While there’s wailing and gnashing of teeth over the US CONUS surface temperature being the “hottest ever” a cursory review of the sea surface temperatures in U.S.Coastal waters shows no cause for alarm, as they aren’t even close to record levels. It’s just one more reason to suspect that UHI and thermometer siting issues are a major forcing component of the surface temperature record. – Anthony
Are July 2012 Sea Surface Temperatures for U.S. Coastal Waters Also At Record Levels?
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
The map in Figure 1 shows the July 2012 sea surface temperature anomalies, based on NOAA’s ERSST.v3b dataset, for the coordinates of 24N-50N, 130W-65W.
Figure 1
We’ll use those coordinates for the sea surface temperatures (not anomalies) of the U.S. Coastal Waters in the following two graphs. Figure 2 illustrates the July sea surface temperatures for those coordinates from 1854 to 2012, and Figure 3 shows the annual (ending in July) sea surface temperatures for U.S. Coastal Waters from 1855 to 2012. I’ve also plotted the July 2012 value in Figure 2 and the value for the period ending in July 2012 in Figure 3 to simplify your task of comparing the most recent temperatures to the earlier values.
Figure 2
HHHHHHHHHHH
Figure 3
The sea surface temperatures of U.S. Coastal Waters are nowhere close to being at record levels for the month of July 2012 or the 12-month period ending in July 2012. I’ll let you decide (speculate about) what that means with respect to the claims of unprecedented U.S. land surface temperatures in July 2012.
My priority is finishing my book about ENSO and its multiyear aftereffects. I’ve only got a few more chapters to write and then I’m done with the first draft of Who Turned on the Heat? The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. Then I have to go back and read the 500+ pages to see what I wrote.
SOURCE
The map and the data presented are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer.
Bill Illis says
Contiguous US temperatures on a monthly anomaly basis back to 1743
Henry says
Now show me a calibration certificate of a thermometer, from, say, 1895?
I highly recommend the comment thread linked by Ventor. In which Willis demolishes Mosher’s strawman arguments.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/on-volcanoes-and-their-climate-response/#comment-101336
Henry says
Now show me a calibration certificate of a thermometer, from, say, 1895?
LINK
Schmidt and company (fellow travellers) are rejoicing at the northern polar cap ice level today, yet don’t mention its polar opposite?
To bad we can’t pull up a graph from 1884…
Sorry:
LINK = http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
Henry@Fernando
there is no calibration certificate in the link?
that means the accuracy and methodology is in question, of anything before 1900.
Unless I could get hold of the original mesurements, especially the maxima and minima and look at the average change per annum from the average measured over certain defined periods, like ca. 10-12 years, to include a solar cycle, as I have done here,
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Bob Tisdale says:
August 12, 2012 at 6:29 am
When the trade winds relax, gravity causes the warm water that was piled up in the west to slosh east. The mechanics of this have been known for decades. The trade winds relax due to weather-related phenomena called Westerly Wind Bursts, and there are a number of causes of those.
Westerly Wind Bursts is a phenomenological descriptor which tells us nothing. Please tell us more about the causes you allude to.
Whatever they are, we need to keep in mind the furnace which ultimately drives the heat engine.
As usual with components in coupled systems, disentangling cause and effect is tricky…
Westerly Wind Bursts: ENSO’s Tail Rather than the Dog?
“Westerly wind bursts (WWBs) in the equatorial Pacific occur during the development of most El Niño events and are believed to be a major factor in ENSO’s dynamics. Because of their short time scale, WWBs are normally considered part of a stochastic forcing of ENSO, completely external to the interannual ENSO variability. Recent observational studies, however, suggest that the occurrence and characteristics of WWBs may depend to some extent on the state of ENSO components, implying that WWBs, which force ENSO, are modulated by ENSO itself.”
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI3588.1
“””””…..HenryP says:
August 12, 2012 at 1:11 am
George E Schmidt says…..”””””
So HeinrichP, I guess you live in St Louis Mo. I was living there in the mid 1960s when they built that famous memorial to the first people who were smart enough to clear out of town.
Their first question after I told them my name was; ” Is that dt or two tees ?
I guess your final comment went right over my head.
Bob, I have a question regarding SSTs.
Your graphs (thanx for using actual Temps) suggest near US ocean waters are around 295K, and I guess that globally we can be fairly sure they are greater than 273K.
So some 70% or so, of the earth surface (sans Arctic Ocean) is a pretty good mimic of a black body radiator (well gray anyway) with an emissivity (where it matters) of around 0.97-0.98
So MY BB radiation calculator, says that the largest near BB radiator on the planet, is emitting a roughly black body spectrum with a peak spectral emittance at something between 9.86, and 10.65 microns, with a mean of 10.1 microns at 288K. Some of the hottest desert surfaces must be peaking as low as 8.75 microns, and at nearly double the emittance of the 288K mean earth.
So how in the hell can earth’s external emission spectrum correspond to an equivalent Temperature as low as 255 K , when there doesn’t seem to be ANY global BB like emitter that is at that Temperature ?
We are told that the atmospheric gases do not emit a BB spectrum, since the normal atmospheric gases N2 and O2 don’t radiate, and atmospheric emission can only consist of greenhouse gas molecular line spectra (in bands) which don’t shift fequency with Temperature like BB thermal emission does.
So what gives. Why does earth IR emission not look like a 273-295 K Thermal spectrum, with holes for the main GHG absorption bands. I expect to see holes, since the bands absorbed by GHG such as CO2, O3, and H2O, must get reradiated isotropically, so only about half can directly escape.
So I’m puzzled; earth should not be emitting much in the way of a 255 K spectrum.
George E. Smith; says: Your graphs (thanx for using actual Temps) suggest near US ocean waters are around 295K, and I guess that globally we can be fairly sure they are greater than 273K.
Reynolds OI.v2 Global sea surface temp for 2011 was about 291 deg C and GHCN/CAMS Global land surface temp for 2011 was approx 283 deg K, so a weighted average would be near 289 deg K.
tallbloke says: “Westerly Wind Bursts is a phenomenological descriptor which tells us nothing. Please tell us more about the causes you allude to.”
From chapter 4.15 of my soon-to-be-competed (yipeee!) book “Who Turned on the Heat?”
A phenomenon known as a Westerly Wind Burst (WWB), also known as a Westerly Wind Event (WWE), accompanies the relaxed trade winds. So if you wanted to investigate this further, those would be the phrases to use in your searches. There are multiple causes of Westerly Wind Bursts, including:
1. Cross-equatorial tropical cyclones in the western tropical Pacific. This refers to a time when one tropical cyclone exists north of the equator in the western tropical Pacific, while at the same time, another tropical cyclone exists there but south of the equator. These are discussed in Keen (1982) The Role of Cross-Equatorial Tropical Cyclone Pairs in the Southern Oscillation.
2. A single cyclone and series of cyclones in the western tropical Pacific. These are discussed in Hartten (1996) Synoptic settings of westerly wind bursts.
3. Cold surges from mid-latitudes, discussed in Harrison (1984) The appearance of sustained equatorial surface westerlies during the 1982 pacific warm event
4. Convective cloud clusters associated with the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO). Refer to Zhang (1995) Atmospheric Intraseasonal Variability at the Surface in the Tropical Western Pacific Ocean.
As noted earlier, there are a plethora of other papers that discuss these factors. There is a good overall discussion in Vecchi and Harrison (2000) Tropical Pacific Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies, El Niño, and Equatorial Westerly Wind Events.
tallbloke: And based on your follow-up comment, there’s no need for me to link that paper as well. But the statement you quoted (“…the occurrence and characteristics of WWBs may depend to some extent on the state of ENSO components, implying that WWBs, which force ENSO, are modulated by ENSO itself.”) is not unrealistic. ENSO simply provides feedback to itself.