November Global Temperature Update Delayed
By Dr. Roy Spencer
There has been a delay in our monthly processing of global temperature data from AMSU.
An undersea telecommunications cable used to transmit about half of the huge volume of data coming from the Aqua satellite was cut in late November off the coast of the Netherlands, delaying receipt of that data. While there were redundant data transmission capabilities, apparently both failed.
Also, John Christy and I have been on separate travels quite a bit lately (I spent 2 weeks in Miami after my daughter had an emergency C-section — I’m a grandpa!) and now I’m at the AGU in San Francisco, with a trip to DC early next week, so monitoring of the situation has been difficult.
Version 6 of the UAH Dataset is in the Works
I have been working on a new diurnal drift correction for the UAH global temperature dataset, which will be released as Version 6 when it is finished.
The orbital drift of most of the satellites carrying the AMSUs (and earlier MSUs) has been the largest source of uncertainty in getting long-term satellite temperature trends, and the correction for this drift has been a research topic for us off-and-on for many years.
Fortunately, there has always been at least one satellite operating without significant drift, and so we have used those satellites as a “backbone”, or anchor, for the others. The Aqua satellite is the only one which has its orbit maintained with on-board propulsion, but channel 5 on the Aqua AMSU instrument has become increasingly noisy in recent years, so we anticipate at some point we will no longer be able to rely on it, thus the need for a new diurnal drift adjustment.
I’m hopeful that the new procedure I’ve developed will work well, which is rather novel and is mostly insensitive to instrument calibration (see if you can figure out how that would work, wink-wink). The ultimate test will be the removal of long-term drift between simultaneously operating satellites, which also depends on season. It should allow us to get better regional temperature trends, land-vs-ocean trends, and remove some spurious season-dependent differences in temperature trends.
The earliest Version 6 of the UAH dataset would be available is the early January update of the December temperature data.
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“…new procedure..”, “…rather novel and mostly insensitive to instrument calibration…”
I thought Dr Mann had already worked that out.
Congratulations on your new grandchild. Hope your drift adjustment works as well. The number of times I’d thought I had an operational problem licked and then had to pull back the code because there was something else going on as well…. Good Luck.
Congratulations, Grandpa. Best (partial) reason I’ve heard to be late with your homework in a long time. 😉
Congratulations grandpa – I know that feeling having had the same (first) experience recently, C-section and all.
Considering the satellite position problem, would it be helpful to have three existing or new satellites in a more distant orbit to use as reference points for those instruments bobbing around in lower orbit? Is the long term solution that simple? The faster-than-light neutrinos from CERN faced a similar issue, which is, where are the satellites, really?
If that was in place your time could be better used sorting out the instrument issues.
I really appreciate your efforts and look forward to a description of your prescription for drift (of all kinds).
“which is rather novel and is mostly insensitive to instrument calibration”
Measuring tree rings by satellite? 😉
Congratulations and keep the good work coming.
Congrats Dr Spencer. Take the time to be with your family, The temp data isn’t going anywhere… Well, unless Phil Jones gets his hands on it!!!! 🙂
Thanks for the update. I turn on my computer each morning and look to see if there is an update of the Lower Troposphere temperature data and wait patiently. The Ap Index still remains jaw-droppingly low. The index was “5” last month. I wonder if Dave Archibald has released an update of his Solar Cycle 23 and 24 comparison graph. It might give us a feel on where this solar cycle is going. I have been too busy working on the historical weather chronology to do anything else at the moment. Next update is a week or two away and includes 200 additional pages of early U.S. weather data. I just got my hands on 2,000 years of Chinese weather event data but that will have to wait for a while. It is amazing how much historical weather data exists if only one looks for it. Congratulations on the new grandchild.
data can be questioned in the future?
RSS +0.033 º C …. are correct?
good job. thanks
Obviously a Dutch Captain dragging an anchor on his way to an oilfield!
Congratulations by the way, my Grandson is now 3 and so much fun!
is the RSS value 0.03C for November?
Hopefully Telenor will get that cable fixed.
BTW, when do you think you will be accessing NPP data – or will you be using it at all? It is the next satellite to have a controlled orbit crossing.
Extrata says:
December 9, 2011 at 9:02 am
is the RSS value 0.03C for November?
Well,
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_3.txt
Congratulations, gramps. Your genes improve the global pool so I hope this is the first of many.
Surely the cause of the communications failure is somehow due to CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion, right?
Fernando
Obrigado
Congratulations Dr Spencer, I sincerely hope mother & baby are doin’ just fine!:-) I am rather hoping my two are going to wait a little while longer before taking that most momentous of decisions!!!!! (I don’t want to feel old 🙁
“I’m hopeful that the new procedure I’ve developed will work well, which is rather novel and is mostly insensitive to instrument calibration (see if you can figure out how that would work, wink-wink).”
Triangulation. Use three (or more) adequately separated receivers at fixed positions on the ground and compare arrival times of the satellite transmission. That should get a pretty darn good position fix on virtually anything in orbit that’s got an active radio transmitter on it.
Another way would be to leverage NASA’s space debris tracking programs to get a fix on the satellites. Those resources include radars and telescopes. It would probably be cheaper and easier though to triangulate on the transmitter with a few ground based receivers.
Getting a super accurate timestamp for each receiver is a piece of cake with off the shelf hardware used in GPS receivers. In fact if the operating frequency and modulation technique for the climate satellite transmitters is similar to that employed by GPS satellites then it might be as easy as flashing some new firmware into an off the shelf GPS receiver and viola you got your ground based receiver so cheap you can scatter scores of them all over the world anywhere wherever there’s an internet connection for the receiver to use to ship its data to you.
Thanks for all the congrats. Baby Noah was over 2 months early, 3 lbs 14 oz. Mother and baby are fine now.
It looks like there is some confusion over what I mean by “drift”. (The orbits of the satellites are known quite precisely…that’s not the issue.) The problem is that atmospheric drag causes the orbits to slowly fall from their original sun synchronous altitude, which means they start measuring at a different local time. Since the day-night temperature cycle is so large, even a 30 minute drift in the observation time can cause a significant error in long-term trends, at least over land. Two of the satellites (NOAA-15 and NOAA-16) have drifted by several hours.
Eventually we will get the ATMS temperature data from NPP, the newest non-drifting satellite.
This is also why the ICSSP cloud dataset is a little dodgy for cloud trends…those are the same satellites, and it is difficult to remove the diurnal cycle in clouds in the data.
(I spent 2 weeks in Miami after my daughter had an emergency C-section — I’m a grandpa!) – Frigging trumped again by Anthony must change my name to Mr Cliamte Scientist 🙂 I’m an Uncle, although my mum went with Nan, Grandpa.
Heart felt congrates, although my poor little nephew is the spitting image of me at 1 month.
Dave Springer says:
December 9, 2011 at 10:07 am
That should be trilateration, not triangulation.
Congratulations!
@Alan the Brit says: December 9, 2011 at 9:25 am
“Congratulations Dr Spencer, I sincerely hope mother & baby are doin’ just fine!:-) I am rather hoping my two are going to wait a little while longer before taking that most momentous of decisions!!!!! (I don’t want to feel old :-(”
Alan, Just wait until you are a Great Grandpa (with another on the way)!
Best Wishes Roy!
I like the saying:- “If I’d known how much fun Grandkids are, I’d have had them first!”
Congrats 🙂
Ya know, its hard to not be paranoid about “accidental” cable cuts and the like these days. It seems that since cooling began and sea level stopped rising, there have been a number of satellite problems and the like.
Undersea Briffa Bodge.