Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Poised for a Plunge
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Just an update…as the following graph shows, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) along the equatorial Pacific (“Nino3.4″ region, red lines) have been plunging, and global average SSTs have turned the corner, too. (Click on the image for the full-size, undistorted version. Note the global values have been multiplied by 10 for display purposes.)
The corresponding sea level pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin (SOI index, next graph) shows a rapid transition toward La Nina conditions is developing.
Being a believer in natural, internal cycles in the climate system, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that global-average SSTs will plunge over the next couple of months. Based upon past experience, it will take a month or two for our (UAH) tropospheric temperatures to then follow suit.
This might be of interest. Can’t put images up directly so here is a link.
https://daedalearth.wordpress.com/thermal-bounce/
Dr. says:
The anomalous step change from 2002-2003 is a step change (3.5 deg) during the transition from XBT to ARGO, something which Josh Willis has acknowledged in exchanges with RPS, yet mysteriously is not mentioned in the Nature article.
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If you took out the step change I bet the calculated radiative imbalance calculation would drop to something like .3W/m2 – even more missing heat.
Talking of plunges, we should not forget that just a week or two ago a post here showed the largest monthly fall in upper ocean heat content (near the tropics) in the instrumental record since 1979:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/07/the-decrease-in-upper-ocean-heat-content-from-march-to-april-was-1c-largest-since-1979/
There is more to climate oscillation than ENSO in the long term, so the cooling Dr Spencer is predicting is likely more than just a post-el Nino reflex. Since change in OHC is likely predictive of SST and tropospheric temperatures, and OHC has been dropping for a decade or more, a more sustained temperature decline is indeed probable. The tropospheric temperature record since the 1998 el Nino looks curiously symmetrical – two similar peaks (1998, 2009) separated by a plateau. This symmetry can be expected to continue on any rational basis – i.e. with falling temperatures. AGW proponents will of course continue to reassure themselves by nostalgic reminiscence about 1970-2000 warming. They will have to think quickly of some new innovations analogous to short-selling to persuade us of global warming in the face of an intensifying cooling period.
OTOH – I’m in Delhi and its in the mid 40s – thats C not F, not much sign of cooling here.
I would like to clarify my statement about the effect of growing ice.
Hansen claimed that .2 w/m2 of the missing heat from 1993 to 2008 likely went to melting the arctic ice cap. The ice cap has grown at a much faster rate than the decline from 1993 to 2008, thefore based on Hansen’s analysis at least .2/W/M2 must have been released by the growing ice. Therefore if the radiative imbalance since 2008 is calculated to be say be .1 w/m2 from a gain in ocean heat content, it must be corrected by .2W/M2 to an actual .-1W/M2 or a cooling planet.
Kirk Myers says:
May 20, 2010 at 5:52 pm
The cool PDO (20 to 30 years) has resumed, so we should see more La Ninas, weaker El Ninos, and cooler temperatures ahead, according to Joe D’Aleo and Joe Bastardi.
Really, the cool PDO has resumed? I always thought that a positive PDO Index meant that it was the warm phase!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/05/flashback-to-2007-sst-to-plunge-again/
The ARGO buoy situation puzzles me.
Realizing that they measure something different than the SST. It was once explained to me once that the sea is the ultimate measure of global warming and these 3300 buoys would prove once and for all that Manmade Global warming is real.
First it seems that NOAA hid the data.
Then it seems that NOAA needed to adjust the data since it does not match earlier measurement methods.
Now it seems as though the data is being ignored.
We know that ARGO shows slight cooling 2003 to 2009
Is this no longer considered important?
Can someone explain what is going on here and why isn’t the data reported more frequently?
Or is there some site where I can get the data monthly.
Thanks for any explanation
What’s the correlation between global sst and global air temperature? This is key IMHO. Everything else is secondary (feedbacks, adjustments, perception, hysteria, indifference).
Here is NOAA’s PDO forecast, which shows it entering negative territory during the April-May-June seasonal timeframe.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/forecasts/sstlim/for1pdo.html (click on “numerical forecast”)
The first Argo floats were deployed in late 1999.
The Argo array did not reach its full planned coverage of at least 3000 floats until late 2006. Not all the floats are equal – about 66% dive to at least 1500 meters, and 46% to 2000 meters.
The new Argo data looking at the upper 2000m gives a possible explanation for the wide swings in 700m data – heat is being moved vertically, in upwellings and downwellings, that hadn’t been seen before in the instrument data.
700m data:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Look at the Argo data for the upper 2000m of the world’s oceans:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/ocean-heat-2000m.gif
This graph is from Figure 11a:
http://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
From beginning 2003 to the end of 2008, the oceans warmed at a rate of 0.77 ± 0.11 Wm−2
Note that the upper 200m of the oceans continued to warm while the upper 700m cooled slightly.
Offhand, I don’t know of any papers analyzing Argo data for the full 2000m in 2009.
http://w3.jcommops.org/FTPRoot/Argo/Doc/Argo_new_brochure.pdf
Also note that Argo floats cannot go under the sea ice, or operate over the steep continental slope, nor can the array adequately measure the oceans’ narrow and swift western boundary currents. Here autonomous gliders integrated with Argo will help to link the deep ocean to the boundary currents and continental shelves. The Argo data system can handle this data from gliders.
I’d like to see something like a vertical wall of Argo floats measuring how much heat moves from the North Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Ocean each year:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Arctic_circle.svg/1000px-Arctic_circle.svg.png
I think this is the main cause of the vanishing Arctic sea ice:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
Note that there is already less sea ice than in summer 2007.
Speaking of plunges…anybody notice the Arctic Sea ice volume anomaly chart:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
Going so low, they’ll need to move the vertical scale downward. Yes, just model, but that much vaunted (by the AGW skeptics) multi-year ice doesn’t seem to be holding up too well so far…and the big time melt season is still ahead…
richcar said:
May 20, 2010 at 8:01 pm
I would like to clarify my statement about the effect of growing ice.
Hansen claimed that .2 w/m2 of the missing heat from 1993 to 2008 likely went to melting the arctic ice cap. The ice cap has grown at a much faster rate than the decline from 1993 to 2008, thefore based on Hansen’s analysis at least .2/W/M2 must have been released by the growing ice. Therefore if the radiative imbalance since 2008 is calculated to be say be .1 w/m2 from a gain in ocean heat content, it must be corrected by .2W/M2 to an actual .-1W/M2 or a cooling planet.
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This part of your post is especially erroneous: The ice cap has grown at a much faster rate than the decline from 1993 to 2008…
All I can say is what in the world are you talking about???
richcar 1225 says:
May 20, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Although the maps of Arctic sea ice extent are 2D, the actual sea ice itself is 3D, and the heat required to melt it depends on the volume of ice melted, not the “extent”.
As far as they can tell, the volume of Arctic sea ice is trending down, even after the large summer melt of 2007:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
The recently launched CryoSat-2 should hopefully start returning useful data before the summer Arctic sea ice minimum – this will be a useful check on the PIOMAS data assimilation model. With the now defunct ICESat ice volume measuring satellite, PIOMAS was shown to be a bit high in it’s estimate of Arctic sea ice volume, without the ICESat data assimilated – ICESat showed it was even smaller in the summer of 2007:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/IceVolAnomaly19792010.MarNov2.png
FWC News – Record cold leads to record number of manatee deaths
http://myfwc.com/NEWSROOM/10/statewide/News_10_X_ManateeRecordDeaths.htm
As of March 19, biologists with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC) Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) have documented 431 manatee carcasses in state waters so far in 2010. This preliminary data indicates that in just three months, the number of manatee deaths has exceeded the highest number on record for an entire calendar year, which was 429 in 2009. The cause of death for the majority of these animals is cold stress…
Fish and Wildlife Research Institute
http://research.myfwc.com/features/view_article.asp?id=33589
http://myfwc.com/NEWSROOM/10/statewide/News_10_X_ManateeDeaths09.htm
Looks like colder water to me!
Don Shaw says
The ARGO buoy situation puzzles me.
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Don,
Global warming is due to a radiative imbalance where the earth absorbs more heat than leaves to space. The imbalance results in a heat buildup in the atmosphere and the ocean. Heat is measured in joules. Because the oceans can hold a much higher quantity of joules per volume than the atmosphere it has been agreed by climate scientists that 80% of all the heat accumulation due to global warming must be found in the oceans. The Argo buoys measure down to 2000 meters. Sea Surface temps may be quite different than the temperature of the water at depth therefore the temperature distribution at depth needs to be determined to calculate the ocean heat content in joules. I think everybody agrees that Argo has the answer. So far there has been little heat accumulation from 2002 when Argo started untill 2008. Since 2008 there has been an increase in SST. Whether this is reflected in the Argo data we do not yet know. I suspect that it will demonstrate a heat increase but at a rate that reflects a much smaller radiative imbalance than the models have predicted. Now SST as Dr Spencer points out is about to decline rapidly. I think a few more years and thanks to Argo we will have a real estimate of the real radiative imbalance, positive or negative.
Don Shaw :
Go to this website
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/Marine_Atlas.html
You can download the program and subsequently the data every month. You can also get a CD sent to you with the program and the latest data. Contact Megan.
According to the study, 15 years of ocean warming indicates”a strong climate change signal”. How does this fit in with Phil Jones statement that there has been no statistically significant global warming for 15 years?
Have we now changed weather to climate from 30 years to 15 years?
R. Gates says:
May 20, 2010 at 3:13 pm
“I doubt we’ll see the La Nina low temps we saw in 2008, though temps may fall somewhere to the 2009 low.”
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Well I am sure scientists and experts across the world are hanging on every word of that “prognostication”.
I doubt we will “see” this either, but you know what I would really like to see?
A live panel with you, and then Roy Spencer, Lindzen, Bastardi, Tisdale, Maue and other actual scientists and physicists.
It might be rather amusing to watch somebody who incessantly, and surprisingly “confidently”…talks out of his arse on this site, with material that is continually over his head and out of his league…get eaten up by the lions.
And if that still is unsuccessful in preventing your “25% skeptical” side from being “nudged down the road” toward the religion you SO want to “believe” in…then I guess you were predestined to go that way anyway.
Hint for ya: Listen and try to learn more. You might surprise yourself.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Two items that grab my attention:
First, when people speak of the PDO the focus seems to be on two different things. The first is a mathematical measurement of the sea surface anomalies, subtracting the cold from the warm and arriving at either a “cold” or “warm” result. However a second focus is the configuration of those anomalies. This second focus can see the PDO as being in a “cold” phase even if the total of all anomalies is “warm,” because the cold anomalies are located in a certain, distinctive parts of the
Pacific.
Using this second focus, I look for a blue, backwards letter “C” of cold water in anomaly maps of the Pacific, stretching from the Aleutians east and down the coast of California and then westwards beneath Hawaii towards Japan.
This configuration will obviously result in quite different weather patterns than will be created when the backwards “C” is warm and red, and in my humble opinion it is these changes in weather patterns that matter most. They are what mark the changes in the PDO phase. Even if the sum of all anomalies shows the Pacific, as a whole, is slightly warmer, the weather generated by the configuration of cold water
will resemble the “cold” phase.
The second major focus of my thinking revolves around whether swings in the PDO are regular, like a pendulum, or whether they are erratic.
It seems to me the PDO attempts to be well behaved, going “tick” for thirty years and then “tock” for thirty years, in the manner of a nice, neat pendulum. However it also seems Mother Nature likes to throw wrenches into the clockwork. Or perhaps the outside influences are not wrenches but mice, leaping onto the pendulum and swinging like Tarzan, and scampering up and down the pendulum in a manner that throws the nice neat tick-tocking and action-reaction-ing all out of whack.
One current mouse is the quiet sun.
richcar 1225
Afraid not. Where there are data to be tortured and idiots to listen the AGW movement will continue. There is tOOOOOO much money involved.
R. Gates,
You say that the ocean warming from 1993 to 2008 is just what the AGW models predicted. Fine. It is also what we expected from natural climate variation. I recall Bill Gray saying (around 1993) that the Atlantic hurricane activity would soon pick up and that global cooling would commence in the early part of the 21st Century, all due to natural ocean cycles. Of course, he was exactly right about the hurricanes and the lack of warming over the last 12 years appears to support Gray and the natural cycles much better than the AGW model. And lets not forget the lack of a mid-tropospheric tropical hot spot, a gradual drying of the upper tropospheric atmosphere, a major rebound in Arctic ice, the lack of warming in Antarctica, no evidence of a persistent, positive water vapor feedback and all the other areas that the models have failed.
Of course, if we go back before 1978, the models have an even bigger problem. They can’t explain any of the climate changes of the 20th century, the LIA, MWP, Dark Ages Cold Period or the RWP. Simply put, the models seem to work for about 20 to 30 years in the late 20th century, but fail miserably for all other time periods. Not a good track record. On the other hand, natural climate variability does a good job explaining the last 120 years and is rapidly deciphering that last 2,000. With a natural climate theory, we do not need to pretend that well documented climate changes didn’t happen.
So why are you only 25% skeptical of a theory that only explains 1-2% of the last 2,000 years? Shouldn’t you be 98-99% skeptical based on the observations alone?
“The corresponding sea level pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin (SOI index, next graph) shows a rapid transition toward La Nina conditions is developing.”
Since this 2009/2010 event was classified as an El Nino Modoki ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/01/history-suggests-dont-bet-on-la-nina-this-year/ ) ,surely the chance of a La Nina event following this El Nino is very small…
the australian weather bureau is reporting an increasing amount of cooler than normal water in the lower depths of the pacifichttp://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
Well Arctic sea ice is taking a nosedive as R Gates said.
“Could we break another record this year? I think it’s quite possible,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
“We are going to lose the summer sea-ice cover. We can’t go back.”
We can’t go back apparently according to an “expert” as ice never comes back once it has melted, apparently.
There is of course one huge problem with the assumptions and that is very simple:
Monitoring of Arctic sea ice only began in 1972.
I know, lets play a game. Are you up for it R Gates???
Lets imagine you have Roald Amundesen and the crew of the St. Roch standing in front of you. Now explain how the current melting is unprecedented.
About the new Nature OHC article: Has anybody taken a peek behind the paywall? It seems that they are not denying that temperatures have fallen (or at least “stalled”) since 2003, at least according to this article: http://www.livescience.com/environment/ocean-warming-100519.html
So still no increase for the period with the most reliable data.