The Impact of Sandy on Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies Along Its Track
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
We’ve established in recent posts that, based on linear trends, the sea surface temperature anomalies along Sandy’s storm track haven’t risen in 70+ years and that there was nothing unusual about the sea surface temperature anomalies there during October 2012. And we’ve established and discussed for years that there is no anthropogenic global warming component in the warming of global sea surface temperatures or ocean heat content.
Yet activist websites continue to post climate change alarmist nonsense in Sandy’s wake. See examples here, here and here. And they call themselves realists. They must think Salvador Dali’s paintings were realistic. Refer to the discussion of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. MOMA notes that “Dalí painted this work…he said, ‘to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.’” I read that and instantly thought of Joe Romm at ClimateProgress and John Cook at SkepticalScience.
I’m tired of responding to their drivel, so this is an informative post.
It presents the impacts of Sandy on the sea surface temperature anomalies, using the storm track data for the week centered on Wednesday October 24th, which, due to data availablity, we’ll have to consider the week during Sandy, and the week of October 31st, which will be the week after.
Like El Niño events, tropical cyclones (hurricanes) are one of Mother Nature’s ways of transporting heat from the tropical oceans toward the poles. These processes allow the heat to be radiated into space more readily at higher latitudes and they also help to reduce the temperature differences between the tropics and the poles that would exist without them. Sandy was a prime example of those processes at work. It drew enough heat from the western North Atlantic to cool the sea surface temperature anomalies about 1.0 deg C along the storm track (12N-40N, 80W-70W). See Figure 1. Sea surface temperature anomalies were near their seasonal high the week of October 24th (during the storm). A week later, the week of October 31st(after the storm) they were about 1.0 deg C cooler.
Figure 1
Keep in mind, though, that the storm track is a reasonably small portion of the global oceans. As such, weekly sea surface temperature anomalies there can be very volatile. Figure 2 illustrates the weekly change in sea surface temperature anomalies (Week “n” Minus the Week before “n”) since the start of this portion of the weekly Reynolds OI.v2 data, January 3, 1990. As shown, weekly changes of 0.4 deg C occur regularly. Even changes of near 0.6 deg C have occurred 4 times. The drop in response to Sandy, however, was freakish—the combined aftereffects of a number of factors that contributed to the storm—and obviously not part of some new normal.
Figure 2
The greatest drop in sea surface temperature anomalies occurred in the extratropics, Figure 3. This should be after Sandy merged with the cold front and became a large extratropical (baroclinic) cyclone (with a small hurricane in the center?).
Figure 3
SOURCES
The Sea Surface Temperature anomaly data used in this post is available through the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh
or:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite=
P. Solar says:
November 12, 2012 at 4:36 am
“As you can see his plot avoids the big picture from which you can clearly see what is happening without dubious trend fitting.”
Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification.
Could a storm of this nature be a leading indicator of the looming end of the interglacial?
Peoples Democratic Republic of Catastrophic Climate Disruption.
Bob Tisdale says:
November 12, 2012 at 2:30 am
Philip Bradley says: “There is no seasonality to anomalies.”
Actually, there is. You can see the seasonal component in SST anomalies in any long-term sea surface temperature anomaly animation:
Bob, There can be short term (one or several years) seasonal pattern in the anomalies, but a long term (covering the reference period) seasonal pattern is impossible.
You said,
Sea surface temperature anomalies were near their seasonal high the week of October 24th
You could have said ‘annual high’. Although annual high for the anomaly doesn’t mean much.
As I mentioned the seasonal SST (and satellite temperature data) pattern in the last 2 or 3 years means (assuming its not chance variation) that something has changed in the climate, and it appears to be a global reduction in clouds and resultant increase in solar insolation.
And to follow up on P Solar’s post. When someone points out an error in your work use it as an opportunity to learn something you didn’t know and/or improve the quality of your work. Science writing requires a degree of precision in the use of language that many people find difficult. I come across examples of imprecise language all the time in published peer reviewed papers.
Take Anthony as an example. He is always gracious when people point out errors in his work (although he makes very few), and its an important reason for the success of his blog.
Philip Bradley says: “Bob, There can be short term (one or several years) seasonal pattern in the anomalies, but a long term (covering the reference period) seasonal pattern is impossible.”
I’m not discussing the long-term, Philip.
Impossible? That’s a bad word for you to use when you obviously have not studied the subject. Read on, Philip.
Philip Bradley says: “As I mentioned the seasonal SST (and satellite temperature data) pattern in the last 2 or 3 years means (assuming its not chance variation) that something has changed in the climate, and it appears to be a global reduction in clouds and resultant increase in solar insolation.”
And as I have suggested to you on past threads, you need to study the impact of the base years on the seasonal component and on the additional variability. Further to this, in my earlier reply to you on this thread, I provided the graphs of the Northern and Southern Hemisphere sea surface temperature anomalies to illustrate the seasonal component in the data. You must’ve missed them or maybe you were having trouble with seeing the seasonal component. If so, here’s a graph of the difference between the sea surface temperature ANOMALIES of the two hemispheres: Northern Hemisphere minus Southern Hemisphere. Note how the seasonal component grows in recent years, outside of the base years of 1971-2000 used by NOAA:
http://i49.tinypic.com/2a9v2ud.jpg
I used the NOAA NOMADS website for that graph, as I did when I wrote this post. Now, using the KNMI Climate Explorer, I shifted the base years to 1995 to 2011 for the next graph. It’s the same data, just different base years. Note how the greatest seasonal component has shifted to the early part of the data:
http://i45.tinypic.com/1pcu38.jpg
Looking at the earlier part of the graph, would you also assume that “something has changed in the climate” during those wild swings?
Philip Bradley says: “And to follow up on P Solar’s post. When someone points out an error in your work use it as an opportunity to learn something you didn’t know and/or improve the quality of your work.”
When I’m wrong, I’m happy to admit or correct my mistake. HOWEVER, in this instance I was not wrong. Maybe you should heed your own advise!
Typo correction, Philip. The last sentence should read, Maybe you should heed your own advice!
Drivel, drivel, drivel – hoping for Sandy 2.0 at 910 hPa 🙂
REPLY: So you’d wish death and destruction on people just to prove your point? What a schmuck. Get the off my blog PERMANENTLY. We don’t cater to sadists here, and after many warnings, I’m done with you. GET OUT. – Anthony Watts
Anthony: After you banished cRR Kampen from WUWT, he/she came to visit me at my blog.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/the-impact-of-sandy-on-sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-along-its-track/#comment-6321
It was his/her first and last comment there.
The warmies have said that “Sandy” was the worst Hurricane ever.[snip. No HAARP discussion, please. — mod.]
Could it be that the surface temperatures were churned, revealing cooler deeper water? I’m just curious. It of course makes sense that bring warmth higher up would lead to heat transfer out of our upper atmosphere.
I notice the discussion of a hurricane moving heat laterally, but not the effect of moving tons of water vapor to altitude where it condenses and radiates heat to space vertically.
All that water falling as rain represents heat transported to great heights in the clouds. And released there.
In that situation, more GHG (at altitude) ought to increase heat radiation and net cooling.
It’s not just poleward transport that matters…
So one could say that rain generally has a balancing effect on warmer weather. If it rains more when oceans are warmer, this makes sense. Is there a general study that shows this as one of the moderating effect, helping to balance the earth’s energy budget? Is this one of the negative feedbacks?
[snip]