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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Enneagram says:
August 4, 2010 at 7:35 am
ao“…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…”
Paradoxically the is both order and chaos. Our climate and that of the sun are driven by deterministic chaos. Linear trends mean nothing, but periods of order do appear and quasi-cycle behaviour allows for some predictability, but not within a few tenths of a degree like the IPCC would have us believe.
In fact, they cannot measure the temperature anomaly to within a few tenths of a degree. If you could look at the actual temperature from the raw data, (before it has been stretched, averaged and homogenised), you would find that within cold areas there are patches of warmth and vice versa and, because weather/climate is fractal, as you enlarged the map you would find the same patchiness whatever the scale.
Science today has great difficulty in understanding and quantifying non-linear systems.
Way cool, Steve, and you are correct, too.
El Nino/La Nina are measured above 0.5C or below -0.5C.
I have some criticisms. I think the original was better because white is the color of snow and ice (white is even used in the original map to depict sea ice), so this change has just made the maps seem a lot colder than they should. You’ve replaced the cyan with an even colder color and converted the warmer than normal temperatures to cold.
Also by removing more 0 – 0.5C areas than -0.5C to 0C areas, you haven’t just changed the colors, you’ve adjusted the data the maps represent. If you add up the anomalies before and after the totals won’t match. You’ve reduced the global temperature anomaly with this change.
I didn’t see a problem with the original yellow/cyan. It gives the impression that global average SST is warmer than average, but then that would be the correct impression because it IS warmer than average.
Fuzzylogic19 says:
August 4, 2010 at 4:57 am (Edit)
mikelorrey says:
August 4, 2010 at 4:00 am
Beck,
Thats a rather simple tool in both photoshop, gimp and photopaint where you select a color from the image, then select a second color to change it to, with a range + or – you can set, then just use the selective erase tool and swipe it over your image.
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So the + or – range can sneak in a few extra yellow pixels and a few less blue ones?
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No, the tools that the graphics apps have only use the same value plus and minus, so you an set a range of 5 and it will capture all colors in the image palette 5 colors up and 5 colors down from the chosen median color. Usually you’d use this in jpg images which is a lossy compression format and creates a lot of noisy color information due to the interpolation the format requires to render (jpg is a 24 bit image so it will have 64,000+ possible colors. With GIF images you only have 256 possible colors, and often images that are not photographs have optimized palettes that limit the actual number of colors used, so the range width you’d use on a GIF image is much smaller than you’d use on jpg for the same effect).
NOTE: for those of you making graphics for web pages, unless the image is a photograph or has near photographic complexity (like a 3d rendering or a fractal or fluid dynamic image), then you should use a GIF format for all other graphics like charts, topographics, if it looks like the image has less than a few hundred colors. When used in this manner, a GIF image will compress more and take up less memory space (thus will download faster) than a jpg even though jpg’s compression algorithm allows for much higher potential compression because it is inherently lossy with its interpolation method. GIFs compress their image by counting the number of consecutive pixels of the same color and counting them all as one with a number to indicate the number of identical pixels in a row. Thus a GIF is a lossless compression file format.
What I notice on the color scheme is the complete lack of the use of the bright emerald green and the shades of green that I believe should be used for normal or near normal temperatures. I think would reserve violet and red-brown colors for areas that are so changed from normal that serious biological impacts might be expected.
The comment was made about the cooler-than-normal water around the Antarctic. What is with all of that warmer-than-normal water around the Arctic? Is the Gulf Stream pushing all of that north through the G-I-UK (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) gap or what? The air temp is not that warm up there is is?
Jeff
This post is a deception, degenerating into an instruction manual for using photoshop pixel colouring. The fact is that you cannot simply hide half a degree Centigrade up or down as ‘normal’ when the measured temperatures since 1880 show a rise of 1C at an average rise of .008C p/a. About .65C of that ocurred since 1980. Simply blotting out .5C either way means blotting out warming which took 68 years. If I take the 30 year rise of .65C since 1980 (.02C p/a) then it still hides 25 years of warming. A good example how the oceans are warming faster; .004C p/a 1880 to 1980 – .02C p/a 1980 to 2010. Reference graph; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_%28NASA%29.svg
Correction, liked the wrong graph (SST) the intended one is http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/NOAA_Ocean_Temperature_Anomaly.png
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/climate/indicator_sst.jsp?lt=global&lc=global&c=ssta
See above for Weatherzone Australia picture using white instead of yellow.
Correction typo; read ‘linked’. Have a flu going to bed.
Give “Roy” and atta-boy. Kuddos to someone who can see the data past the visualization method. Tufte has some good writing on how visualization techniques can bring out the detail vs. be used to mislead.
Loved the video although I wouldn’t want to be a passenger if the earth moved like that.
Fuzzylogic, your logic is.. fuzzy. I see pretty steep warming between 1910-1940, inexplicable since we all know that CO2 causes weather, planetary rotation and climate change.
Why the warming rate was slower with the onset of CO2 increase?
PS. Oceans stopped warming during the last decade.
Paint those pixels red, the ocean “looks” hotter.
So far as anyone can tell, such pixel manipulation doesn’t change anything, does it.
Over the last decade the water temperatures around Greenland have been almost continuously above average, especially in the summer months, as can be seen in the NOAA archives, such as:
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/archive/monthly_anomaly/monanomv2_201007.png
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/archive/monthly_anomaly/monanomv2_200907.png
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/archive/monthly_anomaly/monanomv2_200807.png
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/research/cmb/sst_analysis/images/archive/monthly_anomaly/monanomv2_200707.png
Does that mean some relatively new natural phenomenon is affecting water temperatures there and therefore ice extent? Or perhaps, historic data has underestimated past temperatures in the region.
In any event, this phenomenon must be having a negative impact on the extent of the Arctic ice.
Juraj V. says:
August 5, 2010 at 3:02 am
PS. Oceans stopped warming during the last decade.
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Have they? Must have been a 10 year solar eclipse; everywhere.
Peter Miller says:
August 5, 2010 at 5:40 am
Over the last decade the water temperatures around Greenland have been almost continuously above average, especially in the summer months, as can be seen in the NOAA archives, such as:
——-
Does that mean some relatively new natural phenomenon is affecting water temperatures there and therefore ice extent? Or perhaps, historic data has underestimated past temperatures in the region.
In any event, this phenomenon must be having a negative impact on the extent of the Arctic ice.
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The arctic is talking right now.