NOTE: A second graph has been added. See below.
The RSS data for Dec 2010 is out and available here, and I’m second in publishing it. The honor for being first goes to Lucia at the Blackboard here.
I used the same RSS lower troposphere data, but used a different plotting program than she did, Dplot, which provides for an automatically generated moving average. She computed the annual average as the average over Jan-Dec of each year and plotted each annual average, where I used a built in moving average generator in Dplot, set the moving average generator interval to 12 months, and came up with similar results as she did. The annotated plot is below:
2010’s end moving 12 month average is .510°C at month 383 (Dec. 2010) The peak 12 month moving average value is .550°C at month 239, just after the red 1998 El Niño spike. So by the RSS satellite data, 2010 has not exceeded 1998. Lucia comes to the same conclusion: 2010 is not warmer than 1998, but is a close second. There’s still other year end data sets to be published. I would expect Dr. Roy Spencer to publish UAH soon and we’ll have that also.
Here’s the output from the Dplot program for the two curves above:
Curve 1 – Monthly Anomaly
Minimum = -0.458 at X = 68
Maximum = 0.858 at X = 231
Max – Min = 1.316
Mean = 0.09933333
Standard deviation = 0.2288476
Standard error = 0.1725063
Curve 2 – Moving average (prior), interval=12
Minimum = -0.2989167 at X = 79
Maximum = 0.5506667 at X = 239
Max – Min = 0.8495833
Mean = 0.09812891
Standard deviation = 0.1940199
Standard error = 0.1301371
The peak global monthly temperature anomaly in 1998 was .858°C while in 2010, the peak global monthly temperature anomaly was 0.652°C
Also, the December 2010 value at 0.251°C is down significantly from the peak value of 2010 which was 0.652°C in March. What a difference El Niño to La Niña makes.
UPDATE: I had some time later today after a busy post holiday Monday, so I decided to update this post. To better match the UAH data published today, which uses a 13 month moving central average, I’ve added this annotated plot:
Here’s the output from the Dplot program:
Curve 1 – Monthly Anomaly
Minimum = -0.458 at X = 68
Maximum = 0.858 at X = 231
Max – Min = 1.316
Mean = 0.09933333
Standard deviation = 0.2288476
Curve 2 – Moving average (central), interval=13
Minimum = -0.2908462 at X = 74
Maximum = 0.5316154 at X = 233
Max – Min = 0.8224615
Mean = 0.09751444
Standard deviation = 0.191728
The results are slightly different, and the conclusion remains unchanged. The central moving average is a more correctly representative since it encompasses the entire year, where a lagged average needs to additional data points into 2011 to properly show 2010.
The peaks of the 13 month central average are:
.531 month 233 (1998)
.507 month 374 (2010)
Wowie !!
I hope it wasn’t me that appended all that predata to my two liner observation of Dr Roy’s exposition. Sometimes that click and drag can be a bummer; and grab more stuff than it is supposed to. I’m not going to tell you who made the mouse that did that without my asking; but it is turning out to be a pretty lousy mouse; and the left click switch sucks; it takes three of four clicks to connect sometimes. No I did NOT design any Optics for that one.