By Steve Goddard
RSS April 14,000 Foot Anomalies
UAH and RSS satellite data have been showing record warm temperatures in 2010, despite the fact that many of us have been freezing – and CAGW types have been quick to jump on this fact. But Had-Crut surface data has 2010 at only #5 through March, which is the latest available. So Watts Up With That?
Had-Crut rankings through March
I don’t have any theories about root cause, but there are some very interesting empirical relationships correlating ENSO with satellite and surface temperatures. Satellite TLT data is measured at 14,000 feet and seems to get exaggerated relative to surface temperatures during El Niño events. Note the particularly large exaggerations during the 1998 and 2010 Niños below. UAH (satellite) is in red and Had-Crut (surface) is in green.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1978/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978/normalise
Looking closer at the 1998 El Niño, it can be seen that both UAH and RSS 14,000 ft. temperatures were highly exaggerated vs. normalised Had-Crut and GISS surface temperatures.
Below is a chart showing the normalised difference (UAH minus Had-Crut) from 1997-1999
The chart below shows the same data as the one above, but also plots ENSO. This one is very interesting in that it shows that the satellite data lags ENSO by several months. In 1998, ENSO was nearly neutral by the time UAH reached it’s peak, and the 1999 La Niña was at full strength before UAH recovered to normal.
Conclusions: ENSO is already headed negative, but it is likely that we will see several more months of high satellite temperatures. CAGW types will abandon their long cherished Had-Crut, and declare 2010 to be the hottest year in the history of the planet. Yet another way to hide the decline.ñ
Joel Shore,
When I plotted NOAA’s ONI temp anomaly data (I calculated an annual average), I got a tepid 0.098ºC/decade trend from 1950 to 2010. Is that what you meant when you said; “The data for the multidecadal trends are more ambiguous because all the data sets used have issues in regards to artifacts that could affect the multidecadal trends.”? Incidentally, the scatter plot I created shows linear highs in parallel with linear lows, i.e., no acceleration to be found. I am a novice, so I may be using the NOAA data in some unacceptable way…
Guys, it’s pointless to look at month to month temperature data, or even year to year, and then argue about whether anthro GH gases are responsible or not. GHG increases only affect the underlying long-term temperature trend. With feedbacks, this only amounts to a little over 0.02 degC per year on average. The range of natural variability is +/- 0.4C from the average, 40 times the contribution of GHGs, and global temperature can move from the top to the bottom of that range in a year. This means we have to wait DECADES to really see if there has been a change.
Geoff Sherrington says:
You have it exactly backwards. It is an “actual” temperature method that is sensitive such things and the anomaly method that removes this sensitivity. Anomalies are much better behaved than absolute temperatures. For example, they are correlated over long distances, whereas surface temperatures can vary greatly. (As an extreme example, compare the temperature at the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire to the temperature in a nearby valley.) See here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ and here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html for further discussion.
Climate alarmists always attempt to claim that natural events are caused by humans. But they can not provide testable evidence to support their conjectures.
Arctic ice naturally fluctuates on multi-decadal cycles. What we are seeing now has happened many times in the pre-SUV past.
I’m not so sure LT will persist this El Nino compared to 1998.
SOI was very much negative through April and didn’t go positive until June
1998 1 -22.9 3
1998 2 -22.2 1
1998 3 -26.1 1
1998 4 -22.4 1
1998 5 -0.3 4
1998 6 8.2 4
1998 7 12.8 2
1998 8 9.7 2
1998 9 12.1 2
1998 10 11.2 2
1998 11 13.2 2
1998 12 11.7 2
Compared to 2010 through April
2010 1 -8.3 1
2010 2 -18.2 3
2010 3 -10.8 1
2010 4 12.1 4
Also, the oceans were still warming prior to and after 1998. Since 2003 the oceans have been losing heat, or certainly not gaining any.
Joe Bastardi thinks surface temps will come crashing down by winter IIRC. He’s got a pretty darn good track record.
jbar,
The HadCrut Arctic hole is about the same size as the RSS Arctic hole, so your theory doesn’t work. Se the second figure for reference.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/mind-the-gap/
groweg –
Bastardi’s prediction about the global temperature and the end of El Nino is a no-brainer, not the pronouncement of The Oracle. If you run correlations on the data, it becomes very clear that the El Nino is the biggest driver of short term (months to 2-3 years) global temperature changes. El Ninos always end, and when they do, the globe always cools.
stevengoddard,
You want offset, not normalize. Normalize does bad stuff in this case :-p
In general, surface temps seem to lag satellite temps during ENSO years. With GISS just reporting the warmest April on record, I expect HadCRUT to be high this month as well.
Mooloo says:
Well, they signed on to this joint academies statement http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf from the scientific academies of all of the G8+5 nations. They also signed on to this earlier joint academies statement: http://www.nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
In addition to the links that I have given above, here is a place with more links to the various statements from various scientific societies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change You have a strange definition of “bland” and “stay[ing] out of the fight”.
Wren says:
May 14, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Wren, I think you got cause and effect mixed up;
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/05/global-warming%E2%80%99s-64-trillion-question/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/05/strong-negative-feedback-from-the-latest-ceres-radiation-budget-measurements-over-the-global-oceans/
Zeke Hausfather
It makes very little difference if the WFT offset or normalise is used. The results turn out almost identical.
Ian W –
and let’s not forget that the oceans can hold vastly more heat than the atmosphere, and no satellite can measure the variation in ocean temperature below the surface.
On revisions in the data –
If you follow the numerical data of these temperature trend plots, you find that they are often revised, presumably due to error corrections, reinterpretations of data, or who knows what. If 1998 data was revised, there must be some reason for it.
Wren is obviously not a geologist.
After scanning some of the early comments, I see there are a couple of issues here that some do not yet understand:
(1) It is well know, and widely published, that year-to-year surface temperature anomalies are magnified with height, This is due to moist convective transport of heat from the surface to the atmosphere by evaporation and precipitation; It’s been seen in radiosonde data before there were ever satellites.
(2) It is similarly well known that this heat transport takes some time to occur, especially on large space scales (e.g. the tropics) with a 2 month or so average time lag between peak surface temperatures and peak tropospheric temperatures in the case of El Nino/La Nina.
The magnified warming with height is the same effect as the so-called “hot spot” that is expected with *long-term* warming, but which the satellite data do not seem to support so far. Some think this is a big deal, others not so much, and still others think is an artifact of errors in one or more of the measurement systems.
Adrian O – 60 year temperature cycle
According to my number crunching, that long term slow cycle in global temperature correlates best with the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation). When temperatures were rising from 1920 to 1940, so was the AMO. When temperatures were wandering aimlessly (more or less flat) from the late 1940s to 1974, the AMO was either flat or falling. From 1974 to 2000, the AMO was rising in concert with global temperatures. Since 2000 the AMO appears to be in a flat trend (hard to tell because it bounces up and down a bit in the short term), and eyeballometrically so does global temperature (although statistically, global temp is still consistent with a slowly rising 0.2C/decade trend since 1974 – this month the Hadcrut index is right on the centerline of that trend plot).
This does not mean that the AMO alone drove the warming from 1974 to 2000, but it does seem to have added to that warming and given a boost above the warming attributable to GHGs. The statistics over 160 years show that CO2 is the highest single correlating factor to global temperature, with an R-squared of 63% (vs Hadcrut). In a multi-variable correlation derived from 16 variables CO2 “explains” 47% of the fit. It “explains” the really long term trend but cannot explain decadal, multidecadal and short term variation, nor should we expect it to.
(Of course, it doesn’t have to mean or “explain” anything at all, because correlation is not proof of causation.)
Geoff Sherrington,
“If ENSO causes heat, where does it come from?”
I think that is not well understood. ENSO is related to a change in air and water currents in the tropical Pacific which leads to anomalous warming in the eastern Pacific, but it also affects temperatures farther away. Hypothetically less vertical mixing in the ocean could cause higher than normal surface temperatures, thus raising global temps. I saw a paper recently that claimed that there is a reduction in clouds in the tropical Pacific during ENSO which then allows more sunlight into the ocean.
Steve G –
I was thinking about HadCrut vs. NCDC and GISS indicies (not the RSS), which do various things to eliminate this Arctic hole.
Tamino has a long post comparing these 3 indices. http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/giss-ncdc-hadcru/
However, although in theory the HadCrut index should have lower numbers because of the Arctic omission, in reality it doesn’t seem to be there in Tamino’s graphs.
All – on the alleged change in HadCrut 1998 temperature spike data
In http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/giss-ncdc-hadcru/, Tamino compares the HadCrut, GISS, and NCDC indicies. After normalizing the curves to put them on the same scale, HadCrut’s 1998 El Nino temperature spike stands out like a sore thumb over the other two’s data. It’s about 0.1C higher. Perhaps there was something wrong with the way they arrived at the numbers and they just corrected it. ???
The Russian Academy of Sciences? Fossil fuels are the only thing that Russia has going for it right now, and with the death grip that Putin has on that country, I wouldn’t believe anything that came out of Russia.
I agree that Dr. Roy Spencer will respond to this real soon. I hear he just stepped out for a smoke and will be right back!
This year will be exceptionally interesting. Especially next winther.
Of course the warmers will be pouring out reports, ready to get them stacked up for the next IPCC report. There will be reports on the effects of warming regarding
-lizards
-birds flying into mountains
-vulcanos erupting
-people going hiwire in city centers
-honeybees (soon to come, Im sure)
-penguins
-Polar bears
-Ocean acidification
-fish dying?
-Coral reefs
-fly overpopulation?
-planes chrashing(pilots getting hot?)
-Ants getting confused?
and on and on.
But noone will care about cause and effect….? Too difficult, maybe?
And in September…what will the arctic look like?
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm0
In the middle between 2006 and 2009 maybe?
That wold be nice for us humans stuck on this planet.
But it wouldnt be nice for the Doomsday prophets. Al Gore would hate that.
@ur momisugly stevengoddard May 15, 2010 at 4:16 am
barry
Several flaws in your logic.
I didn’t present an argument, so there is no logic to fault. I was responding to a post upthread, not your top post.
1. I am not discussing the 31 year satellite trend. I am discussing the 200% anomaly discrepancy during ENSO events.
By invoking “CAGW types”, the ‘conclusion’ section of your post was about climate. I took it that the point of your examination of ENSO event disparities was your prediction on how people with certain ideas on climate will change their selection of data sets. Otherwise, what was the point you were trying to make?
Having followed this thread, I think you were halfway prescient – it is plain that some of the denizens at this site are quick to abandon a long-favoured data set (UAH, because it has a cooler long-term trend and is produced by a climate change skeptic) when it doesn’t accord with their preferences (short-term). We’ll see what the other half do. I doubt you’ll witness quite the flip-floppery from that section, but who knows?
2. The trend from 1979 to the present is anomalous. The long term trend is 0.65 C/century
It is anomalous. That’s what the mainstreamers say, too.
It is well-known by anyone who’s done a bit of reading on surface v satellite temps, that ENSO fluctuations are more pronounced in the satellite record, and that there is often a lag between them. The ENSO deviations are interesting, but in terms of climate, what matters is the long-term trends. For the purposes of comparing satellite to surface, we now have 31+ years of data, and we find that the trends are converging, which is to be expected if the different methodologies are reasonably robust, and as a result of increasing amounts of data.
My own take, FWIW, I prefer no data set, but see them all as contributing to the understanding of modern climate. I think a reasonable compromise, when there is really not much difference between them, would be to work with an average of all of them, eg:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/
That only works for temps, since 1979, of course, but the similarity of trends lends credence to them all. For times earlier in the instrumental record, there are three well-known data sets to average, or you could throw in the Japanese and Russian global temp records for good measure. Seems to me that picking out noticeable differences in short-term weather phenomena, when the long-term trends are very similar, amounts to splitting hairs – when commenting on climate. Will someone here – yourself for instance – suggest a reasonable data set to work with, or various to average, that can be worked with (without being sarcastic)? Or is the focus here is too narrow to countenance that kind of progression? At what point do we stop haggling over molehills and check the view from the top of the mountain?
stevengoddard says:
May 15, 2010 at 5:43 am
John Finn
Ypu can theorize all you want, but the normalisation did not scale the data. It shifted HadCrut by -0.23 with no scaling.
Yep – you could be right. I’ve no idea what it’s trying to do. A bug in the algorithm seems a possibility.
stevengoddard says:
May 15, 2010 at 5:49 am
John Finn
My last post was wrong. You were correct.
Are you sure I was right. I’ve just done this plot ….
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978/offset:-0.23/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1978/normalise
i.e. 2 plots of Hadcrut; one with offset=-0.23 and the other with the normalise option. The plots are identical – unless I’m going mad.