At NASA’s Climate 365, there is an interesting story posted with this statement and a graph:
Some say scientists can’t agree on Earth’s temperature changes
Each year, four international science institutions compile temperature data from thousands of stations around the world and make independent judgments about whether the year was warmer or cooler than average. “The official records vary slightly because of subtle differences in the way we analyze the data,” said Reto Ruedy, climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But they also agree extraordinarily well.”
All four records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades. All show the last decade has been the warmest on record.
In sync? Weellll, not quite. Japan apparently hasn’t ‘got their mind right‘ yet as the graph shows:
Here is where it gets interesting. Note the purple line after the year 2000.
The Japanese data line in purple is about .25 degree cooler than the NASA, NOAA, and Met Office data sets after the year 2000. That has partially to do with anomaly baselines chosen by the different agencies, as these two comparison graphs shown below illustrate:
Source: http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/news/press_20120202.pdf
NASA GISS uses a 1951-1980 average for the anomaly baseline, Japan’s Meteorological agency uses a 1981-2010 baseline, and that explains the offset difference between 0.48 and ~ 0.23 C, however, it doesn’t explain the divergence when all of the data is plotted together using the same anomaly 1951-1980 baseline as NASA did, which is explained in more detail at the link provided in the NASA 365 post to NASA’s Earth Observatory study here:
Source: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80167
In that EO story they explain:
The map at the top depicts temperature anomalies, or changes, by region in 2012; it does not show absolute temperature. Reds and blues show how much warmer or cooler each area was in 2012 compared to an averaged base period from 1951–1980. For more explanation of how the analysis works, read World of Change: Global Temperatures.
The justification for using the outdated 1951-1980 baseline is humorous, bold mine:
The data set begins in 1880 because observations did not have sufficient global coverage prior to that time. The period of 1951-1980 was chosen largely because the U.S. National Weather Service uses a three-decade period to define “normal” or average temperature. The GISS temperature analysis effort began around 1980, so the most recent 30 years was 1951-1980. It is also a period when many of today’s adults grew up, so it is a common reference that many people can remember.
So, the choice seems to be more about feeling than hard science, kind of like the time when Jim Hansen and his sponsor Senator Tim Wirth turned off the air conditioning in the Senate hearing room in June 1988 (to make it feel hotter) when they first tried to sell the global warming issue:
But, back to the issue at hand. The baseline difference doesn’t explain the divergence.
Perhaps it has to do with all of the adjustments NOAA and GISS make, perhaps it is a difference in methodology in computing the global surface average and then the anomaly post 2000. Perhaps it has to do with sea surface temperature, which Japan’s Met agency is very big on, but does differently. A hint comes in this process explanation seen here:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/explanation.html
Global Average Surface Temperature Anomalies
JMA estimates global temperature anomalies using data combined not only over land but also over ocean areas. The land part of the combined data for the period before 2000 consists of GHCN (Global Historical Climatology Network) information provided by NCDC (the U.S.A.’s National Climatic Data Center), while that for the period after 2001 consists of CLIMAT messages archived at JMA. The oceanic part of the combined data consists of JMA’s own long-term sea surface temperature analysis data, known as COBE-SST (see the articles in TCC News No.1 and this report).
The procedure for estimating the global mean temperature anomaly is outlined below.
1) An average is obtained for monthly-mean temperature anomalies against the 1971-2000 baseline over land in each 5° x 5° grid box worldwide.
2) An average is obtained for monthly mean sea surface temperature anomalies against the 1971-2000 baseline in each 5° x 5° grid box worldwide in which at least one in-situ observation exists.
3) An average is obtained for the values in 1) and 2) according to the land-to-ocean ratio for each grid box.
4) Monthly mean global temperature anomaly is obtained by averaging the anomalies of all the grid boxes weighted with the area of the grid box.
5) Annual and seasonal mean global temperature anomalies are obtained by averaging monthly-mean global temperature anomalies.
6) The baseline period is adjusted to 1981-2010.
Note what I highlighted in red:
…for the period after 2001 consists of CLIMAT messages archived at JMA
That along with:
The oceanic part of the combined data consists of JMA’s own long-term sea surface temperature analysis data, known as COBE-SST
Is very telling, because it suggests that Japan is using an entirely different method for both land and sea data. For the post 2001 land data, it suggests they use the CLIMAT data as is, rather than the “value added” processing that NCDC/NOAA and NASA GISS do. The Met Office gets the NCDC/NOAA data already pre-processed with the GHCN3 algorithms. NASA GISS deconstructs the data then applies their own set of sausage factory adjustments, which is why their anomaly is often the highest of all the data sets.
Prior to 2001, Japans Met Agency uses the GHCN data, which is pre-processed and adjusted through another sausage recipe pioneered by Dr. Thomas Peterson at NCDC.
The land part of the combined data for the period before 2000 consists of GHCN (Global Historical Climatology Network) information provided by NCDC
A good example of the GHCN sausage is Darwin, Australia, as analysed by Willis Eschenbach:
Above: GHCN homogeneity adjustments to Darwin Airport combined record
So, it appears that Japan’s Meteorological agency is using adjusted GHCN data up to the year 2000, and from 2001 they are using the CLIMAT report data as is, without adjustments. To me, this clearly explains the divergence when you look at the NASA plot magnified and note when the divergence starts. The annotation marks in magenta are mine:
If anyone ever needed the clearest example ever of how NOAA and NASA’s post facto adjustments to the surface temperature record increase the temperature, this is it.
Now, does anyone want to bet that the activist scientists at NOAA/NCDC (Peterson) and NASA (Hansen) start lobbying Japan to change their methodology to be like theirs?
After all, the scientists in Japan “need to get their mind right” if they are going to be able to claim “scientists agree on Earth’s temperature changes”, when right now they clearly don’t.
P.S.
BTW if anyone wants to analyze the Japanese data, here is the source for it:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/map/download.html
It is gridded, and I don’t have software handy at the moment to work with gridded data, but some other readers might.
UPDATE: Tim Channon at Tallbloke’s has plotted the gridded data and offers a graph, see here: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/jmas-global-surface-temperature-gridded-first-look/
It really bugs me when long term temperature plots are measured against a 30-year average when it is pretty common knowledge the PDO/AMO are near 60-year periods. Why can’t they use the 1950-2010 average? How would that affect the plot? How about using only stations which conform to the WMO siting requirements – how would *that* affect the plots? etc. etc. etc.
The Japanese are crazy.
http://www.cracked.com/funny-108-japan/
http://www.cracked.com/article_18567_6-japanese-subcultures-that-are-insane-even-japan.htm
http://www.cracked.com/article_15670_the-25-most-baffling-toys-from-around-world.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_15001_insane-japanese-halloween-costumes21.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_19816_6-japanese-video-games-that-will-make-your-head-explode.html
http://www.cracked.com/funny-3966-japanese-commercials/
(And there’s more where that came from. Not that I need this stuff. I’ve lived in Japan, I speak the language, and am married to a Japanese, so I know whereof I speak. And my wife doesn’t read this blog.)
Plus, they have had their brains fried by the radiation from Fukushima . (About which their Government and media are lying to them.)
So it is no surprise that they end up with differing results.
They are probably right, too. My wife always is.
Arno Arrak says:
January 31, 2013 at 4:24 pm
As an example, I have determined that NASA and Met Office temperatures, from two sides or the ocean, were both subjected to a mysterious computer processing which had the unanticipated consequence of leaving many high spikes in these data sets.
However with GISS, there seems to be more going on. For example, three weeks ago, the warmest ever monthly anomaly on GISS was January, 2007 where the anomaly was 0.89. (It still reads 0.89 on WFT since it has not updated GISS for December yet.) However at the following, that number has been raised to 0.93 over the last 3 weeks.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
On the other hand, Hadcrut4 had January, 2007 at 0.818 both last month and this month as their highest monthly anomaly. Can you tell me exactly what the GISS people discovered about a record from 6 years ago that they did not share with the Hadcrut4 people?
The fact that there is not a higher spike in the 1930’s than now, shows the graph to be wrong.
I included a table in my recent powerpoint presentation for Wattsupwiththat comparing the global temperature anomalies between agencies. I developed the idea from an observation I made several years ago about a 0.5°C difference between HadCRUT and NASA GISS annual temperature one year. What intrigued me was that this almost equalled the claimed 0.6°C increase over 100+ years Jones made in the 2001 IPCC Working Group I Report. It suggested this was abnormal and therefore by implication caused by humans.
This figure, along with the hockey stick, was the second major claim of human influence in that Report. It effectively formed the blade of the stick. The actual figure Jones used was 0.6°C ±0.2°C, in other words a 33% error range, which means the number is effectively meaningless.
Despite this, both parts of the hockey stick became the bulwark of the argument for energy and economic policies for most of the world. Further, we were denied access to data from which both pieces were constructed so a complete standard scientific test for reproducible results is not possible. Was policy ever based on two more discredited pieces of information?
davidmhoffer says:
January 31, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Steve Mosher;
Bottom line, you dont need base periods,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
What you do need is justification for averaging anomalies from very cold regimes with anomalies from very warm regimes. I’ve brought this up with several NASA scientists, none of whom have ever answered. Perhaps you could explain how this is justified?
==========
Because if you have one foot in the oven and the other in the freezer you are statistically comfortable.
sunshinehour1 says — exposing GHCN as the hothead in CAT crowd —
hothead? Climate hotheads? Climate hotheads shouting out their apocalyptic message of a fiery doom???
Hotheads!!!!!! Now there is a great word for referring to the alamrists! Demeaning and accurately descriptive of their behavior. Hotheads.
That hothead Hansen. Hothead alarmism. No sane person could fail to recognize that the hotheads of climate alarmism are best ignored. He is just another hothead. Just more hothead exaggeration. Etc.
That is definitely a word with potential. It should become part of the standard skeptic rhetoric.
Hothead! Got to love it!
Eugene WR Gallun
Hide the
declinedisagreement.rgbatduke says:
January 31, 2013 at 1:12 pm
“Curiously, in climate science it seems to be the other way around. Plot not the measured quantity, but the “anomaly” compared to some presumably known baseline. Plot it without any error bars, even though the methodology used to compute it is rife with assumptions, corrections, interpolations, adjustments, and the blood of a white chicken sacrificed with a black-handled athame. When the error bars are (rarely) shown, do not let the fact that they often include the null hypothesis stop you from asserting otherwise. It’s like they actually study the book How to Lie with Statistics, and not in a good way…”
Rgbatduke sums it nicely. However, the athame is used to draw the magic circle but not for actual cutting.
James Hansen Busies Himself
Creating A Third World Holocaust
That hothead Hansen’s
Atmospheric reflux?
Just Charlie Manson’s
Helter Skelter redux
Realities will
Not reorder his mind
Delusions that kill
Leave all reason behind
Eugene WR Gallun
When all of the data sets use mostly the same sources and then apply the same biased adjustments, why would we think that they would not be in sync. They all have the same political goals.
Dave in Canmore says:
January 31, 2013 at 4:48 pm
“davidmhoffer says….
So refreshing to hear someone speak of the difference between an anomaly in the dry Arctic and at the moist equator! Whenever I see a warm anomaly in the Arctic I always just see it as heat escaping to space and oppositely, a warm temp anomaly in the equator is heat accumulation (temporarily anyway.)
Data means things! Ignore at one’s peril!”
Great to see that others recognize the peril that anomalies present to science. Good points from each of you.
Eugene WR Gallun says:
January 31, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Wow! Your poetry is rather good.
davidmhoffer says:
January 31, 2013 at 1:12 pm
Steve Mosher;
Bottom line, you dont need base periods,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
What you do need is justification for averaging anomalies from very cold regimes with anomalies from very warm regimes. I’ve brought this up with several NASA scientists, none of whom have ever answered. Perhaps you could explain how this is justified?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I threatened to start keeping track of who I have asked this question of and gotten no answer. I’ve asked at least a half dozen warmists this question, but at this time I can only recall (and find record of) two. So the list shall begin:
Zeke Hausfather
Steven Mosher
David:
I see no specific reason why an anomaly-processed trend or analysis may be completely useless ….
But – a VERY important “but” has to be emphasized!
Net radiation from a gray body CANNOT BE ANALYZED or discussed with a simple “single yearly average anomaly” UNLESS you can established explicitly by real world data that EVERY trend at EVERY temperature band at EVERY latitude IS ACTUALLY following the exact same deviation from its respective anomaly baseline.
And, by the way, since the CAGW religion cannot even decide what the actual temperature was for a single year in a single country (the 1934 US “average” temperature for example) then WHY should we believe that a simple 0.2 degree deviation over the entire world from some single but unspecified and never reported and never justified “baseline anomaly of 0.0” is valid?
For example: Are the pole temperatures actually going “up” at the same rate as the world average? Are the equators or mid-tropics or mid-latitudes going up, but the poles going down? Is the Canadian middle tundra going up (because of higher growth in plants and trees and bushes and grasses and low shrubs) while the actual arctic ocean temperatures 1200 km further away are going down?
We read from the CAGW religion that “arctic temperatures are 8 degrees higher, but the DMI reports that mid-summer temperatures at 80 degree north latitude have been gradually decreasing since 1959. So exactly what is the religion’s baseline for their “Bible” of an undefined anomaly that their faith is based on?
davidmhoffer says:
January 31, 2013 at 10:31 pm
I have noted previously that Steven Mosher makes a single appearance on topics here then disappears; a drive-by you might say.
Eve:
BINGO!
End of required discussion.
I agree about the overlay of satellite data.
But perhaps even more telling would be the overlay of CO2 emissions. No fall in CO2 emissions between say 1880 and 1912 9yet a significant drop in temperature anomaly), no significant increase in CO2 emissions between about 1912 and late 1930s 9yet a significant rise in temperature anomaly). CO2 emissions begin to rise as from about 1940 and yet through to the late 1950s temperature anomaly drops! CO2 emissions then rise significantly and temperature anomalies go up from the late 1950s through to the late 1990s (but not at a rate faster than that observed between say 1912 and 1944 when CO2 emissions were not rising sharply), and as from the late 1990s the temperature anomaly is flat (not withstanding the continued rise CO2 emissions).
Anyone looking at that plot with CO2 emissions overlayed would see in the clearest possible terms that there is no first order correlation between CO2 and temperature.
With the satellite data overlayed, would on see that temperatures have been flat for some 33 years (not just 16 years) with only the step change in and around the 1998 super El Nino and again it is apparent from that data that there is no correlation with CO2 emissions.
Climate science will only begin the long road to becoming a real science when temperature anomaly graphs also overlay CO2 emissions.
PS I agree with the many comments regading the dangers of looking at averages (how I hate them) and anomalies from some assumed average. There is no such thing as global climate (apart from being in a glacial or interglacial period), and no such thing as global climate change. Not only that, the impact of any change is dictated by local conditions. Of course, this is all political nonsense since if one were to look at matters locally (as one ought to), each country would do its own thing based upon an assessment as to whether ‘climate change’ would be beneficial, neutral or adverse to its own interests.
RACookPE1978 says:
January 31, 2013 at 11:09 pm
///////////////////////////////////////////////////
At the heart of the AGW claim is one of some energy imbalance. We therefore need to look at energy not temperature. The only valid metric would be to look at RH adjusted figures, alternatively sea water temperatures.
The data is simply not fit for purpose. Ignoring all the basterdisation through repeated adjustments, the problem with siting issues, station drop outs, the proper evaluation of UHI, the length of the data set and the lack of uncertainty/error bars, it is not evaluating the heart of the claim. No genuine science would work off such data.
davidmhoffer:
In your post at January 31, 2013 at 2:51 pm you say
Allow me to suggest a possible explanation for the use of temperature anomalies.
Your stated concern is the spatial variation of temperatures.
But I think the primary reason for using anomalies is the temporal variation of temperatures.
Global temperature varies throughout each year as a function of
(a) the Earth’s orbital distance from the Sun and
(b) the different proportions of ocean and land over the Earth’s Southern and Northern hemispheres.
This seasonal variation is a rise in global temperature of 3.8 deg.C from June to January and a similar fall of global temperature from January to June each year. It is over 4 times larger than the 0.9 deg.C rise in global temperature over the twentieth century.
Presenting monthly global temperatures would mask the global warming since 1990 with the much larger seasonal variation.
Presenting global temperature anomalies reveals the global warming since 1990 which is of interest.
And before anybody asks, no, I am not being sarcastic. My suggestion is completely serious.
Richard
Ouch!
In my post at February 1, 2013 at 2:22 am I wrote
Presenting monthly global temperatures would mask the global warming since 1990 with the much larger seasonal variation.
Presenting global temperature anomalies reveals the global warming since 1990 which is of interest.
I INTENDED TO WRITE
Presenting monthly global temperatures would mask the global warming since 1990 with the much larger seasonal variation.
Presenting global temperature anomalies reveals the global warming since 1900 which is of interest.
Sorry.
Richard
Absolutely BRILLIANT, Anthony, very usefeul. Im making a speach on the sceptics viewpoint on the largest Danish university soon, and this goed directly into the program, perfect!
K.R. Frank
Somewhat on topic: I just threw together a 2-graph post about the JMA COBE sea surface temperature data. There’s nothing exceptional about it and that’s a good thing:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/a-quick-look-at-the-jma-cobi-kobi-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-data/
RACookPE1978 says:
January 31, 2013 at 11:09 pm
I didn’t generate a yearly anomaly of temps, but an annual anomaly of the difference between today’s rise, and tonight’s fall over 5 lat bands. here I also include annual average Min/Max temps, and average Rise/Fall, which I think is very interesting, it varies slightly from year to year, but on an annual basis are almost exactly the same.
It doesn’t appear they are changing the same over the globe. But you can easily see how the polar regions are under sampled.
Worse still, is if the NCDC station list is accurate, there are no arctic station that aren’t on the coast, So Arctic “Warming” is coming from changes in water temps, which we know is happening, we also know that summer temps are not increasing anywhere near as much as winter temps, which makes complete sense if it’s being driven by water temps.
Lastly, which the annual average daily Rise/Fall is almost a perfect match, when looked at on a daily basis, you can see it change as the seasons progress, yet are almost identical over the year.
The last paragraph:
was suppose to be:
Lastly, while the annual average daily Rise/Fall is almost a perfect match, when looked at on a daily basis, you can see it change as the seasons progress, yet are almost identical over the year.