NOAA/NCDC just published their State of the Climate Report for May 2013, and in it, are some claims about global temperature that look just plain wrong when compared to other global data sets.
They claim:
- The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for May 2013 tied with 1998 and 2005 as the third warmest on record, at 0.66°C (1.19°F) above the 20th century average of 14.8°C (58.6°F).
- The global land surface temperature was 1.11°C (2.00°F) above the 20th century average of 11.1°C (52.0°F), also the third warmest May on record. For the ocean, the May global sea surface temperature was 0.49°C (0.88°F) above the 20th century average of 16.3°C (61.3°F), tying with 2003 and 2009 as the fifth warmest May on record.
NOAA says that GHCN has tied for third warmest Global Temperature in 119 years, but that just doesn’t jibe with Dr. Roy Spencer’s UAH data.
UAH says 0.07°C for May. Source: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/uah-global-temperature-update-for-may-2013-0-07-deg-c/
The RSS temperature anomaly dataset is also much lower than NCDC is reporting:
Source: http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TTT_Anomalies_Ocean_v03_3.txt
UAH/RSS measure the lower troposphere, instead of the 2 meter surface temperature as done in GHCN by NCDC, and there usually a lower value for UAH/RSS than NCDC surface data for that reason, but the discrepancy usually isn’t this large.
NCDC’s claim also doesn’t jibe with the WeatherBell 2 meter global temperature reanalysis from Ryan Maue, which shows a anomaly value of -0.024C for the global average.
*Note: 2 meter reanalysis map above is for the entire month of May, with final run on May 31st, 2013. It is not for a single day as some suggest.
Even NASA GISS is lower according to their May monthly combined global data which comes in at +0.56°C compared to NCDC’s claimed value of 0.66°C
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
I think one of two things has happened:
1. NCDC may have made some sort of processing error.
2. Due to the circumstantial lateness of the May NOAA SOTC report, this is one of those times where maybe many of the CLIMAT reports are lagging, and they don’t have much of a complete data set. If you watch the numbers after the month they claim, they always change later as more data comes in. Watching the data later may tell us.
One thing is clear, since GISS almost always reads higher than other datasets, including NOAA, and in this case NCDC’s claim is higher than any comparable dataset, it doesn’t seem believable. Perhaps a correction will be forthcoming.
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Was wondering why in the UK this years record May snowfalls were melting so quickly – its the heat thats done it then !!!!
Obama is ready to start driving his green agenda. I believe that this report was generated to make his announcements more believable.
NCDC – Annual Global Mean Temperature Anomalies (17-Sep-2012, NOAA, National Climatic Data Center) already showed this surprising anomalies.
See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
The people here are too smart not to recognize that this was coordinated with the Obama attack on coal fired power plants. Maybe I have been around too long but to witness this kind of corruption from top to bottom in practically all the agencies is unprecedented. This is open warfare against the American consumer. No wonder our stock market crashed today.
Eliza – I put: cooling consensus “the economist”
into google and the article popped right up.
Even if this NOAA/NCDC 0.66°C did turn out to be correct, and given that temps have pretty much stabilized over the past 17 years, I don’t think it’s all that surprising that we might find the odd month that comes close to records set within that 17 years. I’m not even sure why alarmists would jump on this story because all it proves (if it turns out to be true) is that temperatures in the month of May tend to vary by fractions of degrees from year to year.
“Weather is climate. More specifically, aggregations of weather are climate. Means, averages, and distributions of daily weather comprise climate.”
From Actually, Weather Is Climate (William M. Briggs, Statistician & Consultant. Jan. 22, ’10)
See http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/actually-weather-is-climate/
Record highs and lows come and go, they all get aggregated and averaged.
The NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Annual Global Mean Surface Temperature Anomalies over Land & Ocean database shows a 0.05°C cooling from 2005 to 2011.
See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
Roy UK says:
June 20, 2013 at 1:46 pm
It will not matter, the press release is out, the newspapers will print the story tomorrow, Global warming will be big news again….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That could backfire this time.
May was down right COLD here in mid NC and I am not the only one who noticed. Last week the corn was about ankle high with two to four leaves instead of over my head. Mid NC is not the only place corn went in very late and the late planting of the corn crop in the USA made the news.
Reuters: U.S. corn plantings bogged down by rain; freeze hits wheat
NOAA graph is pure junk as they show Ohio as neutral to above normal for May. Hmm I live in Ohio and it was a cold May and has been a cold June too. Air Conditioners being turned on has pretty much been non-existent so far in Ohio this year, I’ve had to turn the heat on a few times in May though. I know for a fact they have my area wrong, what say the rest of you.
June hasn’t been particularly hot either, Gail. It’s 77F outside in Durham at the moment — downright cool for late June. The high for the WEEK in Durham is forecast to be only 86F. Again, most years I would expect it to be near 90 every day by this time. The low temperatures are even more remarkable — it is supposed to go down to 59 tonight. A high in the low 80’s is cool for June. A low in the 50’s is very cool — even cold — for June.
Some of the other stuff Jeff Masters reported seems odd — extremely early snow melt in the NH for May, for example — that don’t jibe well with the latest ever ice melt in Alaska. It is consistent, however, with winter drought in e.g. Kansas.
But NC is not the world, of course. But it would be nice if one could trust the announcements of global temperature but this one sounds a bit sketchy given both RSS and UAH being unremarkable and even GISS running in lower. And third highest or not, AR5 itself isn’t showing the temperature trend for the 21st century as being anything but flat.
What is really interesting is equating this May with 1998 and the super El Nino pulse. The satellites put that pulse over 0.5 C warmer than the present. That seems very sketchy indeed — a bit too high to just be “noise” or late station reporting.
Odd.
rgb
The NCDC global temperature record is unreliable.
I downloaded the numbers just 5 days ago.
This is how much they have changed over those 5 days. Yes, the old temps are adjusted down and the newer temps are adjusted up.
http://s12.postimg.org/ns5tyq2fx/NCDC_Change_in_Last_5_Days.png
And it has been a systematic process which occurs at least every month (sometimes multiple times per month) since 1988. And there have been 304 months in that time period which, if they just upped the trend each month by 0.005C (as they have done in the last five days), that would be 1.52C of change over the time period. So yes, those tiny changes every month can add up to a very big number.
I agree with Jared. The “official” data do not support what we have experienced.
That’s why we continue the fight, even though we often laugh. They falsely report rising temperatures until the next record cold/snow, then they claim the record cold/snow is due to the rising temperatures, caused by CO2.
So, get back to the battle, after you have stopped laughing.
I always find it laughable when they going on about the Global Temperature average.
If 14.5-15C is used as the Global Temp average, Then the Global average is unsustainable to healthy Human life.
We’re always told 16C is the minimum temperature for maintaining human health. And actually 18-21C is a recommended temp. 🙂
Does anyone have a comperable global map for UAH or RSS. It looks like Siberia is burning up in that map. I’d like to see if the Satellites have the same thing. I wonder if Yuri was reporting the temp next to his fireplace again?
Up-state NY has been witch-tit cold!!!!!!
Anthony,
Time for Private Sector to put out own Monthly State of the climate Numbers. The Rotten Apples are spoiling all government agencys. Started with one rotten Apple who is a billionaire now and sits on Apples Board.
Re the UAH number being “much less” than the NCDC number, we all know that they use different baselines, so the numbers can’t be compared like that, right?
Right?
Jack Mclaughlin says:
June 20, 2013 at 4:13 pm
The people here are too smart not to recognize that this was coordinated with the Obama attack on coal fired power plants. Maybe I have been around too long but to witness this kind of corruption from top to bottom in practically all the agencies is unprecedented. This is open warfare against the American consumer. No wonder our stock market crashed today.
Hmmmm, so our stock market crashed because of this, not because Bernanke announced the beginning of the end of quantitive easing, and it came out that China is having a hard time finding takers for their debt offerings. Really???????
Corruption in practically ALL the agencies – any evidence for that?
I did my summary and map on June 13. I found about the same temperature rise as GISS. The satellites went the other way, but that quite often happens.
There were then 3872 stations reporting, including SST cells (where the number never varies). That’s fairly normal. There is a map (June 13) here.
It is nice to think that somebody had some warm weather during May. As for us in Cheyenne, Wyoming, we had 15″ of snow on 1 May.
chrisd3 says:
June 20, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Re the UAH number being “much less” than the NCDC number, we all know that they use different baselines, so the numbers can’t be compared like that, right?
Right?
They do have different base lines, however there are other means of comparing things. The graph with UAH anomalies is one way. Another is to take each May anomaly of other sets and ask yourself where 2013 would rank if that anomaly would hold for the year. Above, I gave the anomalies for May for RSS, UAH, and GISS as follows: 0.139, 0.074 and 0.56 respectively. The rankings based on the May anomaly are, respectively: 14th, 13th, and 10th.
The article says: “The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for May 2013 tied with 1998 and 2005 as the third warmest on record”
So I fully agree that things “look just plain wrong when compared to other global data sets”
As we are fond of saying , correlation is not causation. But it is curious that The Puppet President is once again clanging the “climate change” alarm (and in Berlin, no less, where Angela Merkel has been faced with a power-supply crisis caused by a few decades of ‘green’ policies, causing people to devastate forests for wood to burn). Reports are this insane Watermelon administration is going after the coal industry with renewed vengeance, presumably to keep the Democrats’ eco-fascist base happy. They’ll probably keep the XL pipeline stopped, too.
If you’re in Massachusetts, please turn out for the Senate Special Election and vote against the execrable Ed Malarkey, Chief Alarmist in the US House of Representatives. Don’t let him get to the Senate!
/Mr Lynn
“Rex says:
June 20, 2013 at 3:27 pm
>> Zeke Hausfather says:
>> Running a quick gridding process on GHCN monthly adjusted land
>> data, I get May 2013 as the fourth hottest May on record for land.
>A philosopher of language would have a field day with this and suchlike.
>Hottest ???? Wjhat’s HOT about 15 degrees ????
>> Steven Mosher says:
>> June 20, 2013 at 3:32 pm
>> err. no. they would not have a field day. I suspect you haven’t
>> studied philosophy of language
WRONG AGAIN MOSH
REPLY: or, just wait, and watch the number change, which is what I plan to do. We’ll talk then. – Anthony
###########
you might want to have a look at what tamino says. Basically he looks at the differences over time as I suggested. nothing remarkable about this month.
plus you made some other slips.. baseline? and Ryan’s chart is for a single day.
REPLY: I care not a whit what “Tamino” says, he’s too angry to bother reading. Ryan sent me that in email, representing it as monthly, I didn’t notice that is was a single day, but I think you may be making a mistake and conflating May31st as a day and month end run on that date. Note the title gives a RANGE from 00ZMay 1 to 18ZMay 31.
– Anthony
Marian says:
June 20, 2013 at 5:21 pm
We’re always told 16C is the minimum temperature for maintaining human health. And actually 18-21C is a recommended temp. 🙂
=========
naked human beings cannot produce enough energy to maintain their body temperature if the average temperature is less than 28C/86F. The only place on earth that has average temperatures this high year round are the tropical jungles.
22C/72F is the long term average temperature of the earth during its warmest periods. It is also the temperature human’s find most comfortable to heat their houses and the temperature at which trees try and maintain their leaves during photosynthesis.
Our current average temperatures are considerably lower than optimum for human beings. Without technology no human being can survive outside the the tropical jungles. Without the domestication of fire we would still be living in the jungles or extinct. And fire creates CO2.
We are now planning to create laws to ban the very thing that made human civilization possible. The Madness of Crowds.