A Quick Look at the Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies of European Coastal Waters

But, but – look at the anomaly off Manitoba / Nunavut! There’s the proof of CAGW right there! In fact, it’s worse than we thought! Soon we’ll have palm trees growing there and coral reefs in Hudson Bay!

Very confusing color scheme.
Of course, I’m a man so I can’t tell one color from another anyway, but the -2 and +10 color looks almost identical to me.
I assume we are seeing the minus numbers in the N. Atlantic.

Thanks Bob.
James Cross says:July 13, 2013 at 5:53 am
The colors do look identical. Why they don’t use green, middle of light spectrum, for neutral, and tend toward the red end for hot and blue end for cold. Seems simple enough. The NWS uses a spectrum that keeps shifting the temperatures attributed to a color, makes me nuts.

The centre of the north icelandic hot spot is right over the where the mid-atlantic plates are pulling apart. Perhaps magma close to the surface is warming the water there, from below.

“UNISYS Current Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Plot”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/enso/
Why the two maps?????????

An interesting article. On the color scheme topic I agree with James Cross and Steve Keohane. I am somewhat color challenged (my wife doesn’t have to dress me) so am easily confused by many temperature charts. In Figure 1 the color scheme for -6.5 to -2. seems to be repeated for +5.5 to +10. Are there no standards or commonly accepted practice for color schemes for figures such as these? I know color has the most impact but for clarity I would prefer contour lines with temperature displayed at the center of each critical region.

Ok, visualize a “sarc tag” at the end of my post immediately precedent, this one. I say this just in case someone thinks I was serious and would take me to task… it would be a stretch to consider the warmed waters shown in the graphs as accounting for Trenberth’s missing heat.

I agree with above comments about the color chart. With the technology available, someone must REALLY want to be incompetent to produce a chart like that.
(That of course does not reflect on Bob, or his effort in bringing this post to us.)

Isn’t the Iceland anomaly just the Gulf stream but it then leads to the question what is different this year vs past years?
The hot spot in Hudson bay north of Churchill Manitoba is a puzzler and one that warrants further examination since my first guess would be that river discharge temps are being compared to sea water temps somehow … likely changes in sampling points which yield yet another “its worse than we thought” alarmist data point 😉

This colder water off the coast of Europe may explain why AMO has been dropping since November 2012 at 0.484 to 0.079 in June 2013

l see this fine weather we have been having in the UK over the last week has started to warm the waters around the UK. This helps to confirm what l have seen else where. That the local weather can have a real impact on sea surface temps.

In the Netherlands we have had 6 consecutive months with temperatures below normal, thanks to the cold North Sea. Please tell me that this is just noise in the climate system and that the expected warming will soon continue. 😉

The Polar Front is normally just north of Iceland. If it retreats a few hundred kilometers the result will look like a narrow swath of strong warming.

I think underwater volcanoes do play a part, maybe small, in the sea ice shrinkage in the Arctic. The obvious one has to be off of Thule, Greenland (far north west). Also, it looks like there is one northwest of the Svalbard islands (Longyearbyen side). Thule in particular will have heavy sea ice north and south of it but open water for some time. Maybe their is a warm river due to geothermal activity nearby.

Has anyone ever seen a study of the impacts of volcanic ash and pumice on the optical properties of sea water and/or on sea surface temperatures? And has anyone seen a study of the impacts of volcanic ash from recent high-latitude eruptions on the albedo of sea ice?
Pumice is light coloured and floats for a period. Clearly it will have a large albedo effect, until it sinks. I don’t recall any reports of pumice off Iceland, and it would take a lot to affect SSTs.
The north south SST anomaly differences are due to recent weather patterns. That they start east of Iceland is probably just a coincidence. Note the warm anomalies in the shallow Baltic and in the shallow seas around the Kola Peninsula. This indicates above average sunshine is the cause.

Looks like ash as fertilizer is the hot new research area:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/3891/2010/acp-10-3891-2010.pdf

@ Bob Tisdale
The three storms we have had so far have been TS rather then hurricanes.
Now don’t get wrong am not saying there is no risk of storms forming. Just that if the current conditions in the mid Atlantic stay in place. Then the risk of large hurricanes forming in the mid Atlantic will remain low.

From the Manmade Global Warming Challenge”>: “You’ll Often See Statements to the Effect of: 90% of the Manmade Global Warming Goes into Warming the Oceans.”
I don’t know about manmade global warming (and for serious reasons I don’t think there’s a significant “manmade global warming”, and definitely not anything like significant “manmade, warming of the oceans”) but in my opinion it is true that:
1. Even the oceans cover only a bit over 2 thirds of the Earths surface, almost 90% of the solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface absorbed there and converted to heat is absorbed and converted to heat in the open oceans by solar radiation extinction in the so called epipelagic zone (where the solar irradiation shortwave spectra flux is still significant) of the ocean (0~200 m)
2. This is i.e. given by very low ocean reflectivity even at relatively high angles of insolation – i.e. due to ocean waviness – and also due to the fact the bulk of the open oceans is at latitudes below 65° (where the average water reflectance even at zero waviness is ~0.03).
3. Due to air/water interface refractive properties the ocean waviness considerably lowers the net ocean reflectivity near terminator, so with even slightly wavy ocean its net reflectivity goes considerably down at lower incidence angles when compared to waveless water. Effectively the mean wavines of the ocean causes that even at high angles of insolation incidence close to 0° the average water reflectivity closes to 0.5 (although for waveless water it would be close to 1) and so the average ocean reflectivity comes out considerably lower than the often mentioned ~0.08 – which is in fact the average reflectivity value for ~2-90° incidence angle. -But, I reiterate: the open ocean we find at 0-65° latitudes stripe, for which the average reflectivity is ~0.05. Which means unlike landmass the ocean absorbs well 95% of the solar radiation reaching its surface converting it mostly immediately to heat.
4. The solar irradiation is significantly reaching relatively deep (~up to the 200m depth) which is given by exceptional transparency of the water for solar spectra (unlike almost all the solids covering the landmass) including UV. So the sun directly and immediately warms the sea water to considerable depth of the ocean surface layer (unlike the solids covering the landmass, which are heated to depth much more by much slower heat conduction from the surface heated to relatively much higher temperatures). The ocean surface layer is moreover quite well mixed by turbulences and so although the intensity of the penetrating shortwave solar radiation diminishes exponentially with depth the surface layer has more or less same temperature.
5. On the other hand the water is order of million times more opaque to the mid-IR spectra at which the atmosphere radiates than to the solar spectra. Which means the atmospheric mid-IR radiation can’t significantly penetrate and warm the water deeper than order of tenth of milimeter of the ocean surface skin – where it mostly contributes heat to evaporation-water vapor (which then transports the latent heat up to the atmosphere by convection), and therefore a GHE, even if considerably enhanced by elevated CO2 concentration, can’t have a significant net direct warming effect on the oceans. (And it is physically impossible even indirectly by way of heating air and the heat conduction from the heated air-to water. -The surface atmosphere layer has lower average temperature than ocean surface and therefore can’t cause net heating of the ocean by conduction – such a conductive heat transfer would be direcly in violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.)
6. According to the Solanki TSI reconstruction the TSI (upward) trend for the 20th century was several hundreds of miliWatts per square meter per century (~0.69 W/m^2/century). And even it looks like a small number, if one calculates how much ocean heat content change the upward TSI trend would cause in the 100 years in the ocean surface layer (heat surplus ~0.4+ GJ per square meter of the ocean surface) and how much it would warm the ocean epipealgic zone (believe it or not, you can calculate it for yourself) the result is well in order of magnitude consistent with the observed sea surface/epipelagic zone temperature change in the 20th century – while the amounts of surplus heat at play are several orders of magnitude higher than in the atmospheric boundary layer, so one can conclude that the sun heating the surface layer of the ocean was in fact the chief factor causing the slight surface warming in the 20th century.
All this and especially the point 5. implies that the cited “90% of the Manmade Global Warming Goes into Warming the Oceans” is physically impossible – at least surely for the proposed GW mechanism of the anthropogenic CO2 causing allegedly the warming through the slight enhancing of the GHE.