UAH Global temperature for January, up significantly, but other data doesn't match

Claude Harvey says:
February 5, 2013 at 11:18 pm
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x2.
It was not what I was expecting given the winter that I have just lived through, but certainly it was what the UAH global data was pointing at throughout the last month. Always dangeous to have preconceptions and let these cloud your judgment and interpretation of data.
The observed increase is most likely a consequence of the oceans cooling. It is only ocean temperature that should concern us given that that it is the oceans that drive the climate, ocean temperature is a true metric of energy and the latent heat content of the oceans dwarves the latent heat content of the atmosphere. Look at the dog, not the tail since it is the dog that wags the tail, not the other way around..

Anthony,
you say – quote: “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.” – unquote.
That is correct. Folowing your “Sea Ice Page” very closely – i.e. twice a day, regularly – I noticed that recently, some areas of the the Gulf Stream’s northern extension towards Europe, the North Atlantic Drift, have SIGNIFICANTLY cooled over the past few weeks: From above 8 degrees centigrade to approx. 6 degrees centigrade, in it’s warmest areas, which can be seen HERE:
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/color_anomaly_NPS_ophi0.png

@- jc
“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 unclear which side, {or both?} this indictment applies to. Reality seems to be warming.
Several different methods give a consistent result. Another unknown method gives a result that conforms to the preferences of the people that produced it. Which do you think are interfering with the basic measurements, Dr Roy Spencer…. Or Weatherbell?
@-“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.”
Indeed.
The history of motivated rejection of scientifically identified dangers. CFCs, asbestos, lead, OPs, particulates, SOx… And of course tobbaco all indicate the lack of decency on the part of those trying to avoid the implications of science on these subjects.

Temperature anomalies resolved to 0,01° to 0.0001° and no error bars? Maybe the satellites will to 0.001°, but I’m always amazed by how well climate scientists measure things.

Kind of an unusual December and January.
On Land and in the atmosphere that is.
Ocean sea surface temperatures seem to be following the typical pattern expected as we transition from a short 2012 El Nino to the current La Nina conditions.
HadSST3 was down -0.06C in December and Oiv2 SSTs are down -0.05C in January. More-or-less lagging behind the changes in the ENSO which peaked last August at +0.73C and is down to -0.5C now.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/data/HadSST.3.1.0.0/HadSST3_monthly_globe_ts.txt
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/sstoi.indices
On Land, Crutemp4 fell by an amazing -0.62C in December down to 0.233C. There is larger variability on Land but this is an unexpectedly large drop. (northern Asia/Russia were the most below normal).
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/crutem4/data/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/CRUTEM.4.1.1.0.global_n+s_monthly
The atmosphere was more-or-less following the ENSO as well until January’s large increase. Not too much to explain it There was a large Sudden Stratospheric Warming event at the north pole. This usually makes the atmosphere warmer in the far north (colder in some other location like northern Asia/Russia) but it usually does not impact the rest of the globe and there is a least one of these events each winter so should be expected.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_JFM_NH_2013.gif
I sometimes think of the ENSO’s impact on global temperatures by how much the out-going long-wave radiation (OLR) varies at the International Dateline. This is one of the planet’s biggest thermostats and the variability here (lagging 3 months behind the ENSO) is truly massive. +/- 50 Watts/m2 which would dwarf the variability of any other place on the planet.
When the trendline in this chart is strongly Yellow, the planet is cooling. When it is Blue, the planet is warming. It is based on how the ENSO impacts the formation of clouds at the International Dateline and whether the warm equatorial Pacific ocean energy is simply radiated fast to space because there are no clouds to hold it in or whether there is lots of clouds here holding the heat in. This is how the ENSO impacts global temperatures the way it does. This January and into February, there is lots of clouds holding the heat in (Blue) – while we should be transitioning now to (Yellow) and little cloud here. Not right now.
http://cawcr.gov.au/staff/mwheeler/maproom/OLR/ts.r4.l.gif
That is my convoluted explanation.

Who lives at the global average address? And if those that do are finding things a little warm for their liking couldn’t the hat be passed around to raise enough money for them to buy a ticket out of there?

The January data are clearly wrong. Massive aerial cooling of both the Tropical and Non Tropical
Eastern Pacific Ocean ensued throughout January. Very distrustful of any “satellite data” now.

@ur momisugly izen
It is clear from the tone of your comment taken as a whole that you are incapable of viewing this issue and any other in all likelihood in terms other than “sides”. This is tribalism. This is primitive.
To put it in your terms, the side is called reality.
Reality of warming or cooling is not in any measurements of any sort.
These are precisely that, measurements.
Measurements can be faulty.
.
This can be the case because they are intentionally corrupted.
Your last paragraph shows you clearly for what you are.
Your conflation of the reliability of the measurement of reality, and confidence in that, with the rejection of “scientifically identified dangers” shows all.
On the one hand you propose that there is in fact a history of those with a “lack of decency” “trying to avoid the implications of science”.
On the other, you plainly reject any possibility that any reason for doubt as to the actual basis – measurements of reality – for claiming legitimacy for any proposition is itself valid.
It is not debatable that vast mounts of money, and the validation of those with certain ideologies which compel them to a certain result and course of action (such as you), are directed at and depend upon this issue.
Simple question.
If it is true, as you apparently accept at least when it suits your case in the issues you mentioned, that there are those who willfully attempt to distort the perception of reality for their own gain, is it not only possible but very likely that they will attempt to interfere with a process of understanding in any way they effectively can?
Yes or no is all that is required.

Ooops
http://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ec-normals-0x0-2012-01.png
http://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ec-normals-0x0-2013-01.png
http://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ec-normals-0x0-2012-12.png

An addition to my earlier comment as to the reliability of measurements.
I am not implying at at all that Christy and/or Spencer are involved or even could be involved with the falsification of measurements.
They don’t have control of the application of the technologies required for measurements. The media in only the past week has carried stories of computer programmes being corrupted in major companies. This is a commonplace in terms of the occurence and reach of execution. It is hard to see why readings from any satellite that exists should be exempt.

Ric Werme says:
February 5, 2013 at 10:46 pm
….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/
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Dr Nir Shaviv’s idea The oceans as a calorimeter does a good job of coupling everything together. We already know the oceans temperatures rule the atmosphere and not the other way round.

A calorimeter is a device which measures the amount of heat given off in a chemical or physical reaction. It turns out that one can use the Earth’s oceans as one giant calorimeter to measure the amount of heat Earth absorbs and reemits every solar cycle….
One of the raging debates in the climate community relates to the question of whether there is any mechanism amplifying solar activity. That is, are the solar synchronized climatic variations that we see (e.g., take a look at fig. 1 here) due to changes of just the solar irradiance, or, are they due to some effect which amplifies the solar-climate link. In particular, is there an amplification of some non-thermal component of the sun? (e.g., UV, solar magnetic field, solar wind or others which have much larger variations than the 0.1% variations of the solar irradiance). This question has interesting repercussions to the question of global warming, which is why the debate is so fierce.
If only solar irradiance is the cause of the solar-related climate variations, it would imply that the small solar variations cause large temperature variations on Earth, and therefore that Earth has a very sensitive climate. If on the other hand there is some amplification mechanism, it would imply that solar variations induce much larger variations in the radiative budget, and that the observed temperature variations can therefore be explained with a smaller climate sensitivity…
is there a direct record which measures the heat flux going into the climate system? The answer is that over the 11-year solar cycle, a large fraction of the flux entering the climate system goes into the oceans. However, because of the high heat capacity of the oceans, this heat content doesn’t change the ocean temperature by much….
It turns out that there are three different types of data sets from which the ocean heat content can derived….
The ocean heat content, is a direct measurement of the energy stored in the oceans….
Nevertheless, the beautiful thing is that within the errors in the data sets (and estimate for the systematics), all three sets give consistently the same answer, that a large heat flux periodically enters and leaves the oceans with the solar cycle, and this heat flux is about 6 to 8 times larger than can be expected from changes in the solar irradiance only. This implies that an amplification mechanism necessarily exists. Interestingly, the size is consistent with what would be expected from the observed low altitude cloud cover variations.….
So what does it mean?
First, it means that the IPCC cannot ignore anymore the fact that the sun has a large climatic effect on climate. Of course, there was plenty of evidence before, so I don’t expect this result to make any difference!
Second, given the consistency between the energy going into the oceans and the estimated forcing by the solar cycle synchronized cloud cover variations, it is unlikely that the solar forcing is not associated with the cloud cover variation.
Note that the most reasonable explanation to the cloud variations is that of the cosmic ray cloud link. By now there are many independent lines of evidence showing its existence (e.g., for a not so recent summary take a look <here ). That is, the cloud cover variations are controlled by an external lever, which itself is affected by solar activity…..

Graph fig 2: Sea Level vs. Solar Activity
Paper: Nir J. Shaviv (2008); Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing, J. Geophys. Res., 113, A11101, doi:10.1029/2007JA012989
Another paper by a bunch of engineers: Alexander, WJR, Bailey, F., Bredenkamp, DB, van der Merwe, A., and Willemse, N. 2007 Linkages between solar activity, climate, predictability and water resource development. J. South African Institution Civil Engineering Vol. 49, July, pp 32-44 Paper 649. http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=2643
I am going to add Dr. Shaviv’s rebuttal to Dr Svalgaard criticism that he “tortured the data” used for the figure 2 graph. (Comment)
The rest of the comments on Sciencebits are also interesting.

Torquemada – the data torturer
Yes, I pulled finger nails until the data said “I give up, I give up!”
o.k., now seriously.
In order to get the cleanest data I used the 24 tide gauges chosen by Douglas 1997 for different stringent criteria (e.g., in geologically stable locations, long records, consistent with other gauges nearby, etc). I used someone else’s tide gauges so that I could not be accused of cherry picking.
Secondly, because I am not interested in long term trends, but I am interested in short term derivatives, I treated the data differently than what other people do. Instead of averaging the station heights and then differentiating, I first differentiated the data for each station and then added the derivatives. The reason is that this way I avoid getting spurious jumps from the start or end of individual station data. Because it can give rise to spurious long term trends and because I don’t care about long term trends, I simply removed any linear trend from the data.
In the graph from 1870 that Lief Svalgaard points to, one cannot see the 11-year signal because the latter only amounts to a few cm amplitude (3.5 mm/yr!). It obviously drowns in the annual noise or the long term trends in Leif’s particular graph. Note that at least over the past 50 years, Holgate sees consistently the same 11-year variations in the data (e.g., referenced here). Of course, because he uses a lot of lower quality stations (177) and/or is not careful to first differentiate and then add the tidal gauge data, he sees somewhat different variations before 1950, than what I find. (Of course, this is not a problem because he does not care about 11-year variations). Anyway, did Holgate torture his data too?
Oh, and the fact that Lean 2000 is used for the TSI is totally meaningless. The correlation with any signal synchronized with the 11-year solar cycle would give the same result. Note that I removed any long term trends from the tide data and from the solar proxies (whether TSI or cosmic rays).

Russ R. says:
February 6, 2013 at 3:51 am
For individual readers’ self-reflection…
Would you have been similarly skeptical of this particular data point if it had been a decline in temperature of similar magnitude? Or would you have accepted it without another thought?….
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Depends on the author. Dr. Spencer has shown by his actions that he doesn’t play games with the data. Hansen’s actions speak for themselves An original graph from 1975