Willis publishes his thermostat hypothesis paper

[snip] to ‘tips and notes’ please. 😉 RT-mod

Great article. I am watching thermals and a rapid thunderstorm build up in the last 30 minutes. When the storm hits, it will remove a lot of heat. Wind sheers are examples of redistribution of heat.

congratulations Willis

My congratulations also!

Part 2

Nicely done Willis. As an amateur scientist, you should feel proud of your achievement. I look forward to reading your paper in detail, or at least watching the above referenced videos. I remember reading your post about this and had a few questions about it. Undoubtedly, thunderstorms do act to control excessive temperature buildup from solar insolation, and so are at least a local and regional “thermostat” in this regard, and if thunderstorms (i.e. cumulonimbus) were the only kind of cloud in the world, and only came out during the heat of the day, and never formed at night, etc. then life would be even more simple.
Anyway, congrats.

Congrats Willis.
I’d sit down and read it now, but I’ve got to get ready for a gig tonight. Tomorrow??? I’ll be hiking Yosemite! Monday read it is!
Mike

Congratulations! Very interesting read!
When I read this, one thought comes to mind; Surely, SURELY most, or at least some of this is in meteorology text-books already?
Surely ? I would think that some of it is not, and some is mentioned here to “educate” the reader? Like the “Governor” talk?
In that case, it would be nice to know which parts are actually “the new idea” ?
(Sorry, I am not a meteorologist)
Thanks.

Is there a silver lining in the clouds? Only time will tell.

“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
Dr Roy Spencer

————-

“Although sea ice and snow cover had noticeably declined in the Arctic from 2000 to 2004, there had been no detectable change in the albedo measured at the top of the atmosphere: the proportion of light the Arctic reflected hadn’t changed. In other words, the ice albedo feedback that most climate models predict will ultimately amplify global warming apparently hadn’t yet kicked in.”
“According to the MODIS observations, cloud fraction had increased at a rate of 0.65 percent per year between 2000 and 2004. If the trend continues, it will amount to a relative increase of about 6.5 percent per decade. At least during this short time period, says Kato, increased cloudiness in the Arctic appears to have offset the expected decline in albedo from melting sea ice and snow.” NASA Earth Observatory

Very good Willis-might I add I see someone who has experienced that heat engine from
say, the bridge or a mast of a Boat or Ship or the Cockpit of an Aircraft. I’ve had similar thoughts over the years fighting fire from a Four-Engine Douglas, not nearly so reasoned or articulate, great job!

Darkinbad the Brightdayler says:
July 24, 2010 at 2:20 pm
“[…]Why?[…]”
Because we still exist. HTH.

Brilliant. It made perfect sense to me. That certainly sounds like negative feedback or even better a governor is likely. I suppose the distinction between a governor and pure negative feedback if I understand correctly is that the governor will maintain the temperature in a range of 3 percent in your example and negative feedback would just reduce the magnitude of the warming. It should increase if the forcing increases. We seem to be at a warm point so any significant warming should be resisted by the governor if I understand correctly.
Many aspects of these ideas would be very threatening to those that rely doomsday scenarios. Even questioning how the thunderstorms are not positive feedback is going to be threatening. It seems obvious by your showing how the clouds follow the sun that the idea of thunderstorms causing the heat is foolish. The ideas used in the climate models seem counterintuitive and even contrived. I can’t make logical sense out of it. What you said makes logical sense and seems obvious after it is explained.

Convection is the most obvious stabilizing mechanism, and the one most overlooked in the alarmosphere.

R Gates
You are always quick to question anyone who shows that manmade global warming is wrong. But you never question the PIOMAS graph. No. Instead you come up with all kinds of poor arguments to defend it. This shows everything about you.

I’m glad to see this thread. I hope Willis is able to chime in a time or two. I got engaged in a discussion of skeptic theories on Lucia’s Blackboard last week and when challenged to show a skeptic theory which has scientific merit I remembered something I’d read by Willis and went looking. It was the Thermostat Hypothesis, of course, so I read his posts here and the lightbulb turned on so that now I’ve internalized the argument. Then yesterday someone linked Willis’ speech above and now here’s an entire new thread.
Frankly, whether others have come up with similar theories before or Willis is the first, this is a potential game-ender for team CAGW. They’d better come up with a good counter and soon. And one which isn’t just hand-waving, either. Frankly I don’t think they can as it’s seemed obvious to me from the beginning that there must be a mechanism to keep the climate within bounds.
The fellow I was arguing with was complaining about the theory not being able to account for entering or exiting ice ages, but I think that’s a solvable problem and really less of a problem for the thermostat hypothesis than it is for CAGW.

Willis (and Vukcevic if you’re reading) can you please reconsider putting backgrounds on your graphs and slides? It makes it harder to read. Thanks.

Earth has been in one or the other kind of atmospheric equilibrium for milions of years, already. I doubt, that the engines driving the Earth’s climate to one or the other kind of equilibrium will cease to exist, only because some warmists say so. Mother Earth remains to be inherently good to us – because, otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to know.

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
July 24, 2010 at 6:29 pm
R Gates
You are always quick to question anyone who shows that manmade global warming is wrong. But you never question the PIOMAS graph. No. Instead you come up with all kinds of poor arguments to defend it. This shows everything about you
___________________
Wow, that came out of left field. Your bitterness toward those who think the AGW hypothesis is likely correct is overpowering. Good luck with that…

Jim….
Where do you think the heat goes when vapor condenses in a cloud? How do you think it is radiated?
Check what you bear in mind.

Seems like there a lot of papers coming out now showing the negative feedback of clouds. Could it be that we are nearing the end of this insanity!?
JB

JimF writes: “I look at your Figure 1: the same process that transfers so much heat from the surface to near-space in the equatorial area of earth (Hadley cells) is repeated in more northerly and southerly areas by the Temperate cells (and maybe the mobile polar cells). The earth is rejecting quantities of heat from the sun, and transporting lots of what it accepts back to near-space where it can be got rid of easily.”
This figure is reflecting an obsolete knowledge and the circulation described does not stand to observation. This has been known since 1993!
http://ddata.over-blog.com/xxxyyy/2/32/25/79/Leroux-Global-and-Planetary-Change-1993.pdf
Leroux “Dynamic analysis of weather and climate” Springer 2ed 2010

R. Gates
So you dispute what I said about you is true?

R. Gates,
are there limits to the accuracy of the PIOMAS graph?

_Jim says:
July 24, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Great. Latent heat of evaporation is released into the ‘air’ at altitude … can you ‘splain to me how it gets into ‘space’ via air that is a poor black body at best (bearing in mind effective IR emission occurring only from certain molecules like CO2 and H2O)?
Air is a poor black body, the atmosphere I think goes like T^6 instead of T^4, but the common misconception that it is only green house gases that are emitting radiation from the atmosphere is something that should be corrected. All matter at a certain temperature emits radiation according to the black/gray body or whatever body formula. . Thermodynamics knows nothing of green house gases, just specific heats and heat capacities are enough to have the energy content of the matter under consideration.
To say that only 0.4% of the atmosphere ( combined H2O and CO2) radiates away is very wrong, and illustrates the confusion climate blurbs have introduced on all our houses ( from a “plague on both your houses”).
Lets take this further. If the energy lost through the black body ( for simplicity) radiation is not replenished by an outside source, the temperature of the body falls. It keeps radiating and loosing temperature until it reaches 0K, green house gases or no.

Congratulations Willis!!!

I’ve always liked Willis’s hypothesis because it concentrates on the obvious importance of equatorial tropospheric air circlation and explains it very nicely.
As Willis says there does seem to be a climate ‘governor’ in place and the findings of Miscolczi concerning a stable optical depth add weight to the idea.
As for my part I have tried to collate all those ideas into a broader global climate description and to do that one needs to go somewhat further to consider internal oceanic cycling, solar cycling and the latitudinal shifting of the air circulation systems which indicate cycling in the speed of the hydrological cycle globally and not just in the tropics. All those aspects show cycles on varying periodicities but the most apparent one of significance is the 500/1000 year cycling from the historical past (as far as our records go) through the MWP to LIA to date.
Anyway, it all seems to be coming together with a set of workable hypotheses that account for observations, comply with basic physics and present AGW alarmists with an alternative that cannot be ignored for much longer.

“historical temperature stability of the Earth”
Ice ages?
I think it’s safe to say there’s a thermostat (essentially the water cycle) which limits maximum temperature but ice ages appear to be prima facie evidence that the only lower limit is established by the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun which, in the case of a snowball earth, is not much as most of it is reflected.
Current thinking holds this is where greenhouse effect comes to the rescue. Volcanism is constantly belching CO2 and soot into the oceans and atmosphere. Absent abundant plant life to use it, and absent complete melting, the CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and the soot (which floats) accumulates on top of the snow and ice. Over the course of time it builds up enough to start melting the snow. Once the melt starts positive feedback from a falling albedo takes over and it’s off to the races. Plants can increasingly utilize to their benefit CO2 up to near 2000ppm in some cases and can tolerate far more. Animals can tolerate a lot more than that too with no ill effects.

Willis,
I haven’t read the full text, and your other presentations don’t mention your methodology for calculating the energy/albedo effects, but if rigorous enough, this should be able to result in a model diagnostic. Similarly for the works of Spencer and Lindzen, if the supporters of the AGW hypothesis can’t yet accept the final conclusions, they should at least have to face comparisons of their model results to the data.
thanx and regards

vukcevic says:
July 25, 2010 at 8:24 am
It´s Ok!, we need now a description how this system is powered and connected to the grid.

Hey Willis,
I didn’t read the paper but did you mention that the heat pump in a thunderstorm can work so well that ice can fall from the sky on a hot summer day in south central Texas?
The latent of heat of melting is less than the latent heat of vaporization but it’s still quite significant and hail on a hot day is an even more dramatic illustration and, I think, more intuitively obvious to the layman about what that thunderstorm is actually doing – hot air goes up, ice comes down.

Last but not least: Lunar tides on the atmosphere:
http://www.scichina.com:8080/sciDe/fileup/PDF/07yd1380.pdf

Vuk etc. says:
That Nikola Tesla´s Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media looks like a plasma torch welding machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cutting

In Willis´ model electric thunderstorms are forgotten, and these are intrinsically associated with tropical storms/hurricanes. What is more frequently forgotten and missed is the fact that clouds, those nice and white “cotton balls” floating over our heads, contain thousands of tons of water….just flying against the law of gravity. Water droplets to fall down need to lose its electric charge….
If we are to unravel the mysteries of the atmosphere we must not satisfy ouselves, or rather to gratify ourselves by just describing how it seems to work, but to find how it really works, and if by doing so we hurt some “flintstones universe” believers´so dear and so self indulging egos, it will have to be so.

Willis Eschenbach says:
July 24, 2010 at 10:23 pm
First, my thanks to all for the kind comments.
Next, R. Gates raises an interesting question:
July 24, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Willis,
I would ask you to clarify what forcings can overpower or overwhelm the ability of thunderstorms to act as a thermostat. Certainly there must be limits to the range of control under your theory.
If we imagine a much cooler earth, and then mentally turn the sun up, what we will see is more and more clouds. At some point, the clouds will form thunderstorms, which will prevent the temperature from rising further. This makes for a very stable system.
Now, I would put changes to that system into two groups. First would be forcings that would “overpower or overwhelm” the system. I don’t know what those might be. The earth has seen giant meteor strikes, huge millennium long volcanic eruptions, and a host of other destabilizing events. None of these have caused more than short-term (geologically speaking) changes in the temperature. So I don’t know what it would take to make a long-term change in the temperature.
The second group would be things that might change the equilibrium temperature without overpowering or overwhelming the system. First among these would include anything that would affect cloud formation, type, or color. The obvious candidates would be changes in cosmic rays, and changing levels of various aerosols (both natural and man-made) that modify clouds.
Also in the second group would be anything affecting the average wind speed. I’m not sure what might do that, but I can see the possibility. It appears, for example, that winds were stronger during the ice ages.
Next would be anything affecting evaporation. The most obvious candidate there would be monomolecular surface films from things like ship sinkings, oil leaks, and hydrocarbon smog.
So in answer to your question, R. Gates, I don’t know the answer…
_______
Willis, thanks for your well thought out answer. Every control mechanism has a limit beyond which it can’t keep up with the extremes one way or another. Obviously, for example, the Milankovitch cycles overwhelm the ability of system to keep up, for we do have ice ages, as other posters have pointed out. True, thunderstorm and the general hydrological cycles are reduced during these ice ages, so the thermostat is attempting to keep up (by turning down, so to speak), but it simply can’t do the full job…it can’t turn down far enough..it has hit its range of control.
But your speculations and your general theory have given me much to think about. One thing, only perhaps tangentially related to thunderstorms is the whole issue of “sprites” or this only recently discovered form of lighting that goes from the tops of thunderstorms into space itself. This has to be a tremendous amount of energy, and I’m wondering if anyone thought of looking at exactly how much energy this is that is being vented into space via sprites. Lighting in general is simply another form of converted sunlight, so in essence, the sprites have to be considered in the net outflow of energy form earth to space, in addition to the LW radiation that leaves.

Hi Willis.
I was impressed with your hypothesis a year ago.
And since then I hoped you would published it.
Congratulations.

Chris R. says:
July 25, 2010 at 12:13 pm
To R.Gates:
I have seen one estimate of energy in a red, or high-altitude sprite:
http://www.athena-spu.gr/~upperatmosphere/index.php/Sprites
of up to 5 kJ of optical energy per discharge. Otherwise, we can probably just estimate
from electric field strength (the well-known formula (1/2)*permittivity*E**2 times the estimated volume for the sprite.
__________
Thanks for that Chris. There is no doubt that a lot of energy is being released by sprites and I don’t think that has been accounted for in GCM’s. I suppose on the scale of the total energy balance of the earth, it could be a small amount, but since sprites are fairly new in terms of being studied, and we don’t really know that much about their frequency etc. I would think it would be at least worth a look.
Also, my physics here may be wrong, but wouldn’t sprites going from the tops of thunderstorms into space be energy lost from earth, or do they really go that high? Certainly since sprites can be seen from space, we know at least some of the energy is going into space. In general, when a normal lighting bolt releases its light, heat, and electricity, that energy is simply converted but stays in the earth’s system.

R. Gates
You did not address this:
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Your bitterness toward those who think the AGW hypothesis is likely correct is overpowering.
I ask that you publicly retract this lie.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Please address this so I don’t have to ask again.

R. Gates
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/24/willis-publishes-his-thermostat-hypothesis-paper/#comment-438915
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Since you didn’t say anything about this should I assume that I was correct in what I said?

Willis,
Congratulations! But I wouldn’t call that as the thermostat hypothesis. I’d rather call that as the buffer hypothesis. The system undergoes the reactions as a answer for circumstances coming from the sun and space. So it isn’t independently. But it acts as a buffer, keeping itself parameters constantly for a input range. If the input range is to wide, the system must be changed. This behavior is well known for the chemists, if they are working with the buffer solutions.
BTW. I hope you had corrected the molecular weight for water vapor. It is 18 g/mol, not 16 g/mol.

H.R. said on July 24, 2010 at 7:29 pm:

The Thermostat Hypothesis made sense to me when I first read it on WUWT. It would seem to work during glaciations and interglacials. So what causes the switch between glaciations and interglacials?

If nothing else, it would be the humidity. Cold glaciated areas tend to have very low atmospheric humidity, the H2O would rather be in solid form. Offhand I would expect at some point with growing worldwide glaciation that low atmospheric humidity would greatly reduce cloud cover. Snow cover would also come into play. Snow is a diffuse cover, reflecting incoming light. With its small crystal size it would sublimate relatively quickly in an ultra-low humidity environment. Then the ice would be exposed. As is noted with glaciers where calving is occurring, light will penetrate glacial ice, and thick ice is not clear but has a bluish color therefore it absorbs some amount of visible light. With very low humidity, without snow cover, and with greatly reduced cloud cover, it seems likely sufficient sunlight would penetrate to permit a slow warming.
Eventually, after a very long warming, glaciers would stop growing, humidity will rise, more clouds will form, precipitation will occur. With rain at the edges of the glaciated areas, the rain will transfer heat and become runoff before freezing. Some will also go into any cracks at the edge, expanding and freezing thus worsening the cracks leading to calving. Net result is edge loss. This effect will be greater than the reduced insolation due to increased cloud cover as the loss will occur relatively fast. Then comes less ice cover, more exposed area soaking up more light, more warming… Interglacial occurs.
(And yes, water vapor is a potent “greenhouse gas” so as the humidity rises there will be greater retention of heat, promoting faster ice loss. But water vapor is the only “greenhouse gas” in this possible description, no CO2 increases need be involved.)

R. Gates
Thank you for addressing this. I appreciate it.
My comments toward you are not caustic of bitter. They just are not softball. This is something you should expect.
If you had serious questions about the PIOMAS graph like you have serious questions about other things I would think differently of you. And I think others would too. But you find nothing wrong with it. You portray it as virtually correct with nothing other than needing small improvements. But it is clear the PIOMAS graph is seriously flawed. It is making wrong assumptions, assumptions that should have been corrected by the programmers by now. It doesn’t just have “inaccuracies inherent in models”. That graph is showing something that is laughable in the real world. And that’s not being bitter. That’s not being caustic. The PIOMAS graph diverges from reality.

R Gates,
maybe you shouldn’t take my comments so personally. I write comment with readers in mind, not with you, per se, in mind.

Chris Schoneveld says:
July 25, 2010 at 9:37 am
Have you considered plate tectonics and thus the fact that the Carboneferous coal deposits in Spitsbergen originate from a time when Spitsbergen was in a near equatorial position. Also the Paleocene coals at Spitsbergen and the oil accumulations in Alaska have nothing to do with past polar climates but everything with the paleogeographical position at the time of deposition.
The same
Redwoods grew on Greenland only 450,000 years ago. A bit too recent to invoke plate tectonics. And I thought it was all ice for Greenland. Must have been warmer for far longer than the MWP, where people grew grapes far north.
And it gets cold fast. Mammoths munching on warm-weather plants in Alaska.

vukcevic, we seem to be in agreement:
1) The lower correlation with PDO is not surprising given that the teleconnection is atmospheric.
2) AMO & PDO are related but there is a 1/4-cycle phase-difference.

Willis,
How well can we ascertain changes in global cloud quantities ?
I ask because most ideas linking clouds to albedo changes (Svensmark and others) rely on changes in quantity yet it seems to me that the task is virtually impossible due to the huge variability in cloud types and heights and the speed of changes.
I have recently begun to favour the view that global cloud quantities may not vary much at all and that the real cause of global albedo changes is movement of all the cloud bands latitudinally so that the angle of incidence of solar radiation changes.
They all seem to move either poleward or equatorward in unison.
That suggestion seems to be supported by the observation that albedo started to rise again around 2000 when the jet streams started moving back equatorward. Before that albedo had been declining as the jets had moved poleward.
Doesn’t that simple proposition resolve a number of problems ?

Willis:
I have only read the WUWT version of your fascinating paper, so forgive me if any of the following is outdated.
The mechanism you describe is so obviously real that it must be at least a major contributing factor in setting planetary temperatures. Whether the effect is quite strong enough to be the full governor you envisage is less clear. I have been trying to think of a clear-cut test, but have not yet found a suitable one (unfortunately, observing daily or seasonal albedo changes only shows the mechanism is operating, not whether it is sufficient to overcome long-term changes in the inputs or boundary conditions).
Your exegesis is I think somewhat marred by a confusion over negative feedback. Even simple linear negative feedback without lag can come arbitrarily close to eliminating variations (that’s what an op-amp does). With lag or underdamping, it can even reverse the change. A governor, such as you describe, is in fact a classic case of nonlinear negative feedback. Whereas your example of friction slowing a car isn’t actually negative feedback at all – it’s a loss or damping factor. None of this directly affects the substance of your hypothesis; however, it would be relevant to those regions in which the cloud formation/thunderstorm mechanism does not reach full strength. Even where the active governor does not fully operate, the negative feedback implicit in the process will still contribute largely to stabilising temperatures against changes in irradiance.
As has been noted, there must be limits beyond which the governor will not work. A lower limit would be when the input of solar energy is insufficient to create any thunderstorms before the evening or night. We could perhaps get a handle on this by observing the latitudes above which the mechanism does not operate. This would seem to be somewhere in the 30-40 latitude range, which might suggest that a reduction in irradiance of 10-20% would be enough to turn off the governor. I would be cautious about that, though, because clearly irradiance is not the only driver, or it would operate even at the poles (due to axial tilt, the mean irradiance at midsummer at the poles is actually slightly higher than at the equator!). An upper limit will be reacheed when so many thunderclouds are formed so early in the day that there’s no room for any more. Your albedo diagrams may give a handle on that. Another possible upper limit obtains if the thunderclouds, after their active phase, fail to dissipate before morning; we might then switch to a mode with a comparatively thin stratus cover, which substantially blocks nighttime cooling, yet permits enough sunlight to filter through to maintain surface conditions; the governor would no longer work, and any residual negative feedback would be weak.
Your hypothesis does not, it seems to me, depend upon any particular theory of global circulation, so the emphasis on the tropic-polar heat engine is perhaps misplaced. As a thought experiment, consider a planet in which only the tropics exist (slice off the ends or raise them above the atmosphere like Niven’s easter-egg planet Jinx) . Your governor will operate just fine, maintaining the tropical temperature on that world even if irradiance varies over a considerable range.
I have further thoughts, but don’t want to overload a single post.

Congratulations, Willis, on having your paper published.
At the moment mainstream climate science does not understand enough about how the hydrological cycle produces the observed climate oscillations, which are quasi-cyclic in nature. Your paper provides a framework for a better understanding of how Earth’s energy budget changes due to the turbulence inherent in the system. This explains why climate has not warmed as much as expected over the last 30y and why we are now dipping down into a period of cooling.
The IPCC spectre of run-away climate warming has now been exorcised!

“One is that oftentimes thunderstorms are nearly as tall as they are wide (10 km or 6 miles). This means that their albedo doesn’t change much with changing solar angles.”
They cast longer shadows though.

Willis, Congratulations!
For another comment I did a quicky look at afternoon rain on the east coast (USA)
Florida had about 20 -25 days of rain per month. Georgia,South Carolina and southern North Carolina had 20 days of rain per month. In the middle of North Carolina – between Fayetteville and Sanford (or Rocky Mount) a distance of fifty miles further north, the number of rain days changed from 20/month to 10/month.
The Sanford area is also the present “snowline” It snows regularly further north and rarely further south.

Thanks Willis! Seems “Climate” is a function of the size/strength of Hadley, Temporate, and Polar Cells, and the strength/location of Jet Streams (as well as much more;-) Has anyone produced a graphic of the globe similiar to the one you show at the deepest point of the Glacial periods? Wouldn’t the cells be different? Thanks again!

Re: Bill Illis
Thanks for the notes & graphs. That inspired a look at how cumulative OLR relates to OHC — see some of Bob Tisdale’s OHC graphs here:
1) http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/02/ohc-linear-trends-and-recent-update-of.html
2) http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/enso-dominates-nodc-ocean-heat-content.html

Dear Willis,
In the next paragraph down, you write “And it’s always summer under the sun.”
It is always noon, but not summer, I think.
Best regards

Thanks Willis,
I had mixed up your thought experiment with the GOES view.
Best regards

Hi Willis,
Hope you noticed this in a buried thread.
We’ve had a some scorching heat lately here in south central Texas but I noticed something that begs for quantization. We get afternoon thunderstorms here quite often on hot days with 40+ mph winds and hail. When one of those boomers rolls through, often right at the peak temperature, it will lower the air temperature 10-20 degrees F in a matter of minutes for miles in every direction around the center of the cell. The rest of the day stays that much cooler. This cooling won’t register on max/min thermometers as they record the low at night and have already recorded the high, or very close to it, in the afternoon before the storm rolls through out of a clear blue sky. As far as total degree-hours for the day a thunderstorm can knock it down considerably – say if instead of max/min the record was hourly and you added up 24 records for the day and divided by 24.
My question is whether there’s any database or proxy for thunderstorm frequency such that we could estimate whether the frequency changing on a global basis from year to year. A second question would be how these are treated in GCMs – I’m guessing it’s just a constant like they use for albedo.
One final thing – there must be a plethora of hourly records from automated stations that also report min/max used in GISS etc. and also metadata about thunderstorms coming through, particularly I’d think at airports. It would be interesting to see the difference, if any, in station records averaged by daily min/max and averaged by hourly temperatures.
As I wrote this a second cell just passed over me. The first knocked the temperature down from 103F to 93F at 2:30 and this second an hour later dropped it another 10 degrees to 83F at 3:30PM. That removed probably 100 degree-hours or more from our day which is quite a bit of missing energy at the surface.

Willis Eschenbach – August 24, 2010 at 11:33 pm
However, many stations don’t have hourly temps
Couldn’t we use the stations that have hourly temps as proxies for those that don’t? Just thinking that 12 hours of proxy using the same unit of measurement is more likely to be skillful than tree rings at 1000 years.
Nice work. In Ohio, plenty of convection in August. We tend to catch the tail end of hurricanes. Difficult part is quantifying thunderstorm energy on a historical basis. Going forward, the satellite data for albedo should be good. Is that data kept from 1979 forward?