May 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update: +0.53 deg. C.
By Dr. Roy Spencer
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature remains warm: +0.53 deg. C for May, 2010. The linear trend since 1979 is now +0.14 deg. C per decade.Tropics picked up a bit, but SSTs indicate El Nino has ended and we may be headed to La Nina. NOAA issued a La Nina Watch yesterday.
In the race for the hottest calendar year, 1998 still leads with the daily average for 1 Jan to 31 May being +0.65 C in 1998 compared with +0.59 C for 2010. (Note that these are not considered significantly different.) As of 31 May 2010, there have been 151 days in the year. From our calibrated daily data, we find that 1998 was warmer than 2010 on 96 of them.
As a reminder, three months ago we changed to Version 5.3 of our dataset, which accounts for the mismatch between the average seasonal cycle produced by the older MSU and the newer AMSU instruments. This affects the value of the individual monthly departures, but does not affect the year to year variations, and thus the overall trend remains the same as in Version 5.2. ALSO…we have added the NOAA-18 AMSU to the data processing in v5.3, which provides data since June of 2005. The local observation time of NOAA-18 (now close to 2 p.m., ascending node) is similar to that of NASA’s Aqua satellite (about 1:30 p.m.). The temperature anomalies listed above have changed somewhat as a result of adding NOAA-18.
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 0.251 0.472 0.030 -0.068
2009 2 0.247 0.564 -0.071 -0.045
2009 3 0.191 0.324 0.058 -0.159
2009 4 0.162 0.316 0.008 0.012
2009 5 0.140 0.161 0.119 -0.059
2009 6 0.043 -0.017 0.103 0.110
2009 7 0.429 0.189 0.668 0.506
2009 8 0.242 0.235 0.248 0.406
2009 9 0.505 0.597 0.413 0.594
2009 10 0.362 0.332 0.393 0.383
2009 11 0.498 0.453 0.543 0.479
2009 12 0.284 0.358 0.211 0.506
2010 1 0.648 0.860 0.436 0.681
2010 2 0.603 0.720 0.486 0.791
2010 3 0.653 0.850 0.455 0.726
2010 4 0.501 0.799 0.203 0.633
2010 5 0.534 0.775 0.293 0.710
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2009 1 0.251 0.472 0.030 -0.068
2009 2 0.247 0.564 -0.071 -0.045
2009 3 0.191 0.324 0.058 -0.159
2009 4 0.162 0.316 0.008 0.012
2009 5 0.140 0.161 0.119 -0.059
2009 6 0.043 -0.017 0.103 0.110
2009 7 0.429 0.189 0.668 0.506
2009 8 0.242 0.235 0.248 0.406
2009 9 0.505 0.597 0.413 0.594
2009 10 0.362 0.332 0.393 0.383
2009 11 0.498 0.453 0.543 0.479
2009 12 0.284 0.358 0.211 0.506
2010 1 0.648 0.860 0.436 0.681
2010 2 0.603 0.720 0.486 0.791
2010 3 0.653 0.850 0.455 0.726
2010 4 0.501 0.799 0.203 0.633
2010 5 0.534 0.775 0.293 0.710
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Does there appear to be any connection with the warmer than normal arctic temps reported in your April temp post and the steep sea ice extent decline that’s apparent in May?
Thank you
@Climate Kate (or anyone who has an opinion on the matter):
How likely do you think it is that June and/or July will have an anomaly exceeding 0.50 per GISS? The last likelihood given for June was 57% and for July 60% by bettors on https://www.intrade.com My guess is that 57% is a realistic estimate for June, but that it’s even money that July will be less than 0.50.
RSS was the organization which found the errors in data processing that UAH had been doing from 1989 to 2006 – the UAH analysis which kept showing “the GCMs are all wrong” for so long, despite repeated requests from other researchers to look closer and see if they were doing anything wrong:
Now, I ask, who is looking for errors the other way?
Is there any group who actively seeks to see if the data can be read into a lower trend?
If not, how can anyone be certain that errors that tend to raise the temperatures are not being missed?
Don’t give me the “they are the best scientists” line. We have all watched the group think of the worlds “best” bankers lead to a global financial melt-down.
That UAH can have been “wrong” for so long does not inspire confidence. We now know they are “right”, but are they actually right?
Mooloo says:
June 5, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Now, I ask, who is looking for errors the other way?
Is there any group who actively seeks to see if the data can be read into a lower trend?
If not, how can anyone be certain that errors that tend to raise the temperatures are not being missed?
That UAH can have been “wrong” for so long does not inspire confidence.
It’s not like UAH was totally incompetent – I think RSS found just two subtle errors to do with how they handled orbital drift and inter-satellite calibration biases. This changed the warming trend significantly, but in fairness, doing something for the first time is more difficult than improving it later – UAH made a few errors, but hey, that happens in Science.
A team at University of Washington has also found additional errors in the work of UAH and RSS (at least, they prefer to do the analysis of the satellite data differently, especially subtracting the component of measured stratosphere cooling from the measured mid-troposphere warming). Whereas UAH would use two different view angles to try and subtract the stratosphere component from the MSU/AMSU channels, UW uses a different approach which uses two channels (frequencies) and weights them to subtract the stratosphere cooling signal from the troposphere warming signal:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/nature02524-UW-MSU.pdf
The UofW work shows more warming than either UAH or RSS, indicating that they think both groups do not handle the overlaying, cool stratosphere correctly:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global
The example of just four researchers from one University (UW) coming up with a reanalysis of the first two groups, which is recognized by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, should inspire the Heartland Institute, or the Marshall Institute ( http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=415 ), or Dr. Lindzen, or whatever ‘skeptic’ authority there is which can recruit a few researchers to look at the satellite data again, and see if they can find any additional errors that make the warming trends go down.
I agree that perhaps there are such errors, waiting to be discovered.
Not guaranteed, but possible.
But honestly, after 21 years, I think if they were there, Dr. Spencer would have found those errors by now.
———-
We have all watched the group think of the worlds “best” bankers lead to a global financial melt-down.
The bankers did very well –
for themselves.
It kind of reminds people why they put all those financial regulations in place after the last global financial meltdown.
Anu,
today is the first time I’ve been to this thread. And I see you’re all confused. You’ve got GISTemp confused for UAH. You’ve got melt confused with shear. You’ve got political/environmentalists propaganda confused with truth. But really, I know it is not confusion. It is intentional.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
June 6, 2010 at 10:05 am
Anu,
today is the first time I’ve been to this thread. And I see you’re all confused. You’ve got GISTemp confused for UAH. You’ve got melt confused with shear. You’ve got political/environmentalists propaganda confused with truth. But really, I know it is not confusion. It is intentional.
Huh?? where has he confused UAH with GIStemp?
The average temperature does not tell any kind of story where the story matters most. Farm to fork. For me, that means agriculture in NE Oregon. I believe the confounding influence of the Aleutian pressure system, the cold water at the mouth of Bering Strait and upper East side of the Pacific, along with the negative AO and El Nino conditions, conspired to make dry deserts wet and Springs cool and prolonged. Old retired farmers got this, intuitively. They may not have understood the drivers, but they totally were keyed into the signals that times were a-changing for crop rotations. But alas, land was sold to corporate farms or taken over by new-age youngsters fresh out of agriculture school in our now green-nosed institutions (IE Oregon State University). Who know nothing of these time honored weather predictors of both year to year variation and oscillations.
Time was when dry land fields were rotated between cool season crops (IE rape and peas here in NE Oregon), with warm crops (wheat) interspersed with fallow. Now all that is grown is wheat, year after year. New age farmers got hooked and addicted to the water supply coming out of irrigation sprinklers sucking up water from the various feeders and the river itself that forms the backbone of water supply to much of Oregon’s agriculture efforts. This system of “never mind the climate or weather, just grow it and irrigate when necessary” has become the fall back position over wiser crop management.
The result? This year, after three years of wet cool Springs, farmers again planted wheat, and sprinkled it, ignoring the gathering rain storms, to see it rust in the field. The old leg-bowed farmers would have put that land in peas (or any other cool season crop) two years ago. And kept it in peas till the confounding parameters switched back to wheat friendly weather oscillations.
It just seems to me that wild-eyed panic over rusty wheat should be filed under “duh”.
http://www.capitalpress.com/content/ml-wheat-rust-052810-art
John Finn says:
June 6, 2010 at 11:44 am
I think he’s on strong medications.