UAH Global Temperature Update for January, 2013: +0.51 deg. C
By Dr. Roy Spencer
Our Version 5.5 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for January, 2013 is +0.51 deg. C, a substantial increase from December’s +0.20 deg. C. (click for large version):
The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 13 months are:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2012 1 -0.134 -0.065 -0.203 -0.256
2012 2 -0.135 +0.018 -0.289 -0.320
2012 3 +0.051 +0.119 -0.017 -0.238
2012 4 +0.232 +0.351 +0.114 -0.242
2012 5 +0.179 +0.337 +0.021 -0.098
2012 6 +0.235 +0.370 +0.101 -0.019
2012 7 +0.130 +0.256 +0.003 +0.142
2012 8 +0.208 +0.214 +0.202 +0.062
2012 9 +0.339 +0.350 +0.327 +0.153
2012 10 +0.333 +0.306 +0.361 +0.109
2012 11 +0.282 +0.299 +0.265 +0.172
2012 12 +0.206 +0.148 +0.264 +0.138
2013 1 +0.506 +0.553 +0.459 +0.375
Due to the rather large 1-month increase in the temperature anomaly, I double checked the computations, and found that multiple satellites (NOAA-15, NOAA-18, and Aqua) all saw approximately equal levels of warming versus a year ago (January, 2012), so for now I’m accepting the results as real. The most common cause of such warm spikes (when there is no El Nino to blame) is a temporary increase in convective heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere. This would suggest that the global average sea surface temperature anomaly might have actually cooled in January, but I have not checked to see if that is the case.
Archived color maps of local temperature anomalies will be updated shortly are available on-line at http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/;
The processed temperature data (updated shortly) is available on-line at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
===============================================================
Anthony: Given Dr. Spencer’s obvious trepidations about the large jump, I have to wonder though, why this result from Dr. Ryan Maue at WeatherBell is so much different? Maue reports that the January 2013 NCEP 2 meter surface temperature reanalysis global temperature anomaly is +0.087°C compared to the same 1981-2010 base period that Spencer uses for UAH. The CONUS value for January is +0.006°C
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I saw this this afternoon, (I include some climate comments in my monthly status report at work).
Two things I noted – the stratospheric warming event from a couple weeks ago to support for Spencer’s suggestion of heat from the ocean, see Bob Tisdale’s preliminary report at
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/preliminary-january-2013-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-update/
Doesn’t really make sense unless it was that meridional flow we had for nearly the entire month that was taking air up the eastern Pacific from the tropics all the way up to Alaska. California was very dry as the moisture was 150-200 miles off shore and headed nearly due north for the entire month. The flow looks like it might be becoming a bit more zonal now so maybe we will get some rain But there was a lot of tropical moisture being shipped to Alaska in January. It was raining in Alaska with snow levels pretty high at times. But Europe, Asia, and the much of the US were pretty cold in January. Hard to figure this one out.
This is exactly what I would have predicted (did predict) There is a peak every 3.75 years (roughly), this being the tenth peak since 1979 and should peak out about mid this year. It should turn around a head for a new low bottoming out around mid to late 2016. That low should be a deep one – every second trough (7.5 years apart) being extra low. Take a look at the running averages in the Climate4you site with their dip every 7.5 years.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/AllCompared%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979.gif
What it all means – I don’t know but I believe climate inertia is such that when you get 4 X 7.5 year- cycles in a row – you are probably going to get another one.
Credibility = zero
Something = wrong
Cold NH based on reports. Decisively cool in my part of SH. Apart from short lived heat wave in Aus… where the heck was it consistently so warm? Can this data be correlated to real life experience? Colour me VERY sceptical…
Having long ago abandoned all but the satellites to reliably measure global average temperature, I’ll not whine when they tell me something I don’t want to hear. Time will tell whether or not this is a momentary blip (I like the oceans coughing up heat theory), but for now, at least, I think it is what it is. Anyone who regularly visits the ASMU temperature site could see this one coming all month long.
I hope the alarmists jump on this, anything that highlights their disconnection from reality is always welcome. It certainly hasn’t beem warm here in the UK!
Re my posting at 11:13 – I will add that it is best to remove the 60 year sinusoidal cycle first which peaked late 2008 with an amplitude of plus or minus just under 0.2 degrees C.
Wish i could send you a graph but its technically beyond me.
Cheers
I don’t trust UAH anymore. I don’t quote it either. I also was in Europe in January and it was cold.
All data sets, except UAH are declining over the period of 11 years (= equiv. of one solar cycle)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend
RSS has just reported an even bigger jump than UAH for January 2013, up by +0.34 on December at +0.44C: http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_3.txt
Tisdale is reporting in his preliminary sea surface temperatures for January (doesn’t have the final published yet as of right now) that the oceans cooled significantly in January which would be consistent with what Dr. Spencer said. The preliminary monthly graph is here:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/preliminary-global.png
But that is shy some data yet. The final report should be published within a week if he keeps to his usual pattern.
GabrielHBay says: February 5, 2013 at 11:15 pm
“Apart from short lived heat wave in Aus… where the heck was it consistently so warm?”
I did a very early TempLS run. It was up about 0.15°C, only partly recovering the big drop in December, due to cold in Russia and NW N America.. The January hot places were NW N America, Central Asia and Australia. But there is more data to come yet.
Whilst the RSS data has a different baseline, it will be interesting to see what it says for the month.
I trust the satellite data at least for short term changes like this. Longer term (decades) there may be unrecognized biases, despite Dr Spencer’s and others best efforts.
This is also contrary to the pattern of the last 2 years when winter global anomalies reduced in winter to close to or below zero. But look at Dr Spencer graph above and a winter anomaly peak was the norm prior to the last 2 years.
I agree with Dr Spencer that it relates to ocean heat transport to the land via evaporation and precipitation. Remember, increased water vapour increases the heat capacity of air and thus reduces temperatures (all else being equal).
BTW, the ‘normal’ winter anomaly peak is due to reduced aerosols and aerosol seeded clouds. Which suggests aerosols increased in the previous 2 years and have now returned to their longer term downward trend. Which further suggest increased ocean evaporation has rained out the aerosol increase of the last 2 years.
I see the “just for entertainment purposes” regression has gone – I wonder why!
If any of you commenting think Spencer or Christy would intentionally bias their data set warm you are bats#!t. Mistakes can be made, sure. But accusing either of these two of peddling alarmism is outlandish and flat-out wrong.
NCEP is a model.
I think it makes sense that the LT warms if earth cools.
There are a few ways that earth can cool or warm.
– More/less TSI
-More/less clouds.
-More/less water vapour
-More/less CO2.
-Higher/lower temperarture in parts of atmosphere that irradiate directly out to space.
The only way that earth looses it’s energy is through IR so if earth is going to cool it has to emit more IR to space than the energy it absorbes from the sun.
Without knowing exactly how much IR that is radiated from anywhere from the surface to the top of the atmosphere I think I have read that the main part of IR radiated back out to space is higher up in the atmosphere. In that case the one way for surface to cool is to warm the amtosphere and it may be that process that UAH is detecting since it do not meassure surface temperatures.. Warmer molecules in the part of atmosphere that irradiate directly out to space will increase earths energy loss and give earth a nagtive energy balance as long as this condition occur.
Sanity check. The Global troposphere can’t (and does not) change temperature by such a large amount instantaneously.
The measurement methodology/processing might be flawed, but more likely you are seeing a plot of baseline noise with excess “zooming in” ie brownian artifacts of the display.
Any analytical measurement value MUST show both a value and some kind of error bar.
What you are seeing in that plot is high frequency noise that does not occur in reality. Try “zooming out” the Y-axis and adding realistic error correction.
For example
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/to:1980/plot/rss-land/plot/uah-land
shows the same data with a different graphical representation.
I was going to write something sarcastic in the style of the idiotic alarmists of “more proof” … but its so long since I’ve heard them that I’ve literally forgotten what they say.
As someone who lives in “NW N America” I can confirm that most of January was more pleasant than most years. We had the less usual situation where north winds were warm, as the tropical flow tracked north up the coast, then took a hard 180 degree right somewhere around Alaska and came back down this side of the Rockies.
Unlike some people, though, I was far from alarmed, and actually enjoy a January day that isn’t too cold to breathe. Christmas time was very, very cold. My lake still has completely average ice thickness.
Also, in my eyes this still essentially renders the entire exercise of a “global average temperature” as completely useless, as I’ve been saying for years. Atmospheric temperature is something like 1/600th of the climate system anyway. If you click over to http://www.wx.ca and click the “Almanac” tab you can see the daily averages were above mean (but nowhere near records), with a few days when the flow faltered and we dropped back to the icebox.
Given that Dr Ryan Maue is using a re-analysis method that is not publicly available for audit as far as I can discover, surely the discrepancy between the Weatherbell adjusted result and all the other measurements, including Dr Spencer’s, should cast the doubt on the Weatherbell claim given the weight of evidence.
This issue has now got nothing to do with science. If it ever did.
It is about power.
Given that reality has failed to support this programme, it is very obvious that the proponents of this are increasingly ready to do anything to at all to achieve what they want.
If they can possibly interfere with basic measurements and data they will.
It is foolish to the point of suicide to not see this, and to naively believe that all the participants in this are at heart “decent”.
They are not.
All of human history will tell you that.
This months data shows record heat for the state of the ENSO cycle. Could this record heat be caused by Global Warming? How hot will it get the next time there is an El Nino?
UAH is run by John Christy & Roy Spencer – both of whom are impeccable scientists. Anyone here who would question their motives or competance should take a step back and reconsidre their own motives. The data is what it is. One month is just noise. Wait and see.
My understanding is that Dr. Maue uses the data put into the GFS model. In other words, it is not from a model run; rather it is the “starting point.” One would hope the data put into the model was not “modeled” but rather was the actual facts, gathered from all over the world, (though of course one never knows, these days.)
By using this data it is possible for Dr. Maue to not merely get an average for the entire month, but to get daily and even hourly read-outs of the average 2m temperatures of the planet.
What fascinates me is that these numbers do vary quite a bit, on a daily and even hourly basis. The “average” is not a temperature that slowly changes over a period of time, but rather is amazingly responsive. You might even call it “lively.”
In any case, when the world’s average temperature can vary half a degree in a matter of days, it is hard to worry so much about it varying half a degree over thirty years.