By Dr. Roy Spencer
Despite cooling in the tropics, the global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly has stubbornly refused to follow suit: +0.60 deg. C for September, 2010.
Since the daily global average sea surface temperature anomalies on our NASA Discover web page have now cooled to well below the 2002-2010 average, there remains a rather large discrepancy between these two measures. Without digging into the regional differences in the two datasets, I currently have no explanation for this.
For those following the race for warmest year in the satellite tropospheric temperature record (which began in 1979), 2010 is slowly approaching the record warm year of 1998. Here are the 1998 and 2010 averages for Julian Days 1 through 273:
1998 +0.590
2010 +0.553
YR MON GLOBE NH SH TROPICS 2009 1 0.251 0.472 0.030 -0.068 2009 2 0.247 0.565 -0.071 -0.045 2009 3 0.191 0.324 0.058 -0.159 2009 4 0.162 0.315 0.008 0.012 2009 5 0.139 0.161 0.118 -0.059 2009 6 0.041 -0.021 0.103 0.105 2009 7 0.429 0.190 0.668 0.506 2009 8 0.242 0.236 0.248 0.406 2009 9 0.505 0.597 0.413 0.594 2009 10 0.362 0.332 0.393 0.383 2009 11 0.498 0.453 0.543 0.479 2009 12 0.284 0.358 0.211 0.506 2010 1 0.648 0.860 0.436 0.681 2010 2 0.603 0.720 0.486 0.791 2010 3 0.653 0.850 0.455 0.726 2010 4 0.501 0.799 0.203 0.633 2010 5 0.534 0.775 0.292 0.708 2010 6 0.436 0.550 0.323 0.476 2010 7 0.489 0.635 0.342 0.420 2010 8 0.511 0.674 0.347 0.364 2010 9 0.603 0.556 0.651 0.284
[NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments.]
Meanwhile, Sea Surface Temperatures Continue to Fall
Since I just provided the September 2010 global tropospheric temperature update, I decided it was time to update the global SST data record from the AMSR-E instrument flying on Aqua.
The following plot, updated through yesterday (October 4, 2010) shows that both the global average SST, and the Nino3.4 region average from the tropical E. Pacific, continue to cool.
(click on the plot for the full-size, undistorted version. Note that the global values have been multiplied by 10 for easier intercomparison with Nino3.4)
Past experience (and radiative-convective equilibrium) dictates that the global tropospheric temperature, still riding high at +0.60 deg. C for September, must cool in response to the cool ocean conditions.
But given Mother Nature’s sense of humor, I’ve given up predicting when that might occur. 
“The following plot, updated through yesterday (October 4, 2010) shows that both the global average SST, and the Nino3.4 region average from the tropical E. Pacific, continue to cool.”
With the SST cooling, the tropospheric temperature is begining to resemble Wile E Coyote, who is just about to notice that the trap door he was standing on has suddenly collapsed, leaving him momentarily suspended in mid air, while he contemplates his imminent fall.
R. Gates said “but of course, for AGW skeptics, these extreme hydrological events are unimportant.” On the contrary, they are ignored by AGW alarmists who fail to factor in the reduced water vapor feedback which lowers sensitivity. Sensitivity is much more dependent on the evenness of water vapor than an average amount.
A healthy tree is known by its fruits . If practicly all crops both from the southern and northern hemiphere are showing in 2010 lesser yields than in the previous years , are they getting all over the world more unhealthy with the best chemical and human treatments possible ? At more precipitation and higher outside temperatures ? Well does mother nature itself show us here that the worldwide temperatures are falling or has it been caused by rising co2 nanopromillas in our atmosphere ? Reality is in front of our eyes , but the agw-fools are closing their eyes and continue to drum their message around . As Euripides already stated , Whom the Gods wish to destroy , will be crazified first .
I know most of us have looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming, (and bristle, of course, when we see phrases like ‘due to the greenhouse effect’).
But the section on Temperature Changes makes this assertion (which doesn’t involve GHG’s):
“Ocean temperatures increase more slowly than land temperatures because of the larger effective heat capacity of the oceans and because the ocean loses more heat by evaporation.”
So here’s a question for Dr. Spencer: What is the expected drop in ocean temperature, as described above (for the global average lower tropospheric temperature) given current ocean evaporation rates? Does this differ from this 0.60 deg C drop that you are observing for Sept 2010?
“NOTE: These satellite measurements are not calibrated to surface thermometer data in any way, but instead use on-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers.”
So, explain to us again why those readings have to be adjusted if they are so precise and how you know the adjustments are correct?
It’s not hard to figure where all the evaporation went – Australia has had rain for a month! Central Australia is covered in wildflowers and the Birdsville Horse Race was cancelled due to rain for the first time in it’s 100 year history.
More evidence that CO2 is beneficial:
SPPI
The sst anoms for the Indian and Atlantic probably negate the Pacific, reinforcing the warm el nino rather than the la nina. (see “global oceans” above, =approx. 0)
Antarctica expands to record extents, but massive heat in SH is the reason for +.6C? okay. Massive sea of red in SH, but SST’s are going through the floor? mmmk. That all adds up, right? Oceans are dumping heat, ocean cooling expands Antarctica.
Calm down Vermeulen.
Rob Potter says:
October 5, 2010 at 10:10 am
“A few days/weeks ago, Anthony had a posting showing the cooling of the SST after passage of hurricanes, but this was in the tropics/north Atlantic. Does anyone know if there has been similar activity in the SH?”
I don’t know if they are comparable but the snow storms that recently hammered southern New Zealand were caused by a series of intense depressions in the Southern Ocean. The central pressures were reported as being 960 mBars or less. These were huge storms with diameters of 2-4,000 miles. The measurable temperature change induced by storms such as these might be relatively small, particularly as they are over already cold water, but as they cover such huge areas the total effect could be much larger than for the relatively smaller but more intense tropical storms (i.e. hurricanes).
Rocky T says:
October 5, 2010 at 2:48 pm
More evidence that CO2 is beneficial:
=======
OT but interesting:
“Both the EPA and the IPCC evaluated the incidence of deaths from epidemiologic studies of mortality from heat waves, but basically ignored the effects of possible warming during winter months. For the past 15 years, however, evidence from the US, Europe and around the world is consistent with a decreased death rate of about 2% for every 0Centigrade of warming. This effect dwarfs the minor temporary effect of heat waves. The rate of cold mortality from winter months is six to nine times greater than heat deaths, and therefore the overall benefit from each degree of warming is expected to be six to nine times the harm from heat waves.”
I will attempt to translate “extreme hydrological events” for the layman audience.
NORMAL.
That’s the best translation for “extreme hydrological events” which have been occurring forever and will continue forever no matter what shortsighted descriptions are given to them…
Remember, AGW predicts ALL weather – “too much” or “not enough” rain and snow, but also droughts, floods, tornados, hurricanes, etc. – all normal weather patterns are therefore evidence of our carbon sins…
I don’t feel much like repenting to a “God” as stupid and shortsighted as that, though. Guess I’ll be a carbon sinner for the time being…
R. Gates says: We can only speak of probabilities and consistencies over a longer term.
Well, over a longer term climate type span (and no, 30 year average weather is still weather; climate is thousands of years) we have a long slow downward march from the Holocene Maximum to the next glacial. The lows have been getting lower on each 1500 or so year “dip” and the highs are less high on each rise. That we have had a recent rise out of the Little Ice Age dip is not comforting when seen in context.
From:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/an-interesting-view-of-temperatures/
This chart:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Kind of sums it all up. The black average line is wiggling downward and our present instrumental blip up is very much like the prior thin line blips up (the average process suppresses any individual record ‘blip’), only not as high.
So the probabilities (and the consistencies, and the histories, and the geologies, and the ice age theories) all point to colder over the climate cycle.
This years warmth is consistent with that which would be expected and predicted by GCM’s over the longer term
Two Small Problems:
1) “The longer term” in a GCM is a few years. Just glorified weather forecasting (and not very good at it at that).
2) The models predict everything from burning up 10 C rises to a new LIA in Europe. That’s not a prediction, that’s a shotgun at the wall by a blind man on a rollercoaster.
One Nit: As is frequently squawked by the warmers when caught in a wrong prediction: GCM’s don’t predict, they “project”. Much like the projectile vo… {oh, self snip…}
More interesting to me this summer are the extreme hydrological events around the world, from the U.S., to South America, to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, we’ve seen extreme downpours and flooding setting all sorts of records.
While the records are not nearly as many or as extreme as you paint, the reality of what they MEAN is lost on the hard core warmers. They mean a heck of a lot of steam, condensing to water, at ALTITUDE and dumping heat into space. I.e. a dramatic heat flow off of the planet. Do not confound heat and temperature. (I know, it’s hard for AGW believers to keep them separate, but it very much does matter.)
So give it about a decade to suck the heat out of the oceans and be prepared for one heck of a ride to the cold side with tons of snow. And no, that is not an outcome of “global warming”.
While this also is not proof of AGW,
I’ll say. In fact, it’s proof of exactly the opposite.
it is certainly quite consistent with what is to be expected as CO2 continues to increase…
Oh really? I thought we were supposed to expect desertification and everyone dying in a dessicated runaway desert? That’s what the GCM’s predicted, er, projected, some of the time… and what has been claimed in
published paperspress releases by the AGW “climate scientists”. As soon as the warmers can Pick ONE scenario to predict, then they can claim to have been accurate in their predictions. As long as they say, in effect, “The stock market will be higher, or lower tomorrow, unless is closes even.” they have said nothing.but of course, for AGW skeptics, these extreme hydrological events are unimportant.
As pointed out above, this statement too is “exactly wrong” (a skill the warmers are rather good at…) The rains are very important to me, for they confirm the heat flow off planet.
Even more important to me will be the very large snow falls as winter sets in, with each year having the snow further south than the last. Then in about 10 years when the oceans have cooled dramatically from all that mass / heat transfer, we will see a gradual drop of snow fall amounts as we stabilize back at a cold level and with a cooler ocean not evaporating as much. Heck, we might even get some of the spectacular snowfalls I saw in the 1950’s. (I think it was about 1958? that there was 18 foot on the way to Donner Lake and some trains got snowed in. I remember the snow was way above the car my Dad was driving… Another hot to cold transition time. As the hot ’30s and ’40s turned to the cold ’60s and ’70s).
See, part of the problem you have convincing “old farts” like me is that we lived through a whole cycle now. I’m seeing now what I saw at the start of my life. So trying to tell me it’s the “worst ever” or “unprecedented” or “record” this and that just gets me thinking “Wait a minute. This is just like, oh ’55 or so…” Much like our ‘warm now’ is rather like (but a bit cooler than) my Dad experience in Iowa in the ’30s (and he told me about them years, and I remember what he said…)
So contrary to your professed beliefs: This rainfall is CENTRAL to my view of what is important. We simply must have more precipitation to demonstrate the supremacy of the hydrological cycle over the fictional (or perhaps merely trivial) impact of CO2.
So please please please, continue to trumpet just how much rain is falling. It’s music to my ears…
blackswhitewash.com says:
October 5, 2010 at 1:33 pm
R Gates:
Please can you post the data which show that current hydrological “events” are more extreme than previous ones, or that such “events” are increasing?
_____
tonyb says:
October 5, 2010 at 12:20 pm
R Gates said;
“More interesting to me this summer are the extreme hydrological events around the world, from the U.S., to South America, to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, we’ve seen extreme downpours and flooding setting all sorts of records. While this also is not proof of AGW, it is certainly quite consistent with what is to be expected as CO2 continues to increase…but of course, for AGW skeptics, these extreme hydrological events are unimportant.”
Extreme compared to when and what sort of records?
______
The floods over the past year in Pakistan, South America, China, and even just recently, N. Carolina broke records. Studies would indicate that we have in fact been seeing a slow increase in precipitation globally each year:
http://www.physorg.com/news205425928.html
Now of course, such studies are not proof of anything, nor would one expect them to be, but, like the decreasing summer arctic sea ice, and warmer decade following warmer decade, these are all consistent with GCM’s predicted effects from AGW. I find it curious that it comes as a mystery to certain skeptical “experts” that any of this is occurring, just as I find it curious that at least one expert is confused on how during a La Nina period, such as we are in now, the troposphere could continue to show such warmth. With 40% more CO2 in the troposphere now than there was in the 1700’s, why is it so remarkable that the troposphere could becoming less sensitive to the fluctuations of ocean temps? Do skeptics just toss basic physics aside in trying to refute what GCM’s are telling us should be happening as CO2 continues to increase?
How come there is no mention that this September is the warmest on the
UAH record?
R. Gates says:
October 5, 2010 at 4:40 pm
——-
There has been some large rainfall events this year, but overall, there is not an increase.
This map (the anomaly one at the bottom) provides a pretty good indication of precipitation patterns in September. Australia, Indonesia, Indian Ocean, the South Carribean above-normal, almost everywhere else, below normal.
http://cawcr.gov.au/staff/mwheeler/maproom/OLR/m.lm.html
Over the last year, probably below normal.
http://cawcr.gov.au/staff/mwheeler/maproom/OLR/m.ly.html
(and the paper you linked to was reviewed in the post before this one).
Check out the precipitation numbers in select cities in Pakistan (or India) and see if you can find a “climate pattern”. A few small areas got dumped on in the beginning of August – other than that, mostly normal to below-normal.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/global_monitoring/precipitation/nindia_1yrprec.shtml
Remember that these anomaly figures depend on where the baseline is set. The AQUA satellite is relatively new and does not have a long history on which to set a baseline, so it uses adjusted data from earlier satellites. AQUA may not have quite the same pattern of month to month variation that previous satellites had.
If you take the AQUA satellite’s own Ch 05 baseline average figures (2002-2009), the September average anomaly was only 0.45, virtually identical to August. The last two weeks have been 0.38, the last week 0.33 and dropping, indicating that the El Nino warmth is finally working its way out of the system.
The daily data from AQUA Ch 05 is here
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/data/amsu_daily_85N85S_ch05.r002.txt
Perhaps someone with expertise could explain why AQUA’s September anomaly did not increase against its own baseline, but increased against the more general baseline.
Surely the cooling in the oceans is showing up in GISS land/ocean GISTemp. It must be.
E.M.Smith says:
October 5, 2010 at 11:27 am
Lets see…. Ocean cooling means it’s dumping a lot of heat. Heat leaves the ocean as water vapor (and we’ve had a lot of rain and snow). Water vapor condenses way up high in cloud tops to fall as snow, hail, and rain. Dumping heat way up high. And we find that the cooling oceans are matched to a warm ‘up high’.
I don’t see the problem.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Interesting.
If you look at the daily record you will see a big uptick of warmth in the first week of September. Seems like this created the impetus for the extra warmth for the month. Any ideas on what may have caused this one week phenomenon? This was about the same time the Antarctic ice took a nose dive. Could they be related?
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
October 5, 2010 at 11:29 am
It’s dropping quite dramatically now.
Mr. Ghost, it dropped quite dramatically in September. The question is how is it dropping relative to other Octobers. Plot it versus the record highs and you’ll see it’s still up there.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
October 5, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Lets see…. Ocean cooling means it’s dumping a lot of heat. Heat leaves the ocean as water vapor (and we’ve had a lot of rain and snow). Water vapor condenses way up high in cloud tops to fall as snow, hail, and rain. Dumping heat way up high. And we find that the cooling oceans are matched to a warm ‘up high’.
Amino – The cold surface ocean temps (due to upwelling of deep ocean water) of La Nina result in a net transfer of thermal energy from the atmosphere to the ocean, cooling the troposphere. What you describe above is tropospheric warming due to the warm ocean surface of El Nino.
Bill Illis says:
October 5, 2010 at 5:19 pm
“There has been some large rainfall events this year, but overall, there is not an increase.”
On the matter of extreme weather events, I was in St. Louis for the great flood of ’93. It was called a “Five Hundred Year Flood of the Mississippi River.” It was such a big deal that the president felt compelled to buzz it in a helicopter. It was pretty impressive, but not all that impressive to someone who was there for the “Five Hundred Year Flood of the Missouri River” in 1982. The Mississippi and the Missouri flow together at St. Louis. And, I had been prepared for all this by the “Five Hundred Year Flood of the Mississippi River” that occurred in 1973. I arrived in 1971 and I haven’t researched earlier floods. I haven’t been paying attention since leaving in the ’90s, but I take it there have been no such events in the last 18 or 19 years. I guess Global Climate Disruption has caused an end to “Five Hundred Year Floods” near St. Louis.
R. Gates writes:
“I find it curious that it comes as a mystery to certain skeptical “experts” that any of this is occurring…With 40% more CO2 in the troposphere now than there was in the 1700′s, why is it so remarkable that the troposphere could becoming less sensitive to the fluctuations of ocean temps?”
We sceptics do not find it a mystery. We find it a puzzle. And we are looking at a lot of possibilities. Everyone is doing puzzle solving work and having a blast. Apparently, you suggest that we should conclude that “40% more CO2 in the troposphere” is the unique explanation that we seek. But what does the “40% more” have to do with this particular puzzle? In other words, if we accepted the “40% more” as the explanation, what more would we know about this particular phenomenon than we know now? As for the big picture, and speaking just for myself, I believe that these puzzles exist simply because the measurement system that we have deployed is hopelessly inadequate to the task.
*****
Owen says:
October 5, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Mr. Ghost, it dropped quite dramatically in September. The question is how is it dropping relative to other Octobers. Plot it versus the record highs and you’ll see it’s still up there.
*****
If you “turn on” all the years, this year is no longer the hottest. It is lower than one and about even with a couple. Move along. Nothing to see here.