With apologies to Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. and Steve McQueen, I offer this advice: run ! A giant temperature anomaly is attacking Canada and Greenland.
An Example Of Why A Global Average Temperature Anomaly Is Not An Effective Metric Of Climate
Roy Spencer and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville have reported in their Global Temperature Report that February 2010 was the 2nd warmest February in 32 years (e.g. see Roy’s summary).
Their spatial map of the anomalies, however, shows that most of the relative warmth was in a focused geographic area; see
The global average is based on the summation of large areas of positive and negative temperature anomalies.
As I have reported before on my weblog; e.g. see
What is the Importance to Climate of Heterogeneous Spatial Trends in Tropospheric Temperatures?,
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, ect] not a global average temperature anomaly.
Neil McEvoy (10:07:08) :
Zero. These are satellite readings.
It looks like the satellite anomaly data is another can of worms… Magic Java is going some really great work over at http://magicjava.blogspot.com
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.
Think “residual heat”.
Trillions of tons of water have frozen to ice this winter – trillions of tons more than froze over the the past winters. This freezing frees lots of residual, thermal energy which, in turn, has to go elsewhere – exactly, 332,5 kJ per kg of water.
This heat has to go somewhere. And it did.
The huge heat-island up north is the direct consequence of the arctic ice-cap recovery.
This heat island to the west of Greenland / Hudson Bay area is the direct consequence of Global Cooling.
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
I thought it was cold in the UK, and it was.
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.
Oops: “residual heat” = fusion heat
I am sorry to be german sometimes…
The map should be plotted in a equal-area projection, otherwise it shows the Blob as much larger than it really is.
Bloody hell – has anyone ever thought to weight the values by geographic coverage??? I would also weight it by number of thermometers (2 hot thermometers spread over 16 ‘grids’ is not the same weight as 20 neutral thermometers spread over another 16 grids.
Is this new math or something?
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I am still extremely suspicious of the Satellite derived temperatures, they go through too much mathematical conversion compared to a simple thermometer.
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I’m guessing you haven’t spent a lot of time studying how thermometer temperatures are created.
Mike Haseler (09:50:50) — 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!
Yeah, but £100k isn’t really that much money. It would be relatively simple for many/most decent scientists or engineers to top this working for private companies. While I’m sympathetic to the overall premise the reality is that most public sector employees aren’t really doing anything that would merit high pay elsewhere, so pay cuts or salary freezes make sense give that they’re typically overpaid anyway. One HR apparatchik or other paper pusher is much the same as any other. This however doesn’t apply to science and engineering, which is much more competitive at the higher end. In fact I’m rather amazed that they can get most them to work there for that little; they must be truly devoted to their work. (Note that the US armed forces have the same problem, as does the FBI, etc.)
Disclaimer: I’m an engineer, so my viewpoint is skewed accordingly.
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.
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).
I agree, it makes the ‘blob’ look much bigger than it is. In this projection, Greenland at 2.2 X 10^6 sq km appears as large or larger than the USA at 9.8 X 10^6 sq km, when it is actually 22% of the USA’s size.
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.
Given that we’re in an el nino why would the temperature patterns demonstrated expect to be different? It would be interesting to see this plotted against historical el nino timing to determine how anomalous this is against known cycles.
Pearland Aggie (09:58:24) :
I wonder what that temperature anomaly graphic would look when plotted in a perspective other than Mercator
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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.
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
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?
George Ellis
Sometimes simple observations (like the one you just made) are the most brilliant. How can North America, Europe and Asian Russia be so cold yet the temperature anomaly for the Northern Hemisphere by .73? Just because of one graphically misrepresented blob?
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.
As a resident of northern Canada, living under ‘the blob’ mentioned in this story, I can attest to the fact that temperatures here were much warmer than normal this February and early March. Being above or below freezing matters some, but the degree of cold matters too, for things like ice roads, permafrost maintenance etc. Although it only went above freezing here one or two days, the lack of normal extreme cold has impacted us here, both positively and negatively.
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.
The Mercator projection makes the warm anomaly look much bigger than it really is so expect the WWF etc to leap on this. The warming was caused by the blocking cold air over Europe diverting warm SW winds over Canada instead of over UK, Ireland, Brittany etc. Total Arctic ice not affected though. Weather systems are returning to normal with SWesterlies starting to blow over UK again.
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…
I agree. The baseline is an average, but temperates can vary quite a bit from day-to-day within that average. When we report monthly temps in terms of an anomaly, it doesn’t tell us if those temps fall outside the range of natural variation.
Another issue is different sources use different baselines so the size of the anomaly also depends upon who is doing the reporting.