Upwelling Solar, Upwelling Longwave

Thank you Willis,
For over ten years, being an educated sort of layman, I have been trying to explain the increased temp/increased water vapor/increased Albedo, equilibrium scenario. Your post has given me one more arrow in my quiver to further state what I feel as the obvious (in my non-scientific opinion), That is the state of equilibrium will always be the result of increased surface absorption/ reduced radiative reflection, for whatever reason.

Bad amatuer…BAD BAD AMATUER…shades of Tom Edison, Michael Faraday, and (horrors) the Wright Brothers. Shame on you for making primates out of the Phd’s. Your punishment, watching Lady Gaga, Al Gore, and Ahhhnold Schwartneger give talks on AWG. (Wait, that’s right, under the current administration, “enhanced interrogation” is not allowed. I guess you get by this time!)

Shouldn’t the right hand box of Fig 1 show 390W/m2 ?

I believe your third cartoon “My View” should have 390 as the surface radiation.
Interesting post Willis

Willis,
with regard to the cloud thermostat, the time of day that clouds form is a factor even if the amount of cloud is only marginally increased. Earlier cloud formation leads to greater cooling even if cloud mass is not greatly increased.
Increased radiative gases should cause clouds to form a few minutes earlier after dawn over the oceans in the ITCZ.

Willis said:
“When the GHGs increase, the TOA upwelling longwave radiation decreases because more is absorbed. In response, the albedo increases proportionately, increases the SR. This counteracts the decrease in upwelling LW, and leaves the surface temperature unchanged”
All my work since 2008 has been based on that proposition and I have stated it multiple times in multiple locations.
Where we differ is that I see the ultimate determinant of the set point surface temperature as atmospheric mass held within a gravity field and irradiated from an external source.
Is the reason for that difference that Willis still gives undue prominence to the assumed need for GHGs to initiate the necessary convective overturning ?
It isn’t a matter of ‘pressure’ since ‘pressure’ is merely a proxy for the combined effect on density of mass and gravity.
It is varying mass densities caused by uneven surface heating that sets up the convective circulation which then applies the negative system response whenever the combined thermal effect of radiation and conduction goes out of line with the amount of energy required to maintain radiative balance for the whole system.
GHGs and especially water vapour are merely lubricants for the convective process.
The visible climate response from our perspective is shifting climate zones but the effects of variations from sun and oceans are so huge that we could never identify our miniscule contribution.
This post from Willis is the ultimate logical conclusion to be derived from his initial thermostat hypothesis (which was limited to tropical convection) but still requires recognition of the physical processes behind it all.

”In the consensus view, the system works as follows. When the GHGs increase, the TOA upwelling longwave (LW) radiation decreases because more LW is absorbed. In response, the entire system warms until the longwave gets back to its previous value, 240 W/m2. That plus the 100 W/m2 of reflected solar shortwave radiation (SR) equals the incoming 340 W/m2, and so the equilibrium is restored.”
While this is perhaps the most succinct explanation of the consensus view I have ever seen it glosses over several key points that expose some of the additional problems with the view:
In the consensus view, the system works as follows. When the GHGs increase, the TOA upwelling longwave (LW) radiation decreases and downwelling IR increases because more LW is absorbed. The increased downwelling radiation decreases the surface net radiation transfer to the atmosphere by radiation. Assuming no other energy transfers from the surface to the atmosphere increase, the surface warms and due to the Stephan-Boltzmann Law must emit more radiation. The entire system warms until the longwave gets back to its previous value, 240 W/m2. That plus the 100 W/m2 of reflected solar shortwave radiation (SR) equals the incoming 340 W/m2, and so the equilibrium is restored.
This portion seems to be shared by both views:
”the TOA upwelling longwave (LW) radiation decreases because more LW is absorbed”
Is there any real world evidence for this?
Another view:
When GHGs increase, both the TOA upwelling longwave (LW) radiation and downwelling longwave (LW) radiation increase because more LW is absorbed therefore more LW is emitted, not being a black or grey body GHGs emit what they absorb* (as opposed to emitting in proportion to their temperature). The increased downwelling radiation decreases the surface net radiation transfer to the atmosphere (slows the cooling) by radiation causing more energy to be transferred to the atmosphere by other processes like evapotranspiration thus keeping the surface temperature relatively unchanged since it is temperature gradients that drive heat transfer not radiation balances. The increased water cycle activity (i.e.: evaporation) increases the albedo of the atmosphere decreasing the solar energy absorption thus leaving the temperature of the atmosphere relatively unchanged as well (the increase in LW is offset by the decrease in SW). So, if there were a panel in figure 1 for this view the numbers would be around 101,241, & 390.
* More technically correct would be to say they may emit IR due to energy gained by absorbing IR or through collisions depending on a host of variables.

Dear Willis, very fine work. Thanks

Note that beneath a completely transparent atmosphere the job of adjusting albedo is dealt with by winds causing the uplift of surface dust.
We can see some evidence for that on Mars which lacks water.
Periodically, the Martian winds become strong enough to create planet wide dust storms. That is the convective adjustment process in action on a dry planet.

great work again willis . the climate “scientists” will not like it though.far too simple and no funding required for carrer extending “research”.

All 3 diagrams are wrong.
Let us consider the system called “GHGs” in the pictures. According to the pictures it absorbs 390 W/m² and emits 240W/m² (averaged values over 24 hours).
Therefore it “keeps” 390 – 240 = 150.
Where can this “kept” power (W/m² is a power unit) go ?
Well the only place is the heating of the whole atmospheric column.
An atmospheric column of 1 m² with a pressure of 1 atm weighs about 10 000 kg.
The specific heat capacity of air at 0°C is Cp ~ 1000 J/kg/K. We neglect here the variation with temperature because we only want an order of magnitude.
So in 1 second (1 W = 1 J/s) the atmospheric column with base of 1m² will increase its temperature by 150/(1000 x 10000) = 0.000015 °C.
Using here dQ = Cp . m . dT.
How long would it take for the column to reach 450 °C where it would basically burn everything and boil the oceans ?
Well 450/0.000015 = 30 000 000 seconds = 1 year.
As the oceans are obviously not boiling, the pictures are wrong and in reality if the ground emits 390 W/m², then whatever the GHG emit (here 240 W/m²) is also what they absorb (here 240 W/m²)

Willis, your code ran a treat, no messing, very nice. I see you’ve change the range of colour scale which is better, but it would be much better with more than six fixed increments. It can’t see where to change that. Is it hard-coded in the map library you use?

Willis
In your diagrams you depict in coming solar as being reflected off the top of the cloud.
You depict incoming solar as reflecting off the surface and then it appears that it passes straight through the cloud and out into space..
Why is not some part of the solar that is reflected off the surface onto the underside of the cloud, reflected back off the underside of the cloud downwards back to the surface.
If a cloud, its top, can reflect incoming solar back out to space, why cannot a cloud, its underside, reflect reflected solar from the surface back towards the surface?
After all even on a cloudy day with low level cloud it is not dark which suggests that solar is being rflected from the underside of a cloud back towards the surface. Further when a cloud interrupts solar, it is not pitch black in the shaddow area of the cloud. This suggests that either some part of the incoming solar penetrates its way through the cloud, or some solar that has been reflected from the surface, interacts with the underside of the cloud and is re-reflected back towards the surface thereby illuminating the surface in a diffused manner.

About half of TSI is longwave in the first place

You probably say this because someone told you that half of the incoming solar radiation is in the infrared. But this is the near infrared, it is not longwave infrared. The proportion of solar radiation with wavelength greater than 5 microns is negligible in comparison to the radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface itself. It’s safe to say that if we detect radiation shorter than 4 microns then it is from the Sun (or a rocket engine or a furnace) and that infrared radiation above 5 microns is from the Earth or its atmosphere.
All warm bodies emit electromagnetic radiation. The distribution of that radiation accords with Planck’s Law and depends only on the body’s temperature and its emissivity. To find where the peak emission will be simply divide body’s absolute temperature into 3000. For example, a body at a typical Earth temperature of 300K will have a peak emission of 3000/300 = 10microns. On the other hand the Sun, with a surface temperature of 6000K, will emit its peak radiation at 3000/6000 = 0.5 microns. This is Wien’s Law (or more exactly an approximation to it. Use 2897 instead of 3000 for a precise answer).

How then does a material convert shortwave to longwave?

You can see from the above that a material will emit according to its own temperature. Since the Sun at 6000K does not manage to heat the Earth to 6000K but only to, say, 300K, then the Earth radiation will be LW and the Sun’s radiation is SW.
 

Whoops, a typo:
if there is too little atmospheric absorption the surface radiates less out than comes in and the system WARMS.

StephenWilde, as always, I find it very difficult to understand what you are trying to say. What for example is ‘conductive absorption’, a term meaningless to me?
The important thing to understand is that the radiation from the surface of the Earth, or anything else for that matter, depends only on that body’s own temperature and emissivity. Nothing else! It doesn’t care what is happening in the atmosphere somewhere else. It is not effected by convection, evaporation etc., just its own intrinsic properties of temperature and emissivity. It’s quite simple really, why make it more complicated.
By the way, what is meant by “an atmosphere containing any mass at all”. Are there some atmospheres with no mass?

‘conductive absorption’ (not convective absorption) is just conduction but I added the term ‘absorption’ to match the term ‘GHG absorption’ used by Willis.
Gases absorb energy by conduction from a surface and such absorbed energy is not available for radiation out whilst it remains absorbed.
The length of time that energy is stored by the atmosphere’s mass before it is returned to the surface determines the scale of the mass induced greenhouse effect.
Convection both takes away upwards the energy conducted to the air at the surface and then returns it again on the descent half of the cycle for a zero net energy exchange with the surface.
The time taken for the convective cycle creates the greenhouse effect and radiative gases speed that cycle up so as to offset the slowing of energy transmission caused by their re-radiation back to the surface.
Exactly as proposed by Willis but he doesn’t seem to acknowledge the role of conduction.

That’s a lot of words to say “heat causes clouds”. This is hardly a new hypothesis for us on this side of the fence.

Cloud feedback is Negative.
The -1.0 W/m2/century SW reflectance trendline on a temperature change calculated of 0.3C/century signals a feedback value of -3.33 W/m2/K. The IPCC AR5 report put the cloud feedback at +0.7 W/m2/K.
Using this -3.33 W/m2/K value for the cloud feedback drops CO2 climate sensitivity to 0.75C per doubling from the theory’s 3.0C per doubling.

Kevin Kilty says: @ January 7, 2014 at 9:20 pm
Very interesting….
2) You have shown the correlation, but what can you do to establish causation?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Have you read Willis’s The Thermostat Hypothesis and Further Evidence for my Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis
This is the last of several essays/papers on this subject by Willis.

Kelvin Vaughan says:
At noon I am measuring a clear sky at -30°C, the ground is 7°C and the air temperature is of 9°C. When it is cloudy at Noon the cloud temperature is 5°C and the ground and air temperatures are 8°C, A big change in sky temperature doesn’t make a lot of difference to the ground and air temperature.
And what is the sky temperature on a clear, dry day? (Well away from direction of sun)

Richard111 says:
January 8, 2014 at 12:02 am

My understanding is that the surface does not emit in 2.7 and 4.3 micron bands so there is no effect there.

Actually, the surface emits at all frequencies, but the relative amount in those 2 bands is insignificant when compared to the amount at 15 microns.

Please, just what energy is CO2 absorbing from the surface?

CO2 both absorbs and emits in the same frequency band – IR at about 15 microns. When the temperature of the air is lower than the temperature of the surface, CO2 absorbs more than it emits. When the ground is cooler, then the CO2 emits more than it absorbs. What most people miss is that the majority of the radiation is absorbed less than one foot from the surface.

An increase in clouds, whatever the cause, results in blocking surface IR and increasing reflectivity. The negative correlation says nothing about the greenhouse effect.

Thanks Willis, this article is very good.
You keep on driving nails to shut down the CAWG coffin.
Your graphs show that anti-correlation is the dominating norm between incoming SW and outgoing LW. More evidence that there is at least one regulator (governor, thermostat) in our climate system. Lindzen pointed to another. Probably there are more, but we are too invested in throwing money after CO2 as a the direct control for global temperatures to let it go.

Willis, As always I’m glued to your dissertations. As a long retired military forecaster I have a direct question for you. To keep my hand in this I’ve purchased one of Anthonys touted Davis Instruments, a fairly sophisticated one. I measure incoming shortwave radiation everyday. Here in New Zealand it’s fascinating to watch how it changes with not only higher relative humidity (downward), high cirrus (downward) and general cloud cover (downward). Should you graph the values they go up and down like a yo-yo. My question concerns the values. On a low humidity day and cloudless sky, readings of 1500 w/m2 are common; much higher than what you indicate and many texts indicate. Why the discrepancy?

It is interesting that most of the -1 areas in figure 2 are between the horse latitudes and generally follow the upper flows of the Hadley cells.

Willis top post: ”In response, the albedo increases proportionately, increases the SR. This counteracts the decrease in upwelling LW, and leaves the surface temperature unchanged.”
This would imply in effect the Tmean is forever fixed at ~288K (the thermostat set point) and anomaly about the set point would be zero mean with fixed hysteresis. Thermometer evidence shows Tmean is not a fixed set point. Anomaly reports show monthly differences unlike thermostat fixed hysteresis.
Comments?

“Chop and change as you wish …”
Thanks, I added two more colors but I still only get six in the legend range, yet I can’t see where the number of intervals is assigned.
However, I see the legend numbers are not too accurate, lots of crude rounding going on.
maxcolor=.25,mincolor=-1,roundto=2,legendlabel=””
There is a world of significance difference between -0.6 and -1, can you say exactly what interval is getting coloured as “-1” in your graph?
I think this would really be a lot better if it had a continuous colour scale (or at least 10-20 nuances). As it stands it could be over-selling the result.
No knocking it, there is clearly some good information presented but I’m sure you don’t want to give a false impression that there are large swathes with CC near -1 if that’s not the case.

“This would imply in effect the Tmean is forever fixed at ~288K”
Do you understand what correlation coefficient means. If not, you will need to understand the post and the graph.

“I think the thermostat hypothesis is correct but I’m not sure that this particular anti-correlation provides much or perhaps even any evidence for it.”
Since >SST will cause evap, will cause cloud, it’s rather chicken and egg.
The primary driver must be changes in isolation even in the tropics. Perhaps something can be gained for looking at the annual cycle rather than dumping it. If more cloud happens when there’s more insolation, it implies a feedback.
Otherwise we could look at non seasonal changes in insolation:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=310

If there would be only albedo increase as a feedback to the forcing induced by more longwave absorption then the model presented here could be valid. But there are other phenomena that need to be taken into account in the feedback mechanisms such as Planck’s response, change of lapse rate, water vapour, cloud coverage.
Anyway, it’s good to see that as much goes out as comes in, otherwise we would be freezing or frying.

However, clouds are the opposite of transparent to emitted LW. In fact, they are generally considered as blackbodies for IR purposes, as they absorb ≈ 100% of incident longwave radiation.
And they strongly emit LWIR as well, and do so high in the atmosphere where there is much less of a GHG “blanket” between them and the TOA/space. As such they are active transport heat sinks: LWIR incident on the ocean surface is absorbed in the top millimeter, transformed almost entirely into latent heat by causing surface evaporation. The evaporated water vapor with its latent heat is vertically transported and cools via conduction with the lapse rate of the surrounding air and via radiation. When it condenses into clouds it gives off the latent heat, now much higher up in the atmosphere. In the case of upper troposphere clouds, the latent heat is relatively quickly lost. Down lower it may still have a substantial amount of atmosphere and lapse rate to work through.
This is why simple one slab or two slab atmospheric models don’t do very well. From some papers recently reported on WUWT, GCMs substantially underestimate the cooling potential of e.g. thunderstorms via the mostly neglected mechanism of direct, rapid transport of head-laden warm moist air aloft to where it is rapidly lost via radiation on the top of most of the GHG layer. Plus, of course, the modulation of albedo, plus the additional latent heat removal at the warmed Earth’s surface when rain falls and re-evaporates from the ground beneath. It’s basically a heat engine and runs by transporting heat from down low to up high.
rgb

Don’t take offence Willis, I’m trying to make a suggestion to improve what you are showing , not to give offence.
“Regarding your other question, the colors show points on the scale, not intervals. The legend (with colors for say 1, 0.6, 0.2, etc) shows the color that is associated with that specific number.”
I realise what the scale shows , my question is what the graph shows. Clearly it is not just the points that get exactly -1.00000000, that R wants to print as “-1” that get coloured blue.
It seems that the legend label “0.6” is a truncated 2/3 , so what I was wondering was what _interval_ of values get the coloured on the graph.
My guess is -0.67<x<-1 but it could be perhaps half way between -0.67 and -1
I doubt any of the cells actually correlate at -1.0 , so it would be more informative and perhaps less misleading (depending upon exactly what the values turn out to be) to have more graduations.
If I could fix it easily I would have done it and posted the result for you to check out but R is a bitch to work with and I don't have a day free to waste on it's enigmatic and incomplete documentation, to fix something you can probably do in two minutes on code you wrote.
Neither do I have time couch everything in flowery language and conditionals , so please take comments in the spirit they are intended and not get shirty. As you know, I am supportive of what you are suggesting, I'm not trying criticise it other than to improve it and make it more convincing to others who will want to break it.
best regards.

Kevin, “That is away from the sun. The sun is low on the horizon and I measured directly above.”
Well since you said you’d measured cloud, it would not seem to be the “clear dry day” I mentioned. OK, I’ll spell it out. We know emissions are proportional to T^4 where T is absolute temperature.
Space is about 3 kelvin. The difference between -30 C (~243)^4 and and 273^4 is not so great compared to 3^4. Now the atmosphere will still be emitting more than 3K but you can start to get my point. On _dry_ day (not just a gap between clouds on a day with high humidity) the sky can be much colder that what you related. A lot of what you measured as “-30” was thermal emission from water vapour a potent greenhouse gas.
Also there is substantial thermal inertia in the ground , so even when the sky clears don’t expect its temp to plummet in 10 minutes and start to draw conclusions about downward radiation.

Willis, I feel so sorry that you constantly fall into the traps of AGW and this post is a good
example that you are unwilling to learn!
Two points, 1.) you employ the 340 W/m2 value as a fixed value (which is 1361 W/m2 divided by 4), but this TSI-value is an artifical construct for the solar OUTPUT, and the real Earth solar INPUT varies between 1318 and 1408, changing daily).
The IPCC agreed in 2006 to drop the SPIRAL advance of the elliptic Earth´s orbit around the Sun, fixing the OUTPUT of the Sun as the averaged INPUT (Insolation on Earth), which is not a, but THE major lie of the IPCC.
Therefore, in YOUR argument, you keep the effect of the Earth orbit as irrelevant or as Zero.
2.) as CERES shows, [and soon as the launch of the new RAVAN satellite in 2015 will show], there is a greater heat loss (outwelling from Earth into space) than solar inwelling. The increasing solar inwelling since the LIA (17.century) , due to a favourable Earth orbit closer to the Sun (a centuries long warming run of Earth around the Sun), stipulated the IPCC imagination that there has to be an equilibrium between inwelling and outwelling….. another false assumption, which both the measurents of CERES and of the Stockholm insolation of 50 years do not confirm.
Willis, free yourself from Warmist manure and keep going with critical eyes…Cheers JS.

Alas, I do not have time to read the entire discussion to this point, but it seems that something has been missed or misunderstood at the outset. Basically, any “greenhouse” gas functions as a beamsplitter, reradiating any absorbed radiation both upwards and downwards. When there is scarcely any GH gas, there is no impediment. When the GH gas is “saturated” (no further addition will significantly alter the effective width and amplitude of the absorption spectrum, which is total for the defined width), the split will be 50-50. Intermediate values give intermediate results. Willis’s diagrams do not show this.
I used to work problems in radiative heat transfer when analyzing effects of high energy laser weapons, and the physics are the same. (By the way, a similar process occurs in the shortwave spectrum for blue, indigo, violet, and ultraviolet light, which is sent both up and down by Rayleigh scattering. If you don’t believe in down-scattered shortwave radiation, walk outside and check the color of the sky.)

In atmosphere temperatures gases dosen’t practically emit or absorb any heat radiation (emission/absorbing factor 0,002 aprox), only in higher temperatures over 600C you can measure something like 0,05, in 1500C something like 0,2. Gases emits radiation only when they burn, basic thermodynamics, look Hottel tables. Tiny water droplets (humidity) is water and they absorb and emits much much better. There is norhing like greenhousegases in atmosphere as someone thinks. Heat transfer between ground and air is well over 99% only by conduction. Learn how heat transfers between different materials.

Trick,

Then the center panel of Fig. 1 would apply.

How do you figure that? I must be misunderstanding you. You appear to be saying that either temperatures are absolutely fixed in place or that they must be completely unregulated. I don’t understand what basis you have for making that assertion. Well, that or I simply don’t understand what you’re saying.

Michael 12:13pm: Willis has written above his diagrams are simplified, not showing some things.
BTW, all else equal, if earth had a pure argon atm., and you then walked outside from your proper environmental hut in a clear helmet spacesuit and checked the color of the sky, what color would you observe?
******
Mark 12:18pm: The albedo doesn’t compensate (392 changes up from 390) in center panel. In the right panel the albedo does compensate (390 unchanged). What is the interesting mechanism for this albedo compensation making 390 unchanged?

Mark 12:35pm: “Who the heck knows?”
Yeah, think that would be the center panel view. Maybe Willis can add comments on his right side panel if he ever understands, interest has me asking.

Willis:
My bible in these matters, “The Climate Near The Ground” by Geiger, says that going the other way, downwelling radiation, the situation looks like this:
Layer thickness Percent share of downwelling radiation
1st 87 metres above the ground — 72%
Next 89 metres above the ground — 6.4%
Next 91 metres above the ground — 4%
So the majority (72%) of the downwelling radiation comes from the first 300 feet of atmosphere above us, and 82% comes from the first thousand feet. Given that, the idea that the upwelling radiation is absorbed in a single foot of atmosphere seems highly unlikely.
w.
I’ve got an old Meteorolgy Text which has the citation for some work done in the 60’s using a tall tower in Texas that shows this conclusion to have merit. I’ll try to find the citation for you! (When I’m home. I’m working now to…doing FEA work, runs that take 15 minutes to 45 minutes. You probably have an idea of how complicated they are! BUT they are also backed by a variety of “reality checks”…)

Nick Stokes: “IOW, what you are describing as upwelling LW is just (SW+LW)-SW. And since upwelling (SW+LW) pretty much balances incoming SW (solar constant), negative correlation comes from that arithmetic.”
Sounds like reasonable argument, if that is the case, so in that case how can you explain the vast areas with low correlation? Everything should necessarily have strong neg. correlation.

Phil. says:
January 8, 2014 at 7:54 am
Robert Clemenzi says:
January 8, 2014 at 6:22 am
Richard111 says:
January 8, 2014 at 12:02 am
Please, just what energy is CO2 absorbing from the surface?
CO2 both absorbs and emits in the same frequency band – IR at about 15 microns. When the temperature of the air is lower than the temperature of the surface, CO2 absorbs more than it emits. When the ground is cooler, then the CO2 emits more than it absorbs.
Not correct because the emission by the CO2 is not immediate and is orders of magnitude slower than loss of energy by collisions to surrounding molecules when in the lower troposphere. In that region of the atmosphere CO2 always absorbs more than it emits.

Whether or not the emission is immediate is not relevant. Over land, it is fairly common for the atmosphere to be warmer than the surface. As a result, when there is a temperature inversion, CO2 emits more IR radiation than it absorbs.

Interesting to see how the various commenters are beginning to diverge.
Willis is right in his observations and he realises the practical implications but IMHO still needs to do a bit more thinking to see the mechanisms involved. He is currently ‘stuck’ on GHGs as being necessary for a convective cycle whereas they are not needed at all. They just help to ‘lubricate’ the convective cycle.
The usual ‘warmist’ proponents are making more and more picky points about irrelevant aspects and are avoiding the main issues.
Some, like rgb, are getting very close to envisioning the reality. He sees the effectiveness of the hydrological cycle as a system lubricant but has yet to realise that the convective cycle can do the job for a relatively non-radiative atmosphere even if the albedo changes can only be effected by wind kicking up dust from a dry surface.
The simplest description is that the sum of convection and radiation must leave the correct amount of thermal energy (KE) at the effective radiating height to match energy in with energy out. Otherwise no atmosphere.
If it does not, then convection moves energy around (KE to PE and back again) as necessary and the less radiative gases there are in an atmosphere the harder the convective cycle has to work to maintain equilibrium.
The convective cycle will alter albedo by whatever means are available even if that involves merely violent winds whipping up dust from the surface as seen on Mars.
Interesting times 🙂

here is the graph rescaled to clarify the range -0.5 to -1 . This is not supposed to be better or replace fig 2 but give a more detailed look at part of it. A finer colour scale over the range +0.25 to -1 would be better.
http://i39.tinypic.com/2crqzhu.png
Now we need to know what sort of correlation coeffs can considered significant.
Each cell has 13 years of monthly data. but this has been ‘deseasonalised’ which is crude kind of 12m low-pass filter and effectively reduces the number of degrees of freedom by a factor of twelve, so we are back to 13 independent readings.
with N=13:
-1.0/N+2.0/sqrt(N) = 0.48
So anything out of the red can be considered with 95% confidence to show correlation that is non random. So that means that the four regions close to land that were comment on by myself and others, are showing no significant correlation. Willis’ dark blue contour is quite close to showing the limit of significant correlation.
Since Willis understands the arcane workings of R far better than I , perhaps he can clarify how the colour banding works. I’m guessing that anything blue here is between -0.9 and -1.0 , though it could be 0.75 to 0.85.

It seems that the red areas are being decorrelated by the influence of cooler waters being dragged in by the major ocean gyres , as I suggested earlier.
It may be worth checking this against a graph of mean SST but it seems there is a temperature limit below which this regulatory effect does not work. Since it’s all based on evaporation, clouds and storms that is probably consistent with Willis’ hypothesis.
If too much of the SST in a region is below that ‘trigger’ value, the feedback won’t happen.

To me it seems like you have just shown the obvious fact that increased SW warms the surface which gives increased LW, and vice versa. Or am I missing something?
/Jan
In a word, yes. The correlation is _negative_ ie. increased SW produces LESS LW out , if you want to see the causation the way around. That means more the surface heats more it retains that heat. sounds like run-away warming tipping points to me.
However, if conditions which produce more LW out also produce a reduction in incoming SW, that causality would be a stabilising negative feedback.
So do we see run away warming in tropics when sun is overhead or do we see a fairly hard limit on max SST in tropics. Which interpretation fits the facts?

” I’m just noting what the formula says.”
the formula says 50%=50% not 100%+100% . What Phil said was confused and wrong. If he had said 50% absorbed and as much scattered, no one would have commented. It would have been correct but irrelevant.
I tried to point out his error in a light-hearted way but he didn’t get it. Too subtle I suppose. Can we drop that now?

I wish someone would address Tim Groves’ comment of 1/7/14 11:41pm. I too see it as just logic that CO2 would block incoming LW just exactly as it blocks “upwelling” LW. Please advise?

We have three measured quantities, energy incident on the earth from the sun (downwelling solar= constant= 340 w/m2) , visible wavelength energy reflected (upwelling solar ), and upwelling LWIR. Since for equilibrium, downwelling solar= upwelling solar + upwelling LWIR, and since downwelling solar is constant, the upwelling components must be negatively correlated; that is when one goes up the other must go down. Not surprising that the data show this.
However, this says nothing about the average surface temperature of the earth or global warming. The greenhouse effect is real—- have you not noticed the temperature of your car when you leave the windows up on a sunny day. I believe, however, the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is insignificant — generally agreed to be only about 1 deg K with a doubling of CO2.

I’ve emphasised that TOT is subjected to a global energy constraint. But even if it weren’t, it’s the arithmetic link between “LW” and SW which makes correlation with SW unwise.
No interest in playing referee here, but I don’t quite understand this. Suppose we measure an aggregate quantity. Total income of humans in various geographic cells. We also measure the total income of women in those same geographic cells in a separate measurement (we can imagine both are measured to reasonable precision by independent sampling). We can then infer the total income of men by subtracting the total income of women from the total income. This measurement/inference is, no doubt, less precise than either the measurement of total income or the measurement of the income of women, but I see no justification for an assertion that the correlation between women’s income and men’s income will be negative as an artifact of the measuring process. Especially when it is not, in fact, uniformly negative on the sample space.
So you’ll have to explain this. Lower precision, sure. But since the total energy per cell is not constrained to any particular value, I’m not sure that I agree with your assertion that there is a necessary, or even probable, anticorrelation.
Non-climate example, please?
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Willis’ hypothesis and that also of Bill Illis and others of negative thermal feedback by cloud SW albedo is strongly supported by the negative correlation nicely shown by CERES exactly where it would be expected, i.e. the equatorial oceans.
There are a couple of factors that make me feel that there may be additional LW negative feedback:
1. One classic aspect of AGW theory is that CO2 cools the stratosphere decreasing the LW emission height. But a decreased emission height must also mean an emission height with a higher density of air molecules meaning, in turn, increased LW emission.
2. Turbulence and surface area – this is an argument from geometry. It has been stated upthread that both radiative and convective heat transfer in the atmosphere depend on temperature gradient. They must equally depend on the surface area over which this temperature gradient exists. What is this surface area? Is it just assumed to be 4 pi r sqrd at the emission height? This would be wrong if the surface with gradient (boundary between warm and cold) is complex – folded and crinkly – rather than smooth.
Two things will increase the surface area of the emission surface: (1) increased heat input to the atmosphere from CO2 IR will increase turbulence, increasing the emission surface area; (2) decreasing the emission height to a lower altitude that will also be more turbulent, will also increase the emission surface area.
Thus there may be LW as well as SW negative feedback in response to CO2 atmospheric warming.

michael hammer says:
January 8, 2014 at 1:26 pm
—————————————
Michael,
in your 2013 analysis of OLR at Jennifer Marohasy’s site you concluded –
“The last 30 years of NOAA data is not compatible with the theory
of AGW. It would appear that either 30 years of NOAA data is wrong or the theory of AGW
is very severely flawed.”
I would point out that while inconsistent with AGW pseudo science, your analysis is entirely consistent with my claim that adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will not reduce the atmospheres radiative cooling ability and that the net effect of radiative gases in our atmosphere is radiative cooling at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
1. The net effect of the atmosphere on the oceans is cooling.
2. The only effective cooling mechanism for the atmosphere is LWIR to space from radiative gases.
It really is that simple. AGW is a physical impossibility.

Nick seems to be assuming that Total radiation is constant, in which case the correlation of SW with LW would be exactly -1 everywhere and always.
It’s not, because it’s not.

@Nick Stokes-
If:
T = S + L
then making a linear model for S based on L if T is constant results, of course, in;
L = -1*S + C where C is a constant
Therefore deviations of the coefficient from -1 are indications that T is not constant.
But it appears to me that Willis’s hypothesis is equivalent to the idea that T should be approximately constant. If T was *so* inconstant as to make the correlation between S and L near zero, this would probably be evidence against Willis’s hypothesis. To the extent that the correlation deviates little from -1 it would tentatively constitute support for Willis’s hypothesis.
If the correlation had been -1 everywhere and always that would have been definitive proof of his hypothesis.

Trick says:
January 8, 2014 at 8:33 pm
————————————–
Trick,
please have a look at the experiment linked give me your clear and direct answer –
http://i42.tinypic.com/315nbdl.jpg
With a starting temperature of 15C –
A. will the water sample freeze?
B. will it reach around 80C?
Can you even answer A or B?
Will it be the usual round of nit picking hand-waving and bafflegab?
Do I need an ISO certified kitchen with brushed stainless German tap-ware to run this one?
You can’t answer because I haven’t properly defined the unicorn/rainbow ratio?
What will be you glorious excuse for being unable/unwilling to answer this time…

Konrad 8:44pm: “What will be you glorious excuse for being unable/unwilling to answer this time…”
Not glorious. Just the ordinary CERES observations of LWIR data posted and discussed by Willis show your small experiments don’t resolve for the earth system at large. In the past, I’ve responded with links to papers and texts showing you the physical reasons.

Phil. says:
January 8, 2014 at 9:04 pm
————————————–
I see that Willis has added a little more “context” 😉

@Willis Eschenbach at 8:47 pm reply to Nick Stokes
You’ve assumed that the measurement creates the reality.
It is possible you and Nick are both correct.
CERES data from the TERRA, AQUA, AURA satellites may record the individual components of the flux and the correlations are real and not mathematical artifacts.
But again, let’s remember the provenance of the CERES dataSET. It is mostly GOES-MODIS data that is calibrated (SOMEHOW!!) into a CERES look-alike data format. It is also “Adjusted”

Willis Jan 5: So, the CERES folks have gone for second best. They have adjusted the CERES imbalance to match the Levitus ocean heat content (OHC) data. And not just any interpretation of the Levitus data. They used the 0.85 W/m2 imbalance from James Hansen’s 2004 “smoking gun” paper. Now to me, starting by assuming that there is a major imbalance in the system seems odd.

To me it is an open question whether the GOES data recalibration into CERES-like data might create a non-zero, and likely negative correlation coefficient. If the correlation is not generated from the GOES conversion, it might still result from the adjustments they made to close the 5 W/m2 gap in the total.
So, Willis your B = A + C example may be correct if the CERES dataset was pure CERES collected data. But it isn’t. CERES instruments are in solar synchronous orbits, in just two orbital planes. CERES instruments cover no more than 4 out of the 24 hours of the day. The rest of the dataset comes from GOES+mathematical magic.
Nick Stokes may have a point given how much of the CERES dataset comes from some fuzzy GOES recalibration process and fuzzier adjustments to partially close a gap.

Willis Eschenbach says:
January 8, 2014 at 10:55 pm
“…After all, they don’t call you “Racehorse Stokes” for nothing..”
———————————————————————————–
Fast, but not fast enough.
Makarieva et al 2010 discussion paper….
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it”
There is no escape from the Following Dark.

Willis Eschenbach says:
January 8, 2014 at 9:14 pm
janus says:
January 8, 2014 at 5:31 pm
However, things are nowhere near as accurate as Wiki claims. The proportions of UV/Near IR/Visible Light are about right, but the amount of energy received at ground level varies greatly with the transmissivity of the atmosphere.
========
In the proportions given by wiki it does not say that it is shortwave infrared making up the whole infrared amount…
The AGW meme actually claims it is mostly visible light and insignificant amounts of infrared (around 1%), so the wiki quote contradicts that too.
Here: http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange1/02_3.shtml
“The incoming energy from the Sun to Earth is mainly visible sunlight, called the �visible portion of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.� We perceive visible sunlight as colors from violet (short-wave radiation) to red (long-wave radiation). … A relatively minor amount of energy leaves the sun as radiation with shorter wavelength (�ultraviolet�) and as radiation with longer wavelength (�infrared� or �heat radiation�).”
The AGW claim is that we do not get heat radiation, longwave infrared, from the Sun.
The wiki quote says over half as measured at the surface is infrared.
So which is it?
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/grnhse.html
“The greenhouse effect refers to circumstances where the short wavelengths of visible light from the sun pass through a transparent medium and are absorbed, but the longer wavelengths of the infrared re-radiation from the heated objects are unable to pass through that medium.”
The second reason AGW gives of no longwave infrared heat from the Sun reaching us.
Willis, we cannot feel shortwaves from the Sun, that is simply a physical fact. Shortwaves are incapable of raising the temperature of matter, it takes the bigger heat energy of longwave infrared to move molecules of matter into vibration, which is kinetic energy, heat. Heat heats matter.
We cannot feel visible light as heat, because it cannot heat us up. Visible light, shortwaves, affect matter on the electronic transitional level, not the vibrational level of heat.
Your comparisons do not make sense because you are using AGW ‘physics’, now ubiquitous throughout the general education system because the traditional teaching has been systematically removed to promote AGW.
This is traditional teaching now removed from direct NASA pages: http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html
“Far infrared waves are thermal. In other words, we experience this type of infrared radiation every day in the form of heat! The heat that we feel from sunlight, a fire, a radiator or a warm sidewalk is infrared. The temperature-sensitive nerve endings in our skin can detect the difference between inside body temperature and outside skin temperature
“Shorter, near infrared waves are not hot at all – in fact you cannot even feel them. These shorter wavelengths are the ones used by your TV’s remote control. ”
Shrug, I’ll stick with traditional teaching which knows the difference between heat and light.
Which if you go back to my first quote you will notice that they say our perception of visible light is as colour…, we do not perceive visible light as heat as they well know.

The NickStokes “arithmetic correlation hypothesis” for Dummies:
(a definitive experiment?)
A) create a blank spreadsheet of , eg, 100 rows
B) fill column LW with randomly-generated numbers between ,eg, [200 .. 300]
C) fill column SW with randomly-generated numbers between ,eg, [50 .. 150]
D) define column TOT as (LW + SW)
E) define column LWx as (TOT – SW) [ie: (LW+SW) – SW ]
F) define column SWx as (TOT – LWx) [ie, (TOT- (TOT-SW))]
G) calculate correlation coefs for this pair of series: (LW, SW)
(( i predict near-zero correlations betwixt random series))
H) calculate correlation coefs for each of these pairs: (TOT, LW) and (TOT, SW)
(( i predict non-zero correlations for these DEPENDENT arithmetically-related pairs ))
I) calculate correlation coefs for this pair: (LWx, SWx)
(( I predict the SAME near-zero result as for (LW, SW) —
despite the arithmetic derivations, the quantities remain INDEPENDENT ))
X) deduction: if LW and SW were generated with some non-zero correlation ,
[to simulate the Willis Hypothesis] ,
the (LWx , SWx) series pair would retain that same correlation.

Nick , sorry if you’ve replied and I missed it but I don’t think so. It seems the simplest way to ask the question is: why would the “arithmatic” produce a correlation between (LW+SW-SW) and SW ?
You suggested a neg. corr. was a necessary consequence of the arithmatic and thus had no significance. I don’t see that.