long and deep solar minimum? If it can’t get the arctic sea ice even back above average, and it even continues its decline, it gives support to AGWT.
The two sides have pretty much staked their claims– on one side, the AGW believers who think that GH play a bigger role than any natural cycles, and if the world is warmer this year than any other on instrument record, it is a strong bit of support for the theory…and on the other head, those AGW skeptics who think that solar cycles, astronomical influences, and other natural cycles will always be more important than any influence of human activity.
The next few years are critical, and will certainly budge me one way or another from my current position of being a 75% AGW believer/25% skeptic.

Vincent (10:32:44) :
I’m a bit surprised to hear this. I keep hearing that although the northern hemisphere had the coldest winter
…………………………………………………………………
The blob is not over most of the land mass of the NH
That’s pretty simple to see.

Isn’t this warmth in that part of the earth a normal part of el Nino?

R. Craigen (11:34:10) :
What will be interesting is what fallout there comes in terms of the Greenland and Eastern Arctic ice sheets.
……………………………………………………………………………
So it was -45F instead of -55F? How much difference would it have made? But, again, this isn’t surface temperature.

Monthly, annual, even decadal global averaged temperatures are meaningless in evaluating climate change, at least when the anomalies are in tenths of a degree.
Climate = 30 years +. Anything less is weather.
In this case, the anomlay is due to a negative NAO coupled with El Nino. Most of us froze our butt off, a lucky few had pleasant winters. I suppose the warmers will find some evidence of the warming in Greenland this winter to convince folks it is due to mans CO2.

“The hot blob correlates with increased ice cover of the Arctic in the same area. So heating causes sea-ice to grow.”
No, the white is the current ice, the magenta line the median. There is LESS ice over that area.

One question I would have is what kind of cloud cover have they had in that region. I know here in Nebraska we tend to find things warmer when we have that nice little blanket of insulation rather than open to the sky (funny how that works ehh?) and of course an increase in cloud cover is a tenet of the cosmoclimatology theory.

Anomalies, trends blobs. Unless we learn more about the vast ocean circulation systems which span all time scales, we know nothing.
Measuring T’s does not tell us the energy budget of the globe. May be a fun exercise but not useful enough regards AGW.
For all we know, the warmth seen by sattelites and measured by ground stations may be caused by the discharge of heat by the oceans.
The atmosphere barely affects the oceans, but the oceans profoundly affect the atmosphere.
This laymans advice? Study the oceans, everything else will fall into place.

R. Gates (16:43:09) :
2) Will arctic sea ice ever go above the long term year-to-year avergage,
We don’t know the long-term year to year average.
We only started measuring using the current methods in 1979. As that was a cold period (relatively speaking), any ice coverage compared to that is always going to be below “average”.
We will see Arctic sea ice go above long term average if the long term average is allowed to be calculated. But not any time soon if arbitrarily taking 1979-1990 as the base.
We all know that the trend is important, not comparison to some arbitrary base. And I’m not convinced we have enough data for that either.

Ok, so higher temperature anomalies = more snow because of excess moisture, right? So where did all this snow go to? Europe, which did have a lot of snow? Why Europe and not Greenland, which is in between the two?

richcar 1225 (12:10:16) :
“It would be interesting to see if the difference in anomalies from the US to the blob can be historically associated with eastern US snowfall and the negative arctic oscillation.”
Yes! “richcar 1225” and several other posters have gotten pieces of the puzzle, but I’ll try to tie these things together a bit below, after my disclaimer.
Disclaimer Statement – First I should declare this is my initial posting (sorry for its length) at WUWT, and also that I’ve been a meteorologist for many years. I’ve taught meteorology at the university level, but have spent most of my career in government and private practice. I’ve been reading this site for a few years, but more often of late. For the record, I’m an AGW skeptic in the sense that I think that most AGW alarmists grossly overstate their case. However, many AGW skeptics do the same. I’m interested in ultimate truth, and therefore, my aim is to go where science takes me, regardless of political ideology. I believe mankind has some effect on global climate change, but that this effect is much smaller than the effects caused by natural forces over the past millennium. So perhaps I might best be categorized, at present, as a mild luke-warmer.
Now to my interpretation of the warm “blob” in the UAH February 2010 analysis, which I believe to be real. As limited confirmation, I checked February surface temperature data for a station in NE Canada near the bulls eye of the blob – Iqaluit – and it did show temperatures well above average for much of the month, especially the latter half.
Before getting to the immediate cause, we must first understand that short-term upward and downward global temperature trends, over periods of a few months to a few years, have nothing to do with long-lived greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane, nitrous oxides, etc. Because their concentration changes rather slowly, these gases should have only long term effects, so we must look for trends in temperature over multi-decade and perhaps even multi-century periods to possibly see a “fingerprint” due to increasing concentrations of these. For anyone to attribute the “warmest February” in 30 years to AGW is laughable. There are obviously much longer climate cycles at work (MWP, LIA). To explain relatively short-term anomalies, we must look for shorter-term forcings, which can be related to volcanic eruptions, ENSO cycles, etc.
The setup for the record snows in the mid-Atlantic and the anomalous February warmth in eastern Canada may have begun with the last La Nina cycle, which apparently helped damp out tropical storm formation in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Tropical storms are large heat transfer devices, in multiple ways. One transfer is from ocean to atmosphere vertically, and then horizontally in the atmosphere (ultimately northward). Heat transferred vertically in the storm allows some of the energy to radiate to space from near the top of the atmosphere. As we know, radiation from near ground level is not very effective at cooling the Earth at tropical and mid-latitude locations. Once the tropical system is caught up in the mid-latitude jet steam, its heat is transported to more northerly latitudes where the greenhouse effect is lower, there is less solar insolation, and where energy loss to space is more effective. Another heat transfer is downward in the sea, as storms mix water vertically, thus leaving the surface water cooler after they pass.
Given the very minimal Atlantic/GOM tropical storm activity this past summer, the waters off our south and east coasts remained warmer than normal going into fall and winter. I experienced this personally, late in October 2009, as I swam off the SW Florida coastline in water that was 90F one day and 91F the next. Check out the US October temperature anomalies reported by NOAA, and you can see the warm GOM waters had their effect on FL, while most of the nation had temperatures well below average.
Now lets add in the effects of the developing El Nino this past fall and winter. Besides adding heat and moisture to the atmosphere over the subtropical Pacific, this helped move the primary storm track across the southern US. Once those storms reached the SE US, they tapped into a very warm GOM. The higher water temperature resulted in greater moisture transport into the storms, which then dropped extremely heavy, moisture-laden snow in the mid-Atlantic states, which happened to be just cold enough to drop the bulk of the moisture as snow.
Anyone with an elementary understanding of latent heat knows that when water vapor condenses, it releases massive amounts of sensible heat, and if it goes all the way to solid (snow), there is a substantial additional increment of sensible heat release. All of that combined heat release was then carried by the February storm systems as they moved NE – toward NE Canada and Greenland. Do you think all that latent heat release was radiated to space before the storms reached eastern Canada and Greenland? Not enough time! Also, these early February East Coast storms then fed into, and perhaps helped maintain, a persistent, massive, broad area of low pressure covering most of eastern Canada. This low was circulating air counterclockwise from Canada’s east coast all the way back over Manitoba and then down over the western Great Lakes. That large gyre kept spinning for many days, almost stationary, until it finally lost the “steam” (water vapor and energy) that warmed eastern Canada and Greenland for much of February (check for yourself the February temperature curve for Iqaluit on Weather Underground).
I don’t know how much the AO fed into this, but this anomaly seems to be consistent with the AO pattern. The question is, did the AO help cause this anomaly, or did the features that caused this pattern help to cause or at least fortify the AO? I don’t know.
Anyway, this is my interpretation of the origin of all that energy represented by the UAH February “blob.”

R.Gates: Watch out for changing goal posts! In light of the onslaught of evidence, the natives here are getting restless, and soon any metric at all of global climate change will be called into question. Surface records? Junk. Satellite records? No good anymore. Dendrochronology? Worthless. Ice cores? So what. Warmest year EVER recorded? Pfft. Not where I live.
Nothing will be good enough for those who have already made up their minds. That’s my prediction. I’d like to be proven wrong though.

Steven Mosher quoted Pielke Sr :
“It is the regional tropospheric temperature anomalies that determine the locations of development and movement of weather systems [which are the actual determinants of such climate events as drought, floods, etc] not a global average temperature anomaly.”
Pielke Sr. gets the causality wrong: it’s on the contrary the development of tropospheric weather systems that will lead to temperature anomalies cold or warm; In fact one needed simply to check the satellite evolution in February to understand the chain of cause and effects. From this data, it is clear the warm anomaly was caused by Gulf of Mexico moisture laden warm air advection –which resulted in mega snowstorms on the NE- due to the conjunction of 1) strong polar air anticyclones descending southward over the US –cold anomaly on most continental US, frost in Florida etc…- and 2) descending polar anticyclones on Western Europe. In fact, it is precisely this configuration that slowed the development of arctic sea-ice along Greenland during that time (advected warm temps). Breaking this configuration has since then in March allowed sea ice to grow back in this area (cf. NSIDC maps). Central Europe showed a slight warm anomaly on the western flank of the powerful Siberian anticyclone agglutination (stable over 3 months of -30c in western Siberia) because of warm air advection on the eastern side of Scandinavian anticyclones. Nothing exceptional, if only the strength of polar anticyclones…
Of course, averaging these temperature anomalies is meaningless physically and climatically; anyone having read Leroux could swiftly figure that one out. Moreover droughts and floods are not climatic events but weather phenomena. Honestly, Pielke Sr. should know better.

@ rbateman (22:24:40) :
How about the massive snow cover? Could that have any effect on flooding?
-facepalm-

rbateman (22:24:40) :
Sou (19:57:42) :
Congratulations…you just fell into the Meractor Projection bias.
I don’t agree. Look at the middle of the chart! If you want to only include the bits that are cooler, that’s up to you. It doesn’t change the following facts:
Both satellite records show the lower troposphere temperature was the second hottest ever recorded for February. The Southern Hemisphere had the hottest Feb ever recorded; February had the second hottest global ocean temperatures ever recorded; and the sixth hottest February was recorded for both land and ocean temps.
It does seem odd that some people are looking at such a warm month to argue that it’s cooling (the second warmest lower troposphere temperature for February ever recorded by satellite, and the sixth hottest land and ocean temps recorded for Feb in more than 100 years). I await the rest of the year with bated breath.

Ref – R. de Haan (05:22:44) :
“Princeton Alumni Weekly: Temperatures rising!”
___________________________
Thanks for posting this link. So true!
It (AGW or the NEW “Climate Change” Cause) is so like a religion that it’s painful. Scientists and their societies/associations (and psyentists and their PACs) have swallowed this crap to such an extent that I fear the consequences will impact them and the future of their profession more than any other group. Instead of staying on the edge of this, they jumped in with both feet and are up to their necks. Too few had the foresight to see, or the courage to say, that the matter was too unsetteled, unproven, unknown. Tis best NOT sign a petition or statement unless you know all the science and all the ramifications– even if you do support 90% of the data, the 10% you don’t can really hurt you.
About the Blob its only weather.

The “blob” has nothing to do w/CO2. It has everything to do w/a semipermanent low-pressure system just to the SE of the “blob”, pulling up N Atlantic maritime air toward the NW, then W into Canada. To the SW of the low, NW winds are cooling down much of the US.
IOW, it’s weather.

Steve Goddard (20:24:40) :
The very negative AO kept the cold air on the Siberian side.
…………………………………………………………………………………..
Thanks for making it simple!
🙂

Sean Peake: (referring to the Arctic weather, diverted to Europe by blocking high over Greenland) ‘And as far as I’m concerned Europe can have it again next year. In fact, keep it—I won’t miss it.’
Thanks Sean, from icy Normandy. Warming up a little now, but we had a cold one.

I moved to New Brunswick, Canada at the beginning of 2008 and have been taking my own temperature readings since then. I can attest to the warmth of this winter compared to last winter. My figures are:
Week no ave min 09 ave max 09 ave min 10 ave max 10
1 -9 -3 -1 +1
2 -11 -3 -8 -2
3 -18 -9 -7 0
4 -15 -7 -7 0
5 -8 +1 -17 -7
6 -12 -2 -9 -1
7 -8 +1 -1 +3
8 -8 0 -1 +3
9 -5 +1 0 +2
10 -7 +2 -4 +5
11 -9 +1 -4 +7
So, on average the minimums in 2010 have been 4.5 degrees warmer than in 2009, and the maximums have been 2.6 degrees warmer.
Highly unscientific, anecdotal etc, but that’s the story in my back yard!

@ R. de Haan (05:22:44) :
Actually, that situation would be perfect. Then the military-industrial complex and the scientific-industrial elite would each be assigned one of America’s two parties as opposition, and we will be able to sort this out rather quickly. Do you support the military-industrial complex or acknowledge its existence?

Pascvaks (12:51:24) : ‘Anomalies’ are friendly little things that wouldn’t hurt a fly.
I always thought anomalies were those fringey looking things with all of the edge tentacle in fishtanks. Ah, here we are: “a group of water dwelling, predatory animals of the order Actiniaria.”
Yep, they wouldn’t hurt a fly, because the only flies that make it down to one are already dead.

Steve Goddard (23:00:58)
Seems so – I am in Montreal on business, its snowing, will reach -8 C this week at night according to local forecasts. Parts of the Canadian winter were mild but it seems now its making up for lost time. (I remembered to bring a woolly hat at the last minute, just as well.)