Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
The CERES data has its problems, because the three datasets (incoming solar, outgoing longwave, and reflected shortwave) don’t add up to anything near zero. So the keepers of the keys adjusted them to an artificial imbalance of +0.85 W/m2 (warming). Despite that lack of accuracy, however, the CERES data is very precise and sensitive.
As an example of what that sensitivity can reveal about the climate system, consider Figure 1, which shows the upwelling (outgoing) longwave (LW) and reflected solar shortwave (SW), month by month, for 13 years (N=156). Since these are individual CERES datasets, their trends and values should be valid.
Figure 1. Upwelling longwave (shades of blue) and upwelling reflected shortwave (shades of red) for the globe as well as the two hemispheres separately. Cyclical seasonal variations have been removed.
Now, there are several very curious aspects to this figure. The first and most surprising issue is that the hemispheric values for shortwave, and also the hemispheric values for longwave, are nearly identical from hemisphere to hemisphere. Why should that be so? There is much more ocean in the southern hemisphere, for example. There is solid land at the South Pole rather than ocean. In addition, the underlying surface albedos of the two hemispheres are quite different, by about 4 watts per square metre. Also, the southern hemisphere gets more sunlight than the northern hemisphere, because the earth’s orbit is elliptical.
So given all these differences … why should the longwave and shortwave in the two hemispheres be the same?
The next thing of interest is the stability of the system. The trends in all six of the measurements are so tiny I’ve expressed them in W/m2 per century so that their small size can be appreciated … if the trends continue, in a century they may change by a watt or two. Note that despite the small spread of the measurements, none of the trends are significant.
The next thing of interest is that in addition to the values being similar in both hemispheres, the trends are also quite similar. All of the trends are very slightly negative.
Finally, despite the great difference in the size of the LW and SW signals (240 vs 100 W/m2, Figure 1), the size of the variations in the two signals are quite similar. Here is a boxplot of the three pairwise comparisons—the anomaly variations in global, and northern and southern hemisphere.
Figure 2. Boxplots of the variations in the longwave and reflected shortwave shown in Figure 1, for the globe (left panel), the northern hemisphere (center panel) and the southern hemisphere (right panel).
Since these are boxplots, we know that half of the data lies inside the colored boxes. This means that half of the time, the longwave and the shortwave are within ± one-half watt of the seasonal value. Plus or minus one-half watt half the time, and within a watt and a half for 95% of the time, for a total of 156 months … this to me is amazing stability.
Given the myriad differences between the northern and southern hemispheres, my explanation of this amazing stability is that a) the temperature of the planet is regulated by a variety of threshold-based processes, and b) the set-point of that regulation is controlled by globally consistent values for the physics of wind, water, and cloud formation.
Now, there certainly may be some other explanation for this amazing stability and symmetry of the climate despite the large differences in the geometry and composition of the two hemispheres. That’s my explanation. If you have a better one … bring it on.
Best regards to all,
w.
NOTE ON DATA AND CODE: I’ve turned over a new leaf, and I’ve cleaned up my R computer code. I’ve put all the relevant functions into one file, called “CERES Functions.R”. That file of functions, plus the data, plus the code for this post, are all that are required to duplicate the figures above. I just checked, it’s all turnkey.
DATA: CERES 13 year (220 Mbytes, has all the CERES data in R format.)
FUNCTIONS: CERES Functions.R (Has all the functions used to analyze the data.)
CODE FOR THIS POST: Amazing Stability CERES (Has the code to create the figures and calculations used above.)
Er… I personally think 99.9% of WUWT contributors DO correlate one rotation of the Earth with one day/night cycle. It’s only the astronomers and those involved in space science who would be pedantic enough to say otherwise. If pushed on details, most WUWT contributors would accept the technical correctness of saying that a rotation of the Earth is not precisely the same as a day/night cycle, but they would then roll their eyes and say that the difference doesn’t matter for almost all practical purposes.
Gerald Kelleher:
At January 7, 2014 at 1:10 pm you assert
That may be true.
But it is certain that 100.0% of WUWT contributors know your assertion has no relevance of any kind to anything which interests them.
And now you are informed they know that, so perhaps you will go away.
Richard
Gerald Kelleher says:
January 7, 2014 at 1:10 pm
Graeme W wrote
“For casual use, people can use a definition of a day that means one apparent rotation of the sun in the sky, and divide that into 24 hours, and similarly divide the planet into latitudes and longitudes.
——————————————————————————————————————–
I’m begnning to seriously suspect that Gerald is some sort of terrine test* entrant, and that his reply to this will bear no relation whatsoever to that assertion but will latch onto and (again) expound his misguided views on the fact that, in 1820, a day was 86,400 seconds and that Sirrius has nothing to do with it.
* Well, if I was designing a TT competitor I’d make sure it would recognise references to a TT and respond appropriately. But they may not have got it quite down paté
But it does have to do with clouds which form in response (among other things) to temperature.
But NH and SH mean temperatures are not the same and do not have the same seasonal variation. NH and SH mean surface albedo are not the same. So it isn’t clear what clouds are slaving too in order to magically adjust albedo so that the annual difference between the hemispheres disappears. Although I agree that it might be that. Willis has hypothesized this as well — that they form a negative feedback system (leaving open the question of how the hemispheres remain fine-grained synchronized). BUT — as I pointed out — this is AFTER an unspecified seasonal correction so that the entire result could be begging a question in the adjustments of the dataset, not a real effect at all.
Either way, I respectfully would suggest that none of these have the slightest relation to anything Jelbring has hypothesized, and indeed in order to form a hypothesis that explains the (reconsidered for all corrections) facts one has to actually introduce non-static relaxation timescales if the symmetry between the two atmospheres isn’t an artifact. There is no timescale at all in the Jelbring hypothesis (and it isn’t correct to assert that all static global hypotheses are variations of “gravity done it” even if one can identify something global and static that things slave to — it would only be a Jelbring variant if that something were “gravity”, and not only gravity, but gravity via PV = NkT, not gravity via the DALR, which is hardly Jelbring’s hypothesis).
rgb
Poor Gerald, but take heart, you wouldn’t be the first person driven crazy by simple relativistic misunderstanding.
The definition of a second can only be understood through the creation of the average 24 hour day and the creation of the average 24 hour day can only be understood in context of the 1461 rotational cycles that cover 4 orbital periods via the reference which fixes the Earth’s position in space.These voodoo chanters and their invalid ‘sidereal day’ assumption so while all these guys with their seriously accurate values mesmerize readers they will not go back in his to the creation of that stupid conclusion which drives these mindnumbing notions that there are more rotations than days in a year –
‘Flamsteed used the star Sirius as a timekeeper correcting the sidereal time obtained from successive transits of the star into solar time, the difference of course being due to the rotation of the Earth round the Sun. Flamsteed wrote in a letter in 1677:-
… our clocks kept so good a correspondence with the Heavens that I doubt it not but they would prove the revolutions of the Earth to be isochronical..’
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Longitude2.html
The position of the Earth in space is fixed by orbital motion and the apparent motion of Sirius behind the Sun’s glare –
I don’t care if I have to shove this down people’s throat but it is the one and only time a background star can be used in tandem with the foreground reference of the central Sun in that Sirius skips its first appearance by one day after the fourth 365 day cycle which corresponds to the 1461 rotations the Earth makes to the central Sun over that period.
You need to be intelligent to engage in a conspiracy,what you ‘solar vs sidereal guys’ believe is pretty much subhuman because the expanded notion of that dumb late 17th century view turns into a perceived imbalance between days and rotations that do not happen.
For Rgbatduke,if you can’t handle the daily temperature cycles and its cause how much do you think you know about climate and temperatures .
Willis, I think you’re moving in the right direction. I suspect that the reason the hemispheres are so uniform is because the atmosphere is the primary radiator, not the surface.
For short-wave (e.g. visible light) upwelling radiation? Excuse me?
rgb
5) Your fixation on Uranus is irrelevant.
or plotted 
over more than one cycle (OMG). A typical idiot who comes in and pompously pronounces something that makes it sound like he has some scientific or mathematical grounding who probably hasn’t ever successfully completed a calculus class.
… or is it…(ba-da-boom).
Otherwise, dead on the money. Obviously the guy has never heard of equations like
rgb
I think the possibility that the SH/NH similarity is a product of the seasonal correction, as has been suggested, is a probability.
This should be able to be tested. If the uncorrected NH data is plotted against the uncorrected SH data, possibly with a lag to align the seasons, we’ll be able to see how similar the two are.
Without a lag, will the two hemispheres mirror each other around a central line? With the lag, will they align to the same extent as in the original post?
Graeme W wrote –
“I personally think 99.9% of WUWT contributors DO correlate one rotation of the Earth with one day/night cycle. It’s only the astronomers and those involved in space science who would be pedantic enough to say otherwise. If pushed on details, most WUWT contributors would accept the technical correctness of saying that a rotation of the Earth is not precisely the same as a day/night cycle, but they would then roll their eyes and say that the difference doesn’t matter for almost all practical purposes.”
99.9% OF WUWT contributors either stated or supported the notion that daily rotations fall out of step with the temperature rising and falling within a 24 hour period for ultimately that is where the now jettisoned ‘solar vs sidereal’ fiction led to –
“The Earth spins on its axis about 366 and 1/4 times each year, but there are only 365 and 1/4 days per year.” NASA
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970714.html
So here we are talking about the most immediate experience of huge temperature fluctuations across a 24 hour period with not a single confirmation that there is no imbalance between rotations and 24 hour cycles.
If you can’t understand the import of this,not just climate but the ability to reason,how a cult and mob mentality operates, historical and technical competence as opposed to historical fiction then you won’t understand why this group is currently part of the problem.
sorry, late to party, and I did not consider the SW component. however, why would there be a difference in reflectance based on hemisphere? I could see a difference based on total hemispherical insolation, but not necessarily on unit of area average. Angle of incidence?
Gerald says:
“The definition of a second can only be understood through the creation of the average 24 hour day and the creation of the average 24 hour day can only be understood in context of the 1461 rotational cycles that cover 4 orbital periods via the reference which fixes the Earth’s position in space.”
Venus has retrograde motion. It’s day moves backward.
Does that mean time moves backward on Venus?
[/s]
I hereby suggest that Gerald posts be ignored and not replied to on this thread..
Gerald , why don’t you go and start your own blog, where you can discuss your insanity with other like minded people… ie none !!!
rgbatduke wrote
“A typical idiot who comes in and pompously pronounces something that makes it sound like he has some scientific or mathematical grounding who probably hasn’t ever successfully completed a calculus class.”
When you discover the dynamical cause for the 6 month day/6 month night cycle at the South pole you will be fine,all you have to do is apply the same orbital surface rotation of Uranus to the Earth as a matter of course,a rotation that is separate from and in addition to daily rotation –
http://londonastronomer.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/uranus_2001-2007.jpg
http://victoriastaffordapsychicinvestigation.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/300px-axialtiltobliquity-celestial-equator-earth-has-tilted-its-axis-again-7-june-2012.png?w=600&h=465
So rgbatduke,you now have two day/night cycles to appreciate and two surface rotations to the central Sun account for them. Enjoy !.
I don’t care if I have to shove this down people’s throat but it is the one and only time a background star can be used in tandem with the foreground reference of the central Sun in that Sirius skips its first appearance by one day after the fourth 365 day cycle which corresponds to the 1461 rotations the Earth makes to the central Sun over that period.
You need to be intelligent to engage in a conspiracy,what you ‘solar vs sidereal guys’ believe is pretty much subhuman because the expanded notion of that dumb late 17th century view turns into a perceived imbalance between days and rotations that do not happen.
I see, so you are a Platonist, right, and think that there are natural harmonies in the spheres, so that a year is exactly 365.25 days and that any attempt to improve on 17th century measurements or proclamations is all part of a global subhuman conspiracy, have I got that all right? Also, it isn’t quite clear — am I part of the intelligent conspirators because — as a physicist, mind you, who teaches astronomy from time to time — I cannot for the world imagine a reason for their to be an integer modulus between the solar revolution period and the Earth’s proper rotational period? Or am I part of the subhuman world because I can trivially understand the difference between sidereal and synodical time and understand enough orbital mechanics to understand why things like the day, the mean orbital radius of the moon, the period and eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit around the sun are all not constants at all but are varying in a computable way according to some readily understandable physical laws?
I mean, aside from my uncertainty as to whether I’m an evil conspiratorial genius, a transcendentally stupid subhuman moron, an idiot savant balanced between the two, or something else entirely (such as a reasonably normally intelligent, decently educated person — for my profession) I still have yet to see any point in this red straw herringbone-tweed dead horseman that you seem incapable of leaving alone. Obviously you are upset that the year is no longer exactly 365.25 days long because we actually invented precise clocks at some point over the last few hundred years, and I’ll bet you are equally sad that Pluto is no longer a planet — well, so am I. Pluto got a raw deal. Leap years, and leap seconds suck — especially for people born on February 29th and people who dislike presidential elections. There, we’ve commiserated about the sad state of the world together. Can we drop this and move on to something relevant now?
rgb
Mosher sez:
“You’ll be amazed at the amount of climate science physics you have to accept to use the data.”
Wait! Wait! ‘The Data is Crap’? Again ? What’s the point? If your ruler needs to be studied and its ‘process’ ‘understood’, it’s not a ruler. If on the other hand, a ruler can be used as a ruler, perhaps there’s a shortcoming on the observation end.
The ongoing lack of consistency in all things observational is having an adverse impact on the validity of conclusions.
We need McMeasurment Hamburgers, and stick with them for a few decades.
So rgbatduke,you now have two day/night cycles to appreciate and two surface rotations to the central Sun account for them. Enjoy !.
Account for what, exactly? The fact that the Earth has an axial tilt? The fact that the axial tilt precesses so that it is only by merest chance that Polaris is (approximately) the polar star? The period of precession? Milankovitch cycles in general? The coincidence between Pliestocene glaciation intervals and some of these periods? And what in the world does Uranus or Sirius have to do with anything at all?
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Now if you could just return to the topic of Australia…
rgb
This will be my last post on the secondary topic of conversation.
You are correct — that is the historical definition of a second. Unfortunately, science and technology has developed a reasonable amount since 1677 and that definition is no longer sufficient. The problem with the definition is that “the average 24 hour day” is constantly changing, because the length of day is changing. It’s not changing a lot — most people won’t notice it, but for scientists and technologists that deal with events at the millisecond or shorter intervals, it’s relevant. Therefore a more precise and constant definition was required. This new definition was aligned to the astronomical one to the extent that it corresponds to the astronomical definition for 1820 (as you’ve referenced earlier).
Because it’s useful to maintain alignment with the astronomical definition, those leap-seconds mentioned earlier have been introduced.
For most people, the astronomical definition remains in use. It’s only for fine-level precision work that the scientific formal definition of a second is important.
You didn’t read my statement carefully enough. I stated that the NASA statement is correct from a pedantic point of view, but 99.9% of WUWT contributors will use the more casual definitions and would correlate one rotation of the Earth with one day/night cycle. The pedantic viewpoint is technically correct. For almost all practical purposes, though, people will use the one rotation equals one day/night cycle approach.
I’ll give you an analogy of what I’m talking about. Most people would consider that the human race is divided into two sexes: male and female. However, when trying to define these two sexes, complications arise. External appearance definitions fall down for badly injured people, or people that are in the process of having gender-realignment surgery. Chromosome definitions fall down because besides XX and XY chromosome pairs, some people have XXY chromosomes. This means that technically, there are more than two sexes in the human race if you’re using a chromosome definition. For all practical purposes, people will use two sexes and assume there are only two sexes. It is only for precise work or in specific situations that it becomes relevant that this is not a true statement of the situation.
Hopefully, this shows the difference between a precise definition and a practical definition. The precise definition has a solar day not being 24 hours. The practical definition has it as being 24 hours. For almost all practical purposes, including climate science, the practical definition (derived from the original astronomical definition) will suffice.
AndyG55 wrote –
“I hereby suggest that Gerald posts be ignored and not replied to on this thread..
Gerald , why don’t you go and start your own blog, where you can discuss your insanity with other like minded people… ie none !!!”
Maybe,as this theory that the Earth turns once in a day from direct experience received no traction in this forum which is really climate via Simcity modelers .The real cool explanation for the polar day/night cycle is something new to me but really attributable to the advantages of 21st century imaging and graphics.
For whatever reasons,forums tend to lose their appeal after this and certainly not in support of what I presented. I am big enough to admit that I do not play well with others and my descriptions can be difficult but somehow readers do absorb the sense that something went badly wrong yet can’t put their finger on it.
“So,we can say 99.9% of WUWT contributors can’t correlate one rotation of the Earth with one day/night cycles in those 1461 times it takes to cover 4 orbital circuits of the Earth.”
99.9% of WUWT Audience/Visitors recognize a Douchebag when performing. The spotlight lingers upon you, day in and day out.
Not an Ad Hom, purely observational.
Graeme W
The 24 hour system was created in tandem with the Lat/Long system out of a specific set of references which did not include stellar circumpolar motion.When those fools in the late 17th century got their hands on the first accurate watches they decided to forget how the average day links in with the Lat/Long system in order to try and make sense of the return of a star daily within the average 24 hour cycle,within the 365/366 day calendar cycle.That is all that observation is.
The guys who developed the first accurate watches would check for accuracy using the return of a star to any foreground reference but as long a person knows the observation is a calendar based observation using the average 24 hour day they will not confuse it with the normal process which links the average 24 hour day to planetary rotation and the Lat/Long system organized around rotation.
I look at these guys try to model climate using computers the way these old guys tried to model planetary dynamics using timekeeping averages and they spawned you guys who conjure causes and effects out of thin air without any discipline or responsibility.
rgbatduke
Thank you for your informed comment about biomass absorbtion. The comment abut Yamal was meant to be mildly humorous. But you raise a salient point abot the biomass at the bottom of the oceans. In time these will be covered and convert to oil and gas over geological time spans.
The energy balance of the Earth over time will be zero ( no changing the laws of thermodynamics) but it is not instantaneous and is modified by other factors including the biosphere.
Whether by design or accident the Earth is a wonderfully self-regulating system
99.9% OF WUWT contributors either stated or supported the notion that daily rotations fall out of step with the temperature rising and falling within a 24 hour period for ultimately that is where the now jettisoned ‘solar vs sidereal’ fiction led to –
“The Earth spins on its axis about 366 and 1/4 times each year, but there are only 365 and 1/4 days per year.” NASA
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970714.html
So here we are talking about the most immediate experience of huge temperature fluctuations across a 24 hour period with not a single confirmation that there is no imbalance between rotations and 24 hour cycles.
If you can’t understand the import of this,not just climate but the ability to reason,how a cult and mob mentality operates, historical and technical competence as opposed to historical fiction then you won’t understand why this group is currently part of the problem.
Sir, are you mad? Seriously? You actually do not understand the difference between the time required for the Earth to spin on its axis and the length of a solar day? When you say “not a single confirmation that there is no imbalance beween rotations and 24 hour cycles”, what exactly do you mean?
My inclination is to direct you to the nearest orrery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrery) so you can watch and count the cycles if you cannot manage the simplicity of Willis’s example of a planet that keeps its single face always pointing towards the sun (and hence has a rotation period equal to its year, much as the moon’s gravitationally locked rotation period about the Earth is more or less equal to its day) or my equally simple example of a planet that isn’t rotating at all in absolute space but that is revolving around a sun so that it has an apparent solar day equal to its year. You can do either of the latter two by using a lamp to simulate Mr. Sun and an orange to simulate Mr. Earth — either one suffices to prove that in general the sidereal day and synodical day will not be the same as it is possible for one to be infinity or zero and the other to be one. If you are clever with your hands you can even manage rotating the orange more than once as it goes around and count that as well. Not exactly an orrery — more like an orang-ery.
I’m just going to throw this out there — did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, that the world isn’t filled with the stupid or conspiratorial, but that you just haven’t got things right? The example with Mr. Orange only takes a few minutes to physically set up and understand. There are all of these marvelous pictures in astronomy textbooks that can help as well, but of course you are likely not willing to invest any money in an actual reference that could help you understand. Otherwise you would no doubt have already read things like this:
http://aa.quae.nl/en/antwoorden/getijden.html
with all sorts of interesting real science in them. Or you could look at online pictures like this one:
http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/sidereal.htm
that pretty much says it all, from an approximately inertial frame reference point. It explains the 360.986 degree thing (and yes, degrees suck — who cares, get over it).
I doubt that you’ll pay any attention to this — you have pretty clearly got a narcissistic personality disorder with a side helping of grandiosity going on, which is well beyond my ability to cure by simply directing you to simple pictures or presenting simple arguments. But suffice it to say that most people on the list actually do understand this — it isn’t even that difficult to understand — and that if you ever stop thinking that you have to be right because you are are, well, “you”, you can understand it too.
rgb
I’ve learned to ignore Gerald Kelleher’s incomprehensible posts and all replies to them, which really improves a comment thread’s signal-to-noise ratio. But I’m a selfish bastard, and I hate to see the intellect of people like RGB wasted on such trolls/zealots/bots when they should be wasting their intellect on me. 🙂
I haven’t seen any “Slayers” posting lately, so I assume they’ve been banned. Wouldn’t it just be simpler to ban GK, too? The only downside I can foresee is a drop in the comment stats. 🙂
[Reply: WUWT does not ban commenters for having different opinions, even if everyone else disagrees. If they start violating site Policy, that’s different. ~ mod.]
Curious George says:
January 7, 2014 at 10:36 am
(at perihelion)
Er yeah. That’s what I meant. Thanks.