By Steve Goddard
This map below is from the NOAA High Plains Regional Climate Center and shows the continental USA as “departure from normal for Jan1st, 2010 to July 31, 2010:
Source: http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/YearTDeptUS.png
We keep hearing from NOAA and in the press about 2010 being the hottest year ever. Apparently, objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information to press before La Niña spoils their party, and before the ruling party gets tossed out of Congress. An analysis of the above and below normal portions of the map yields some surprising data that contrasts with recent “official” announcements.
El Niño is now fading, La Niña is coming on strong:
So how are things looking in the US? Despite the second strongest El Niño on record, 62% of the US has had below normal temperatures for the year so far. To make things clearer, I split the lower 48 up into above and below normal regions by combining pixels to a two color map.
Using a pixel counting graphics program, I counted the pixels that were above normal and below normal. To be precise, there are 86,725 pixels below normal, and 53,336 pixels above normal. Total red and blue pixels is 140,061. With 86,725 pixels below normal this yields 61.9%.
As La Niña takes hold, we should see the percentage below normal increase.
Philadelphia finished July with an average temperature of 80F. That is one degree cooler than the years 1793 and 1838, and tied July 1791, 1798, 1822, 1825, 1828, and 1830. July was almost as hot as it was 217 years ago, when CO2 was at 290 ppm.
We live in interesting times.
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Not really no. In the Pacific Northwest it’s been well below average for months. Apart from a handful of hot days, it’s been downright cool.
I hate it when results are presented but the data or code is “private,” so for anyone curious about my calculation of the average cooling per pixel in NOAA’s map (0.089 degrees), the Mathematica notebook is now webbed at .
URL didn’t get through. I’ll try once more:
I hate it when results are presented but the data or code is “private,” so for anyone curious about my calculation of the average cooling per pixel in NOAA’s map (0.089 degrees), the Mathematica notebook is now webbed at:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9188291/NOAAmap.nb
From the Weather Is Not Climate Anecdotal Observation File (ME subdivision), daily temps on the ramp here (Kirkuk, Iraq) during July and August 2008 and 2009 varied from 50°C to 56°C between 1000 and 1700 local. This year, it hit 50°C *once* between 1000 and 1700, and the normal high has been 48°C.
But, like fire, it’s a *dry* heat…
@E.M.Smith
“So if THEY can rant about “hottest ever” in the USA (or even smaller subsets of it) then WE can look at subsets and cry foul when it doesn’t match reality. Gander, meet goose.”
True, I am not so interested in “hottest ever”, “coldest ever” claims, certainly not on a regional scale, this goes for both sides. But what Steven Goddard is saying
“Apparently, objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information to press before La Niña spoils their party”
And this is simply untrue, it IS correct that 2010 is (upto now) the warmest or second warmest year according to a variety of temperature sources. Accusing scientists of giving incorrect information is without giving any evidence whatsoever (because US data is no evidence whatsoever) is, in my opinion, very wrong.
“If it truly were “the hottest ever” globally, it ought to also be “the hottest ever” in a very large number of individual places. And it isn’t.”
Well, I don’t know whether it is the hottest ever, but it is hot in MANY places, the whole of Russia, for example. And really, it is very easy to check their calculations if you like. People have been complaining about these temperature data, that they don’t trust the corrections etc, but fact is, that all these corrections change the overall picture hardly and you can check it all for yourself!
(if you are really interested in the data, check http://residualanalysis.blogspot.com/ and his GHCN processor. You can download it and play around with the raw data)
milanovic
Half of Russia has below normal temperatures. Your claims are incorrect.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NDyYbP9_Zg]
It’s been hot this summer in Europe and parts of Siberia too, although the winter was quite cold. Dry in England, particularly the South and East – we usually find our droughts don’t last too long, but 2010 has been dry, dry, dry here.
The sun is perking up too……..
Word is that wheat in the US is bumper, it’s bad in Canada, Russia, so prices are currently high but may tail off………..
The scaremongers are reporting the floods in Canada, no doubt others will mention the record crop in the southern 49.
Jigsaws with missing pieces…………
No one has addressed my concern that the average low is never reached in Reno in the summer. It is NEVER REACHED.
If you don’t think that is global warming I don’t know what you are thinking. This has been the case since I moved here 11 years ago.
And down 395 the same is true. And it has nothing to do with population. Wake up people. If you can’t address this you obviously don’t understand anything about global warming. At elevation it makes a difference.
James Sexton,
Especially when speaking in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, I’d consider an anomaly of -0.089F to be essentially “normal”. I said: “I expect they will show that the country as a whole was roughly at or above “normal” for the seven-month period.” It’s a better analysis than Steve Goddard’s, and likely closer to what NOAA will come out with in their monthly report in a couple weeks. Thanks to SF James and bbttxu for doing the calculations.
Weighted pixel counting is skewed high, because northeastern states have larger positive anomalies and are positively distorted in area due to the map projection.
Be very, very afraid, beware the global warming taking place everywhere but here, where here is defined as anywhere.
Re: Steve Goddard, August 3, 2010 at 11:32 am
The fact that the northeastern states have larger positive anomalies was my entire point. Accounting for those positive anomalies does not skew the data; it brings us closer to the true mean. Additionally, since the map projection is curved and not flat, distortion due to latitude over such a small range of latitudes should not be a significant source of error.
steve goddard,
you have that backward. you can overlay a box on the image from los angeles, CA to morehead, NC on the bottom and lakeside, OR to colbrook, NH on the top. horizontal pixel is the same for both.
the northern boundary is 4123 km
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-map.html?lat1=44.893945&long1=-71.495075&lat2=43.585489&long2=-124.172459
the southern boundary is 3780 km
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-map.html?lat1=34.052375&long1=-118.243790&lat2=34.740484&long2=-76.751003
more km packed into the same number of pixels necessarily means that a northern pixel contains more km^2 than a southern one for the same associated value assigned to a pixel.
cooler, southern regions are over-reported compared to the warmer, northern regions, so that -0.089 F anamoly may actually be closer to 0 if not positive.
anyone know the projection of this map?
http://egsc.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/MapProjections/projections.html
Travis
It is the aspect ratio of the pixels that I am concerned about, not the temperature readings.
Even if you do integrate the temperatures across all pixels, the average temperature still comes up negative.
Gary Anderson says:
August 3, 2010 at 8:12 am
No one has addressed my concern that the average low is never reached in Reno in the summer. It is NEVER REACHED.
If you don’t think that is global warming I don’t know what you are thinking. This has been the case since I moved here 11 years ago.
And down 395 the same is true. And it has nothing to do with population. Wake up people. If you can’t address this you obviously don’t understand anything about global warming. At elevation it makes a difference.
Guess what, Gary. The average low in south alabama is almost never reached in July and August, either. And, I think it almost never has been. Whoever decides what the average low is seems to have his/her own agenda. I lived here during the seventies and I don’t think we had many nights in July and August get down to 69F, but that’s what they say the average low is supposed to be. I base that memory on camping a lot growing up. It was alway miserably hot all night during the summer.
steve goddard and travis,
i too have been concerned with the “aspect ratio” of the pixels, so i did a little experiment—take a transect of the larger states from S to N and see how their areas (found at wikipedia) compare to the number of pixels they represent in the image used for analysis in this post
behold…
st pixels km^2 km^2/pixel
tx 6579 696241 105.827785377717
co 2263 269837 119.23862129916
wy 2002 253348 126.547452547453
mt 2823 381156 135.018065887354
as you can see from the km^2/pixel, the area represented by one pixel in montana (N) is 27% larger than one in texas (S). corollary, a pixel in mt is valued at 79% of a similarly weighted pixel in tx.
the cards are clearly stacked in favor of the south influencing the average temperature for the US. remember that, in spite of this bias, the average of all temps (forgetting this present analysis) is negative at less than 1/10th of 1 degree F, or -0.089 deg F, for the time period
the majority of (undervalued) (+) anomalies occur in the N, whereas the majority of (overvalued) (-) anomalies occur in the S.
if a true value for each pixel, calculated from it’s weight and (now) N-S location, could be tallied for each pixel, i trust Travis’ gentlemanly proposition would come out in his favor.
in summary, pixel counting is a fun pursuit (i enjoyed this), but rather useless for doing any revelatory “gotcha” science. code here: http://github.com/bbttxu/wuwt-strike
It occurred to me that I could look up NOAA’s U.S. year-to-date temperature through June. It turns out that even after June, NOAA’s year-to-date anomaly was positive. The value they give is 49.03F, whereas the 1901-2000 mean sits at 48.39F. Adding in July’s clearly positive anomaly in the contiguous U.S., it would appear extremely likely that the year-to-date anomaly through July will also be positive.
While Steve’s analysis on the percentage of the U.S. that experienced below-normal temperatures may be correct, this information shows that his analysis does not contradict statements that the U.S. (and the world at large) has been experiencing positive temperature anomalies so far this year.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
Travis
But there is a big difference between “positive” anomalies and “record” anomalies.
RE: Steve Goddard August 3, 2010 at 9:38 pm:
“But there is a big difference between “positive” anomalies and “record” anomalies.”
You keep moving the finish line. Who said that the U.S. was experiencing record heat this year? Certainly not me, and not NOAA either, to my knowledge. If I remember correctly, NOAA’s year-to-date for the U.S. had 2010 ranked between 30th and 40th warmest. Certainly nothing alarmist there, though it seems you want there to be.
If you want to talk about it in the context of global anomalies, then NOAA and GISS both show 2010’s YTD as warmest on record through June. Through July, UAH and RSS both have 2010 second to 1998 by about .06C. No other year comes even remotely close to these two years; the next closest year is more than three times that lower. Same for HadCRUT through June, although the third-place year is somewhat closer.
Nothing I can find directly from NOAA or GISS says “2010 was the warmest year on record” as if all was said and done; so far as I can tell, that was the spin added in by others afterward to spark fear or outrage amid whichever crowd those sentiments were deemed appropriate/advantageous. It’s all much ado about nothing as far as I am concerned; 2010 is similar to 1998, and both rise significantly above the rest. In my opinion, that in itself is worthy of note.
Yes, there is a difference between “positive” and “record.” There is also a difference between “second most/arguably record” and “positive.” It’s misleading to try to play down that fact as it seems you are.
@stevengoddard
I hate that, when I am wrong 🙂 Thanks for correcting me, I was indeed lo0king at the wrong data previously, my apologies.
But could you still respond to my question earlier: why do you claim that “Apparently, objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information”, while the information is correct? (Ok, some data show 2010 as second warmest, but others do show 2010 (upto now) to be the warmest. You may think it is not very relevant (as I do, temperature records don’t say too much I think), but to claim it is “incorrect information” is simply wrong. And although I believe global records don’t mean very much, regional data, as you show, are really not relevant.
Global Warming strikes again!
On August 2, both myself and bbttxu, by tallying pixels on NOAA’s map (using different software) independently computed identical coarse estimates suggesting cooling of 0.89 degrees. Late on August 3, trying to assess the effect of the varying area represented by pixels at different latitudes, I was unable to reproduce the earlier result. After much head scratching, I discovered that NOAA’s map has both a newer date and fewer cool regions. Pixel tallying now suggests cooling by only 0.055 degrees.
This warming, by 0.034 degrees, happened, literally, overnight!
Travis says:
August 3, 2010 at 11:11 pm
RE: Steve Goddard August 3, 2010 at 9:38 pm:
“But there is a big difference between “positive” anomalies and “record” anomalies.”
You keep moving the finish line. Who said that the U.S. was experiencing record heat this year? Certainly not me, and not NOAA either, to my knowledge. If I remember correctly, NOAA’s year-to-date for the U.S. had 2010 ranked between 30th and 40th warmest. Certainly nothing alarmist there, though it seems you want there to be.
If you want to talk about it in the context of global anomalies, then NOAA and GISS both show 2010′s YTD as warmest on record through June.
Begging your pardon, but …
First you remark: “… NOAA’s year-to-date for the U.S. had 2010 ranked between 30th and 40th warmest. ”
Then you follow that up with: “… NOAA and GISS both show 2010′s YTD as warmest on record through June.”
It can’t be both …
899, it can be. first remark for global, second for US…
Re: 899 August 4, 2010 at 8:50 am
What bbttxu said, except in reverse. The 30th to 40th rank was for U.S. temperatures ONLY. The warmest/second warmest rank applied to the GLOBAL mean, not just the U.S.