By Steve Goddard
WUWT reader “Roy” astutely noted that the NOAA SST map shows a lot of hot yellow, in regions which are just barely above normal temperatures. So I tried an experiment to remove all colors between -0.5C and 0.5C anomaly (i.e normal.) The blink comparator below shows the difference. In the original map, the Pacific looks about 50/50. But when the normal temperatures are removed, the Pacific appears colder. The reason being that there are a lot more pixels in the 0 – 0.5 range than in the -0.5 – 0 range.
The video below takes a tour of the earth with “normal” SST’s painted white.
Note that all of the water around Antarctica is normal or below.
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For the post normal science theorists what really matters is that the whole world population should think there is only chaos in the universe, that there is no order whatsoever, no anything predictable through the analysis of harmonies and cycles. No order=No God, a secular world which will not allow, for example, a circle of 360 degrees, that’s why THEY replaced it by an stupid 400 degrees metric circle, etc.etc.
We are supposed to be scared all the time, just waiting for their ex-cathedra preachings. We are supposed to be dumb, to know nothing, to expect all from “above”, from the “governments” of the world.
So, they say we are about to burn up, however a little voice from within us says that any amount of red ink won’t stop a solar minimum, which, according to law of cycles, is repeating again.
OK here is my attempt:
First, it is clear that by some miracle, the yellow positive SST anomalies in range 0-0.5 deg C cover bigger area than the light blue negative ones. Looks like the change to colder SST anomalies is more abrupt, without the fine transition edge.
http://i36.tinypic.com/282pe0g.jpg
(red = positive 0-0.5, green = negative 0-0.5 deg C anomaly)
Second, by replacing the -0.5 – 0.5 deg C by white I got the following map with kless white:
http://i36.tinypic.com/wat4d5.jpg
Fuzzylogic19
Does it make sense to have +0.01 in yellow and -0.01 in blue? The error bar is large enough to make both meaningless.
And as a follow-up to my earlier comment, the NOAA OI.v2 SST webpage…
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/#_sstplots
…also also has links to weekly…
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/wkanomv2.png
and monthly…
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/monanomv2.png
…SST anomaly maps with the -0.5 to +0,5 contour range set at white.
I do not find this a surprise.
In the early 1980’s I was experimenting with seismic sections and time slices and how best to display them on a colour monitor; their amplitudes were fairly symmetrical about zero.
Our first conclusion (based on the judgement of others, as I am partially colour blind) was that, because the events were indicated by the first positive maximum (think seismograph) and not a change in sign, changes in colour due to small amplitude fluctuations on either side of zero only highlighted some of the noise. This was especially true if the change in colour across zero was a major change. For a bad example, how about -5 to 0, going from light blue to dark blue and 0 to +5 from dark red to light red. A better choice would be to change the scales from -5 to -1 and 1 to 5, with an extra, neutral colour from -1 to 1, (as you have done.)
The other conclusion was that we shouldn’t use colour! And we were displaying it on a very expensive colour monitor too! When we used an odd number of greys, to keep one grey straddled across zero ( black, dark grey, medium grey, light grey, and white), we had seismic sections that would display diffractions and other very interesting phenomena (for scientists), but in colour the SAME seismic sections were better candidates for marketing purposes!
The brain spends a lot of time re-interpreting colour, which in this context can be very misleading.
I don’t think that there should be a dramatic change in colour at zero unless it is to show a point. If the data drifted from zero, any anomaly could be missed.
Being somewhat colour blind myself, I preferred to vary a colour lookup table with say, three colours, in real time, and see how the tide went in and out on the data display. A little project for someone!
Lawrie Ayres says:
August 4, 2010 at 3:49 am “Someone in advertising…”
One story I heard, when colour monitors and printers were the latest in technology, was about a company that had such good financial results that, when they presented them, they displayed the best (large, positive, ie: profitable) amounts in RED! The bank managers in the audience were close to heart attack.
Another story I heard, many years ago, was that DEC were advised that they could use their colour display devices, of which they were very proud, to present their financial results. The restrictions were that the only colours they could use were light blue and dark blue. To avoid problems like the above, one would expect.
Thought for the day.
If that warm pool stays off the coast and protected in the Northern Pacific, the moist ocean air it produces will cross over the COLLLLDDDDD pool directly adjacent to Washington and Oregon. What happens then? Usually we get a circulating system that just keeps rotating between these two pools, picking up more moisture and getting colder, before it lands on us with tons and fricken tons of @ur momisugly#$% ice and snow. AND…AND… because of this circulation, the Arctic air is allowed, through a loop in the jet stream, to freeze our iced and snowed asses to whatever we touch all winter long.
Great. Just great.
Fred N. says:
August 4, 2010 at 7:26 am
NOAA map doesn’t agree with NOAA map
Can somebody ask them to say which one is the real one?…And, what is more important: Does anybody could say what the real SST are?. Perhaps now nobody knows it! That would be really funny. I guess this is the case.
I think what some of you might be running into is an issue of minute changes to the colors introduced by the JPEG compression algorithm that slightly distorts the color every time the image is manipulated or saved. This is particularly true of reds and it is affected by adjacent colors because the algorithm as generally used in the internet realm is a lossy compression. I’m not sure how much it would affect yellow. You would need to work from a GIF or TIFF or some other lossless compression/no-compression image format.
“all colors between -0.5C and 0.5C anomaly (i.e normal.)”
On what grounds have you decided that that is normal? Why not -0.05°C and 0.05°C? Why not -5°C and 5°C?
Juraj V
When doing an exercise like this, you have to establish a tolerance because the colours in the map are blended. If you use the exact RGB values from the colour bar, you will actually select almost no pixels – as you found out. If you repeated the same exercise for each colour in the colour bar, you would find the map scarcely changed from the original, even though it should be all white.
This exercise is more complex than people realize.
Edward Tufte in his book “Visual Explanations” talks about gradient scales like this.
The human eye discerns very small color differences. To display a temperature range the color gradients must of course be continuous, otherwise you have a strongly misleading use of color. So the SST image clearly conveys the wrong impression.
I wouldn’t necessarily ascribe it to nepharious intent. Scientists are well known for theirl poor graphic communications skills.
I see a “normal” area in the animation for the Gulf of Mexico. Is there any implication for the predicted “active” hurricane season?
We had a thread discussing ocean temperature maps from NOAA a while back.
Too many threads back, I tried looking for it, couldn’t find it.
If I were doing the recoloring, I’d take the area from -0.5 to +0.5 and make it white. But that’s if we’re trying to be fair. It would be fun to see what the map looks like if we did to blue what they did to yellow. I like white instead of green because it removes emotional bias. Green is considered a “cool” color. I sure wish the warmists would try to be fair.
Robin Kool says: “…It’s like these tests where you give people a green button and a red one. And you ask them to hit the green button when you say red, and to hit the red button when you say green. Even though you have explained it carefully, people keep making mistakes and hit the green button when you say green, and red when you say red….”
That’s because green and red are the same thing, so it doesn’t matter.
I think that the color scheme has a great influence on peoples mind. I wonder what will look a map with an inverted scheme (red in blue, and blue in red) ?
WA777 says:
August 4, 2010 at 9:33 am
You will have to tell your grand kids: ” There was a time when big whirlwinds formed in the atmosphere and used to smash coastal cities” and then show them a movie about them as they won’t believe seas were warm and people went there to take a bath….
This is the consequence of a big punishment sent by God against the mischievous teachings of a minor devil who appeared down there, at the end of the XX century under the name of “Al Baby”
I’ve been using the NASA Earth Observatory maps.
http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html?group=32
The color scheme goes from +5C to -5C with +/- 0.3C or so as white. So I think it works pretty well and provides a truer, hi-res view compared to most other maps.
The downside is there is no animation.
The default map is the previous month, but you can also get yesterday’s map or the past 8 days. You can open it up as a hi-res jpeg map or download the actual data in CSV formats with grids as small as 0.25 degrees or as big as 1.5 degrees. (Which is good right now because the question of how big this La Nina gets depends on how much the Peru-Humbolt current is going to contribute in terms of cooler water and what the warmer water on the north side of the Equator is doing).
It uses the AMSR-E instrument from the Aqua satellite and the base period is 1985 to 1997 (so the anomalies are about 0.19C higher than some other datasets depending on the area you are looking at).
[if you are opening the CSV files with Excel, just search 99998 and 99999 missing pixels and replace with nothing].
fredb says:
August 4, 2010 at 4:09 am
By the same argument, you should also remove the all pixels between -0.5 and 0, else I fail to see the rational purpose. What’s makes the set of pixels on one side of zero any more important than those on the other side of zero? Otherwise it sounds like an attempt to portray a message that’s not really there.
Here removed the normal RANGE of temperature from -0.5 to +.05 and showed what is of concern.
I pointed out the color problem in a comment on WUWT last fall. The problem is that they are not using the standard color temperature scales and switch directly from blue to yellow, bypassing white.
Here is a standard color temperature scale chart:
http://www.fireflyelectric.com/image/colortemp.gif
There charts move directly from blue to yellow, creating a mental image for the viewer that is biased. Rather than using a gradient, they have also chosen a set of fixed colors that tends to emphasize warmth, rather than a display of temperature anomalies.
They also choose a Mercator projection map which tremendously overemphasizes the polar temperatures by stretching a tiny area across the entire top and bottom of the chart.
The choices made suggest either someone not familiar with presenting information visually (i.e. incompetent), or someone who specifically knew what they were doing in order to create an effective marketing presentation for the purpose of closing a sale.
fredb,
“So I tried an experiment to remove all colors between -0.5C and 0.5C anomaly”
Charles Wilson says:
August 4, 2010 at 5:54 am
Steve: Climategate is about doing what you just did..
… The Euros asked Hansen’s U.S. boys to “JUST CHANGE A LITTYLE.
You are ELIMINATING DATA.
This makes you a FRAUD….
___________________________
August 4, 2010 at 6:59 am
Steve, REMOVING “a little” DATA IS CLIMATEGATE.
…tallbloke: GOOD IDEA. Changing Colors is OK — REMOVE data: NOT OK.
Besides, it is ALL, “Tenths” of a Degree…
__________________________________________
WHOA!
What was done to the graph was explained. The original is also shown, so there was no fraud.
Second +/- 0.5C is the sampling error!
DO YOU UNDERSTAND???
+/- 0.1C is just plain noise and nothing else.
THAT is the REAL fraud!
CRU Sampling Error graph:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/CRU%20Sampling%20Error.gif
“…..The title of this graph indicates this is the CRU computed sampling (measurement) error in C for 1969. Note how large these sampling errors are. They start at 0.5°C, which is the mark where any indication of global warming is just statistical noise and not reality. Most of the data is in the +/- 1°C range, which means any attempt to claim a global increase below this threshold is mathematically false….” http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
Remember the temperature anomalies are based on the average of the historic data and the error in the anomalies can not be any smaller.
Ed,
It’s not a Mercator projection but a Platte Carree. It still distorts, however, the further you move away from the equator towards the poles.
Hi Steven, you are correct I used no tolerance in the Photoshop and thus got less white, but our results were basically the same.
This is interesting. Really. It shows that Obama is a city man who has lost touch with the countryside and the natural order of things, things like climate and what kind of weather helps plants and how CO2 is puffed into greenhouses to increase yield.