By Steve Goddard
We are all familiar with the GISS graph below, showing how the world has warmed since 1880.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
The GISS map below shows the geographic details of how they believe the planet has warmed. It uses 1200 km smoothing, a technique which allows them to generate data where they have none – based on the idea that temperatures don’t vary much over 1200 km. It seems “reasonable enough” to use the Monaco weather forecast to make picnic plans in Birmingham, England. Similarly we could assume that the weather and climate in Portland, Oregon can be inferred from that of Death Valley.
The map below uses 250 km smoothing, which allows us to see a little better where they actually have trend data from 1880-2009.
I took the two maps above, projected them on to a sphere representing the earth, and made them blink back and forth between 250 km and 1200 km smoothing. The Arctic is particularly impressive. GISS has determined that the Arctic is warming rapidly across vast distances where they have no 250 km data (pink.)
A way to prove there’s no data in the region for yourself is by using the GISTEMP Map locator at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
If we choose 90N 0E (North Pole) as the center point for finding nearby stations:
We find that the closest station from the North Pole is Alert, NWT, 834 km (518 miles) away. That’s about the distance from Montreal to Washington DC. Is the temperature data in Montreal valid for applying to Washington DC.?
Even worse, there’s no data in GISTEMP for Alert NWT since 1991. Funny though, you can get current data right now, today, from Weather Underground, right here. WUWT?
Here’s the METAR report for Alert, NWT from today
METAR CYLT 261900Z 31007KT 10SM OVC020 01/M00 A2967 RMK ST8 LAST OBS/NEXT 270600 UTC SLP051
The next closest GISTEMP station is Nord, ADS at 935 km (580 miles) away.
Most Arctic stations used in GISTEMP are 1000 km (621 miles) or more away from the North Pole. That is about the distance from Chicago to Atlanta. Again would you use climate records from Atlanta to gauge what is happening in Chicago?
Note the area between Svalbard and the North Pole in the globe below. There is no data in the 250 km 1880-2009 trend map indicating that region has warmed significantly, yet GISS 1200 km 1880-2009 has it warming 2-4° C. Same story for northern Greenland, the Beaufort Sea, etc. There’s a lot of holes in the polar data that has been interpolated.
The GISS Arctic (non) data has been widely misinterpreted. Below is a good example:
Monitoring Greenland’s melting
The ten warmest years since 1880 have all taken place within the 12-year period of 1997–2008, according to the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) surface temperature analysis. The Arctic has been subject to exceptionally warm conditions and is showing an extraordinary response to increasing temperatures. The changes in polar ice have the potential to profoundly affect Earth’s climate; in 2007, sea-ice extent reached a historical minimum, as a consequence of warm and clear sky conditions.
If we look at the only two long-term stations which GISS does have in Greenland, it becomes clear that there has been nothing extraordinary or record breaking about the last 12 years (other than one probably errant data point.) The 1930s were warmer in Greenland.
Similarly, GISS has essentially no 250 km 1880-2009 data in the interior of Africa, yet has managed to generate a detailed profile across the entire continent for that same time period. In the process of doing this, they “disappeared” a cold spot in what is now Zimbabwe.
Same story for Asia.
Same story for South America. Note how they moved a cold area from Argentina to Bolivia, and created an imaginary hot spot in Brazil.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
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stevengoddard says: “If Bob believes that the GISS maps do not accurately represent GISS data, he should write an article about it. That is a different issue.”
I did not write or imply that. The GISS trend maps for 250km radius smoothing have different data to work with than the GISS trend maps with 1200km radius smoothing. The maps with 250km radius smoothing have limited data, while the maps with 1200km radius smoothing are more complete. And this is why you are seeing different trends in areas.
I still don’t understand the complete ocean coverage, even at 250km smoothing.
We certainly don’t have data available at 250km intervals across the world’s oceans since 1880. Highly unlikely that we have it any time before satellite data became available.
Are you sure Zimbabwe is cooling? I find this curious, as I was thinking a few weeks ago that Zimbabwe would be a good place to look at UHI signal, since it is one of the only places on earth that is regressing at a rapid rate, and has been doing so for a while. Deurbanisation, I thought, would start showing up, as would a decrease in the use of vehicles. If Zimbabwe is really cooling, I wonder if a graph against GDP or population densities near measuring stations might be revealing.
Yet another post from Goddard that should be titled “I don’t believe”.
Yet another post from Goddard that allows him to wallow in his personal incredulity and provide his readers fix of “daily hate”.
Yet another post from Goddard that takes us not one iota towards appreciating the magnitude of the problem.
It would not be hard to write a useful post, to test if the interpolation of anomalies to 1200km have any skill. It would require only a modicum of coding and statistical nous.
But Goddard would have to be brave enough to face the risk that the analysis shows that the 1200km interpolation is useful, and that it is most useful in the Arctic.
GISS is, at worst, assuming that the change in temperature over decades in Monaco might be a reasonable basis for estimating the change in temperature over the same timescale in Birmingham, England (but only if there is no data available for Birmingham.)
And you are comfortable with this? Really?
My issue is that climate is not static. Even if a good correlation in anomalies can be shown for a time (and even the stated correlations are more like 0.6 than 0.96) there is no proof that they existed before or after the time tested.
The financial markets have a tendency to make fools of themselves with the sorts of thinking we see used by Hansen. Very clever people – and make no mistake, a lot of people in high finance are very clever – find some correlation and ride it for all it’s worth. Until the crash, when the factors causing the correlation break down. “Unbreakable” correlations have a habit of being very breakable. (Remember when it was almost impossible for whole of the US to have a slowdown in the housing market, because it had never happened before. Thanks guys!)
Hansen has shown a mediocre correlation between some places over time at distances of 1200 km. He appears to use this to justify any places, at any time, having such a correlation. I struggle to agree.
As I’ve said before: The amount of warming is inversely proportional to the number of thermometers.
The concept of using statistical methods to replace actual measurement is not real-world thinking, which suggests that those who do this are inhabiting some kind of mental wonderlland. I know from my own experience of vastly differing micro-climates in a very small geographic area that anything other than using the correct measurement tool will produce garbage. In this case it may be fascinating and passionately-argued garbage, but it is still garbage nonetheless. Why is it impossible for GISS to admit that ‘don’t know, nil measurement’ is an acceptable statement.
“Monaco might be a reasonable basis for estimating the change in temperature over the same timescale in Birmingham, England”
Good examples, since they demonstrate just the dangers of taking such an approach. Birmingham temperatures come from the airport, which is at the intersection of two motorways. It shows appreciable UHI. Monaco doesn’t have an airport at all. Birmingham is on flat land about as far away from the coast as you can get in the UK, but is still affected by the Gulf Stream. Monaco is between the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea.
Basically you couldn’t have two measurement sites that were much more different. Unless you head 1200km north from Birmingham, in which case you end up in the Shetland Isles. On the other hand you could move a 60 kilometers south-west from Birmingham to Ross-on-Wye – but Ross-on-Wye doesn’t show any warming (but then it doesn’t suffer from UHI)
So much for the idea that an anomaly in one site will replicated in a site 1200km away.
Thanks anna v,
Looking at the comments there, it looks like they are trying use it as input into the models, rather than as a guage of temperatures, which is what it was originally meant to be.
I still don’t understand why they don’t use the absolute temperatures ordinarily, and then convert it into anomalies for the models.
P.S. Always like your comments.
To me the elephant in the room is that we’ve warmed up since the Little Ice Age.
We don’t know why we went into that period and we haven’t a clue how we came out of it.
Now we have a field of science that claims that because we can’t explain recent warming with known natural mechanisms, it must be because of CO2.
That’s a pretty shaky foundation for any hypothesis especially one that demands endless investment and sacrifice if we are to avoid catastrophe.
When that investment flows into the coffers of the High Priesthood and the sacrices are those of others then a modicum of cynicism is not surprising.
Anthony and Steve Goddard: It appears I should have been clearer in what I wrote first on this thread. I originally wrote:
I hope you’re aware that the GISS trend maps do not present you with all of the stations used by GISS in their product with 250km radius smoothing.
There are fewer stations used in 1880 than what you’ve presented in the trend maps but the numbers increase with time.
I was not commenting on the accuracy of the data used to create the maps. And I was not commenting on the use of 1200km radius smoothing. There are pros and cons to the 1200km radius smoothing. In fact, I’ve written a post that was critical of GISS for presenting maps that give the appearance of a globally complete temperature record, when it is far from complete:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/01/illusions-of-instrument-temperature.html
My comment pertained to the last three maps in Steve’s post, and while not presented clearly, it was a note about why the trends and locations of the trends were changing in the maps with 250km and 1200km radius smoothing.
To create the trend maps, GISS uses cells where at least 66% of the data exists. Refer to their map making webpage:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
The note toward the bottom of the page reads, “’Trends’ are not reported unless >66% of the needed records are available.”
Since the maps with 250km radius smoothing have much less data from which to create trends (than the maps using 1200km radius smoothing), the trends will be different.
Sorry for confusion my cryptic first comment created.
Actually there is a much more obvious way of showing that the 1200km smoothing is unreasonable. If you look at the 250km gridding then you will see that the cool spots are very close to dark orange and red spots. This indicates that contrary to what has been suggested by proponents of AGW, two sites less than 500km apart can show anomalies of opposite (and extreme) polarities. It therefore indicates the fallacy of extrapolating warm anomalies into areas with no data. In fact, I would theorise further that regions that tend to produce more frequent areas of high pressure will tend to produce low pressure in adjacent regions such that hot regions will often be found adjacent to very cool regions.
Nick Stokes says: July 27, 2010 at 1:27 am
“Yes. it is.. Here’s the plot. Lots of correlation.”
Good correlation Nick, again it points out that a smaller network of high quality sites should be good enough to detect any long term trends (How is the SurfaceStations project going, Anthony?).
What is the gain in spreading these good observations into unobserved areas though, just use the data directly and point out in any conclusions caveats such as poor coverage in some areas.
I’m interested in what exactly has been driving the cooling in Greenland the last 70 years? I’d guess it is the PDO that shows strongly here too.
The Alert NWT is based at an airfield:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFS_Alert#Weather_Station
GISS lists it as “rural”. However, the airfield has been much the same as it is today for 60 years, so whilst UHI is probably a factor it is probably stable. GISS/GHCN drops it after 1990 although according to Wikipedia it is still recording temperatures today.
However, the GISS/GHCN data for Alert shows no warming over the period 1950-1990. Makes it even more curious as to how they have come to the conclusion that the Artic is warming rapidly when the few reliable stations nearest to the pole don’t show any warming at all.
Nick Stokes: July 26, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Yes, it’s true, and well known, that there were not a lot of met stations operating in interior of Africa, or the Amazon jungle, in 1880. And that there is not a long history of measurements on the sea ice of the Arctic Ocean.
So what was your point?
Just a graphic demonstration of *why* HadCRUT’s claim to have an accurate record of surface temperatures from the southern hemisphere dating from 1850 is dubious, at best:
“The historical surface temperature dataset HadCRUT provides a record of surface temperature trends and variability since 1850.”
and renders absurd its contention that:
“In earlier periods the uncertainties are larger, but the temperature increase over the 20th century is still significantly larger than its uncertainty.”
Introduction to Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed
temperature changes: a new dataset from 1850, P. Brohan, J. J. Kennedy, I. Harris, S. F. B. Tett & P. D. Jones, Accepted version: December 19th 2005.
Nick Stokes: July 27, 2010 at 1:27 am
“Is the temperature data in Montreal valid for applying to Washington DC.? “
Yes. it is. Here’s the plot. Lots of correlation.
You forgot the sarcasm font.
Regarding 1200km radius smoothing, its use by GISS in its GISTEMP product is based on Hansen and Lebedeff (1987) “Global Trends of Measured Surface Air Temperature.”
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1987/1987_Hansen_Lebedeff.pdf
We can all find examples of surface stations where there appears to be little correlation between two surface stations that are less than 1200km apart. Though, in 1987, the correlations apparently existed; refer to the discussion of Figure 3 in Hansen and Lebedeff. But unless we can prove statistically that the correlations presented in Hansen and Lebedeff are wrong or outdated, complaining about it serves little purpose. Why?
GISS creates its global temperature product one way. NCDC infills temperature anomalies around the globe using other methods. And Hadley uses spatially incomplete data with fewer adjustments. Yet the linear trends of the three global land surface temperature anomaly products from 1880 to 2009 are remarkably similar between the latitudes of 60S-60N. Refer to the discussion of Figure 8 in my recent post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/07/land-surface-temperature-contribution.html
It was also co-posted here at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/23/bob-tisdale-on-giss-landsea-ratios/
Do GISS run academic degrees (UK)? I’d like to do a law course and would love to be able to get a good pass mark in an exam and smooth this across the rest of my exams, I could be a straight A student even in classes i’ve never been to, cool. Oh wait the real world does not work like that, i must have results to show for all the areas i’m studying, silly me.
/Sarc
Following up on Ron Broberg’s post and his neat animation, I’ve put together some KML files so that you can see in Google Earth what stations are in the GHCN v2.mean record for 1880, 1890, 1900… up to 2009. Details are here
richard telford says: “But Goddard would have to be brave enough to face the risk that the analysis shows that the 1200km interpolation is useful, and that it is most useful in the Arctic.”
Actually, the 1200km smoothing in the Arctic is only useful for exaggerating Arctic temperature anomalies. GISS deletes SST data in areas where there is seasonal sea ice and extends land surface data out over the Arctic Ocean during seasons without sea ice. By deleting the SST data, GISS biases the Arctic Ocean with the land surface data which has a significantly higher trend. Discussed it in this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/05/giss-deletes-arctic-and-southern-ocean.html
And that post also ran here at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/31/giss-deletes-arctic-and-southern-ocean-sea-surface-temperature-data/
When you add what has been brought up in this post by Goddard to the red spot missing data as well as the poorly site stations highlighted by Surfacestations it doesn’t inspire much confidence in me. I haven’t even touched on the divergence problem, Yamal etc.
WE "…can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t" so I say let’s make it up as we go along eh.
I have been checking correlations in WA looking for steps .
Here is a sample of the two Kalgoorlie stations compared with stations in a less than 600km radius.
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/kalannualmaxr.jpg
http://members.westnet.com.au/rippersc/kalannualminr.jpg
Note the Kalgoorlie Airport record includes Kanowa in the early years.
The pearson R correlation is in 11 year segments which when done by month makes any outliers stick out like dogs balls.
You know, you can have a lot of fun with that 250km smoothed map. For a start it demonstrates clearly that we don’t reall yhave any data at all in areas where there isn’t “modern civilisation”. In fact, we have most data in exactly those regions where we are most likely to be impacted by UHI. In those regions where we are less likely to be affected by UHI, such as Eastern Europe (because the UHI would have been pretty stable during the cold-war period) we don’t see much warming. Alaska sees a lot of warming – but then I have a suspicion that Alaska has seen a lot of UHI since the black gold rush began.
But the most important fact I can glean is that the sites listed on GISTEMP over the period 1950 to present, whether in Alaska, Greenland or Canada, don’t show any significant warming. Any warming that is detected is in the period 1890 to 1920. So the big red dots you see all over the North America and Greenland have little or nothing to do with the alleged increase in CO2 in modern times.
According to AGW theory the temperature changes prior to 1950 are all natural as we didn’t make a big impact on CO2 concentrations before 1950 (according to ice-core data and data from Mauna Loa) – SO WHY ARE THESE MAPS SHOWING ANOMALIES THAT ARE KNOWN TO BE DUE TO NON-CO2 CAUSES????
The only thing you learn in college, in the academic sense, is how to find an answer. There are no guarantees in life. The answer you find may be right, or may not be. But at least you found something. It’s all yours. that is, it is until you come across more information, data, what not, and then you can update ‘your’ answer. Or not! Ain’t life a beach?
It does make you wonder WHY we bother to have so many local weather services? We could probably cover the USA with just 10 thermometers. Does anyone know what that number would be by the way?