Dr. Roy Spencer has an essay below on sea surface temperatures starting to bottom out, but in addition to that, the UAH daily lower troposphere plot shows a sharp drop also.
As this graph of UAH TLT from D Kelly O’Day’s site shows, The current global anomaly is 0.044C – or very nearly zero. That’s a big drop from last month when we ended up at 0.60C.
Note the black dot, the value on 10-26-10. Click to enlarge the image.
Now compare that to Dr. Spencer’s Sea Surface temperature plot below.
Bottom Falling Out of Global Ocean Surface Temperatures?
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Having just returned from another New Orleans meeting – this time, a NASA A-Train satellite constellation symposium — I thought I would check the latest sea surface temperatures from our AMSR-E instrument.
The following image shows data updated through yesterday (October 27). Needless to say, there is no end in sight to the cooling.
(Click on image for the full-size version).
Since these SST measurements are mostly unaffected by cloud cover like the traditional infrared measurements are, I consider this to be the most accurate high-time resolution SST record available…albeit only since mid-2002, when the Aqua satellite was launched.
I won’t make any predictions about whether SSTs will go as low as the 2007-08 La Nina event. I’ll leave that to others.
So, how is that “warmest year ever” thing looking right now? 10/12ths of the year in the books on Sunday, time for an update?
Someone should tell Roy Spencer’s AMSU website is showing yesterday’s global temperature being 463.25 degrees F below the same date last year.
I sincerely hope this number wasn’t being used in these calculations!
The most interesting comment abut this was made in advance as it were by Pielke senior on his blog on 8 Oct when he pointed out that if the these high global tropospheric temperatures persisted during this La Nina that would suggest there was warming due to greenhouse gasses but if they fell back to normal or below then this would imply some other kind of temperature limiting/regulating system was at work.
Perceptive and very telling.
Kindest Regards
on the 29/10 /10 we had the heater on in sydney” bring on global warming please”
How can we lose heat in the atmosphere like that? I mean, I think I have been lied too all this time. I was told CO2 trapped the heat in and it was going to cause CAGW. snic off….
many stated prior to this post, but indeed, it just shows that temps go up and temps go down. Nothing to see here, move along.
The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is still cooler than 2007-08
IOD weekly.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/iod1.png
but not so the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation index (AMO)
Monthly 2007-10
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/AMO-07-10.png
Long term the AMO appears to be at the top of it’s cycle.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/AMO.png
If I see any more religious discussion on this BB will write this site off as gone to the dogs.
Global TLT UAH:
1998 (1-12) : 0,593 °C
2010 (1-9) : 0,554 °C
http://i54.tinypic.com/23w1yt1.jpg
Bob Tisdale,
If the cause of current warming is “integration” of the ENSO (by that I assume you mean that the release of heat from ocean to atmosphere in the past 50 years during El Nino phases has exceeded the recapture of that heat during the various La Nina phases), the n the ocean should show a definite cooling. Nicht wahr?
Guys,
This will have no effect whatsoever on the “warmest year evah” proclamation from Jimmy boy. He had his speech written last year, and he’s been jockeying the averages higher all year long anticipating this drop.
He’ll tack .o2 onto 1998 and fudge his way to it come hell or high water.
“Owen says:
October 29, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Bob Tisdale,
If the cause of current warming is “integration” of the ENSO (by that I assume you mean that the release of heat from ocean to atmosphere in the past 50 years during El Nino phases has exceeded the recapture of that heat during the various La Nina phases), the n the ocean should show a definite cooling. Nicht wahr?”
Interesting point, Owen.
Bob has often mentioned the discharge / recharge process with which I agree but in the absence of any other factor that should have resulted in a decline in ocean heat content during the recent warming spell but in fact ocean heat content actually rose until recently.
Now with stronger La Ninas the ocean heat content is declining which again is opposite to Bob’s proposition.
So my conclusion is that a separate influence is operating to dictate the longer term ENSO trends from the background thereby overriding the discharge / recharge process on longer than interannual timescales.
My proposition is that the background trend is provided in part by internal ocean cycles but also by solar variability so that the more active sun draws the jets and their associated cloud bands poleward to let more energy into the oceans just like opening a pair of window blinds.
The quieter sun pushes the jets back equatorward to reduce the energy input to the oceans just like closing the blinds again.
Thus are the tiny variations in solar output massively amplified via albedo changes to explain the much larger global tropospheric temperature changes that we observe. And in the process they also skew the relative intensities of El Nino and La Nina especially on timescales longer than the 60 years or so of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
One is forced to propose something of that sort in order to explain the even longer climate cycling from MWP to LIA to date.
mircea
October 29, 2010 at 11:03 am
THX! I wanted to respond with this very argument, but I am at work and don’t have the time to be composing posts that attempt to explaining simple but difficult reasoning, that the anti-theists will work overtime to miss-understand. I am also an aspie which makes it especially difficult to communicate, unraveling my nonlinear thought. I don’t understand were people find the time to write up these 10 paragraph opuses. That someone else out in cyber-land was able to post what I wanted but was unable, it really quite amazing 🙂
That’s it… I’m putting snow tires on my car during next week’s little burst of Indian summer on the northern high plains.
Stephen Wilde says:
October 29, 2010 at 12:33 pm
“My proposition is that the background trend is provided in part by internal ocean cycles but also by solar variability so that the more active sun draws the jets and their associated cloud bands poleward to let more energy into the oceans just like opening a pair of window blinds.
The quieter sun pushes the jets back equatorwards to reduce the energy input to the oceans just like closing the blinds again.
Thus are the tiny variations in solar output massively amplified via albedo changes to explain the much larger global tropospheric temperature changes that we observe. And in the process they also skew the relative intensities of El Nino and La Nina especially on timescales longer than the 60 years or so of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
One is forced to propose something of that sort in order to explain the even longer climate cycling from MWP to LIA to date.”
Good stuff, Stephen! However, I think as well as the ones you posit, there are many more quasi-cyclical over-lapping mechanisms at work. As climate is ultimately driven by the rules of deterministic chaos, when these cyclical mechanisms coincide they can push Earth’s weather-regimen/climate from the warm attractor to the cooler attractor. These events include sea-ice melt/freeze changes, ocean salinity, elecro-scavenging from solar wind, changes to ozone level/chemistry and importantly, changes to the rate of the hydrological cycle (heat engine).
It seems that every time a monthly satellite anomaly is announced, it becomes a springboard for rampant speculation here about the future course of global temperatures. Even religious viewpoints are now invoked on this thread. This betrays an ill-founded notion of the mechanisms and scales of climate variability that befits the alarmist camp, rather than sober scientific skepticism.
Although intradecadal components of climate variabilty are of great interest to agriculture and commerce, they are of little consequence to the ever-ongoing natural evolution of climate and the question of anthropogenic influence. At the very least, a multidecadal or quasi-centennial viewpoint is required for meaningful consideration of climatic issues. Much as we’d like to have nature demonstrate that the alarmists are dead wrong, latching on to every cooling month’s anomaly exposes skeptics to identical charges of sensationalism.
Let’s not forget that natural climate variability is a very wide-band process (albeit demonstrably not 1/f in structure), with irregular oscillations out to the multi-millennial scale and beyond to the Milankovitch cycles. Present-day temperatures are sitting somewhere near the midpoint between the MWP and the LIA. Natural variability can go either way from here. If we have confidence in thermodynamic laws rather than ill-posed climate models, any excursion of ~1K should in forthcoming decades or centuries should not be cause for alarm. Such excursions have been commonplace throughout the Holocene.
[If that were the case, why does Hansen, et al, demand an immediate cap-and-trade tax scheme of seling carbon credits and ruinously increasing energy prices? Robt]
“Mike Haseler says:
October 29, 2010 at 1:23 am
Thankyou Anthony – I’ve just had a profound realisation. I’ve been wondering for a while why there is such a distinction between the Judeo-Christian god which is so predictable and “good”, and the Greek/Roman/Norse style gods who “just play with men as their playthings”.”
Quite close actually, the night sky up North gives you clouds, thunder, lightening and the violence of the Northern Lights.
Deserts give you clockwork like movements of the heavens.
The pagans had small violent gods who vied for power. The Abramic religions have a really big god who runs a tight ship.
Owen says: “If the cause of current warming is ‘integration’ of the ENSO (by that I assume you mean that the release of heat from ocean to atmosphere in the past 50 years during El Nino phases has exceeded the recapture of that heat during the various La Nina phases), the n the ocean should show a definite cooling. Nicht wahr?”
And that’s precisely what happens in the tropical Pacific. The tropical Pacific OHC shows decadal and multidecadal cooling between multiyear La Nina events: the 1973/74/75/76 La Nina and the 1998/99/00/01 La Nina. The exception is the unusual rise during the 1995/96 La Nina (due to anomalously high trade winds) that fueled the 1997/98 El Nino.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/enso-dominates-nodc-ocean-heat-content.html
The North Pacific had a multidecadal drop in OHC from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, then shifted upwards with a change in North Pacific SLP:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/north-pacific-ocean-heat-content-shift.html
The North Atlantic OHC (like the North Atlantic SST and Sea Level) is the outlier. It’s OHC rose at a rate that was 2 to 4 times higher than the other ocean basins, but it has also been dropping at about the same rate since about 2004. Pick a variable to blame that one on (AMOC, ENSO, NAO). Lozier et al (2008) found the NAO played a major role:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/north-atlantic-ocean-heat-content-0-700.html
With respect to my use of the term integrates, each ENSO event leaves multiyear residuals, (the strongest of which are in the North Atlantic). If El Nino events were counteracted by La Nina events, global SST anomalies would remain flat. That is, if the frequency and magnitude of El Nino events were equal to the frequency and magnitude of La Nina events, there would be no change in long-term global SST anomalies; the trend would be flat with some ENSO noise. The instrument temperature record shows that during periods when the frequency and magnitude of El Nino events exceed those of La Nina events, global SST anomalies rise, and they fall when the frequency and magnitude of La Nina events is greater that those of El Nino events.
Stephen Wilde says: “Now with stronger La Ninas the ocean heat content is declining which again is opposite to Bob’s proposition.”
It is? Please show me. You make statements with no basis in fact.
The North Atlantic is driving the recent drop/flattening of Global OHC, Stephen. Without the North Atlantic, global OHC would still be rising:
http://i56.tinypic.com/2m2hq1v.jpg
The graph is from this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/10/update-and-changes-to-nodc-ocean-heat.html
OP needs a correction in the first line:
“Dr. Roy Spencer has an essay below on sea surface temperatures starting to bottom out, ”
Spencer’s article is titled “Bottom Falling Out of Global Ocean Surface Temperatures?”
FALLING out not bottoming out. Big difference.
For a population used to the last 30 years being very warm, or to those who grew up in warm times, it does not take a whole lot of cooling to have a profound effect. Summer is shorter/cooler/later and Winter is long in the tooth, blustery and distinctly punishing.
For those who remember the 50’s – 70’s period, you’ll have to get used to telling the uninitiated that this is how it’s going to be for a long time.
If this is indeed the onset of a cold period, ya ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Leif Svalgaard says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:40 am
Somewhere in that analysis, something got away from you. It did get much colder in the Little Ice Age, otherwise nobody would have bothered wasting precious time, paper & ink describing the conditions if they were indeed unremarkable. Today, yes, back then, absolutely not. The unknown is how the Sun played a part and to what degree, because until you know exactly how the Earth cooled so much, you cannot rule out the unknown.
Ed_B says:
October 29, 2010 at 11:54 am
If I see any more religious discussion on this BB will write this site off as gone to the dogs.
One man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh. [Robert Heinlein]
It would appear to me that we have been in the past where we are now several times. Some of us older bloggers even remember some of the more recent times going back to the 1930’s and 1940’s. It would appear to me that the climate scientists of the current generation think they have discovered something new by only seeing warming ahead.
1878 PEAK OF WARM CYCLE [VERY WARM] strongest El Nino ever
1911 TROUGH OF COLD CYCLE [VERY COLD] cold of the 1910-1917
1944 PEAK OF WARM CYCLE [VERY WARM] drought of the 1030’s and dust bowl
1977 TROUGH OF COLD CYCLE [VERY COLD] extreme winters of the late 1970’s
2010 PEAK OF WARM CYCLE [VERY WARM] recent decade of warm weather
Future
2043 TROUGH OF NEXT CYCLE [COLD]
2076 PEAK OF NEXT CYCLE [WARM]
In between these cycle there is a predictable and similar rise and fall of temperatures over approximately a 60-66 year full cycle. Even the rate of decline and fall of the different cycles are amazingly similar from cycle to cycle. We have peaked for the current cycle and are now heading down for approximately next 33 years toward the next trough in about 2043. There may be warm years in between as in the past but the general trend is cooler for the next part of the cycle. The next global warming peak may be 66 years away. So let’s ride the wave and not try to out guess every moment.
rbateman says:
October 29, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Leif Svalgaard says:
October 29, 2010 at 10:40 am
Somewhere in that analysis, something got away from you. It did get much colder in the Little Ice Age, otherwise nobody would have bothered wasting precious time, paper & ink describing the conditions if they were indeed unremarkable.
I disagree.
If you were living in a cold period (of several hundred years) why would you bother to note that it was cold? A lot has been written about the very cold 1962/63 winter in the UK – because of the very fact it was so unusual.
Bob Tisdale says:
October 29, 2010 at 7:09 am
Based on the timing, will the La Nina bottom out in January?
————————-
You know, I can’t tell. There is still some warm water just north of the equator at 125W to 80W and this is being pulled into the ENSO east-west circulation at the equator. At the same time, there is still a large amount of cool water at 100 metres to 25 metres depth that is being pushed/pulled up and I can’t tell which will end up being dominant.
Have a look at the high resolution equatorial ocean currents over the last 30 days. The mini-gyres created by the east-west equatorial current and the west-east north equatorial counter-current (where the warmer water is) makes this a little unpredictable [and might also be the reason why La Nina’s never get to the magic Super La Nina level of -2.5C or less. There is always enough warmer water in the north equatorial counter-current that cycles in and prevents a La Nina from getting too cold].
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/global_nlom32/navo/EQSP1_nlomw12930doper.gif
The TAO bouys show where the warm pools are still lingering.
http://tao.noaa.gov/refreshed/sectionPlots.php?type=5day&sec=depth&var=temp
But there is a huge amount of cold subsurface water that is still yet to come. The 140W cross-section is still showing temps as much as 9.0C below normal and it normally takes 3 months for this water to make it to the surface.
http://www.ecmwf.int/products/forecasts/d/charts/ocean/real_time/yzmaps/
On the whole, it would be easier if the warmer pools just north of the equator were gone by now but they are still there. On ther other hand, there is still 3 months of cooler water yet to come. So, December to February for the peak.