Kevin Trenberth is one of the authors of new Balmaseda et al (2013) paper Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content.
I find the title of the paper somewhat odd. The paper is based on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Ocean Reanalysis ORAS4. That reanalysis is described in detail in the Balmaseda et al (2012) paper (submitted) Evaluation of the ECMWF Ocean Reanalysis ORAS4. Basically, the reanalysis is the product of a climate model that has data rolled into it. Since volcanic aerosols and sea surface temperatures are used as inputs, it should therefore come as no surprise that the reanalysis will include the “distinctive climate signals” associated with El Niños and volcanic eruptions.
FIRST: A BRIEF LOOK AT THE EARLIER PAPER THAT DESCRIBES THE ORAS4 REANALYSIS
Figure 1
My Figure 1 (with my note) is Figure 4 from the Balmaseda et al (2012) paper (submitted) Evaluation of the ECMWF Ocean Reanalysis ORAS4. (This is NOT the paper that Kevin Trenberth co-authored. But I want to discuss it before we move on to the more recent paper.) Figure 1 contains three time-series graphs that represent the temperatures of the global oceans at different depths from 1958 to 2009. Each cell contains three variables. The blue “control integration” (CNTL) curves are the outputs of the models that don’t fold in the data. Balmaseda et al describes them as:
It is important to evaluate the impact of assimilation in ORAS4 by comparing it with a simulation that does not assimilate data. This simulation, called the control integration (CNTL), uses the same spin-up, forcing fields, SST/sea-ice relaxation and relaxation to climatology (with 20-year time scale) as ORAS4.
The black curves are the five ensemble members of ORAS4. And the red “NoBias_Crtn” curve “is equivalent to the unperturbed member of ORAS4 but without bias correction.” All of the graphs show how poorly the model, the blue “control integration” (CNTL) curves, simulates the warming. The bottom cell shows no warming at depths below 2000 meters in both the black ORAS4 curves and the red “ORAS4 without bias correction” curve. For depths of 700m to 2000m, the right-hand cell, the red “ORAS4 without bias correction” shows the same temperature in 1958 and 2000, but the black ORAS4 curves show a gradual warming due to bias corrections. Is the upward swing in the red “ORAS4 without bias correction” a result of the introduction of ARGO floats to a dataset that had poor spatial coverage before them?
For the upper 700m, the red “ORAS4 without bias correction” curve shows little to no warming from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, when an upward shift takes place. The red “ORAS4 without bias correction” curve basically remains unchanged from the early 1990s to 2000, when another upward shift takes place, leading to another plateau. Upward shifts give the appearance that Mother Nature is the primary cause of warming, and that’s not practical in a world that’s supposed to be warmed by greenhouse gases, so that would definitely need to be corrected. The bias corrections in the black ORAS4 curves smooth out the 2000 upward shift to make it look like a more gradual increase, and the corrections lower the temperature significantly before 1990 to provide a greater long-term warming.
Some of you might think these are yet more examples of inconvenient results being resolved through corrections.
A BRIEF LOOK AT THE MORE RECENT PAPER
Okay, we’re back to the Balmaseda et al (2013) paper Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content. That’s the paper coauthored by Trenberth.
The abstract of Balmaseda et al (2013) reads (my boldface):
The elusive nature of the post-2004 upper ocean warming has exposed uncertainties in the ocean’s role in the Earth’s energy budget and transient climate sensitivity. Here we present the time evolution of the global ocean heat content for 1958 through 2009 from a new observational-based reanalysis of the ocean. Volcanic eruptions and El Niño events are identified as sharp cooling events punctuating a long-term ocean warming trend, while heating continues during the recent upper-ocean-warming hiatus, but the heat is absorbed in the deeper ocean. In the last decade, about 30% of the warming has occurred below 700 m, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend. The warming below 700 m remains even when the Argo observing system is withdrawn although the trends are reduced. Sensitivity experiments illustrate that surface wind variability is largely responsible for the changing ocean heat vertical distribution.
It would be interesting to see just how much the warming trend is reduced when ARGO data is removed.
Figure 2 is, I believe, Figure 1 from Balmaseda et al (2013). Since the paper is paywalled, the illustration is from the World’s oceans are getting warmer, faster post at CarbonBrief. It illustrates the warming of ocean heat content for the depths 0-300 meters, 0-700 meters and “total depth”, but because there has been no warming below 2000 meters in the ORAS4 reanalysis, the “total depth” is kind of misleading. The SkepticalScience post New Research Confirms Global Warming Has Accelerated also presents that same graph. And of course, Joe Romm cross posted Dana1981’s post from SkepticalScience as In Hot Water: Global Warming Has Accelerated In Past 15 Years, New Study Of Oceans Confirms over at Climate Progress. Curiously, looking back at my Figure 1, the only acceleration appears in the red “ORAS4 without bias correction” for depths of 700m to 2000m, but that should have been excluded from Balmaseda et al (2013).
Figure 2
Do Balmaseda et al (2013) address how much of the long-term warming is also a response to “surface wind variability”? As an example, see Figure 3, which shows the NODC ocean heat content (0-700 meters) for the North Pacific north of 24N, with and without the 1989-1990 shift that’s likely caused by a shift in the “surface wind variability”. Figure 3 was presented and discussed (as Figure 25) in the post Is Ocean Heat Content Data All It’s Stacked Up to Be?
Figure 3
CLOSING
Ocean heat content is at best a make-believe dataset. Refer again to the post Is Ocean Heat Content Data All It’s Stacked Up to Be? Even with all of the adjustments to the NODC’s ocean heat content data, the data still indicates the warming resulted from natural factors, as shown in that linked post.
A reanalysis is an even more abstract form of ocean heat content “data”—one that also requires “corrections” to provide the desired results.
Curiously, Paul Voosen’s October 2011 article Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming includes quotes from a handful of well-known climate scientists—including Kevin Trenberth. Voosen had this to say about Trenberth’s opinion of ARGO:
Trenberth questions whether the Argo measurements are mature enough to tell as definite a story as Hansen lays out. He has seen many discrepancies among analyses of the data, and there are still “issues of missing and erroneous data and calibration,” he said. The Argo floats are valuable, he added, but “they’re not there yet.”
A reanalysis didn’t make the ARGO floats any better; it simply provided a way for Trenberth to confirm his beliefs–regardless of whether or not those beliefs are realistic.
Jean Parisot says: “Why are we even measuring the atmosphere as climate, the oceans are climate – the atmosphere are weather.”
And below the surface of the oceans, there are subsurface ocean processes that could be described as “weather”–most of which we haven’t discovered yet. Satellites monitoring ocean salinity have only been in place for a few years.
I’m afraid unless you can anchor a distribution of Argo sensors, you are not sampling properly. Since currents move these things around, you are getting over sampling of the temperature of particular bodies of water (the water of the current). I suspect that the deeper layers are better sampled because they are much less variable.
Bill Illis: Your comment would make a great post here at WUWT.
If my memory serves me correctly, isn’t this the same Kevin Trenberth who said to us around 1995 and hurricane Katrina that AGW would lead to more and more severe hurricanes? I’m curious, did he discover those devious hurricanes hiding out in the same location that he discovered [through a “reanalysis” (revealing word, eh)] where that ocean heat was hiding out? Were those hurricanes and that ocean heat conspiring to trick us? If he’s now caught the one, as he tells us, can he now catch the other?
Trenberth’s search for the missing heat reminds me if Winnie the Pooh and the search for the North Pole.
And Pooh saves the day! For he has already found a long pole, and he is already standing downstream with it, and when Kanga comes to help him hold it they set it out over the stream and Roo manages to grab hold of it and climb out. Well done, Pooh!
Roo is rather overexcited after his Adventure and asks everyone if they saw him swimming. Christopher Robin isn’t paying proper attention though because he is staring at Pooh, who is still holding onto the pole he used to rescue Roo. Christopher Robin asks Pooh where he got the pole from, and Pooh says that he just found it, and Christopher Robin announces that it is not just a pole, it is the North Pole!
Supposing for the sake of argument that all of the ‘missing’ energy is going into the deep ocean. Isn’t that basically a win situation anyway? I mean, what difference does it make if the deep ocean warms some small fraction of a degree? We’re basically never going to see that heat again, unless the surface of the planet cools dramatically, right? So, if this is so, why are we still carrying on about AGW? Sea level rise, OK, anything other than that?
This isn’t an argument, it’s an honest question. What’s the impact of this supposed to be / what’s the significance and why should anybody care? Thanks in advance.
Bob, looking at the above graphs I’ve decided to reduced my concern for CAGW.
I will check WUWT for three things:
1. Are they farming Greenland again, yet?
2. Has the ocean covered any islands, yet?
3. Have they released the CG3 password, yet?
Because the remainder of the conversation seems to be about how to use small made up numbers to get at my stash and how to spread out my hard-earned gains.
cn
The animals stick the North Pole into the ground, and Christopher Robin writes out a notice to remind others that it is the North Pole and that it was discovered by Pooh. And then they all go home, Pooh feeling very proud of what he has achieved on this momentous day.
For the depths below 700 m they are reporting temp. changes of 0.01 degrees. I would like to see error bars on those. Are they errors of only 0.002 degrees? Or are they closer to 0.01 degrees which is half of the observed change over a 50 year period?
And these error bars only address the instrument used for the measurement. How do they account for error in the fact that only 0.000000001% (estimated) of the ocean volume is being sampled for temperature and certain depths are only sampled 0.0000001% of the time?
And as someone above pointed out, the floats are being carried by currents so they are mainly measuring the temperatures of these and are not random samples of the ocean. These temperatures, especially for lower depths, are quite uncertain. Yet without extensive “corrections”, it still did not show them what they wanted to see.
Bob T @ur momisugly 6:29 AM, I particularly like the subsurface ocean processes as weather. I’d like to say ‘the subsurface ocean processes are a continuation of the sun by other means’, but I don’t have the mechanisms all clear yet.
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As an interested layman I am bemused by the dramatic decline in ocean heat at all depths after the volcanic erruption circa 1990 (fig 2).
Clearly, the upper level would have received less solation due to the effect of aerosols, but such a dramatic drop in total heat content seems to imply that the oceans dumped their heat somewhere, and very rapidly too. Atmospheric temperatures also dropped at the same time, so the oceanic heat could not have gone there, or could it? Or is the input data just a load of baloney?
To paraphrase U2:
“And he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for”
I commented on the Skeptical Science site yesterday on their article about this topic. It seems to me a number of points arise from what they say. First the graph for OHC gives a slightly different picture to the one generally painted by warrmists in that for much of the period OHC actually fell. Indeed it looks as though OHC differed little in 2000 from where it had been in the late 1950s. Second the obvious question that arises from the graph is not why the world has got warmer, but rather why does the atmospheric temperature move differently from the ocean temperature. This is a question the authors avoid but rather see the graph as providing further confirmation of their AGW theory. The more alarmist versions of that theory are getting hard to take seriously as, writing from the UK in the coldest March for >50 years and for the third cold winter in a row, the temperature has just not increased in the way that the extreme AGW view predicted. Third I asked why the authors used this mysterious concept OHC at all. Presumably it is derived from temperature and volume of water. The questions I asked were “would the authors not have made life simpler for the ordinary reader by just using temperature?” and “have the authors used OHC rather than temperature because temperature alone would have looked rather less impressive?”. Fourth I stated that the graph did not use actual temperature measurements but instead relied on a model to calculate past data. I did not add, but it does not take much imagination to see that such a procedure is wide open to producing the result you want.
Needless to say my posts were removed by the “moderator” but this left something odd on the site as several people had commented on my points and begun their replies “Elsa…”. I see Skeptical Science have at least been consistent and removed those comments too so that there is now no record of what somebody who dared to disagree with them actually wrote.
“All of the graphs show how poorly the model, the blue “control integration” (CNTL) curves, simulates the warming.”
well duh. control curves show what the model does without data assimilation.
Here at WUWT NCEP another re analysis product is often used as evidence. And in Fall et al 2011 ( Anthony’s paper) renanalysis data is used. DMI temperatures at the north pole are also cited here– yet another re analysis product. To get the best results with the models that drive re analysis ( and weather forecasts) we know that data assimilation must be used.
So, one cannot simply pick and choose when to like reanalysis ( for example Fall et al 2011)
and when not to like it. Well you can, but the inconsistency is rather obvious.
The problem is climate scientists see the earth actually like a greenhouse in their models. However there is a massive difference, heat can escape the earth to space. And it does. There is no missing heat because CO2 provides almost zero “insulation” or “back radiation” properties. 75% if the earth is water. The specific heat capacity of water is huge.
There is no “missing heat” . The models and the theory is wrong.
The very best thing about ‘hidden’ heat is that its ‘hidden’ and the very best thing about the deep ocean is that its ‘deep’, large and largely unknown and therefore a good place to have ‘hidden ‘ things in.
Also In the 1998 Greenhouse Gas Theory published by hansen, a cooling or standstill or global temperatures isn’t allowed because CO2 is the forcing element of climate temperature. The more we send out into the atmosphere, the higher the temperature should be. Its a very simple and elegant model. And attractive to teachers and politicans because of its simplicity. But its been proven wrong over by observed temperatures not matching theory. And if observations don’t match your hypothesis, your hypothesis is wrong.
It doesn’t matter how elegant it is either !
Whoops – for ‘solation’ read ‘nsolation’
Back in 2004, when I was a Third Mate on a container ship, a NOAA guy took a trip with us. While I was on watch he brought a case of probes up and asked me to help him launch them. I would stand on the bridge wing and wait for him to give me the O.K., then I would toss one over and hold the gun until the little copper wire ran out while he started the program and watched the recording; it was TIme vs Temperature as I recall and he explained that the time was used to calculate depth.
This was done about a dozen times and I think he also launched some on the other watches. It was feed into an old desktop computer that showed a real-time graph which I thought was really cool. After he was done he saved the files on a 3.5″ floppy disk.
These probes are good to a maximum of 2000m, at least these were, so it is interesting that this depth is cited. I have no idea if the data is incorporated in any of these data sets. I know the NOAA boats use different equipment and cover more areas than just the shipping lanes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expendable_bathythermograph
Insolation!
Perhaps Trenberth should join OJ. They might be more successful together.
I can see that dismissing the findings of this paper that significant energy is accumulating in the deep oceans is the preferred response given the local confirmation bias.
But is there anyone here that thinks the findings of this and other recent research that the oceans are warming is completely wrong or can be described {not explained} as an exclusively natural variation?
There is robust evidence that ocean heat content has not varied like this in the past because sea levels have not altered in the last few millennia as they have in the last few decades. I would be interested in anybody who can provide and argument for the recent changes seen NOT being clear evidence of energy accumulating in the oceans, given the credibility of the results from several sources and methods i think there is a better than 95% probability that ocean heat content IS rising beyond the ‘natural variation’ that might be eected from ENSO and volcanic influences.
izen
‘because sea levels have not altered in the last few millennia as they have in the last few decades. ‘
Really try give us the sea level increase in the year 1020 , to the neatest inch.
What’s that you say its impossible becasue the data is simply not there , and yet you ‘know ‘ sea levels have not altered in the last few millennia as they have in the last few decades.
How does that work ?
izen:
At March 26, 2013 at 8:03 am you falsely assert
Really!? You know that? How?
And there is “robust evidence” for it? Really? What is this “robust evidence”?
We have real problems determining accurate and precise sea level changes resulting from warming (and not isostacy) “in the last few decades”. How are “robust” determinations obtained for the “last few millennia” with the accuracy and precision for your assertions to be possible of being true?
Richard
I have a problem with ocean heat graphs. All the ocean heat graphs show ocean heat as increasing in the last decade but the ocean temperature graphs that Bob has put in various posts show ocean temperatures are cooling since 2002. How can this be. Heat is calculated from H=mst (with deltas before H & t ) so if ocean heat is increasing and temperature decreasing then mass or or s must be increasing to compensate and there appears to be no evidence for this?