The university of Colorado has recently updated their sea level graph from the TOPEX satellite data. The 60 day smoothed trend is still stalled and shows no rise over what was seen since the peak in mid 2010:
Data
Raw data (ASCII) | PDF | EPS
Here’s the same data with season variation retained, but the really interesting data is from ENVISAT, which shows no upward trend:
(Graph from Steve Goddard). Envisat data here: ftp://ftp.aviso.oceanobs.com/
Sea level is lower than eight years ago, and according to the graph above just passed the lowest annual peak in the Envisat record.
It’s damned inconvenient.
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Thank you Pierre-Normand and R. Gates. Just one question for now: Exactly how far down does “sea surface” go? Thanks!
George E. Smith: “In more than half a century of observation, I have never observed it to warm up in the shadow zone, when a cloud passes in front of the sun. I plan on living another half century just on the off chance that such a thing occurs.”
Sure, but this observation doesn’t come close to establishing that the overall cooling effect of the cloud dominates over the overall warming effect of the whole planetary surface. There are two reasons for this. (1) The cooling effect within the surface area shadowed from the Sun is entirely restricted to this area (including the penumbra). The warming effect, on the other hand, is diluted over a much wider area. (Likewise, if there is a small breach in an otherwise fully cloudy sky, the shadow effect will disappear entirely when the Sun comes into line-sight, but the warming effect from the surrounding canopy will remain mostly undiminished.) (2) The cooling effect only occurs during the day while the warming effect will continue to occur at night at a just a somewhat reduced rate. (I am unsure just how much cloud temperatures typically vary around the clock).
So, all your observation amounts to is that the cooling effect from a cloud dominates its warming effect within the restricted time-frame and surface-area where the former effect is concentrated. It enables you to conclude nothing about the total net effect when both opposite component effects are integrated over the whole planetary surface during a whole day.
Werner Brozek asked: Thank you Pierre-Normand and R. Gates. Just one question for now: Exactly how far down does “sea surface” go? Thanks!
Definitionally, that’s anywhere between 1mm and 20m depending on measurement methods. For purpose of radiative exchanges with space and the atmosphere, layers deeper than 20m are irrelevant and for purpose of latent and sensible heat fluxes only the temperature of the top skin layer counts. However because of turbulent mixing (the effect of surface waves), there tends not to be much of a temperature gradient within the top 20m or 30m layer. And the heat content gained or lost within this top turbulent layer may only accounts for a small fraction of the overall variations in heat content after, say, one intense La Nina year.
In any case, if the fraction “lost” due to the La Nina cooling of the top layer were significant (I am unsure how small it really is) as compared with the overall gain of heat, keep in mind that it is only “lost” to the deep cold layers this water is upwelling from and not to the ocean as a whole. So, this fraction represents no loss of heat and is therefore quite irrelevant to the issue of sea level change caused by thermal dilation/contraction.
R. Gates says:
February 15, 2012 at 4:39 pm
I’m afraid its spot on. So dominant La Nina is the cause of sea level fall? Then you no doubt accept that the previously dominant el Nino was the reason for the sea level rise in recent 2-3 decades. You are therefore endorsing Bob Tisdale’s argument that the cyclical changes in global temperature (and by association sea level) are attributable to shifting phases of dominant el Nino or La Nina phases (there are also of course the two butterfly wings of the ENSO Lorenz attractor) and in no way related to CO2. Good to see you are on board at last!
_____
Fortunately, the evidence makes it quite clear which is the signal and which is the noise (i.e. natural variability) riding on top of that signal. ENSO fluctuations can be seen as noise in the overall upward trend in sea level rise over the past few decades. Cherry picking short-term noise to try to make a case for your point of view on longer-term ocean changes is…amateurish at best.
In looking at El Nino and La Nina variations, once must not just look at the SST temperature, but where the wind patterns are sending the moisture, as there can be great variations between two different El Ninos or two different La Ninas. Grace satellite data is a powerful tool for really seeing where the water has gone. Skeptics seem to hate this clear cut information. Why?
Lets step back and look at the bigger picture: both global sea level rise and global temperature rise have levelled off and show signs of moving to decline. So all this scurrying around looking for post-hoc explanations and special pleading is clearly the new way of life that the AGW community are going to have to get used to in the years ahead. Why all this winter cold and growing snowpack? Why these declining temperatures and global signs of cooling. I think that the GRACE gravitation mapping satellite is much better used for its real purpose of fine-tuning the navigation of ICBMs than for getting dragged into the climate debate to contribute still further to the smoke-screen of obfustication, swamping the debate with marginally relevant and distracting minutiae.
“ENSO fluctuations can be seen as noise in the overall upward trend in sea level rise over the past few decades.”
Warmistas really hate the ENSO. Why? Because it points to the non-survivability of simplistic back-of-envelope CO2 dogma in the real, complex-chaotic world. Bob Tisdale has shown – and this is not a controversial opinion in oceanography – that ENSO is the dominant mechanism determining global climatic variations on the scale of decades. Certain large ENSO evens are associated with step changes in global temperature which Bob Tisdale has further shown are the ONLY source of significant climate change in recent decades.
So dismissing ENSO as “noise” really is burying your head in the sand and outright denial of the complex processes of the real world. I love the ENSO. It is real and it is big, it is a real nonlinear oscillator, its been around a long time and its not going to go away.
Brian H says:
February 16, 2012 at 7:43 pm
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 7:27 pm
…
the oceans have gained energy during the past few La Nina’s (and this is typical during most La Ninas). Usually this heat would be released during the next El Nino, and some is, but more heat is being retained during La Nina’s, and hence, ocean heat content has been going up.
Sounds good, but … prove it. Show the measurements of warmed ocean water, and give volumes and locations. Report in Degrees Kevin, if necessary.
———–
Do your own research Brian, I am not your errand boy. A few clicks of the mouse and you can get pretty much any data you want. For starters, just look at ocean heat content charts and compare them to ENSO cycles. You”ll notice the ENSO cycle fluctuations riding quite clearly on top of the general increase in ocean heat content. Despite what certain skeptics will tell you, the ocean heat content is the best metric of overall warming of the earth system, and during this past decade the ocean has gained about 10 x 10^22 Joules of energ just down to 2000 meters alone. Hardly the sign of a cooling planet. The skin layer of the ocean is affected by an increase in downwelling long-wave, reducing the thermal gradient across the skin layer, meaning that less heat flux exists across the skin layer, and thus, less heat leaves the ocean and the ocean heat content goes up. Don’t get distracted by those arguing about longwave radiation penetrating beyond the skin layer. Longwave’s effects on altering the thermal gradient of the skin layer quite sufficient to cause the ocean to warm under that skin layer, and the data quite clearly display just that.
R. Gates, you say:-
“Longwave’s effects on altering the thermal gradient of the skin layer quite sufficient to cause the ocean to warm under that skin layer”
Rubbish. there’s only a 10 micron effective penetration in the 4 – 16 micron GHG+clouds LWIR range.
http://omlc.ogi.edu/spectra/water/gif/hale73.gif
Have a think about 10 microns on a turbulent ocean surface (or even a calm surface).
Worse, on the left scale absorption DECREASES 1000 times relative to the effective 10mm penetration of solar LWIR at 1 microm wavelength.
Conflating conventional cool-skin warm-layer physics with Peter Minnet’s Real Climate opining won’t get you anywhere.
Werner Brozek says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:05 pm
Thank you Pierre-Normand and R. Gates. Just one question for now: Exactly how far down does “sea surface” go? Thanks!
———-
Suggest you reference this for a general overview:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/ocean/layers_ocean.htm
What are you actually try to get at by this question, as “sea surface” can be used very broadly.
Pierre-Normand says:
“We would only expect this only if every La Nina event had very similar durations and intensity, and resulted in similar geographic distribution of excess rain events, and, finally, if the ENSO cycle was the only significant determinant of ocean temperature changes.
======================================
Yes Pierre, that was the point I was hinting at. The claim that La Nina’s “cause” sea level decline doesn’t really work because we didn’t see sea level decline during the 2008 La Nina. And while we did see it during the 1999 La Nina (which was very strong), one would have expected to see an accelerating sea level trend afterwards based on your hypothesis, which didn’t happen either. (Because the underlying warming trend would have to be added to the land based water returning to the oceans during the same time frame.)
As you should know, SOI correlates well with strong flooding events in Australia and South America. So you should not blame La Nina as such, but rather discuss sustained periods in which the SOI was strongly positive…We can see 3 periods in the record where that occurred: circa 1999-2000, 2008, and now. Compare those periods to the sea level trends. As you can see they are fairly regular in their cyclical patterns and they don’t stand out when compared to other time periods.
Sea level rise (and fall) is consistent with global temperature fluctuations, but there is no obvious or apparent correlation with SOI. So your claim boils down to asserting there is something unique or special about this *particular* La Nina which has never been observed before in the data. Sounds suspiciously like special pleading to me… Or we can just stick to the most obvious explanation–the ocean have cooled a bit. Don’t worry, I’m sure they will warm up again. They’ve been warming for thousands of years.
Thank you again Pierre-Normand and R. Gates.
From
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/october-to-december-2011-nodc-ocean-heat-content-anomalies-0-700meters-update-and-comments/
“The Global OHC data through December 2011 is shown in Figure 6. Even with the recent correction and uptick in the two quarters of this year, Global Ocean Heat Content continues to be remarkably flat since 2003”
The above quote is about the top 700 m. So IF there is a lot more heat further down to 2000 m, then the next El Nino should be huge after a double La Nina if you are correct. Time will tell.
Werner Brozek says:
February 17, 2012 at 7:57 am
Thank you again Pierre-Normand and R. Gates.
The above quote is about the top 700 m. So IF there is a lot more heat further down to 2000 m, then the next El Nino should be huge after a double La Nina if you are correct. Time will tell.
This waiting for el Nino which has been going on for several years now, has a certain “waiting for Godot” ring to it.
“””””” Pierre-Normand says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:01 pm
George E. Smith: “In more than half a century of observation, I have never observed it to warm up in the shadow zone, when a cloud passes in front of the sun. I plan on living another half century just on the off chance that such a thing occurs.”
Sure, but this observation doesn’t come close to establishing that the overall cooling effect of the cloud dominates over the overall warming effect of the whole planetary surface. There are two reasons for this. (1) The cooling effect within the surface area shadowed from the Sun is entirely restricted to this area (including the penumbra). The warming effect, on the other hand, is diluted over a much wider area. “””””
Well Pierre, you continue to refer to the “warming effect” of clouds at night, and you jump between a small cloud throwing a small shadow (including penumbra, to a complete cloud layer with a small hole. Evidently, the first happens only in the day time, and the latter only happens at night, in your model.
For starters the day / night thing is about a 50 : 50 split. It is NOT the 4:1 split implied by Trenberth et al’s so called earth energy budget.
Actually, slightly more than half of the full earth sees daylight continuously, andf slightly less sees night (absence of solar disk) continuously because of atmospheric refraction; but I’ll not quibble over the fine points.
So clouds, anywhere on the sunlit hemisphere will reflect / scatter / absorb / down shift (Stokes loss) / radiate (LWIR) which ALWAYS results in a net loss of solar energy to the earth; it is irretrievably lost to space. OK; so the obliquity at the periphery results in a cosine (roughly) loss of solar irradiance, both above the clouds and at the surface; big deal, that may affect local peripheral Temperatures, but it has no effect on the total energy that reaches the earth surface over the whole sunlit hemisphere. If anything, the peripheral cooling effect is even greater, than for the sun at zeniith, because you go from an air mass one path to a much longer air path and cloud layer path at the periphery, so the solar energy loss increases as you move away from the zenith. The exact same thing is true of the non condensed state, of H2O, O3, and CO2 absorption of significant parts of the incoming TSI spectrum, where 98% or more of the TSE resides (about 250 nm to 4.0 microns). All of at least those three GHGs have a negative feedback cooling effect with regard to feedback to the incoming sun energy.
Yes that absorption does result in atmospheric warming (compared to lower amounts of those GHGs), but the net result is that LESS solar energy gets stored in the deep oceans.
And I know nowt about oceanic mixing, so I will let you chaps debate how the mixing affects the storage; and whether it is 700 metres or 2,000. Over the long haul, the LOSS of additional solar energy due to INCREASED GHGs (well H2O, O3, and CO2) for climatically meaningful time scales (30 years ? ) can hardly result in a warmer earth.
Now because of the higher daytime Temperatures, over the sunlit half of the earth, the spectral radiant emittance from the surface is higher during daytime than during night time. The peak of that emission spectrum increases as the fifth power of the surface Temperature (roughly), and it also shifts to shorter wavelengths (Wien shift) so it further reduces the LWIR absorption effect of both CO2 and H2O (vapor). So the daytime LWIR cooling is more effective than the night time cooling. And we all know from high dry deserts, that CO2 is quite ineffective in “warming” the desert night times.
As for your small cloud shadow, including penumbra effect, the effect in the shadow zone is a direct reduction of solar spectrum energy, at the surface, as the sun is a near point source. The axial irradiance due to a finite Lambertian source, has an error of about 1/2% for a 10 : 1 distance to source size ratio; and for the sun, that ratio is more than 100, so the deviation from a point source is entirely negligible. There will be a cosine irradiance effect if the sun is not at the zenith.
For the outgoing, the surface source is between Lambertian and isotropic due to surface roughness, and Lambertian is the most favorable case ( for dispersion of the emission.
In this instance, the cloud blockage will see an inverse height squared attenuation and a cosine^4 of cloud angle further reduction, so the cloud irradiance from the shadow zone loses very quickly with cloud height. The fraction of the irradiated energy at the cloud, that gets absorbed, also diminishes with hieght due to the lower H2O molecular density. The resultant LWIR emission from the cloud, is essentially isotropic, so half will be lost to space, and I’ll give you that the other half may be totally absorbed by the surface (other than surface LWIR reflectance.
Well for the night time half of the globe (not 3/4 as in Trenberth), the solar effect is of course absent, but the solid angular capture geometry by the cloud is still fully active, and the average surface radiant emittanceis considerably lower than the daylight average.
But all we are talking about is rearranging the energy that the earth already captured from the sun; and that ALWAYS gets less with more H2O in any phase, and also more O3 and CO2.
And it WILL continue to cool during the night, even though you continue to talk of night time “Warming”.
But all it takes is observational data to establish which view is correct. But somehow, I don’t seem to find any peer reviewed papers relating to Nyquist valid ground level sampling of surface solar insolation, to even establish what the solar blocking effect is for clouds or GHGs.
Well that sort of information would likely not be supportive of the prevailing theories, and might result in curtailment of grant money, if it was widely known. Governments don’t usually spend taxpayer money to find out that nothing untoward is happening; they prefer the “sky is falling” idea.
As for oceanic “surface” absorption of LWIR, the peak absorption coefficient for water is about 8,000 cm^-1 at 3.0 microns, which gives a 1/e depth of 1.25 microns, so the 99% absorption distance would be about 6.25 microns (5 times). For the entire climate interesting wavelength range, the absorption coefficient is greater than 1,000 cm^-1, so the 99% absorption depth is always less than 62.5 microns, and usually less than that. I don’t know how to post data graphs here; so folks can look it up for themselves. I’m not into Giggling, or Wikileaks; it used to be fashionable to actually learn something in school; besides http://www.whatever.com
Werner Brozek says:
The above quote is about the top 700 m. So IF there is a lot more heat further down to 2000 m, then the next El Nino should be huge after a double La Nina if you are correct.
El Nino is a surface phenomenon, and it is localized to a specific area of the Tropical Pacific. Global OHC below 700m is irrelevant. We know that the 0-700m in this area is currently not recharging the heat given up in the last El Nino, as it typically would during a La Nina. Prayers for a huge El Nino based on mid depth ocean warmth would seem to rest on a bunch of heat sitting below 700m in that area of the eastern Pacific, and a mechanism to get it up top in a way that raises near surface temps.
Is it there? If so, how did it get there?
@george E. Smith
“Well Pierre, you continue to refer to the “warming effect” of clouds at night, and you jump between a small cloud throwing a small shadow (including penumbra, to a complete cloud layer with a small hole. Evidently, the first happens only in the day time, and the latter only happens at night, in your model.”
That’s not a model at all. That’s just a pair of illustrative examples. And both of them are daytime examples. In the second example there is a breach in the cloud cover that lets sunlight through as it passes overhead. So, an observer will notice a sharp increase in total radiant heat when the breach passes overhead and the Sun appears. But there will be no significant diminution in the back-radiation from the whole cloud cover when the breach moves away. The point of the example is the same as the point of the first one. In both examples you can’t infer, from the fact that when clouds block direct sunlight total radiant energy drops, the conclusion that the net effect of the cloud cover is to decrease total radiant energy over the whole surface. It only seems so in your live experience because the albedo effect is concentrated on a small area (shadow of the cloud cover) and time-frame (day-time) where it dominates the more widely diluted back-radiation effect.
I myself drew no conclusion over which effect dominates overall in the context of climate. This may still be an unknown.
deja vu all over again.Long term trend looks like sea level has topped out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
What’s all this fuss over the noise of small changes?
George E. Smith wrote: “And it WILL continue to cool during the night, even though you continue to talk of night time “Warming”.”
Of course, no contest. The issue is whether the feedback effect of an increased cloud cover in a warming climate is positive or negative. There is a negative albedo effect and a positive back-radiation effect. When I label the second effect “warming” this denotes a positive feedback effect. It may or may not be dominated by the negative albedo effect. I am not implying that clouds will lead to night-time temperatures increasing overnight. That would be silly. The same is true of the warming effect of H2O or CO2 vapour. En enhanced greenhouse effect is a warming effect in the sense that it yields a warmer climate. Part of the cause of this effect is a reduction of the cooling *rate* at night. There is no implication that greenhouse gases cause surface temperatures to rise overnight.
Note that it would likewise be silly to object to calling the cloud albedo effect a “cooling effect” on the ground that even on cloudy days the surface temperatures still rises between sunrise and sunset. The effect still is a cooling effect in the relevant sense just because the rate of day-time warming is smaller when the cloud cover is larger.
George E. Smith wrote: “For the outgoing, the surface source is between Lambertian and isotropic due to surface roughness, and Lambertian is the most favorable case ( for dispersion of the emission.
In this instance, the cloud blockage will see an inverse height squared attenuation and a cosine^4 of cloud angle further reduction, so the cloud irradiance from the shadow zone loses very quickly with cloud height. The fraction of the irradiated energy at the cloud, that gets absorbed, also diminishes with hieght due to the lower H2O molecular density. The resultant LWIR emission from the cloud, is essentially isotropic, so half will be lost to space, and I’ll give you that the other half may be totally absorbed by the surface (other than surface LWIR reflectance.”
I still don’t see where you get this inverse height squared attenuation and the cosine^4 angle reduction. It still seems to me you are focusing the the effect cloud height has on the interaction between some small bit of ground and some small bit of cloud cover and you are forgetting to perform a double integration over the whole surface and cloud cover. You made no acknowledgement of my argument to that effect in my last reply.
The inverse squared attenuation in the upwelling radiation is irrelevant because integration over the whole cloud cover cancels it fully. (I neglect boundary effects you mentioned and that I acknowledge to be negligible). If the cloud cover is 50%, say, then 50% of the upwelling radiation is being absorbed by the clouds assuming full opacity for simplicity). This is true irrespective of the solid angle emission distribution being Lambertian or isotropic or anything in between. It is also true irrespective of the fact that an individual bit or cloud cover will receive less radiation from an individual bit of ground surface when it is moved higher up. In any case, one random upwelling photon, emitted in any upward direction, will have an X% chance to hit some cloud and (1-X)% chance of missing it, assuming only an X% cloud cover. This is true for all individual photons. And, as you now acknowledge, half this energy will be radiated back to the ground (assuming a one layer thin cloud model for simplicity). So, the other component of your previous fourth power attenuation law also cancels out in the integration of back-radiation over the whole ground surface. The only point here is that your original fourth power attenuation law yields no attenuation at all after the two (upwelling and downwelling) integrations that each cancel out the separate inverse square laws that apply only to the individual pairs of interacting infinitesimal bits of ground and surface.
“In any case, one random upwelling photon, emitted in any upward direction, will have an X% chance to hit some cloud and (1-X)% chance of missing it, assuming only an X% cloud cover.”
This is false as it stands. What I meat to say is that the photon has a (1-X)% to miss every cloud — that is, to miss the cloud cover.
Will Nitschke said: “Yes Pierre, that was the point I was hinting at. The claim that La Nina’s “cause” sea level decline doesn’t really work because we didn’t see sea level decline during the 2008 La Nina. And while we did see it during the 1999 La Nina (which was very strong), one would have expected to see an accelerating sea level trend afterwards based on your hypothesis, which didn’t happen either. (Because the underlying warming trend would have to be added to the land based water returning to the oceans during the same time frame.)”
There is no expectation that the time frame be the same. As I noted earlier, the residence time of groundwater ranges from centuries to millennia. The rebound from runoff water occurs within mere months. We may only expect the other part of the rebound to be diluted over the next centuries. Also, your first sentence seems to be a non-sequitur. That’s like saying that the claim that the gunshot caused the patient to die doesn’t really work because the previous patient who was shot didn’t die. Again, different La Ninas result in different rain patterns and ENSO just is one factor in sea level variations. We ought only to expect an imperfect correlation with sea level rise.
Evidently, the first happens only in the day time, and the latter only happens at night, in your model.
For starters the day / night thing is about a 50 : 50 split. It is NOT the 4:1 split implied by Trenberth et al’s so called earth energy budget.
I don’t understand that claim either. (And I didn’t put forth any “model”. I was considering two daytime specific and local examples. The first example was actually your own.) Also, in Trenberth’s energy budget, the total Solar incident power exactly balances the total outgoing power at top of atmosphere. I not sure what this supposedly implied 4:1 split you are mentioning corresponds to. How do you derive this specific ratio from Trenberth’s budget, and why do you think it should be 1:1 instead?
Sorry, I was quoting George E. Smith in the first paragraph of my previous post.
@ur momisugly Jerome: “What else were we supposed to be terrified about?”
1) The “existential threat” posed by Iran, which has zero “noo-kyoo-ler weapons,” to a country that has 300+/-.
2) Over here, Muslims under the bed–you know, “hat[ing] us for our freedoms.”
3) The “kooky ideas” of Ron Paul, the most dangerous of which are surely liberty, peace, and prosperity. (God forbid that people anywhere should actually be allowed to live their lives as they so choose!)
4) The potential for a serious screw-up with the voting machines that would prevent Ron Paul from having yet another caucus or primary stolen from him.
5) Most of all, raw milk!
Predictions for something like sea level rise are long term by their nature. I’m not sure how useful it is to look at such a short time frame. How about the big picture over thousands of years, from the experts in the field?
otter17 says: February 19, 2012 at 1:41 pm From real experts showing a graph with a 0.6 meter y-axis for the last century to show the sea level rise. Funny how they don’t show it since the last ice age, on top of 100 meters of rise. Oh yeah, I guess you couldn’t see it. Alarmist Expert B.S.