While nowhere close to Trenberth’s missing heat, it’s a nice bite sized chunk of SST. Hurricanes are heat engines, transporting massive amounts of heat from lower to higher levels of the atmosphere.
La Niña is growing too. Have a look:
h/t to reader “mitchel44”
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Nuke says:
August 29, 2011 at 11:07 am
@ur momisugly R Gates:
Sounds like you’re saying these climate patterns are cyclical.
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Of course ENSO and hurricanes are cyclical…but that doesn’t mean those cycles can’t be modulated by changes in earth’s climate. You would expect, for example, the average hurricane during the depths of a glacial period would be of a different frequency, strength and even location than those at the height of an interglacial. So too, while ENSO has been around for millions of years, you’d expect it to change character based on climate conditions.
Come on guys.
The plural of ‘La Niña’ is “Las Niñas’ and the plural of ‘El Niño’ is ‘Los Niños’.
Por favor.
lgl says:
August 29, 2011 at 10:45 am
R.Gates
La Nina’s are a time the oceans absorb more net energy, not dissipate it.
Not globally, http://virakkraft.com/Radiative-imbalance-ENSO.png
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?? Precisely what I’ve been saying.
Something else to add. I was lolling around yesterday, unable to go up to Georgian Bay because the distant fingers of Irene dragged or pushed cold air and cloud cover over Southern Ontario….and I was reading April 2011 National Geographic. Here is the online link:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/nyiragongo-volcano/finkel-text
I took note of one factoid that just jumped out at me.
“Every day the lava lake emits around 7,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, the chief element in acid rain. This is more than the total from every car and factory in the United States. “Basically, it’s one big chimney,” Tedesco said. The environment was noxious, the air full of acid and metallic aerosol particles.”
Got me thinking yet again about how we still don’t pay close enough attention to the natural inputs from our earth. Oh well….
rbateman says:
August 29, 2011 at 10:08 am
La Nina absorbed it, and Irene sucked it right back out before it had time to sink in.
Left a pretty good chunk of colder than normal water in it’s wake.
Sounds like global cooling to me.
_____
Can’t imagine how you see cooling in a system that amounts to balancing out the heat in the oceans…but then again, in your case, I can imagine how you’d see that.
Ryan Welch says:
August 29, 2011 at 6:59 am “” “”
I with you on this . . . I find it practically astounding that clouds float . . . . but yet . . . all that weight just floating around in the sky.
I like to ask people . . . how much do you think THAT cloud weighs?
Tie this truism and a data sets together: 1) Hurricanes are heat dissipators, and 2) We’ve seen a whole lot less of them in the past several years.
Conclusion: The earth isn’t warming up, it is cooling down. One could say the lack of hurricanes supports this hypothesis.
R.Gates
Precisely the opposite of what you’ve been saying.
Perhaps it is also upwelling that contributed to the change in the anomaly for the area not actual ocean heat loss.
People in DC are reporting a Fall like weather situation today.
According to NORSEX SSM/I we’ve possibly reached the annual NH sea ice minimum and ice may already be in its annual expansion at the hemispheric level. I’d been reporting for a number of days that ice growth had commenced around the Date Line. After years of comparing the Anchorage NWS Ice Desk reports and various reporting orgs, I now conclude most orgs under report both extent and area. It’s probably the age old set of issues around melt ponds and how to count at the edge when the edge is very near land, especially land with Continental glaciation.
Laurie Bowen says:
August 29, 2011 at 12:09 pm
Yet the same could be said of huge ships floating on the oceans–they certainly are massive–much heavier than the water that supports them, but they aren’t found at the ocean’s depths. No, they float around just like water does in clouds.
RockyRoad says:
August 29, 2011 at 12:21 pm
Tie this truism and a data sets together: 1) Hurricanes are heat dissipators, and 2) We’ve seen a whole lot less of them in the past several years.
I’ll add to your number 1) all gases are heat dissipators. Our lives depend on this property. Drying hair, heating homes, cooling cars engines, ceiling fans, etc. Only in climate science do gases do something other than dissipate heat.
RGATES:
“Your comments about clear night skies are interesting, but of course the central issue to AGW is that those apparent clear night skies are not so clear as they once were…”
Aren’t they? The central failing of AGW is that it does not account for changes in cloudiness, which is an effect that is orders of magnitude larger than that which ‘simple physics’ can attribute to CO2.
“Higher night time temperatures are one of the things that AGW models have predicted, but course skeptics love to ignore.”
Higher nighttime temperatures may also predicted by changes in the extent and pattern of cloudiness, ‘but course’ CO2 AGW religionists love to ignore. And suppress. And wave hands in front of. And pretend dont exist.
In science, it isnt the simple consistencies with predictions that matter. What matters are the relavent consistencies (those that differentiate between alternate hypotheses) and, most importantly, the inconsistencies. Those are what falsify hypotheses. One of those inconsistencies renders all of the consistencies irrelevant. You know, like the inconsistency between the prediction of a tropical high altitude hot spot, and the observation of no hot spot. And the inconsistency between the prediction of a minimum .2 deg C rise in global for every decade, and the obsevation of no temp rise for the past fifteen years. etc.
John Marshall says
Convection transports the largest portion of heat to the stratosphere. convection on a large scale forms hurricanes/typhoons. QED
And alarmists worry about radiation.
In my opinion the best comment in this post – simple, elegant and so obviously correct – we just saw how powerful convection effects can be.
PS Irene never got organised unlike Yasi which never left the tropics.
R. Gates:
Since you summed up ENSO so nicely (La Nina sucks heat from air to sea, El Nino pushes heat from sea to air) maybe you can answer me a question.
Warmist philosophy states that between 1975 and 2000, human CO2 caused most (if not all) the global warming. Okay. So by that statement, we warm the air a lot faster than nature (Sun) warms the oceans. That’s cool. So between 1975 and 2000, since the air over the Pacific was a lot hotter than the waters, we should see in the records a lot of La Ninas to “balance the heat” as you say.
Hmmm…… I think you have a problem there, let’s look at observations.
During 1975 and 2000 there were 14 El Nino years, 6 La Nina years, and 5 neutral years. So for 60% of that 25 year period, heat was being pushed out of the Pacific into the air and only 20% where heat was being pulled into the Pacific. So unless you somehow found a way to avoid thermodynamics, doesn’t that show that natural warming (Sun heating the ocean) outweighs human warming (CO2 warming the air)? Because if “humans did it” that would mean there should’ve been more La Nina years to El Nino years since the air would be hotter than the sea.
Gary Crough says:
August 29, 2011 at 11:33 am
Is the net effect of a hurricane to transfer heat to outer space?
And if so, at what rate? For example, can a storm like Irene be expected to have a measurable impact on the (monthly & lower troposphere) satellite-based global temperature measurements for global temperature?
The heat transfer from a Hurricane can be calculated from two aspects the energy transport of the water cycle and the kinetic energy of the wind. NASA has a page that explains this:
It uses one method to calculate the energy from convection, clouds and rain, In ONE day an average hurricane releases energy ” equivalent to 200 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity”
The other method is to calculate the wind kinetic energy. In ONE day an average hurricane generates kinetic energy “equivalent to about half the world-wide electrical generating capacity “.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html
A lot of energy – convection carries more heat from the surface than radiation.
If you want to see the infra red from the top of weather systems then look at http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/flash-rb.html
Note that this is infra-red heat energy released as latent heat, it is not linked to temperature or to Stefan Boltzmann’s radiation equations.
For the water vapor imagery look at http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/flash-wv.html
John Marshall says:
August 29, 2011 at 6:50 am
Convection transports the largest portion of heat to the stratosphere. convection on a large scale forms hurricanes/typhoons. QED
And alarmists worry about radiation.
——–
The importance of each mechanism for transporting heat varies with height. The higher you go the more important radiation becomes.
Radiation becomes the bottleneck at the nominal boundary between the atmosphere and space. That’s why radiation is important and why CO2 is important.
@ur momisugly SteveSadlov
Most of the increase in area is from the Beaufort adding a lot of 20-40% ice from convergence after that SLP a week ago wrecked it. Would Melt Ponds freezing over cause the extent to slow dramatically even though there are areas melting out all over the arctic daily?
Have you looked at modis images today?
The flow has been from NE Greenland slamming the Beaufort with ice, now it’s cut off and the ice there is starting to melt out without aid from richer ice sources. This will be reflected in the data tonight. And more so by tomorrow. It is likely we will see Area drop 200,000km2 by Sunday.
A new SLP has formed and moves into the Western Arctic Basin. It will pump warm air/record warm SSTs into the Beaufort/Central Artic While inflow on the fram side/greenland sea side is crippling the ice down there. Ice between 135E and 100E up to 85N is still falling out because bottom melt is as bad as 2007. This is what happens when areas of the arctic are ice free for 3 months exposed to sun and warmth. Some buoys indicate bottom melt well into mid to late October.
As far your continental glaciation.
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c03.2011241.aqua
Norsex also uses a 25km grid resolution which makes it useless.
UB or Jaxa are much more reliable.
Ok hurricanes are powered by ocean heat, it is well understood that they intensify over warm water and weaken over cold or land masses. The obvious heat dissipation mechanism is the evaporation of water vapor powered by convection to high atmosphere to cool and condense giving off radiant heat into space. But I would love to see the actual numbers on the radiation of the oceans heat surface in the trail of a hurricane whether it was from accelerated evaporation, dilution cooling by rainwater at the surface from the storm or vertical mixing of the thermocline due to wave action.
Let us look – earth is maybe 8 billion years old and has definite temperature cycles. We arrogant humans are trying to observe one year, five year, twenty year, one hundred year, 1000 year and 5000 years – that is like looking at the stock market when it opens and seconds or minutes latter tell what it will do over of the next 20 years each day.
We are just silly for even embarrassing ourselves calling this computer generated bunk sicience?
re: R. Gates says: August 29, 2011 at 9:57 am
I can’t speak for all of course, but I seriously doubt many skeptics ‘ignore’ this aspect. Amazingly, this is the exact same effect that urban heat island issue would also cause.
Alternative hypotheses and confounding factors must be considered, and controlled for accurately, or it’s poor science or not science at all.
The latest from the Climate Prediction Center has:
(last week ….. this week)
Niño 4 …… -.2°C ….. -.2°C
Niño 3.4 … -.7°C ….. -.6°C
Niño 3 …… -.5°C ….. -.6°C
Niño 1+2 .. -.3°C ….. -.5°C
Showing increased cooling anomaly in the Eastern Pacific.
Welcome back, La Niña.
As reported here at WUWT
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/26/global-hurricane-activity-at-historical-record-lows-new-paper/
Cyclones/hurricanes are at record low levels. Cyclone energy (per annum) has halved since 1997.
As always with the climate it is difficult to separate cause from effect, but fewer cyclones means less heat energy transported from the oceans to the atmosphere.
The cause is either less heat energy available in the oceans,
Or, some other cause with the consequence more heat energy being retained in the oceans.
Given the evidence that the oceans aren’t warming (Argos) I tend toward the less heat energy in the oceans cause. Which means fewer cyclones results from climate cooling.
http://pafc.arh.noaa.gov/ice.php?img=icef