Where’s that positive feedback that is supposed to manifest itself in water vapor, the most potent natural greenhouse gas?
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. writes:
image Figure 4 from Vonder Haar et al 2012
As promised by Tom Vonder Haar; see the posts
“Water Vapor Feedback Still Uncertain” By Marcel Crok
The new dataset covering 20+ years will be available to the public in 2012 or 2013.
The initial results are now ready as reported in the paper
Vonder Haar, T. H., J. Bytheway, and J. M. Forsythe (2012), Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations,
Geophys. Res. Lett.,doi:10.1029/2012GL052094, in press.
Here’s the Abstract:
The NASA Water Vapor Project (NVAP) dataset is a global (land and ocean) water vapor dataset created by merging multiple sources of atmospheric water vapor to form a global data base of total and layered precipitable water vapor. Under the NASA Making Earth Science Data Records for Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, NVAP is being reprocessed and extended, increasing its 14-year coverage to include 22 years of data. The NVAP-MEaSUREs (NVAP-M) dataset is geared towards varied user needs, and biases in the original dataset caused by algorithm and input changes were removed. This is accomplished by relying on peer reviewed algorithms and producing the data in multiple “streams” to create products geared towards studies of both climate and weather. We briefly discuss the need for reprocessing and extension, steps taken to improve the product, and provide some early science results highlighting the improvements and potential scientific uses of NVAP-M.
Dr. Pielke adds:
The current paper is not the final word on this subject. The end of the paper reads
The results of Figs. 1 and 4 have not been subjected to detailed global or regional trend analyses, which will be a topic for a forthcoming paper. Such analyses must account for the changes in satellite sampling discussed in the supplement. Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.
However, the figure at the top of this post, if it turns about to be robust, raises fundamental issues with respect to the ability of global climate models to skillfully model the role of humans in altering the climate.
Forrest Mimms III writes via email:
This paper is a bit sketchy and needs filling out. Nevertheless, it’s quite possibly the most significant water vapor paper in a decade.
The key finding of this paper is the time series in Fig. 4(c), which bears a rough resemblance to my time series over nearly the same time.This time series is devastating to the modeler’s assumptions about the positive feedback of water vapor in a world with steadily rising CO2 levels.
…
The modelers have no explanation for why temperature and PW across the SE USA have actually declined during the last century. The explanation is likely a combination of at least three factors:
1. Global warming is best described as regional warming.
2. ENSO and other natural cycles play a major role.
3. How can we trust the global temperature record when (as shown by you, Watts, et al.) so many stations are improperly situated, especially as urbanization has arrived or surrounded them.
UPDATE:
Here’s the full paper http://www.leif.org/EOS/2012GL052094-pip.pdf
Thanks Leif.
1) The vast majority of the media are global warming adherents.
2) Pop over to the Guardian or BBC and do a survey of the published pages on climate and let me know how many are sceptical over say a 1 month period. Compare it to WUWT – then get back to me.
3) If the media treated sceptics in the same fair way you want pro-warm papers to be treated then WUWT might not exist. Remember: the debate is settled.
Let go of this dead parrot. You will feel great release and sense of freedom.
Climanotology (clima-not-ology)….
noun, Former branch of science removed for non conformity to established science Laws and methods.
Only a single commenter, Ian W., with a smattering of support, seems to “cut through the crud” as it were. I don’t know too much about climatology, etc. but I do have a fair understanding of air conditioning and heat pumps, etc. the Earth being the ultimate model of the latter. One quickly finds in such systems that “actual” temperatures of fluids has little to do with the cooling/heating efficiency of such devices. As correctly stated by Ian W., enthalpy and moisture content of the various fluids (air included) are the dominant factors describing ALL heat pumps/engines and the concept of “average temperature” is simply a red herring. Integrals of enthalpy measurements and RH% are the actual “robust” science parameters we should be examining. Please Ian, publish your ideas and let’s quickly dump this “average temperature” BS! Relegate it to the climastrologists!
If the humidity is decreasing and the average temperature is increasing, might that imply that the heat content of the atmosphere is staying fairly constant? At least the energy increase must be less than the temperature increase. What does that say about the greenhouse gas theory?
Ian W says:
July 18, 2012 at 4:03 am
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Ian, seems that several of us here agree with your comment. The concept/principle that you explained is valid and needs the spotlight. Hopefully you have the time and inclination to present it as a leading post/article. I look forward to your “publication” here on WUWT. Common sense goes a long way here.
So, the CFS data ( a reanalysis using multiple data sources, similar to NVAP ) does indicate a positive trend in water vapor, matching the positive trend in surface temperature, for the thirty year period ending in 2009. It would be interesting to compare the two data sets.
Certainly on the seasonal level, when earth temperature is higher, humidity is higher.
As noted, this is driven by the asymmetry of the hemispheres. But the AGW response is also supposed to be asymmetric – greater over land than ocean. The dynamics of water vapor are obviously important. And we should recall that total water vapor is not necessarily a good measure of the water vapor forcing. The greatest emission in the water vapor bands doesn’t come from the dry polar regions because there are also very cold. The greatest emissions in the water vapor bands come from the sub-tropics which have high ( though not the highest ) humidity in the lower levels but dry air due to subsidence above the moist lower levels. It is dynamics, not temperature which gives rise to this configuration.
Further, there is a negative feedback to water vapor in the upper troposphere. Water vapor emits strongly, of course, so when it is present high in the trop,, most of that escapes to space cooling the upper levels. This cooler air can then subside until it is again at dynamic equilibrium. But subsiding air is both warmer and drier than the lower level air which it is compressing downward. That’s why the subsidence inversion raob signature looks like a square funnel shape. So, the presence of water vapor in the upper trop causes the decrease of water vapor in the upper trop. – a negative feedback if evere there was one.
Garrett: “In fact, over the past half a month (almost 100 blog posts on WUWT), hardly one of the posts have pointed to research from the AGW side.”
So you’re advocating that WUWT, if it is to be truly scientific rather than dogmatic, should devote equal time to topics that are contrary to the common skeptical theme here. Fair enough.
And since you’re not tripping over your own tongue we know that you’re also advocating that scientific journals, scientific funding, and scientists devote equal time to researching skeptical themes also.
eyesonu says:
July 18, 2012 at 8:06 am
Perhaps he looked at my WUWT guide (see right-side nav bar) link to http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/index.html
That page has the last 14 days of titles and links to past months.
It is a bit tough to work with since WUWT titles are not bibliographic references.
Faux Science Slayer says:
July 18, 2012 at 7:41 am
That can’t be right. A stratus cloud at ground level is just fog, and from direct observation those droplets aren’t falling at anything close to 200 mph. Ever watch a cap cloud on a mountain? Air flows up, begins to condense, flow over the top, gets back down to the saturation level and finishes evaporating. The observers on top of Mt Washington report fog….
I doubt that hail in a severe Tstrm falls at anything close to that air speed. Rain drops are only in the 10s of mph, IIRC.
References please….
Reg Nelson says:
Turns out one of that one of the authors of that paper (Julienne Stroeve) has made many posts here on Arctic Ice Extent and the work she has done. Of course being a regular reader of WUWT you already knew that, right?
No, I did not know that. I am by no means a fanatical reader of WUWT so I do not see every post and comment. With an average of over 40 posts per week (Google Reader stats) it’s not in many peoples’ abilities to follow all the goings on over here. A quick (but by no means rigorous) search turned up no actual posts by Dr. Stroeve on WUWT. She’s referred to in several, and she has commented on many. I could of course have missed something.
However, I will hold my hands up to jumping the gun: it turns out that WUWT did in fact publish, back on June 30th, a post on the article on recent changes in tropospheric water vapor over the Arctic.
What I don’t get is that there seems to be some confusion here over the distinction between AGW and regular-GW. I sometimes get the impression that some of the blog’s authors (Mr. Watts even?) are fine with the idea that the Earth is getting warmer, but simply disagree that it’s man-made and do not think it will get much worse. Yet higher temps, regardless of whether they are man-made or not, will naturally result in higher atmospheric humidity. I can just about comprehend people’s disbelief that humans are causing GW, I cannot get my head around why so many still think that the Earth is not warming at all.
Garrett says:
“I sometimes get the impression that some of the blog’s authors (Mr. Watts even?) are fine with the idea that the Earth is getting warmer, but simply disagree that it’s man-made and do not think it will get much worse.”
First, nobody knows if the natural warming trend from the Little Ice Age [LIA] will continue. However, it is not getting “worse”. The planet has been much warmer in the past, with no harmful effects. Warmer is better.
And there may well be some minor warming due to rising man-made CO2 emissions [about 3% of the total; the rest are natural emissions]. But any such warming is too small to measure:
http://oi52.tinypic.com/2agnous.jpg
As you can see, the warming trend since the LIA has not accelerated. The inescapable conclusion: rising CO2 has no measurable effect on global temperatures. Any putative effect from human-emitted CO2 is simply too small to measure.
Ric Werme says: July 18, 2012 at 9:56 am
Ric, I know from living on the front range of Colorado we get hail that will punch through a house roof and kill children at softball size. One inch hail can make a car look like someone spent hours with a ball peen hammer covering every inch of the metal with dents.
Playing with the numbers here: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/termv.html
I get velocities in the 200-250 mph range. Depends on the density of the ice too.
Very interesting question! Seems to track NH seasonality — high in summer, low in winter.
______
Ian W.
Keep a-hammerin’. Enthalpy, indeed! But way too advanced for the AGW tyros to grasp, I fear.
You are obviously a seriously disturbed individual.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hilarious! Well done.
😉
P off!
Your explanation is fine, but there are no “dropplets”.
You must take one
‘P’ off (droplets).
>;-p
Garrett says:
July 18, 2012 at 2:42 am
-No AGW papers in WUWT: You know this is a disingenuous remark. WUWT readers are probably anywhere the best educated on the whole subject. Top notch posters and commenters well versed in the sciences and mathematics have had a huge impact on the development of the real science over recent years. Only in a handful of blogs, like this one does the science get a thorough review (peer review has been a closed love-in joke among a couple of dozen prominent advocacy scientists and cheerleading journals – the degradation of science and of formerly august journals has been phenomenal. It has made the Nobel Prize into a Crackerjack prize). The free reign that the advocates have had and the indecent amount of cash flow was set to ruin the world economy and the environment (crazy energy alternatives and restrictions that would kill the growth of wealth needed to deal with world problems including the real enivironmental issues) before a few short years ago these few blogs came on the scene. This is a powerhouse site. You and everyone else are welcome. That is why, if there are unsupported views by anyone on either side of the question,, they too are bound to be shredded. Hey, I became a believer that the world has actually warmed in the past century and a half from reading here.
chris y says: “The graph seems to confirm that we have had no global warming since about 1995. I think I see a wiggle from Pinatubo around 1991, when global atmospheric opacity dropped by 10% for a good part of a year.”
Opacity???
So, water vapour levels are up about 2.0% in the Arctic. They are not up in the Antarctic since 1958 nor on the rest of the planet since 1948.
“””””……Under the NASA Making Earth Science Data Records for Research Environments (MEaSUREs) program, NVAP is being reprocessed and extended, increasing its 14-year coverage to include 22 years of data. The NVAP-MEaSUREs (NVAP-M) dataset is geared towards varied user needs, and biases in the original dataset caused by algorithm and input changes were removed. This is accomplished by relying on peer reviewed algorithms and producing the data in multiple “streams” to create products geared towards studies of both climate and weather. …..”””””
In other words; we threw away the original real data, and replaced it with a made up set that better fits our conclusions.
I didn’t see word one in the report about that water vapor intercepting solar radiation incoming, and stopping it from reaching the earth’s deep oceans to be stored. Try getting a positive feedback effect out of that little problem. And by the way; Ozone (O3) and CO2 also both intercept some of the incoming solar radiant energy, and prevent it from reaching the surface.
“Water dropples have a perfect slip stream shape and a 200 mph terminal velocity”
___________________________
Raindrops falling at 200 mph??? Crap….I wouldnt wanna be outside when that happens….
“””””…..Brian H says:
July 18, 2012 at 10:42 am
Bob Shapiro says:
July 18, 2012 at 4:16 am
The graph seems to have a very obvious annual cycle. But, if it’s for truly global data, why should this be so?
Very interesting question! Seems to track NH seasonality — high in summer, low in winter…….”””””
Actually, that is just an illusion; it really is tracking the Southern Hemisphere seasonality; High in Winter, and low in Summer.
Water vapor behaves differently at different pressures. Water vapor at or near the ground is a very different thing from water vapor at 30K feet. Other phases of water are further different. Most clouds probably present a negative feedback. I’m even starting to doubt that solid state high clouds are a positive feedback. A remaining area to investigate is precip. Everything we thought we knew about H20 is probably wrong.
The seasonality is a little higher in the Northern Hemisphere.
Both hemispheres average about 25 mms/m2 or 1 inch/m2 or 25 kg/m2. The Northern Hemisphere varies from 19 mms/m2 in the winter to about 32 mm2/m2 in the summer. The southern varies from 20 to 30.
Concerning moist enthalpy: You might look at http://meteo.lcd.lu/today_01.html for a life graph of moist enthalpy (and sensible heat)