I’ve been watching with interest and concern some of Steve Goddard’s postings on Envisat on the abrupt changes in their recent sea level data. To me, something didn’t seem quite right, and I expressed concerns privately along those lines that I didn’t know the causes of what appear to be recent unexplained “adjustments” in the recent data. It seems ENVISAT has given up the ghost. So, it is possible it has been sending faulty data and they have not noticed. Here, he shows this graph which seems quite problematic:
This is like what has happened with the AQUA AMSRE failure and the failure that we had to point out to NSIDC (where Dr. Walt Meier famously exclaimed it “wasn’t worth blogging about” only to have to later issue corrections themselves) that the DMSP satellite they were using had issues. Whether this is permanent or not remains to be seen. After 10 years of service, Envisat has stopped sending data to Earth. ESA’s mission control is working to re-establish contact with the satellite.
Via our friend Ecotretas :
I read in the news today that connections have been lost with the Envisat satellite. ESA has already confirmed it too, but reading the latest Mission Operations News, it seems it would be predicted for a satellite that had only been planned for a five year mission.
So I ran to see how the sea level graphs had finished, and to my biggest surprise, the graph from AVISO had changed dramatically! I recall seeing it about a week ago, with totally different values! From an historical perspective, several older graphs can be seen in a post 9 months ago (in Portuguese), or compared with other satellite measurements in this WUWT post. Please compare the graph 9 months ago on the left, and the more recent one on the right (click to zoom):
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Notice that the slope has gone up from 0.76 mm/year to 2.33 mm/year! This manipulation, which has no other name, has been justified by Aviso with the following notes:
- Envisat time series extended before 2004 starting from May 2002.
- Envisat V2.1 GDR reprocessed data used. The new standards are also detailed in the table “Processing and corrections”.
- Instrumental correction sign corrected (impact of around +2mm/year). The error detection and impact on data is detailed in:
- Envisat 2011 yearly report, A. Ollivier & M. Guibbaud, soon on the Aviso website
- Envisat Reprocessing impact on ocean data, A.Ollivier & M. Guibbaud, soon on the Aviso website
- A.Ollivier et al. 2012, Envisat ocean altimeter becoming relevant for mean sea level long term studies? (submitted in Marine Geodesy)
- new NetCDF CF format in the products and images selection interface
Now, this looks like a small part of the Envisat mystery. Please check that the older graph starts in 2004, but the newer graph starts in mid 2002! Notice that in the newer graph, the 2002 and 2003 values were much higher that those of 2004, and that the highest values of 2003 were not surprassed till late 2008. Now imagine why they were not there in the older graphs, and how being there would create a trend probably very near to ZERO!
The last image, the above one on the right, that’s on the AVISO site is dated “Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:14:03 GMT”, so clearly has been put there after the satellite failed, which occurred last Sunday. No doubt that the hiding the decline was already planned, but probably was executed swiftly after the fail. Strangely, the last color image taken by the satellite was above Portugal, which is obviously a coincidence. But it looks like it’s mysteries have only started…
These days, it’s generally accepted in climate science, that when the data doesn’t fit the theory, change the data.
This is for one and all. The word “its” is the possessive pronoun and “it’s” is the contraction for “it is”.
That is an IP owned by cloudflare. It is a service that improves performance of web sites by caching often retreived pages. It also filters out spammers and such from ever even getting to the target web page, It is not a malicious operation.
Larry
173.245.60.41
Steve’s site has some strange things happening sometimes. I had 3 computers that would not reload fresh pages, only got old ones. For a week. And now the pages act like they never finish even though they are done. This could be the culprit. I’ll block it and see if it gets better. Thanks.
Latitude says:
April 12, 2012 at 7:06 pm
James Sexton says:
April 12, 2012 at 5:12 pm
or why would they go back and “adjust” past tide gauge measurements? in fits and spurts…
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I’ll be digging into it as soon as I end my lamitations. ……..
For those who don’t understand, it’s a hard thing to devote some time and energy to a project and hit severval brick walls….. so many that you finally say “it can’t be done”. ….. Only to find out afterwards, they went back and updated sites which hadn’t been updated in over two years.
Data had ended in 2008 and 2009….. only to find they’ve infilled all the data in 2012. Oddly, the very few stations I looked at showed an amazing increase in sealevel measurements after the infill. In spite of Envisat’s “adjustments” this is still incongruent to the time period. For those that wish, they can go to the archives of my site…… I gave periodical updates to the progress and findings as I went along. I had hoped that was one place not tainted by this insidious disease. For reasons I understand, I’m hesitant to look much further. But, I will.
toni arco said on April 12, 2012 at 8:51 pm:
Maybe you could make up and post a helpful mnemonic, like:
Apostrophe appropriate as it is
or something quirky and short that’ll be remembered along with a visual cue, like:
Its tit, it’s fit.
I used to say such data corruption and manipulation to get the desired result (always, always!) in favor of more global warming, sea level rise, etc. was sad. It is more than that. For more than 3 centuries almost all scientists searched for truth and treated data as invaluable and a sin to corrupt. But then the Soviet Union and Lysenko showed the way. Our university and government scientists are overwhelmingly leftists and if it was good enough for Stalin it is now seems good enough for them. As Lord Monckton said, losing our reason is losing our spark of divinity.
I am more than sad for an irretrievable loss, i fear we will never return scientists to the role they once played. God help us.
There’s a better term than “warmist”!
Warmist is too broad, as it includes non-alarmists.
“Alarmist” is too accusatory–it prejudges the case, implying the other side is wrong.
“Cassandra” is just right, as the ancient Cassandra was correct, but subsequent doomsters who see themselves as “Cassandra’s” are ego-driven and have a bad track record.
(Just remember to spell it with two S’s.)
Remember our warmist friends explaining to everyone that Envisat shows dropping sea levels because La Nina causes precipitation, storing all the water in the Amazons etc?
I suspect some frantic rewriting at Skeptical Science right now… Dana, you know what to do…
toni arco says:
April 12, 2012 at 8:51 pm
This is for one and all. The word “its” is the possessive pronoun and “it’s” is the contraction for “it is”.
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toni! You must understand, even if we know this…….. some of us still get too drunk to care! It’s not that we don’t care once we’re sober. Regret lingers for years! Regret it must be, because we know once this happens, we are entirely misconstrued! Meaning gets thrown to the wayside and all is lost, save for the pendantic. 🙂
Just giving you a hard time…..You’re right…. 🙂
think is good, new way in modern technology. . .
Totally sprung for peddling a lie. Sadly if MSM don’t run with story you are only preaching to the choir. Our voices may be loud and sincere but we’re being drowned out by the sheeple.
Paging Dr Christy and Dr Spenser to the Satellite Data Recovery Room!
Folks, if the instruments miles and miles above our heads go off kilter, it’s not a conspiracy of the IPCC zombies to inflate AR5. Pachurri predicted that a year ago.
What is the AR5 cut off date for published papers acceptable for discussion? Anyone? Granted they’ve played fast and loose with that cutoff before and probably will again. Please tone down the conspiracy rhetoric when a simpler explanation is available:
Maybe the damn thing never worked as intended. Not the first time that’s happened in space flight.
I’m becoming increasingly concerned about the nature and extent of ALL so called ‘adjustments’ to the whole range of available empirical data including proxy data.
Having previously accepted the reality of some apparent warming, especially during the late 20th century, it now seems prudent to disbelieve evidence of anything other than a slow recovery from the LIA due to natural internal climate system processes with perhaps a basic background trend supplied by small changes in solar activity levels over the centuries since the LIA.
Personally I think that all we have seen is a slight redistribution of the in/out energy flows across the globe with little or no real change in the climate system’s basic energy content.
This case sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Am I right?
Anything is possible says: April 12, 2012 at 1:54 pm
360 000 000 km^2 of ocean in constant motion due to tides, winds and currents, and they claim to be able to measure mean sea level to an accuracy of 1/1000mm
.
That is 5 times more accurate than is achieved with a co-ordinate measuring machine under laboratory conditions at a constant 68°F/20°C.
RogerKNI says:
They ARE wrong, at least in that they are overstating their case while intentionally omitting the overwhelming evidence that points in the opposite direction. There is much more reason to be worried about cooling than warming.
Of course it is always possible that the planet will warm dangerously, but if it does, it won’t be on any grounds that the alarmists have put down any evidence for, because they haven’t offered any evidence for anything. They avoid the evidence, or “re-adjust” it, as the case may be.
“Anti-CO2 alarmists” is the term I usually use. Nice and short compared to “believers in dangerous human caused global warming,” or some such.
Cecil says:
April 12, 2012 at 11:28 pm
“Please tone down the conspiracy rhetoric when a simpler explanation is available:”
Explain why the adjustments always go in the same direction.
It is not a conspiracy. Conspiracies are secret. The agenda of the UN, UNFCCC, UNIPCC and the member scientist impostors is openly documented.
LazyTeenager says:
April 12, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Of course, that’s kinda my point – if the UAH data is available, it can be checked by others and verified. Is this the same for the Envisat and other satellite data? I don’t believe so.
By chance I also downloaded data from aviso.oceanobs last weekend.
I thought it would be interesting to look at rate of rise from different satellites during periods when they both operating. Surprise Surprise, clearly show that rate of rise has slowed and that there used to be agreement between results from Poseidon and Envisat during period when they were both operational.
After I read James Sexton’s comment I downloaded data again and compared results.
By making the change to get Envisat to agree with Poseidon/Topex overall they’ve messed up the agreement in some of the overlapping periods.
There was a big dip in sealevels (around UK at least) in 1990, so maybe sea levels did rise at 3mm/year until 2000, but this was just reversion to mean, not a permanent change.
http://jeremyshiers.com/blog/sea-levels-still-rising-and-envisat-records-altered-to-show-this/
It appears that they are not just increasing the recent data, but are decreasing the old. Please notice how 2004, 05 and 06 were all fairly flat at 48.5, and now the roll along at about 46.75. The pivot point appears to be about 2008.
toni arco says:
April 12, 2012 at 8:51 pm
This is for one and all. The word “its” is the possessive pronoun and “it’s” is the contraction for “it is”.
Toni – you must be a 50 year old curmudgeon like me! Plural, Possessive, Possessive Plural – why does everyone find it so hard to get this. On the other hand, there is a school in the UK called “The Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls” – What does it mean, I can’t work it out!
[snip. Ad hominem attack on our host. ~dbs, mod.]——–
LT is correct — another name is “adjustment”. The Occam’s Razor explanation for the accelerating convergence of such adjustments is the following chain of scientific reasoning:
• the theory of radiation transport really is correct, and so
• CO2 really is a greenhouse gas, and therefore
• the oceans really are warming and the ice is melting, so that
• sea level really is rising, and moreover
• the rise-rate really is increasing, which
• satellites of every nation really see this rise more-and-more clearly,
• precisely as James Hansen and his colleagues predict, and
• all of these trends are destined to accelerate in coming years.
These are sound physical theories, verifiable observations, and testable predictions … and so there’s no need to introduce “enemy list” factionalism and “witch hunt” politics in assessing this chain of reasoning.
The only solution is to discard all existing historical data and start over with a new satellite. Lets name the new satellite: the PGW [post global worming].
/sarc
Bernie Schreiver says:
[Allow me to deconstruct Bernie’s nonsense]:
• the
theoryhypothesis of radiation transport reallyismay be correct, and so• CO2 really is a [very minor and insignificant] greenhouse gas, and therefore
• the oceans really are [not] warming and the ice is [not] melting [global ice cover is increasing, not decreasing], so that
• sea level really is rising [very slowly, and moreover
• the rise-rate really is increasing [absolutely false], which
• satellites of every nation really see this rise more-and-more clearly [wrong again]
• precisely as James Hansen and his colleagues [incorrectly] predicted, and
• all of these trends are destined to accelerate in coming years [says your crystal ball?].
These are
physical theoriesconjectures, [un]verifiable observations, and [un]testable predictions … and so there’s no need to introduce “enemy list” factionalism and “witch hunt” politics in assessing this chain of reasoning.. . .
There, Bernie. Fixed it for you.
BTW, where do you get your nonsensical talking points? From Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science? Or Closed Mind? Or RealClimatePropaganda? The UN/IPCC? Tamina? Bernie, your “facts” are wrong. Stick around here at the internet’s Best Science site. You will learn the truth… if your mind isn’t closed tight.
Does this mean that Al Gore´s California beach property is literally “underwater”?