Model-Data Comparison: Pacific Ocean Satellite-Era Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
I’ll be adding the Pacific Ocean (60S-65N, 120E-80W) sea surface temperature anomalies to my monthly updates. See Figure 1 for the area covered by those coordinates. Why add the Pacific Ocean? It covers about 45% of the surface area of the global oceans and about 33% of the surface area of the globe (land+oceans combined). Or, to look at it another way, the Pacific Ocean covers more of the globe than the continental land masses combined. The Pacific stretches almost halfway around the globe at the equator, which is one of the reasons why El Niño and La Niña events are so important to global climate. When an El Niño releases a massive volume of naturally created warm water from below the surface of the western tropical Pacific and spreads it across the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific, precipitation and surface temperatures react globally—responding to the all of the additional moisture in the atmosphere and to the shifts in atmospheric circulation (jet streams).
Figure 1
With that in mind, I decided to run a quick model-data comparison for the Pacific, using the coordinates listed above.
The following graph (Figure 2) compares the Reynolds OI.v2-based satellite era sea surface temperature anomalies to the multi-model ensemble mean of the RCP6.0-based climate models from the CMIP5 archive. Those model outputs are available through the KNMI Climate Explorer. The CMIP5 archive is being used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their upcoming 5th Assessment Report (AR5). Climate forcing scenario RCP6.0 is similar to the commonly used A1B scenario from past IPCC reports. I’ve started the comparison in January 1994, right after the apparent rebound from the impacts of the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo—the impacts in the data, not the models. The model mean represents the best-guess estimate of how the sea surface temperature anomalies for the Pacific Ocean would warm IF they were warmed by manmade greenhouse gases. The models say the Pacific sea surface temperatures should have warmed approximately 0.4 deg C or about 0.7 deg F. However, based on the linear trend, the satellite-based data for the Pacific Ocean haven’t warmed since 1994. That’s one month shy of 19 years, almost 2 decades, with no warming of the sea surface temperatures for the entire Pacific Ocean. That’s a chunk of real estate (wet real estate) that appears to contradict the hypothesis of greenhouse gas-driven global warming. I have a funny feeling we won’t see this model-data comparison in the upcoming IPCC AR5.
Figure 2
If we extend the model-data comparison back in time to the November 1981 start of the dataset, Figure 3, the trend of the model simulations is still about 3 times higher than the observed warming. If the modelers can’t even simulate the warming of the largest ocean basin on the planet, what value do the models have? Some readers might think the answers are none, nada, zip.
Figure 3
Figure 4 presents the Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature anomalies as they will appear in the monthly updates.
Figure 4
FOR THOSE NEW TO SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALY GRAPHS
The large upward spikes in Figure 4 are caused by El Niño events and most of the downward ones are caused by La Niñas. The effects of the explosive volcanic eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991 are also evident. The eruption of El Chichon counteracted the effects of the 1982/83 El Niño, which was comparable in size to the one in 1997/98, so the spike in 1982/83 would have been stronger if not for that volcanic eruption. And the eruption of Mount Pinatubo overwhelmed the effects of a series of smaller El Ninos around then and caused the apparent dip and rebound from 1991 until the end of 1993.
HAT TIP
Many thanks to Jennifer Marohasy.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO AND LA NIÑA AND THEIR LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES?
Why should you be interested? Sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not manmade greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal. That is, the warming of the global oceans has been caused by Mother Nature, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
I’ve recently published my e-book (pdf) about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data that’s available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.
Who Turned on the Heat? was introduced in the blog post Everything You Every Wanted to Know about El Niño and La Niña… …Well Just about Everything. The Updated Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing. The book was updated recently to correct a few typos.
Please buy a copy. (Credit/Debit Card through PayPal. You do NOT need to open a PayPal account.). It’s only US$8.00.
VIDEOS
For those who’d like a more detailed preview of Who Turned on the Heat? see Part 1 and Part 2 of the video series The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans. Part 1 appeared in the 24-hour WattsUpWithThat TV (WUWT-TV) special hosted by Anthony Watts in November 2012. You may also be interested in the video Dear President Obama: A Video Memo about Climate Change.
SOURCES
The NOAA Optimally Interpolated Sea Surface Temperature Data (Reynolds OI.v2) are available through the NOAA National Operational Model Archive & Distribution System (NOMADS).
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh
The CMIP5 Sea Surface Temperature data (identified as TOS, assumedly for Temperature of the Ocean Surface) is available through the KNMI Climate Explorer Monthly CMIP5 scenario runs webpage.
Thanks, Anthony.
Great stuff Bob!
Thank you for the post. NOAA predicts EL Nino and to me it seems like La Nina is goin to show up pretty soon. What is your prediction?
Olavi, last time I looked NOAA was projecting ENSO-neutral through the rest of the season:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
I don’t make predictions, but ENSO-neutral sounds reasonable to me.
Refer also to my preliminary November 2012 sea surface temperature update. It’s a week old. NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies have dropped a little since then:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/preliminary-november-2012-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-update/
Regards
Nah? What did I tell you. 1995 – is when the regime changed from warming to cooling. It is the radiation less than half um that warms the oceans and that drives the weather. And that type is regulated by the sun (Gleisberg cycle)
Quick question – re the model ensemble used in the comparions (CMIP5/IPCC) – are any other models (or perhaps the individual components of the ensemble) showing better results?
I find it quite disconcerting that the difference between model(s) and reality is so bad, (yeah, I know the models aren’t going to be perfect, but hey, this is ridiculous IMHO) especially as the models seems to inherently ‘show’ (or calculate via inherent forcings?) a permanent rising trend well above and beyond the observed cooling periods.
Frankly, I would consider the modelers to be way off base with these efforts and any and all works/papers and policy statements or actions based on such models should be immediately revoked/withdrawn, etc.
Bob,
Aren’t there two lessons here? The models have got the slope wrong with respect to warming of the oceans but they also miss the ENSO cycle. Since so much of the seasonal weather patterns are dependent upon the ocean set up, could you also argue that if you cannot predict ENSO (or the temperature distributions in other ocean basins) that you cannot predict the weather and more specifically predict anything about extreme weather?
When were those climate model predictions made?
.
Just a quick observation on a closely related subject.
I have seen it written in WUWT that hurricanes cool the sea, and therefore remove thermic energy from the sea/climate (depositing this energy into the upper atmosphere, and thence intomspace).
However, when I was in the Mediterranean, a small but rough storm passed, and the sea was noticeably 5 degrees c cooler afterwards. Quite obviously, this warm surface temperature had not been redistributed into the atmosphere, but the rough sea surface had redistributed (mixed) this warmth into lower layers in the sea.
Thus storms and hurricanes may well store energy in the lower layers of the sea, for later seasons, rather than dissipating it. Is this so?
.
So .2 since the cold spell of the 40s through the 70s. I wonder what it was like prior to the cold spell?
Bob– Thank you as always for your excellent and informative reports.
I’d like to suggest that occasionally, 2-standard deviation bands be placed on the CMIP temp projections to give a clearer statistical indication of just how far off IPCC’s model projections are from reality.
Thank you.
So Bob, in your first figure, some of those purple up and down edges are pretty darn steep, which just doesn’t look like thermal time constan theating effects, for such a huge mass of water, with an astronomical heat content.
But then it is SST that is plotted, and not total ocean volume Temperature.
So somebody like me who knows pretty much nothing about oceans, would take a WAG that these SST numbers are mostly the result of “stirring” up the oceans, and bringing already existing “heat” to the surface, rather than new heating and cooling of a much more static thermal mass.
I can see how rotation plus land mass edge interractions could be quite effective stirring tools, along with storm systems making it quite chaotic.
For the life of me, I can’t even imagine how one could model such a system.
Well what the hell ! I see the pretty powder blue lines say they can’t.
I do not know the little ENSO meter gets data from – but the indicator is tilted towards the El Nino side of neutral.
SOI daily data plus 30 day and 90 day averages at the Long Paddock page suggest it should tilt towards La Nina.
http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/seasonalclimateoutlook/southernoscillationindex/30daysoivalues/
Silver Ralph, why is it quite obvious that
‘the rough sea surface had redistributed (mixed) this warmth into lower layers in the sea’
?
“””””…..
Silver Ralph says:
December 6, 2012 at 9:21 am
Just a quick observation on a closely related subject……”””””
So Silver, most big oceanic storms physically transport millions of tonnes of real H2O mass into the atmosphere, along with about 590 calories per gram, of latent heat of evaporation.
So I think your thesis doesn’t hold water; that surface “heat” has gone to where the sun DOES shine; the upper atmosphere. So it isn’t down in Davey Jones’ locker !
It seems to me this prediction business, be it numeric models or goat guts is nothing but a sham game of intellectual slight of hand. We all know the numeric models are um-calibratable, as all the variables are neither understood, cataloged or accurately measured. That aside from the impossibility of modeling dynamic systems with essentially static mathematics. This models and often some of the empirical data being collected are also suffering from overly precise inaccuracies.
george e. smith says:
December 6, 2012 at 9:46 am
“So Silver, most big oceanic storms physically transport millions of tonnes of real H2O mass into the atmosphere, along with about 590 calories per gram, of latent heat of evaporation.”
I did a rough calculation that Hurricane Ike dropped enough water to fill about 1/3-1/2 of Lake Erie.
george e. smith says:
December 6, 2012 at 9:37 am
“would take a WAG that these SST numbers are mostly the result of “stirring” up the oceans, and bringing already existing “heat” to the surface, ”
From the water temperature profiles that i’ve seen (a handful), the surface is the warmest water, and below about 300m it’s almost all near freezing.
In case it was not clear from my previous comments and questions, I respect your work.
Thanks for the post.
Silver Ralph: when I was in the Mediterranean, a small but rough storm passed, and the sea was noticeably 5 degrees c cooler afterwards. Quite obviously, this warm surface temperature had not been redistributed into the atmosphere, but the rough sea surface had redistributed (mixed) this warmth into lower layers in the sea.
Why was it obvious, or even evident, that the energy had been redistributed to the lower layers in the sea instead of the upper atmosphere?
Just looking at the CMIP model ensembles, not only are the trends wrong, the magnitude of the seasonal fluctuations are way off (amplitudes much too small). Time to
debugrecalibrate the models…” Silver Ralph says:
December 6, 2012 at 9:21 am
Thus storms and hurricanes may well store energy in the lower layers of the sea, for later seasons, rather than dissipating it. Is this so?”
This season is a later season for previous seasons as are all previous seasons. You seem to be suggesting that the climate is constatntly forcing energy into the deep ocean. The renown Dr Trenberth as failed to find this energy, in fact he thinks it’s a travesty. And as the models predict surface warming your hypothesis if correct would prove them wrong as much as the actual sea surface temperature record does.
Models are wrong and you are wrong.
Frank K. says: “Just looking at the CMIP model ensembles, not only are the trends wrong, the magnitude of the seasonal fluctuations are way off (amplitudes much too small).”
The ensemble mean is the average of dozens of ensemble members and the models are not initiated at any one specific time, so the yearly variations cancel out one another, minimizing the amplitudes we’re seeing.
Anthony,
A suggestion inspired by this latest model fail.
Can you put up a reference page that tracks “claim v data” so we can keep track of CAGW models as they fail?
I’d be willing to bet that if we correlated years to fail and fail that the only surviving alarmist claims are those at the long end of the prediction spectrum.
DR says: “When were those climate model predictions made?”
DR, according to the schedule here…
http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/
…the archive was open through July 2012, with the first models expected to be submitted in February 2011.