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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Rex says:
June 20, 2013 at 10:39 pm
>> Steven Mosher says:
>> June 20, 2013 at 10:04 pm
>> Rex,
>> maybe you should have studied harder. it didnt take.
That’s your take on it. Actually, philosophy has not been my major
(pre-)occupation … for 44 years
###################
that’s obvious, look some people can do more than one thing, work in multiple fields and do well in many fields.
“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
######################
Question: did you rebaseline?
Comment: Ryan sent you something in mail. It might make sense to actually go to the source.
that is, if you want to do an audit of NCDC results its best to start by going directly to the sources. basically steve mcintyre’s approach. Go to the sources. Show people how they can do the same thing, empower them and multiply the army of auditors. That’s what this movement has been about. getting data and code into the hands of many people, readers smarter than us. with many eyes and many hands on the problem we get better answers.
For example, it would be great if ryan supplied tools to get his data directly. I’d support that.
REPLY: Nice mea culpa for your own mistake there Mosh. Unlike Tamino and others on the public dole, I run a business during the day and don’t often have the time to do all that work with every blog post. My points are qualitative comparisons, raising what I consider valid points in the time I have during my work day. Ryan responds to your “source” questions below. I have no reason to doubt his data since it comes from the same sources at NOAA, GHCN.
As for baselining, in a perfect world, GISS would give up their antiquated baseline, and we’d have all datasets using the same baseline. Also in a perfect world, we’d be seeing absolute temperature data plotted in parallel with anomalies. And in the most perfect world, we wouldn’t be mixing good data and bad data, along with leaving out missing data in the homogenization blender, and then serving up the puree to the public and calling it “records of 3rd warmest etc”, only to have the numbers changed later.
Let’s call that practice of making claims without all the data being in as “Claimatology” – Anthony
FTR (and maybe I missed it somewhere here) in what years were the 1st and 2nd hottest May’s on record?
The NCEP CDASv2 “reanalysis” data assimilation is comparable to state-of-the-art NCEP GFS T574 analysis. Since all obs including satellite, in situ, marine, etc. are included in the reanalysis, it is not independent but an optimal fit to the obs. The CFSR-extension reanalysis grid is 1760×880 and available hourly. I use the 6-hr chunks since I am not buying stock in 1981-2010 hourly climatologies (model data assimilation cycle window is 6-hourly).
I’m fairly adept at using NWP products, btw.
Other temperature data is on my temperature page here: http://models.weatherbell.com/temperature.php
The error-bar or uncertainty on recent global surface (or 2-meter) temperatures should be quite small across a wide-variety of data sources including in-situ obs, satellite, and numerical weather prediction (e.g. 3D-Var, 4D-Var). For a monthly value, I’d say 0.1°C is “close”.
“As for baselining, in a perfect world, GISS would give up their antiquated baseline, and we’d have all datasets using the same baseline. Also in a perfect world, we’d be seeing absolute temperature data plotted in parallel with anomalies”
In a perfect world, the U.S. would go metric…
It naturally follows that 0 C is colder than 10 F, right?
In a perfect world,
… Real statisticians and forensic mathematicians would be sent into the NCDC to clean up all the distortion they have created.
1st is 2010, 2nd is 2012.
Data here.
The GISS temperature change from April to May was positive in sign, like NOAA/NCDC, but unlike the rapid drop seen in the MSU products. Perhaps part of the issue is the different quantities that surface and satellites measure?
The jump is bigger for NOAA/NCDC (but not bigger than other monthly temp changes – for any of the data sets), but there is bound to be more than one reason for the difference.
It seems that at least part of the difference between GISS and NOAA for May is due to the difference in coverage of the Antarctic as shown on these maps:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-blended-mntp/201305.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/nmaps.cgi?year_last=2013&month_last=5&sat=4&sst=3&type=anoms&mean_gen=05&year1=2013&year2=2013&base1=1981&base2=2010&radius=1200&pol=reg
The NCDC/NOAA SH anomaly increased in May, while those for GISS/RSS/UAH all fell.
Apparently NCDC/NOAA augment their coverage of the Antarctic using reports from SCAR.
This would tend to make NCDC/NOAA SH anomalies higher than GISS when the antarctic is relatively cold and lower when it is relatively warm.
To repeat:
JohnWho says:
June 21, 2013 at 7:54 am
I note that NCDC notes:
“Note: The data presented in this report are preliminary. Ranks and anomalies may change as more complete data are received and processed.”
Why even release preliminary information?
Thanks to those who responded.
My take is the reason they release preliminary information is that it enables them to say/show what they want to say/show. Then when the complete data comes in that shows what is really happening, the updated information gets much less publicity.
What they should be saying when the release the preliminary data is:
“Note: The data presented in this report are preliminary. Ranks and anomalies may change as more complete data are received and processed.”
and then nothing else. Don’t release a “State of the Climate” report until the data is complete.
Consider a local municipality traffic report by a TV station: they say that traffic is moving along smoothly, but they don’t have reports from all areas. Then, 30 minutes later after they get all the reporting positions, they report major tie-ups that have been going on for over an hour along certain roads, and overall traffic in the city is somewhat slower than normal.
C’mon man – anyone acting on the first report of smoothly moving traffic will not be happy when they are late for work due to the major slowdowns.
GISS actually has two good arguments for not sliding the baseline in time. The first is that this makes it possible to look at all of their published papers without correcting for the sliding baseline. The second is that the global temperature in the period from 1951 to 1980 was relatively flat.
The argument for sliding the baseline forward in time is that it provides a more direct comparisson for immediate (relatively) changes. Opinions differ.
John W, there is good enough coverage in the stations which report in a timely manner that a large change for any month would occur when the later stations come in. Your example would apply if there were significant areas where there were no stations that reported quickly (e.g. the missing traffic reporters). Eli notes that with cell phones traffic tie ups are rapidly reported, as with reporting using the internet.
You could have a discussion about eliminating the late reporting stations so as to have a more timely final version if there was good enough coverage.
If the phenomenon only appears after heavy data manipulation, perhaps manipulation of the data is the only phenomenon.