I’m sure the press will make this into a much bigger story. This today from NOAA News. The choice of “hottest” in the title is interesting. We should ask our Canadian friends if it was “hot” during March, since Canada seems to be leading the world in “hotness” according to the NOAA image. – Anthony
NOAA: Global Temps Push Last Month to Hottest March on Record
The world’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made last month the warmest March on record, according to NOAA. Taken separately, average ocean temperatures were the warmest for any March and the global land surface was the fourth warmest for any March on record. Additionally, the planet has seen the fourth warmest January – March period on record.
The monthly National Climatic Data Center analysis, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions.
Global Temperature Highlights – March 2010
Temperature anomaly is the difference from average, which gives a more accurate picture of temperature change. In calculating average regional temperatures, factors like station location or elevation affect the data, but those factors are less critical when looking at the difference from the average.
High resolution (Credit: NOAA/National Climatic Data Center/NESDIS)
- The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for March 2010 was the warmest on record at 56.3°F (13.5°C), which is 1.39°F (0.77°C) above the 20th century average of 54.9°F (12.7°C).
- The worldwide ocean surface temperature was the highest for any March on record –1.01°F (0.56°C) above the 20th century average of 60.7°F (15.9°C).
- Separately, the global land surface temperature was 2.45°F (1.36°C) above the 20th century average of 40.8 °F (5.0°C) — the fourth warmest on record. Warmer-than-normal conditions dominated the globe, especially in northern Africa, South Asia and Canada. Cooler-than-normal regions included Mongolia and eastern Russia, northern and western Europe, Mexico, northern Australia, western Alaska and the southeastern United States.
- El Niño weakened to moderate strength in March, but it contributed significantly to the warmth in the tropical belt and the overall ocean temperature. According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, El Niño is expected to continue its influence in the Northern Hemisphere at least through the spring.
- For the year-to-date, the combined global land- and ocean-surface temperature of 55.3°F (13.0°C) was the fourth warmest for a January-March period. This value is 1.19°F (0.66°C) above the 20th century average.
- According to the Beijing Climate Center, Tibet experienced its second warmest March since historical records began in 1951. Delhi, India also had its second warmest March since records began in 1901, according to the India Meteorological Department.
Other Highlights
Download additional information and resources.
Download PDF (Credit: NOAA/National Climatic Data Center/NESDIS)
- Arctic sea ice covered an average of 5.8 million square miles (15.1 million square kilometers) during March. This is 4.1 percent below the 1979-2000 average expanse, and the fifth-smallest March coverage since records began in 1979. Ice coverage traditionally reaches its maximum in March, and this was the 17th consecutive March with below-average Arctic sea ice coverage. This year the Arctic sea ice reached its maximum size on March 31st, the latest date for the maximum Arctic sea ice extent since satellite records began in 1979.
- Antarctic sea ice expanse in March was 6.9 percent below the 1979-2000 average, resulting in the eighth smallest March ice coverage on record.
- In China, the Xinjiang province had its wettest March since records began in 1951, while Jilin and Shanghai had their second wettest March on record. Meanwhile, Guangxi and Hainan provinces in southern China experienced their driest March on record, according to the Beijing Climate Center.
- Many locations across Ontario, Canada received no snow, or traces of snow, in March, which set new low snowfall records, according to Environment Canada.
Scientists, researchers, and leaders in government and industry use NOAA’s monthly reports to help track trends and other changes in the world’s climate. This climate service has a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.
Has the UAH temp graph for March been put on here yet? I might have missed it.
Andy
Another thing. Each of those dots represents a different grid, right? Is the global anomaly the value used in the grid box? Or the mean for the grid box is used?
This whole exercise looks like someone is trying to make inferences about the means of many different populations. If that is the case, since you end up with a μ differential that includes zero, you cannot say that there has been any statistically significant warming.
If the global anomaly is used in each grid box, that would have to be justified also, imho. If the gridbox anomaly is used, these are all separate populations, and since you have positive and negative results, you cannot say the change is statistically different from 0.
Very pleasant March here in Minnesota. April looking quite nice too. My rose bushes are busy making leaves, and teasing me that rosebuds are soon to follow.
I have trouble being upset by this.
Of course, last year we had snow the first weekend in May.
Oh rly?
http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html?group=67
Sorry, this was not clear:
Is the global anomaly the value used in the grid box? Or the mean for the grid box is used?
I mean is the global average used for the baseline, from which the anomaly is calculated, or is the baseline used calculated solely with data from the gridbox?
Maybe posted by someone else, but it’s not so hot in the Arctic. A solo exporer needs rescuing thanks to the Canadian Army.
http://www.smh.com.au/wa-news/emergency-rescue-for-oneman-epic-adventurer-20100416-sj5g.html
Two planes AND a helicopter. All that lovely CO2 will thin the, rotten, ice even further.
Anu are you some sort of pessimist? Arctic ice extent:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
And area:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
As for global temperature; one of your links to GISS shows Northern America with anomalies 8.5C above the base period of 1951-80. That’s junk.
March seemed unusually cold here in Tokyo and it has stayed cold into mid April. The sakura blossoms were late in blooming and lasted unusually long on the trees.
Anu (21:32:46) :
Look at that 2008 sea ice extent dive, starting within the “gray area” – things can happen fast in a warm Arctic… and CryoSat-2 will be watching the whole time. I wonder what happens when “the warmest oceans on record” flow up under the Arctic egg-shell-thin sea ice cap.
We’ll see by October.
I’ve only ever found three studies of the sea ice flux through the Fram that appeared close to reliable. The first went back to the fifties but the methodology wasn’t based on measurements but modeled estimations. The other two were derived from satellite data, but only go back the middle to late nineties. The thing they all share is that, though they note the rather large variability of the flux, they all claim the mean VOLUME of the flux has been quite stable and they arrive at numbers for that mean value that are similar.
My question would be, since you seem to believe the Arctic ice has become egg shell thin from its more robust thickness in the eighties, wouldn’t the mean volume of the flux staying consistent require that the mean area increase by whatever factor of thickness reduction you postulate?
Actually I’m probably in the minority around here, because I too suspect there has been a significant decline in ice thickness in the Arctic, but i suspect the proper villain is as described by Rigor and Wallace in this work
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/research_seaiceageextent.html
That is a dramatic shift in the Beaufort Gyre and the Transpolar Drift which occurred in the late eighties took out almost all of the often decades old ice that had filled most of the Arctic west of the Pole.
This shift may relate to the shift in the AO that also occurred around that time or maybe not. At any rate I have seen no reasonable argument to suggest it was caused by anthropogenically generated CO2.
@ur momisugly Juraj V. (22:31:21) :
Uhh… That doesn’t include the square root of fluffy kitties and polar bear cubs facing extinction, so that map is wrong.
rbateman (19:52:35) :
No hot weather on several of those No. Calif. red dots.
Not even warm. Rained, snowed, hailed, cold fog, very few sunny days, cold winds.
Petaluma pretty miserable too overall. And Stanford, too. An informal weather indicator is my plot of the Solar Mean Field, the purple dots and curve on http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SORCE-2008-now.png Where the curve is broken there were no observation on that day [=lousy weather].
Errata
That should have read “require that the mean area of the flux increase”
let’s subtract about half a degree to adjust for el nino,
half the remaining land based anomaly due to noaa’s notorious neglect to correct for UHI
and subtract another 0.3 deg for the error in 1941/1942 bucket/inlet adjustment.
NOAA should at least get their own story straight. Their world-map above shows California with red dots – indicating warmer than usual.
But from NOAA’s data on the calclim website, March was just a bit below average. Same month, same location, same federally-funded outfit making pronouncements. Different results.
NOAA should pick one story, and stick to it. Presents a bit of a credibility issue otherwise.
http://www.calclim.dri.edu/
(note, the graphics on the calclim site change over time, but are archived)
OK, lets revise the terminology:
Global Hotting
Manmade Global Hotting
Global hotting denial
Hottists
Am I mising something here, or do they consider the first 3 years of the satellite record for sea ice extent to be the “normal”, and everything else since has been “abnormal”?
“Arctic sea ice covered an average of 5.8 million square miles (15.1 million square kilometers) during March. This is 4.1 percent below the 1979-2000 average expanse, and the fifth-smallest March coverage since records began in 1979. Ice coverage traditionally reaches its maximum in March, and this was the 17th consecutive March with below-average Arctic sea ice coverage”
If this was the “17th consecutive March with below-average sea ice coverage”, but records only began 20 years ago, then only the 3 or 4 previous Marches were used as the baseline? Maybe those 3 years were just way above average??
PS it has been unseasonably cold in Southern California!
Coldest Winter in the UK for 30 years.
The Mongolian disaster
etc
etc.
Just Weather
A nice March in Canada?
Global Warming!!!! Proof!!!!!!
Aaaaaaargh!!!!!!!
Worse than we thought!
All meaningless nonsense. I’m more concerned about the probability of the Earth being hit by a killer asteroid.
We need a basis on just what is meant by: Hottest March on Record. Why? Because we need to understand our belief that Man is Destroying the Planet with CO2…high time to check those historic thermometer readings as we see them crescendoing into the “Hottest March on Record”.
“Hottest March on Record” – that sounds important – it comes from an important-sounding US Government Agency-note to self: “this is really big news”. How big is big?
Hmmm…really…hottest March…How hot is hottest March compared to say Coldest March, Colder March, Cold March, Average March, Hot March, Hotter March, and finally – Hottest March on Record. Hey – why limit ourselves to adjectives – why not compare temperature rankings of all Marches having had a thermometer inserted; then we’ll really get a flair and feeling for our belief that AGW is destroying earth by making March so hot.
Let’s get to work! We need to know just how hot the Hottest March on Record really is so we can compute (to a high degree of precision) the AGW Earth Destruction Index, or AGWEDI – a desperately needed, highly subjective metric to qualify, to ourselves, important (sounding) statements coming from important (sounding) government agencies like NOAA. But our metric has to have at least the same appearance of precision as NOAH assigns to temperature anomalies; and sticking to land surface temperatures so we can incorporate EM Smith’s valuable work on surface temperatures showing how utterly jacked they are, let’s quote NOAA on land surface temperatures:
“Separately, the global land surface temperature was 2.45°F (1.36°C) above the 20th century average of 40.8 °F (5.0°C) — the fourth warmest on record.”
Wait a minute, “fourth warmest on record for land”…and I so, so, so wanted to incorporate EM Smith’s work on land thermometer records – what!!! I thought “March is Warmest on Record” and now the land records are only the fourth warmest on record? Talk about a let down. Note to self: “And I thought AGW stuff was pretty simple – warm, warmer, warmest… you know…thermometer readings…man-made warming…destroying the planet…we’ll car-pool, recycle, we’ll save the planet; simple stuff.”
Let us not be distracted from our goal: assign a significant number of digits to the AGWEDI so fourth warmest, warmest, whatever, we can start our (important) work. Let’s see: “global land surface temperature was 2.45°F above the 20th century average of 40.8 °F.” Three significant digits – were’re making progress. But doesn’t the record go back to 1885? What’s with the “20th century average” stuff? Oh well, it’s only 15 years difference and what’s that in geologic time anyhow?
Back to work. Now that NOAA has kindly supplied the average land temperatures back to 1885 or 1900; wherever we decide to start, the next question is “what is the standard deviation between temperatures?” Why ask? Well, if our goal is to establish the AGWEDI to any degree of certainty, we need to know how hot is hottest. But in all honesty, we also need to know the uncertainty of the temperature readings as well. I looked on NOAA’s website and couldn’t find any references to standard deviation or measurement tolerance/uncertainty – and temperatures are resolved to three digits. It must be there somewhere. One hundredth of a degree is quite precise. Details, details. I’ll work on them later as this post is already too long. I can also take a shot at instrument bias from work done by EM Smith and others later.
Anyhow, if we really knew how much hotter, hottest March is within a standard deviation of the average; and we knew the uncertainty of the measurement, it would be a simple task to calculate AGWEDI.
Simply assign a value between 0 and 1 to AGW; 0 being skeptical and 1 being true believer. EDI is a set of multipliers consisting of the standard deviation of average temperatures times (on a scale of 0 to 1) the belief that moderately rising temperature anomolies spell the end of Earth, times confidence in UN IPCC reports, times confidence in “Settled Climate Science”, times confidence in MSM predicted effects of AGW, times certainty that man-made CO2 causes all temperature anomolies, times a personal factor you can just fill in at will since after all, it’s your subjective rating.
Personally, I come up with 0. Your results may vary.
Is this weather or climate? I can’t tell because of the cherry jam stains all over the report
Below is a table of global monthly temperatures anomalies, compared to the from the 1979/98 average, from UAH. As can be seen, the El Nino effect starts to kick in around September last year.
Also from UAH, discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
In March this year, this UAH chart showed average daily temperatures between 0.9 and 1.3 degrees F higher than last March last year. Yesterday the figure was 0.28 degrees F (0.15 degrees C) higher than the comparable date last year.
The effect of the latest El Nino is starting to wane and it is now looking like global temperatures will return to near ‘normal’ in the not too distant future – however, do not expect to see a commentary to this effect on any alarmist website.
2009 1 0.252
2009 2 0.247
2009 3 0.191
2009 4 0.162
2009 5 0.140
2009 6 0.044
2009 7 0.429
2009 8 0.242
2009 9 0.504
2009 10 0.361
2009 11 0.479
2009 12 0.283
2010 1 0.649
2010 2 0.603
2010 3 0.653
@GregO (23:59:12)
Nice piece.
“Personally, I come up with 0. Your results may vary”
My result came out negative. What did I do wrong?
“We should ask our Canadian friends if it was “hot” during March, since Canada seems to be leading the world in “hotness” according to the NOAA image”
Must have been BBQ season in Canada when the took that shot.
March in the UK was half a degree C COOLER than an average of the past 10 years.
According to the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium at Uccle (near Brussels), the mean air temperature at Uccle in March 2010 was 6.7 deg Celsius, while the ‘normal’ for March is 5.5. I don’t know to what period this normal refers; maybe to the period 1961-1990.
Anyway, there have been warmer March months at Uccle previously. For example, the monthly mean was 8.0 deg C in March 2007, and 8.8 in March 2003. Farther in the past, we had 8.5 deg C in March 1948, and even 9.6 in March 1957.