UAH Global Temperature Update for September 2011: +0.29 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for September, 2011 retreated a little again, to +0.29 deg. C (click on the image for the full-size version):
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
Here are this year’s monthly stats:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2011 1 -0.010 -0.055 0.036 -0.372
2011 2 -0.020 -0.042 0.002 -0.348
2011 3 -0.101 -0.073 -0.128 -0.342
2011 4 +0.117 +0.195 +0.039 -0.229
2011 5 +0.133 +0.145 +0.121 -0.043
2011 6 +0.315 +0.379 +0.250 +0.233
2011 7 +0.374 +0.344 +0.404 +0.204
2011 8 +0.327 +0.321 +0.332 +0.155
2011 9 +0.289 +0.309 +0.270 +0.175
The global sea surface temperatures from AMSR-E through the end of AMSR-E’s useful life (October 3, 2011) are shown next. The trend line is, again, for entertainment purposes only:
On the subject of the drop-off in temperatures seen in the AMSR-E data in the last week, I have been getting questions about the daily AMSU tracking data at the Discover website which shows Aqua AMSU channel 5 (which our monthly updates are computed from) is now entering record-low territory (for the date, anyway, and only since the Aqua record began in 2002). While I have always cautioned people against reading too much into week-to-week changes in global average temperature, this could portend a more significant drop in the next (October) temperature update, as the new La Nina approaches.
October may prove catastrophic in a number of geographies. The winter jet pattern may settle in early. We’ve had a strong hint of this on the West Coast of the US, which is often a leading indicator. I am imagining some serious storminess in the mid US when this early series of cold pools encounters the very warm “Indian Summer” air mass currently in place there. Similar scenarios may occur in other NH locales.
La Niña looks set for a chilly Christmas.
That is absolutely right week to week changes are just that and little more. If La Nina picks up, if the polar jet settles in to the south, if….. One thing for sure in the vastness of the north it will be cold.
Here in the UK there is a predicted 10 degree C drop in daytime temps between Monday and Friday this week.
I only hope that we can adapt, please send International funds to……
The last couple of winters haven’t been that bad/good (depending on your love of snow) in eastern Canada ‘cos the snow went south to New England. Not being too well up on these things, can anyone tell me if this was this an ENSO thing and are we likely to see this again this year?
Why was the “average” line removed in the discover page graphs? It’s kind of hard to tell what it’s doing now. There used to be one.
Repeat after me everyone:
Warmer than average temperatures = It’s Global Warming ™, just like we predicted!
Colder than average temperatures = Colder weather is not inconsistent with Global Warming ™ theory, just like we predicted!
/cagw
Subsurface Pacific equatorial temperatures to 500 m (BOM) are looking well cold.
Lord B…we are coming off a blocking high that gave us that nice hot weather last week…look out those gloves and the windscreen ice scrpaer
How many months does the atmosphere lag the ocean in this data set?
The always entertaining 3rd order polynomial fit to the data RULES!
I WANT MY GLOBAL WARMING BACK!!!
How does the temp change correlate with US GDP change?
g2-a16bc567d73c7a9cbf046866a1f41d71 says:
October 4, 2011 at 3:43 pm
How does the temp change correlate with US GDP change?
===============================================================
Wrong question. The proper question would be, how does the rules passed to fix an imaginary problem correlate with US GDP, or developed nations’ GDP to be more accurate.
The reason why your question is improper is because on the other side of the world with the same latitudes, there is another country that has a GDP trend going in the opposite direction. (sort of)
Of course, that’s only for the last 15 years or so.
those are some very toasty el temperatures in the past 4 months given there’s no hint of an El Nino
Roy thanks for your rapid end-of-month update. I always am eager see the latest results at the end of each month in the hope each new data point will help us better understand how this system works.
I find it interesting that you observe that we see the temp dropping as La-Nina approaches. I always thought temp lagged ENSO events by at least a few months. Is it different this time? Does temp lead ENSO events when we see cooling or is this an unusual situation?
They continue to hold off on providing sea level data (over 5 months – ever since it began to swing down in earnest). They are either cooking some more upwward corrections or holding off until after a conference or an election or pending legislation ….
Dr. Spencer,
What are the implications of AMSRE-1 ‘s demise? How does this effect your data? How does this effect your job? What are they going to use to calibrate AMSER-2 ‘s sensors? What is your confidence level in the data most recently received, and could this have anything to do with the divergence of RSS’ figures?
That third order poly looks a lot like a sine or cosine with a 50 year wave length.
“”””” The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever. “””””
Earth to Dr Roy; Not only your third order polynomial, but your Red running 13 month curve, and even the blue unexpurgated raw data; also have no predictive value whatsoever. That’s the beauty of real data; it always tells you something you didn’t know before.
George E. Smith; says:
October 4, 2011 at 5:00 pm
“”””” The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever. “””””
Earth to Dr Roy; Not only your third order polynomial, but your Red running 13 month curve, and even the blue unexpurgated raw data; also have no predictive value whatsoever. That’s the beauty of real data; it always tells you something you didn’t know before.
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But, George, what if it continues to tell us the same as opposed to something new?
carface says:
October 4, 2011 at 3:27 pm
> The always entertaining 3rd order polynomial fit to the data RULES!
No – Poly REIGNS! As in “she RAINS confusion.” 🙂
Fred H. Haynie says:
October 4, 2011 at 4:45 pm
> That third order poly looks a lot like a sine or cosine with a 50 year wave length.
Oh, just follow it 50 years in either direction and it will start looking like a tangent function near ±90°!
Dr Spncer. Can you overlay the sunspot data for cycles 21, 22 & 23 onto your first graph and sho us in an update? I think it will be very informative.
Bill
Ric,
So you are saying this is how Hanson got his Venus analogy? I have never seen any tangent function in natural long-term data. It never goes to plus infinity and changes to minus infinity and repeats. Or are you talking about projecting the polynomial 50 years in either direction?
The PNW: Winter left late, and Summer got off to a late start and a well-below average season.
The Acorn crop is pitiful, the geese flew overhead Sunday, and it’s pouring cats & dogs with snow down to 5000….N. California.
Shaping up to be an early winter, at least in the PNW.
“The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.”
Then it should be removed. It adds nothing except the implication that a third order fit has some significance.
Boy, I sure missed summer. This year we had a couple of weeks (Van, Can) vs the usual 2-3 months. If this is the new normal …
Fred H. Haynie says:
October 4, 2011 at 7:09 pm
I’m pretty much sold on Venus and adiabatic expansion. We do have a temperature profile all the way to the surface, IIRC.
I was talking about the polynomial – as you travel away from the modeled area, the terms with larger exponents begin to dominate the equation and they follow cubic curves quickly upward or downward. This is quite different than tangents, those have asymptotes where they climb quickly to infinity and reappear with a negative sign.
While it’s easy to point to sine and cosine functions in the natural or man-made
world, tangents don’t show up in any place I can recall.
“”””” Fred H. Haynie says:
October 4, 2011 at 7:09 pm
……………………………………….
While it’s easy to point to sine and cosine functions in the natural or man-made
world, tangents don’t show up in any place I can recall. “””””
Well of course Tangents show up in the natural world.
We are all the time talking about the oblique reflectance off the surface of water in the polar regions.
The condition for zero reflectance for the polarisation component with the electric vector in the plane of incidence; which also is the condition for the reflected and transmitted rays to be perpendicular to each other, is simply Tan (i) = N2/N1 Where (i) is the angle of incidence (between ray and surface normal), and N1 ; N2 are the refractive indices for the first and second media. Same equation holds for incidence from either air or water. The angle (i) is normally referred to as (B); the Brewster angle.
It is an important condition in Geometrical Optics, since the total surface reflectance is almost constant from zero angle (normal incidence) up to (B) and then the reflectance sky rockets rapidly beyond that to 100% at the critical angle, or at 90 degrees depending on which side the ray is incident on.. (and the 90 degrees is for the air incidence case.) There is NO critical angle for incidence from the lower index medium.
Dinostratus,
“Then it should be removed. It adds nothing except the implication that a third order fit has some significance.”
No, no. It also adds discomfiture to some of those who fear the fit that they cannot help but infer.
It also draws a firm contrast with the second order, geomoetric, and exponential functions that the temperatures are “supposed” to fit, according to adherents of certain religious beliefs. Further discomfiture.
That’s the aforementioned “entertainment” part.
Lord Beaverbrook says:
October 4, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Here in the UK there is a predicted 10 degree C drop in daytime temps between Monday and Friday this week.
I only hope that we can adapt, please send International funds to……
!0 C a week that means by Christmas it will be 120 C colder.
Warning warning Ice age coming, my model says so!
I think that the word we might be looking for is asymptote, and not tangent.
From my Calculus book, in the algebra review section:
For math novices, the “->” can be read as “approaches”.
As to the 3rd order polynomial fit, I like it, please keep using it.
How many Septembers have been warmer in the satellite record?
How annoying it must be for the ‘warmists’, to see how briskly the Arctic sea ice is rebuilding… (H/T to all those nice graphs…)
The only “warm spot” appears to be in the Pacific Ocean east of Japan. Is this a true +4.3 C temperature rise or a measurement error?? Are there any ocean buoys that measure ocean temperature in that area to confirm?? What are their values??
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
Is this a “not named” ocean upwelling spot?? As La Nina [cold] pushes down, do other areas of the Pacific, “push up”??
Many questions: but with a quiet Sun [relatively], the only heat is from the oceans…
David says: October 5, 2011 at 6:30 am
“How annoying it must be for the ‘warmists’, to see how briskly the Arctic sea ice is rebuilding… ”
‘Rebuilding’ to LESS on this day (5th Oct) than in any previous measured year – except one!
Polynomials are often very good at providing nice-looking fits to time series data. However, never be tempted to do any “forecasting” by extrapolating polynomials! The software I use to produce polynomials also calculates automatically the appropriate confidence intervals for the fitted line and for a further single observation of the same family. I can guarantee that Roy’s entertainment graphic would be much funnier if the confidence intervals were also shown. If I had the data I’d produce the lot in half a minute, but would be unable to post them here :-((
Dr. Lurtz says:
October 5, 2011 at 6:53 am
Is this a “not named” ocean upwelling spot?? As La Nina [cold] pushes down, do other areas of the Pacific, “push up”??
Deep water is all cold, only cold water upwells, not warm. The same is true of downwelling.
Only idiots like Trenberth think that warm water can be pushed downward into the constantly cold and denser deep ocean water.
SST does not mean very much, all it takes for an increase in SST is a sunny day or two with no wind.
James of the West
The delay is still there – after the abortive proto-el Nino in May, the Nino index has been steadily falling ever since. It is already technically in La Nina territory below -0.5 – what Roy Spencer means is that it will be another month or two before we are in full blown La Nina.
Falling ENSO index and Pacific SST means air temperatures continuing to fall – with the delay of a few months still there.
So the temperature anomaly for September was again above the 30 year average and people here are saying that we are beginning to cool? What’s up with that?
Anthony, when are you finally going to tell the people here on your site about how much money you personally made from your Surface Station debacle? Doesn’t FOIA also apply to you?
REPLY: Asked and answered the last time you were on a bender. FOIA? Heh, well if you claim that I’m subject to it, then I guess you must be also. Inquiring minds want to know.
Cheers – Anthony
onion2, you’ve been around long enough to know (if you’ve bothered to read) that it’s not simply a case of the whole world warming with Nino and cooling with Nina. Dig out Bob Tisdale’s numerous posts containing the data and graphs if you haven’t already.
While some on both sides of the debate hyperventilate over the weather or short-term spikes and troughs, it’s more enlightening to take the long view based on data and plausible mechanisms. If one does that, the most reasonable expectation is one of a cooler few decades ahead. For that to be possible, CO2 CANNOT be the primary driver of climate, let alone man-made CO2.
Time will tell. Fortunately, we have a lot of time to assess it, given the failure of model projections to match the reality of flatlining temps. It’s the politically-motivated schmucks who have little time to force through their dreams in the face of increasing suspicion.