# Argo, Temperature, and OHC

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I’ve been thinking about the Argo floats and the data they’ve collected. There are about 4,000 Argo floats in the ocean. Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface. Every 10 days they wake up and slowly rise to the surface, taking temperature measurements as they go. When they reach the surface, they radio their data back to headquarters, slip beneath the waves, sink down to a thousand metres and go back to sleep …

At this point, we have decent Argo data since about 2005. I’m using the Argo dataset 2005-2012, which has been gridded. Here, to open the bidding, are the ocean surface temperatures for the period.

Figure 1. Oceanic surface temperatures, 2005-2012. Argo data.

Dang, I like that … so what else can the Argo data show us?

Well, it can show us the changes in the average temperature down to 2000 metres. Figure 2 shows that result:

Figure 2. Average temperature, surface down to 2,000 metres depth. Temperatures are volume-weighted.

The average temperature of the top 2000 metres is six degrees C (43°F). Chilly.

We can also take a look at how much the ocean has warmed and cooled, and where. Here are the trends in the surface temperature:

Figure 3. Decadal change in ocean surface temperatures.

Once again we see the surprising stability of the system. Some areas of the ocean have warmed at 2° per decade, some have cooled at -1.5° per decade. But overall? The warming is trivially small, 0.03°C per decade.

Next, here is the corresponding map for the average temperatures down to 2,000 metres:

Figure 4. Decadal change in average temperatures 0—2000 metres. Temperatures are volume-averaged.

Note that although the amounts of the changes are smaller, the trends at the surface are geographically similar to the trends down to 2000 metres.

Figure 5 shows the global average trends in the top 2,000 metres of the ocean. I have expressed the changes in another unit, 10^22 joules, rather than in °C, to show it as variations in ocean heat content.

Figure 5. Global ocean heat content anomaly (10^22 joules). Same data as in Figure 4, expressed in different units.

The trend in this data (6.9 ± 0.6 e+22 joules per decade) agrees quite well with the trend in the Levitus OHC data, which is about 7.4 ± 0.8 e+22 joules per decade.

Anyhow, that’s the state of play so far. The top two kilometers of the ocean are warming at 0.02°C per decade … can’t say I’m worried by that. More to come, unless I get distracted by … oooh, shiny!

Regards,

w.

SAME OLD: If you disagree with something I or anyone said, please quote it exactly, so we can all be clear on exactly what you object to.

## 232 thoughts on “Argo, Temperature, and OHC”

1. RokShox says:

Very cool graphics, thanks.

2. The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:

Ocean’s heartbeat.

3. jones says:

Oooohh….Lots of sparkly colours and wavy shapes…..
I like!

4. Camburn says:

Thanks Willis.

5. Oh no no no! Never ever express the ocean data in degrees or mention the world’s oceans have warmed only 0.09C over the past 55 years [Levitus et al]. The proper metric is of course Hiroshima bombs.
Paid propagandist SkS refuses to mention the 0.09C ocean warming over the past 55 years anywhere on their website or Guardian articles, instead converting it to scary and ‘sciency’ sounding Hiroshima bombs, hurricane Sandys, kitten sneezes, etc.:
Claim: Warming of 0.09°C over the past 55 years is ‘slowly but steadily cooking the world’s oceans’
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/02/claim-warming-of-009c-over-past-55.html
Nor do they ever admit per the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics, the maximum additional that 0.09C ocean warming can warm the atmosphere is 0.09C.

Ocean’s heat flush. Off the east coast of Asia and North America and in the Southern Ocean. That’s where the atmospheric heat gets sucked through Trenberthian thermal maelstroms into the deep.

7. Amazing Willis. The seasonal variation is huge compared to the trend. This is another data point that says that the system is very stable, yet responds quite readily to seasonal inputs, indicating a smaller time constant than I would have guessed. This means the input or response is not changing much over long periods, but does change a lot seasonally. This also means any new forcing by us is very small, or the reaction to it is very fast and balances it quickly (negative feedback). The fact that we’re only talking about a total system imbalance of around 0.5W/m^2, compared to the forcing by CO2 of almost 2W/m^2 (at 0.5 doublings) means sensitivity is quite small (or there is a huge internal variation forcing it lower).
Great visuals.

8. Yes, the pulse in the top animation is interesting. That reminds me of a thought from the mid 90s on the importance of ‘pulse’, during a thoughtful period.

9. manacker says:

Good post, Willis
BTW, the guy speaking Swiss German to Delaney(?) explained that it never snows in summer in Switzerland.
Max

10. Karl W. Braun says:

Willis, would it be possible to do graphs like Fig. 5 for each ocean basin?

11. Willis, what are the margins of error in the Argo measurements?

12. Keitho says:

Brilliant stuff. I agree with Michael above that there is no support for any purported lag in the ocean’s response to climate change.

13. Kelvin Vaughan says:

Can’t get past figure 1 it’s soporific.

14. AndyG55 says:

Its almost like the world is breathing .. soooo cool ! 🙂

15. Stephen Richards says:

The warming is trivially small, 0.03°C per decade.
Ooooh, that’s 30°c / 10,000 years. That’s massive. /sarc ;)) :))

16. Peter Miller says:

And for an incredible 0.02 degrees C, the alarmists and goofy greens want to decarbonise the economy, which means almost universal economic misery and sky high, unreliable, energy prices.
And we still do not know if CO2 is responsible for any of this ‘runaway’ temperature increase.

17. Reblogged this on Tallbloke's Talkshop and commented:
.
Interesting to compare the post-adjustment data Willis uses to Craig Loehle’s 2009 work which shows cooling from 2004. I wonder if the folk at Colorado.edu have one leg shorter than the other. The sea level altimetry they output has a distinct tilt too.

18. Streetcred says:

March 2, 2014 at 12:42 am | manacker says:

BTW, the guy speaking Swiss German to Delaney(?) explained that it never snows in summer in Switzerland.

You wouldn’t believe it but we have often had snow in Australia IN SUMMER ! 😉

19. tty says:

The margins of error must be considerable, considering the huge areas not covered by Argo: all of the Arctic ocean and most of the Southern ocean, the Hudson bay, the Baltic, part of the Bering Sea, the Caribbean, the Mexican Gulf, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Japanese Sea, the sea inside the Rykyus, all of Indonesia, the Sulu Sea, the whole Sahul shelf, the Andaman sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and sundry other shelf areas and areas off major river mouths. And a majority of these areas aren’t just shelf seas, they also contain large, deep basins. In all at least 10% of the world ocean must lack coverage.

20. RokShox says:

tty you are self-parodying.

21. Sensorman says:

Thanks Willis – if you had a spare moment, could you rotate the globe 90 degrees to the left so we could see the UK?

22. manicbeancounter says:

Lovely graphs, and the punchline is the warming rate of 0.02 degrees per decade.
Visually there is an issue, especially with warming trends. Yellow is a warm color. Not so warm as orange, which in turn is not so warm as red. Green (a mixture of blue and yellow in painting) is neutral. So why are warm and neutral colors used to illustrate cooling? Have these graphics been created by a warmist? 🙂

23. Berényi Péter says:

Willis, would you publish data files behind your Fig. 5 in plain text format? They seem to be inconsistent with the Levitus thing if details are considered.

24. @Heber Rizzo
Let’s see what the Argo Team says:
“The global Argo dataset is not yet long enough to observe global change signals. Seasonal and interannual variability dominate the present 7-year globally-averaged time series. Sparse global sampling during 2004-2005 can lead to substantial differences in statistical analyses of ocean temperature and trend (or steric sea level and its trend, e.g. Leuliette and Miller, 2009). Analyses of decadal changes presently focus on comparison of Argo to sparse and sometimes inaccurate historical data. Argo’s greatest contributions to observing the global oceans are still in the future, but its global span is clearly transforming the capability to observe climate-related changes.”
They also have a lower number for the temp rise:
“This is consistent with the comparison by Roemmich and Gilson (2009) of Argo data with the global temperature time-series of Levitus et al (2005), finding a warming of the 0 – 2000 m ocean by 0.06°C since the (pre-XBT) early 1960’s.”
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html
When I posted these facts on a Dana rant on The Groan it was not appreciated. 🙂
Good work Willis. Lovely diagrams.

25. Thanks Willis. Impressive.
Average temperature 6C or 273+6 = 279K
Trend 0.03C (K) /decade or 0.03/279 = 0.01%
Negligible change.

26. Richards in Vancouver says:

OK. It’s 2 AM and I might be missing something simple, but set me straight if you would. Gently, please. Right at the top you say:
“There are about 4,000 Argo floats in the ocean. Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface.”
Then you continue with 2000 meter depths. How come?
And please don’t answer with, “Argo bleep yourself!” or something saltier. Remember, it’s 2 AM and I’m feeling delicate.
Thanks

27. In agreement with tty at 1:38.
The margins of error might not be considerable, but are uncomfortably close in size to the signal.
The trend in this data (6.9 ± 0.6 e+22 joules per decade)
That indeed looks very precise. 69 ± 6 ZJ. or 0.022 ± 0.002 deg C / decade
(at 27.5 ZJ per 0.01 deg C for 0-2000 meters)
Can we believe we have that much precision to 0.002 deg C / decade? And we have not yet measured a full decade. With 4,000 Argo floats, 130,000 sounding per year, with one Argo float for every 200,000 km^3 of ocean.
That is remarkable precision, especially when the average temperature of the entire 0-2000 column runs from 0.000 – 10.000 deg C and the surface runs from 0.000 to 30.000+ deg C (extra decimal points added to make a point)
Willis’ Decimals of Precision post is excellent and deserves to be referenced here.
If we can believe this precision above, they we should also believe that we could measure a trend to ± 0.02 deg C / decade with just 1/100 of the Argo buoys, just 40 of them. That seems like a stretch to me.

28. Patrick says:

The Argo bouys have that level of granulaity?

29. One of the responders to my Groan comments quoted Levitus at me:
“Levitus (2012) thankfully puts it in context for the measurement-challenged:
If this heat were instantly transferred to the lower 10 km of the global atmosphere it would result in a volume mean warming of this atmospheric layer by approximately 36°C”
It seemed to me to be an spectacularly unscientific piece of alarmism. It seems climate scientists do not need to learn how to communicate their findings better, as some say. Instead they need to call out their fellow ‘scientists’ when they publish nonsense like this.
ALL of the progress in climate science has been driven by sceptics, like this site. Climate scientists will deny the plateau is real (as Dana is still trying to do), will link any weather to CC, will forecast ‘no ice at the poles’ etc. etc. and their fellow grant-aided ‘experts’ will never contradict them.
Thank sanity for sceptics.

30. Harry Passfield says:

OK…Perhaps a stupid question: if the Argoes are free-floating, how do they maintain station and not all end up in an Argo gyre?

31. Nick Boyce says:

Dear Mr Eschenbach, I think you are too ready to take ocean heat content at face value. I’ve attempted to work back from OHC in joules to actual temperatures, and here are the results,
OCEAN TEMPERATURES TO A DEPTH OF 2000 METERS.
(1) The “heat content” of the world’s oceans, to a depth of 2000 meters, increased by 30 times (10 to the power of 22)(joules) = (30)(10^22)(joules) between 1950 and 2013.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
(2) Mass of the world’s oceans = 1.4 times (10 to the power of 24)(grams) = (1.4)(10^24)(g)
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/AvijeetDut.shtml
(3) Average depth of the world’s oceans = 3688 meters.
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html
(4) 2000/3688 = 0.54
(5) Mass of the the world’s oceans to a depth of 2000 meters = (1.4)(10^24)(0.54)(g) = (0.76)(10^24)(g)
(6) It takes 4.186 joules to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 1 °C.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/spht.html
(7) It takes (4.186 joules)(0.76)(10^24) to raise the temperature of (1 g)(0.76)(10^24) of water by 1°C.
(8) (30)(10^22)(joules) divided by (4.186 joules)(0.76)(10^24) = 0.09
(9) Therefore, the temperature of the world’s oceans, to a depth of 2000 meters, increased by 0.09°C, from 1950 to 2013.
Whenever NOAA etc give us ocean temperature data in terms of joules rather than actual temperatures, they perform calculations somewhat like those above, but in a different order. In my opinion, premises (2) and (3) are only approximations, and must come with a very large margin of error.

32. Willis, in your Figure 5, you go from an OHC (Range of -70 ZJ to +80 ZJ)
then subtract out a seasonal (-40 ZJ to +40 ZJ)
To get a residual of ( -55 to +40 ZJ)
The Seasonal component isn’t really subtracted. It’s negative is added. The seasonal component is an uncertain value, so it must have a variance. The Variance of the seasonal component must also be added, so the variance in the residual should include the Variance from the seasonal estimate. With this added variance, the error bars on the residual should increase the uncertainty in the slope.
If you do a trend on the upper OHC from the time of seasonal peak in 2006 to the seasonal peak in 2012, what uncertainty in slope do you get then?

33. Harry Passfield says:

Further to my comment about float drift, I should add that Wiki is not clear on this, merely saying they drift and last about four years…

34. john says:

Willis,
I’ve had a theory for many years that the sun & seasons had something to do with the climate ( not in line with ‘The consensus’ & a bit off the wall, I know, always been a maverick !! ) .
Your brilliant article & good animated graphics shows there may be a small possibility of seasonal sun variability, can we get a research grant together??
(I’ll get a few PhDs off Nigerian E-bay & I’ve got some coloured felt pens, so I can make us some Nobel peace prize certs, :-))
Let’s make money !!!

35. Mike McMillan says:

Willis, you gotta change your colors. Yellow is a warm color.

36. ImranCan says:

Given that the oceans contain about 1000 x as much energy as the atmosphere, and that 0.02 degrees per decade translates into something like a degree every 500 years, isn’t that the true rate of global warming ?? …… whatever the reason is.

37. richard says:

so in 10,000 years time crocodiles will be back swimming in the arctic region again.

38. johnmarshall says:

They also measure salinity.
The top 2000m is OK but the average ocean depth is 4500-5000m. So we know nothing about temperatures below 2000m. The temperature on the ocean floor is 0-2C.

39. Steve Case says:

Hockey Schtick said at 12:30 am
Never ever express the ocean data in degrees … the maximum additional that 0.09C ocean warming can warm the atmosphere is 0.09C.
Exactly, it’s much scarier to express it as 10^22 joules. I’m surprised they don’t spell out the 22 zeros.
But all that aside, the data stream from the ARGO floats is a manipulation created by Dr. Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Like everything else, it’s been adjusted to fall into line with Global Warming theory.

40. RichardLH says:

Willis: Cool (pun).
Do you have the data sources and the code used to produce that above to hand?

41. ozspeaksup says:

I noted consistent hotter areas off japan and over near the pointy bit od usa near the eu side
at a guess they are undersea volcanic vents?
funny they get NO mention by the agw crew either re deep temps.

42. Speed says:

Richards in Vancouver asked, “How come?” with reference to the 1,000 vs. 2,000 meter numbers.
The Argo Floats are “parked” at 1,000 meters (drifting depth) and when activated descend to 2,000 meters before rising to the surface while collecting data.
http://www.argo.net/
For others, there is a wealth of operational and experimental data here …
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/index.html

43. Neo says:

It’s interesting that many of the warmer areas are near recent seismic activity.
Perhaps that line, that Global Warming causes earthquakes, is simply backwards.

44. Peter Foster says:

Willis, are you using raw data or “adjusted data”. I get confused by graphs from Bob Tisdale that show most of the ocean basins cooling. so how do we suddenly get ocean warming when the data used by Bob shows cooling ?

45. Roy Spencer says:

I’ve never seen the seasonal cycle before, Willis. Can you compute what the W/m2 imbalances are for the seasonal cycle, and compare them to the CERES-measured changes in Earth’s radiative budget over the seasonal cycle? Just curious how they compare…seems like they should reasonably match.

46. Speed says:

Averages are sometimes useful, sometimes not. My nine year old car has operated at an average speed of 1.14 miles per hour over its lifetime. This reveals almost nothing about the car or how I drive.

47. A C Osborn says:

That first image is amazing, as has been said the Earth breathing, is it my imagination or does the heat rise up the Earth towards the NH during the winter?
It is hard to watch the image and the date at the same time.

48. Village Idiot says:

So…the thermal capacity of the oceans is 1000 times that of the atmosphere. The upper 2.5m layer of ocean has the same heat capacity as the entire atmosphere above.
48% of the oceans volume is found in the top 2000m
Yet, warming the top 2000m at a rate of 0.02°C per decade is described as “trivially small”?
I think the amount of heat stored could be described as “quite a lot”, especially as we’re being lead to believe that the Earth is undergoing a statistically significant and rapid cooling.

49. Paul Coppin says:

What’s especially interesting, is that the two animations suggest, within the limits of variation in the data, that the heat dynamic is homeostatic. Unfortunately none of us will live long enough to see what other periodicities may occur. Though the timeline is short, it pretty clearly puts the lie to CAGW…

50. Village Idiot says:
March 2, 2014 at 5:11 am
I think the amount of heat stored could be described as “quite a lot”, especially as we’re being lead to believe that the Earth is undergoing a statistically significant and rapid cooling.
—————————————————————————————————————-
I have had a thought in the back of my mind on what the purpose of that heat load might be for. What if it is the release of stored oceanic heat that helps pull the Earth out of a glaciation, or even a deep cold spell such as the LIA?

51. RichardLH says:

Speed says:
March 2, 2014 at 4:41 am
“Averages are sometimes useful, sometimes not. My nine year old car has operated at an average speed of 1.14 miles per hour over its lifetime. This reveals almost nothing about the car or how I drive.”
But averages per day, month or year may well provide data that is of interest as to usage.

52. Steve Keohane says:

Thanks Willis, I really like that first graphic. It looks like the Arctic is a dumping ground and escape valve for heat. Like others, it ran a little fast at .1 second per frame, I slowed it to .5 seconds a frame here:
http://oi57.tinypic.com/12519p1.jpg

53. Tom Moran says:

In Figure 2, the Atlantic, north of the Tropic of Cancer (for this color blind observer) looks very dark. Is it very warm there or does its placement on the map give it the appearance of warmy?

54. Temps based on settled science are going up by 5c which allows an ‘environmental economist’ to publish these findings
“rising temperatures in the United States will lead to an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, and 1.3 million burglaries, among other crimes.
These numbers may sound dramatic, but they’re based on existing crime data and broadly accepted projections for temperature change. Ranson also projects future costs, and estimates that a 5-degree rise in global temperatures over the next century—a middle-of-the-road climate change scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC—will end up costing society $38 billion to$115 billion across the country”
for another paper events like Ukraine would be expected with global warming?
“Hsiang and colleagues analyzed studies of modern and historical data from around the world, and found a surprisingly universal relationship between rising temperatures and increasing conflicts or social unrest.”
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/03/02/climate-change-may-mean-more-crime/dZCKg5nx7mUcj513lwAEyO/story.html
so crime, murder, social unrest never mind being fried with heat should keep those addicted to living in a Munch Scream plenty to ‘worry about’?
Cynics might say add the term global warming to any pet hobby [e.g chess and global warming, Hairdressing and climate change, circle of fifths and climate change] and u will get published in the media ?

55. john says:

Tom Moran March 2, 2014 at 5:45 am
It’s the gulf stream,
& the reason I can grow sub-tropical plants outside in the UK when we live on a line with Newfoundland, Prince Rupert & Moscow.
We have 11°C at moment !!
john

56. Owen in GA says:

Village Idiot:
The amount of heat really isn’t as important as the thermodynamic equilibrium between the two bodies. The fact the ocean has such a higher heat capacity means it is the source of the planet’s thermal stability. It can’t release the heat to make the atmosphere warmer than it. The probabilities against that in a statistical mechanics sense in negligible. It would be like flipping 100 coins a million times and getting all heads one hundred thousand times – it is possible, but so unlikely as to be unobservable. The oceans are our temperature stability. It takes so much heat to move the thermometer on them that they are practically constant temperature. The atmosphere on the other hand has a very low heat capacity and can swing about wildly with slight changes of inputs to the system, but the oceans warm the air over them and tide things over until inputs come back to normal (whatever that is).

57. H.R. says:

Figure 1 is fantastic, Willis. Thank you.
I’m reminded of the view looking into the tub of my top loading washer while it is agitating. There is lot of mechanical swirling and mixing going on.

58. Ulric Lyons says:

“Note that although the amounts of the changes are smaller, the trends at the surface are geographically similar to the trends down to 2000 metres.”
And the most positively trending areas are in the mid latitudes.

59. Go Home says:

Does one have to take into account pressure at different depths for temperature measurements at different depths? Or is that done in your calculation of volume weighted?

60. rgbatduke says:

The only comments I have to make are these:
a) 4000 buoys for 70% of the Earth’s surface is an absurdly sparse grid. The ocean covers roughly 400,000,000 square kilometers. 4000 buoys means that each buoy represents on average 100,000 kilometers. That is a square 300 km — around 200 miles — per side. If the distribution of buoys were either random (Monte Carlo selected fixed locations) or regular, this might be adequate to get a decent estimate. However, they are not — many of the buoys are free-floating and follow the currents. But are the currents themselves random samples of oceanic temperatures, or are they likely to be systematically biased? What is the scale of “features” of oceanic temperature (sea surface or otherwise). Would the state of North Carolina (in comparison) be well-represented in the land surface record by no more than three thermometers?
b) Twelve years is an absurdly short interval in climate science. Here we know some of the time constants. Thermohaline circulation — which surely is a major if not dominant factor in the time variation — has a cycle time on the order of 1000 years. That means that a significant fraction of any observed variation has nothing to do with what is going on now — the mid-ocean heat at depth visible in the Atlantic, for example, has to be decades to centuries old, for example. We know that there is no reasonable physical mechanism for transporting heat from the surface straight down to 2000 meters in a decade, or even two or three decades. The ocean is thermally stratified and (past a few tens of meters from the top) effectively opaque to solar energy, and the salinity variation that causes thermohaline turnover and mixing due to surface winds does not generally cause deep mixing, although there are specific sites where the thermohaline circulations turns over and warm surface currents descend into the depths for return. The movies above are indeed nifty, but they are like looking at gust of wind on a windy day and trying to conclude that the wind is rising as a climate feature. Are we looking at noise? Signal? Detrending on a decade’s worth of data doesn’t even catch one of the decadal oscillations that surely have a “trend” of their own.
c) As always in climate science, no error bars. Everything is smoothed. We cannot see which parts of the globe are oversampled (because ocean currents create an eddy that collects more than its share of buoys) and undersampled (because prevailing currents push buoys away, or because currents are depleted by buoys trapped in eddies). We do not get any feel for the granularity of the actual measurements. It might be more interesting to recreate the same map with each buoy’s results represented by a small patch of pixels along its actual trajectory in color — that, I suspect, would eliminate the smooth contours and impression of homogeneity produced by the maps above, and would give the viewer a much better idea of the probable error in the contours.
The point being, 0.02C/decade — is that $0.02 \pm 0.1$ C/decade, or is it $0.02 \pm 0.01$ C/decade or is it $0.02 \pm 1$ C/decade?
The answer to that one is simple. HADCRUT4 represents what, tens of thousands of reporting stations, including all of ARGO to represent the sea surface, and claims (probably egregiously, given the lack of UHI correction) 0.15C accuracy.
That’s the fundamental problem. I rather suspect that the reported warming is $0.02 \pm 1$ C/decade, which is a number that ought to be reported as “0” no matter how many “joules” one wishes to discover in the deep ocean. Or at the very least, it should be reported with an error bar, and some empirical and statistical justification for the error bar should be provided.
rgb

61. Ulric Lyons says:

There has of course been many more months of La Nina than El Nino from 2005 to 2012.

62. Remember now, supposedly the “warming” is hiding in the “deep oceans”.
According to Wikipedia (sorry) using “Deep Ocean” article):
“The deep sea, or deep layer,[1] is the lowest layer in the ocean, existing below the thermocline and above the seabed, at a depth of 1000 fathoms (1800 m) or more.”
The ARGO bouys only sample the top 200 meters (1800 to 2000) of the deep ocean and only the top 2000 meters of the oceans.
Moreover, again using Wikipedia “Ocean” article:
“The ocean contains 97% of the Earth’s water, and oceanographers have stated that only 5% of the ocean as a whole on Earth has been explored.[6] The total volume is approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometres (310 million cu mi)[7] with an average depth of 3,682 metres (12,080 ft).
(bold mine)
Maybe one should say “the warming is conveniently hiding in the deep oceans”, since the deep ocean is an area well beneath what we are measuring with a wide sampling.

63. Pamela Gray says:

Re: the comment upstream that the rise is “quite a lot”. This trivial rise may be well within the margin of sampling error (due to Argo precision as well as Argo placement, not to mention short span of time). Meaning that the anomalous rise may be spurious and a result of this particular short string of averaged data. Trivially small trends will be seen in random data strings so no cause for panic, worry, upset tummy, or interrupted sleep. Your own normal body temperature could change WAY more than that.

64. ralfellis says:

Is that hot plume in the Atlantic (0-2,000 m), spilling out of the Mediterranean? I imagine the Med does get a bit warmer than the Atlantic.
SR

65. Steven Mosher says:

Neat. Interesting how the pumping to the north is in contrast to what you see at the south…..hehe

66. ChrisQ says:

From what I remember reading, argo floats have a resolution of 0.005C, which is by far the most accurate system for ocean temp measurement ever. There’s a Wiki page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_%28oceanography%29
http://www.argo.net/
Well worth spending some time at and a very ambitious project…

67. Pamela Gray says:
March 2, 2014 at 7:17 am
Re: the comment upstream that the rise is “quite a lot”.

Well, it wouldn’t be much to talk about if one said that during the short term of the ARGO bouys a change of temperature in the first 2000 meters of the ocean is not currently discernable, would it?
🙂

68. lafoster says:

Is it possible rgbatduke has a point about the relevant ocean layer being very near the surface? Not sure at what depth increments Argo measures, but could the joules/decade calculation be made from say, 0 to 50 meters?
Also, is it possible to make a reasonable estimate of how many joules/decade would represent a 0.2, 0.4, and 0.6 C/decade surface warming. Would then comparing those numbers provide an indication of the validity of the theory that significant surface warming would be occurring, but for being masked by oceanic heat absorption?

69. Re: March 2, 2014 at 12:42 am | manacker says:
“BTW, the guy speaking Swiss German to Delaney(?) explained that it never snows in summer in Switzerland.”
I was married in Davos on July 4th 1970 and it snowed on Weissfluhgipfel that day with rain mixed with snow down in the valley.

70. maccassar says:

rgbatduke-
Every time I read one of your comments it increases my knowledge and forces me to gain some different perspectives on the issue at hand. They have been invaluable in trying to sort through all the discussions about the climate. Thanks

71. Frank Kotler says:

Great stuff, Willis! (as always)
I think I know what “NaN” means (in the captions), but you might want to define it somewhere.

One important thing is not to confuse resolution(0.005 c) with accuracy or uncertainty.
I do not believe that the changes measured are more than the uncertainty.

73. jorgekafkazar says:

tallbloke says: “Interesting to compare the post-adjustment data Willis uses to Craig Loehle’s 2009 work which shows cooling from 2004. I wonder if the folk at Colorado.edu have one leg shorter than the other. The sea level altimetry they output has a distinct tilt too.”
Having lived in Colorado and observed the Denvizens thereof, my explanation is hypoxia.

74. tallbloke says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:26 am
Interesting to compare the post-adjustment data Willis uses to Craig Loehle’s 2009 work which shows cooling from 2004. I wonder if the folk at Colorado.edu have one leg shorter than the other.
================
The Argo data is suspect because they selectively turned off the low reading floats, without turning off the high reading floats. In other words, they changed the data to match expectations.
Imagine you were conducting a test of a new medicine. 1/3 were cured, 1/3 unchanged, and 1/3 died. But however, since you didn’t expect 1/3 to die you removed them from the study and reported instead a 50% cure rate.
This is exactly what was done with Argo. The low reading floats were removed because they provided data the scientists had not expected to see. They had expected to see the oceans warming, so they removed the floats that showed cooling. What was left is biased to meet experimenter expectations.

75. jorgekafkazar says:

rgbatduke says: “c) As always in climate science, no error bars. Everything is smoothed. We cannot see which parts of the globe are oversampled (because ocean currents create an eddy that collects more than its share of buoys) and undersampled (because prevailing currents push buoys away, or because currents are depleted by buoys trapped in eddies). “
I’m wondering if differential viscosity would tend to move a float preferentially into the plumes above volcanic vent locations, rather than away.
Great comments, as always. Sehr niftlich, even.

76. Eliza says:

Actually the data shows nothing. Data from 2005 to 2012 is meaningless. There is no significant trend of any type. I would say that over a 100 year period its more likely lt to be a 0C trend

77. jorgekafkazar says:

Steve Case says: “…But all that aside, the data stream from the ARGO floats is a manipulation created by Dr. Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Like everything else, it’s been adjusted to fall into line with Global Warming theory.”
There’s no question that it’s been “adjusted,” but based on statements of some who know him, I can’t draw the conclusion that Dr. Willis consciously did so to fall into line with AGW theory.

78. Eliza says:

Im saying this (Previous post above) because the alarmist’s will of course say 0.03C decade equals 30C over 10000 years which is highly significant and of course they were right all along. This is why short term 7 year data like this should never be interpreted to mean anything except noise. They will use this data to say that is where the missing heat has gone re Trenberth

79. It is essential to realise that the latitudinally shifting ‘heartbeat’ shown so graphically in Fig 1 represents the global thermostat in action. It is a full and fast negative system response to ANY internal system forcing element.
The seasonal adjustment observed in Fig 1 is a consequence of internal system changes arising from the orbit of Earth around the sun and the angle of presentation of the Earth towards the sun which alters the proportion of solar energy able to enter the oceans during the course of each year.
That latitudinal shifting is the negative system response cancelling out the variations in solar input to the oceans fully and completely each year.
It is significant that the CO2 record at Mauna Loa closely follows that annual latitudinal shifting.
ENSO is part of that negative system response because residual imbalances do accumulate over years and so ENSO deals with them in periodic discharging or retention of solar energy.
If energy is being added to the system then El Ninos become more prominent and discharge energy from the oceans more rapidly.
If energy is being lost by the system them La Ninas become more prominent and retain energy in the oceans for longer.
The baseline system energy content that such shifting always seeks to restore is determined only by atmospheric mass within a gravity field plus external insolation (if we disregard geothermal energy as too small to matter though it must play some part).
Willis has already shown the effectiveness of the system thermostat but, initially at least, considered it to be a tropical thunderstorm feature.
Figure 1 supports my contention that the thermostatic mechanism involves the entire global air circulation system as it constantly shifts latitudinally between the poles.
That is the basic climate principle that just does not seem to be grasped by either alarmists or sceptics (excluding Roger Tattersall) despite my having gone on about it for the past eight years.
If the Earth tries to warm up to a level above that permitted by atmospheric mass and insolation as a result of a change in some internal system forcing element (such as GHG amounts) then that latitudinal climate zone shifting simply adjusts its latitudinal extent to cancel the effect.
Likewise, if the Earth tries to cool down as a result of internal system changes.
The thing is that solar and oceanic variability have substantial effects which are constantly interacting with one another such that any effects from changes in CO2 amounts become imperceptible in the wider natural variations.
If an external source such as solar wavelength and / or particle variability then tries to affect system energy content by interfering with the proportion of insolation able to enter the oceans (by altering global cloudiness in the way I have previously described), then the latitudinal shifting will compensate for that too, hence Roman Warm Period, Dark Ages, Mediaeval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and the Current Warm Period.
It really is that simple.
It is all there, in Fig 1.

80. Dr. David Evans at JoNova site says the ARGO floats’ uncertainties are around 0.1 C. This is of course far larger than the change over 7 years, implying that once again Dr. Brown has it right, this number (the change in ocean temperature) would be correctly recorded as 0.0 degrees C!!!

81. Billy Liar says:

Stephen Richards says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:19 am
The warming is trivially small, 0.03°C per decade.
Ooooh, that’s 30°c / 10,000 years. That’s massive. /sarc ;)) :))

You may laugh but that means the oceans were 60°C colder at the end of the last glaciation. (climate science™)

82. Billy Liar says:

rgbatduke says:
March 2, 2014 at 7:02 am
Would the state of North Carolina (in comparison) be well-represented in the land surface record by no more than three thermometers?
In Jim Hansen’s world? Probably one would do – near the ocean.

83. The difference between Fig 1 and Fig 2 is interesting.
The latitudinal shifting is greatest at the top of the oceans and reduces as one goes deeper.
The ocean surface temperatures, then, must control the latitudinal positions of all the permanent climate zones and, therefore, jet stream behaviour as the jets thread between those climate zones.
See my ‘Hot Water Bottle Effect’:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-hot-water-bottle-effect/
and:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/weather-is-the-key-after-all/

84. Tanks, Willis. A superb article.
Figure 1. Oceanic surface temperatures, 2005-2012. Argo data, and Figure 2 are impressive.

85. jorgekafkazar says:
March 2, 2014 at 8:55 am
There’s no question that it’s been “adjusted,” but based on statements of some who know him, I can’t draw the conclusion that Dr. Willis consciously did so to fall into line with AGW theory.
=============
Exactly. All humans are biased, and it is this bias that prevents us from seeing ourselves or our actions as biased. Instead we see our biased actions as being neutral and our neutral actions as being biased.
Thus, to correctly adjust the data, the experimenter must do so in a blind fashion, otherwise he/she will unconsciously introduce bias and mistakenly believe it to be neutral.
In the case of the Argo floats this was not done. Floats were selectively removed based on the trend they showed. This allowed the experimenters to unconsciously bias the results, by deciding which trend was correct and which trend was not.
As a result the Argo floats are not measuring ocean temperatures. They are measuring the experimenters unconscious bias.

86. Ulric Lyons says:

Stephen Wilde says:
“If energy is being added to the system then El Ninos become more prominent and discharge energy from the oceans more rapidly.”
Still the wrong way around Stephan, look at fall in solar plasma velocity at 1997/98 and 2009/10:
http://snag.gy/nf9SK.jpg

• Ulric,
Thanks for noticing my comments but I think the data shows that I have it right.
The late 20th century warming spell showed high solar activity, reduced global cloudiness, a poleward drift of the climate zones and jets plus more El Ninos.
Observations will always prevail in the end 🙂

87. From reading the literature at the time, the Argo adjustments came about because the floats were showing decreasing average ocean temperature over time. This led to the belief that something must be wrong with the floats. Had the floats shown increasing average ocean temperatures, researchers would have instead concluded that the floats were correct.
Thus, the adjustments are a result of experimenter expectations, not ocean temperatures. Thus the result cannot be relied upon.
In the Olympics they know enough to throw out the high and low scores before calculating the average. In this fashion you minimize bias and error. The Argo adjustments threw out the low scores but left the high, thereby cooking the results.

88. Alan Robertson says:

Figure 1. reminds me of lyrics from the song: “Machinehead”, by Bush– “breathe in, breathe out…”

89. Roy Spencer:
May I take a shot at the imbalance? And I have another question…
Taking peak to peak, I’d say it’s ±4.4e+22, or 8.8e+22 j total deviation. I’ve been using 5.101e+14 m^2 as the surface area of the earth (42% more than the ocean, but from a radiative balance perspective using the entire earth area made more sense to me). So that would give us 8.8e+22/31536000 seconds/yr = 2.79e+15W. 2.79e15 / 5.101e+14m^2 = 5.74W/m^2 peak to peak imbalance. I’ll have to leave the CERES question to Willis…
Now on to the more important question I’ve been wanting to ask you. I’ve been saying (as I did above), that if the earth’s surface hasn’t warmed in 17 years, and if the only heating we can seem to find on this planet is 0.5W/m^2 (which is just OHC from Levitus 2010 expressed as W/m^2), AND if we agree that the surface and atmosphere have a negligible heat capacity on this timescale, AND if we take the CO2 forcing as 3.7(log(400/280,2), or 1.94W/m^2, would the estimate of 26% of the direct forcing (0.5/1.94) not be a reasonable estimate of climate sensitivity? Meaning that feedback is negative? I realize I should take the area under the curve of the forcing over time and accumulate the energy, which makes my estimate a little on the aggressive side, but based on this, would you agree that either climate sensitivity is very low, or that we are in the influence of the back side of a natural influence (a sine wave at 90°+)?
Doing the same analysis using Levitus 2010, and going back to 1957, which should tend to suppress most natural cycles, I get a factor of 0.664 of the direct forcing. Meaning I took the area under the curve (total energy in by CO2 forcing * area * time * X) and X turned out to be 0.664 to match Levitus’ measured ocean heat. So by method 2, I also get a very low sensitivity. And if we have only 0.5W/m^2 imbalance, it also means we only have the potential to heat the earth 0.13°C before it reaches equilibrium. Which means it’s at equilibrium now for our ability to detect it.
Would you mind taking a few minutes to punch some holes in that theory? Why does this conclusion not support low sensitivity? No one seems to want to take this question on, and I know it annoys the crap out of alarmists when I explain how insignificant “4 hiroshimas/sec” is, and how wonderful and earth saving their discovery is, and how I wholeheartedly applaud their sharing it since it will save so many lives. So I would appreciate your comments. I realize you don’t respond to every hare-brained theory but I hope mine deserves some merit. Thanks in advance.
Final question… How does one pronounce Levitus? Lev eye tis? Lev eh tis? Leev eye tis?

90. apachewhoknows says:

Just weather: We drove in from the place to Greenville Tx this moring.
Driving back had the pleasure of a “Thunder Sleet” just a few min. ago.
27% ground level.
Tonight 10% F.
But nothing like friends of ours up in Oklahoma.
Just weather. Costly, long term harsh, terrible weather.

91. strike says:

“Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface. Every 10 days they wake up and slowly rise to the surface, taking temperature measurements as they go. When they reach the surface, they radio their data back to headquarters, slip beneath the waves, sink down to a thousand metres and go back to sleep …”
When does the argo go down to 2000 meters?
“Well, it can show us the changes in the average temperature down to 2000 metres.”
Probably a typo somewhere?
As always, thanks for posting, Willis. Please say something to the error-margin in the follow-up.

92. Alan Robertson says:

apachewhoknows says:
March 2, 2014 at 9:44 am
Just weather: We drove in from the place to Greenville Tx this moring.
Driving back had the pleasure of a “Thunder Sleet” just a few min. ago.
27% ground level.
Tonight 10% F.
But nothing like friends of ours up in Oklahoma.
Just weather. Costly, long term harsh, terrible weather.
____________________
“Thundersleet”- that’s exactly right. I’m in central Oklahoma and listening to/marveling at the thunder while it snows/sleets.

93. Thanks, Willis, good post. A couple of observations:
1) The .03 degrees of warming in the past decade is after the data is adjusted. Without adjustments, there is no warming.
2) If there has been warming in the oceans (and that is a big IF), it is likely unrelated to CO2 and AGW theory. The primary mechanism for heating the oceans is direct heating by the sun. Atmospheric transfer plays a relatively small role. Decreasing cloud cover is the likely explanation IF warming is occurring. Additionally, heating related to CO2 ALWAYS begins in the atmosphere. It is not credible that atmospheric heating could heat the oceans without some residual heat remaining in the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere hasn’t warmed in the time period we have had the Argos floats, it clearly can’t be responsible for warming in the oceans.

94. Willis Eschenbach says:

tty says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:38 am

The margins of error must be considerable, considering the huge areas not covered by Argo: all of the Arctic ocean and most of the Southern ocean, the Hudson bay, the Baltic, part of the Bering Sea, the Caribbean, the Mexican Gulf, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Japanese Sea, the sea inside the Rykyus, all of Indonesia, the Sulu Sea, the whole Sahul shelf, the Andaman sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and sundry other shelf areas and areas off major river mouths. And a majority of these areas aren’t just shelf seas, they also contain large, deep basins. In all at least 10% of the world ocean must lack coverage.

Those are not covered by the ARGO data because it is measuring down to 2,000 metres, and they are all shallower than that … however, that also means that the volume isn’t that large. In fact, the areas not covered by the Argo floats because of shallow depths only represent about 0.2% of the total ocean volume …
w.

95. Willis Eschenbach says:

Richards in Vancouver says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:16 am

OK. It’s 2 AM and I might be missing something simple, but set me straight if you would. Gently, please. Right at the top you say:

“There are about 4,000 Argo floats in the ocean. Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface.”

Then you continue with 2000 meter depths. How come?
And please don’t answer with, “Argo bleep yourself!” or something saltier. Remember, it’s 2 AM and I’m feeling delicate.
Thanks

They all sleep at about 1,000 metres. However, some of them wake up, drop down to 2,000 metres, and then measure temperatures from there.
w.

96. richard says:

“The margins of error must be considerable, considering the huge areas not covered by Argo”
very similar to the way GISS estimate temps up to 1200 kilometres from weather stations around the world.

97. Steven Kopits says:

Is this the first time anyone has done this sort of presentation of Argo data? It’s really something. Congratulations, Willis. It seems to be a real innovation in data presentation.

98. bones says:

Willis,
Re: Figure 3. The weighted average global rate of temp increase should be (1/2)x0.1 + (1/2)x(-0.07) = 0.015 C, not 0.03 C.

99. richard says:

going of tangent but an interesting paper, shows that it is best to get out of the lab and monitor real life.
Changes in coral microbial communities in response to a natural pH gradient.
Extract
Most of the studies to date have examined the impact of ocean acidification on corals and/or associated microbiota under controlled laboratory conditions. Here we report the first study that examines the changes in coral microbial communities in response to a natural pH gradient (mean pH(T) 7.3-8.1) caused by volcanic CO(2) vents off Ischia, Gulf of Naples, Italy. Two Mediterranean coral species, Balanophyllia europaea and Cladocora caespitosa, were examined. The microbial community diversity and the physiological parameters of the endosymbiotic dinoflagellates (Symbiodinium spp.) were monitored. We found that pH did not have a significant impact on the composition of associated microbial communities in both coral species. In contrast to some earlier studies, we found that corals present at the lower pH sites exhibited only minor physiological changes and no microbial pathogens were detected. Together, these results provide new insights into the impact of ocean acidification on the coral holobiont.

100. Willis Eschenbach says:

Roy Spencer says:
March 2, 2014 at 4:40 am

I’ve never seen the seasonal cycle before, Willis. Can you compute what the W/m2 imbalances are for the seasonal cycle, and compare them to the CERES-measured changes in Earth’s radiative budget over the seasonal cycle? Just curious how they compare…seems like they should reasonably match.

Excellent question, Dr. Roy, and it’s on my list. I also want to compare the Argo surface temperature dataset with the CERES surface radiation dataset … so many drummers, so little time.
w.

101. Cardin Drake,
I agree, this is a good article.
I also agree with your comment:
Since the atmosphere hasn’t warmed in the time period we have had the Argos floats, it clearly can’t be responsible for warming in the oceans.

102. Steve Case says:

Peter Foster said at 4:37 am
Willis, are you using raw data or “adjusted data”. I get confused by graphs from Bob Tisdale that show most of the ocean basins cooling. so how do we suddenly get ocean warming when the data used by Bob shows cooling ?
No kidding.
tallbloke said at 1:26 am
Interesting to compare the post-adjustment data Willis uses to Craig Loehle’s 2009 work which shows cooling from 2004.

The Argo data is suspect because they selectively turned off the low reading floats, without turning off the high reading floats. In other words, they changed the data to match expectations.

The low reading floats were removed because they provided data the scientists had not expected to see. They had expected to see the oceans warming, so they removed the floats that showed cooling. What was left is biased to meet experimenter expectations.

That’s what I figure was done.
jorgekafkazar said at 8:55 am
There’s no question that it’s [ARGO FLOATS] been “adjusted,” but based on statements of some who know him, I can’t draw the conclusion that Dr. Willis consciously did so to fall into line with AGW theory.
And the shepherd boy who cried wolf finally got eaten by one.
Maybe the adjustments Dr. Willis directed his team to make were legitimate, but after seeing his “Ask a Climate Scientist” YouTube

I am not impressed with him in any way.
ferdberple said at 8:55 am
… to correctly adjust the data, the experimenter must do so in a blind fashion, otherwise he/she will unconsciously introduce bias and mistakenly believe it to be neutral.
In the case of the Argo floats this was not done. Floats were selectively removed based on the trend they showed. This allowed the experimenters to unconsciously bias the results, by deciding which trend was correct and which trend was not.
As a result the Argo floats are not measuring ocean temperatures. They are measuring the experimenters unconscious bias.

B I N G O !
ferdberple said at 9:34 am
… the Argo adjustments came about because the floats were showing decreasing average ocean temperature over time. This led to the belief that something must be wrong with the floats. Had the floats shown increasing average ocean temperatures, researchers would have instead concluded that the floats were correct.
Oh I’m sure they would tell you they would have made corrections if results were deemed to be too high. One would think that the corrections to Global Warming data of all kinds (Temperature, Sea Level, Polar Bear Populations, Glacier Recession, Sea Ice, etc. ) would show a normal distribution around zero but I think that is far from the case.
Thus, the adjustments are a result of experimenter expectations, not ocean temperatures. Thus the result cannot be relied upon.
Again, B I N G O !

103. Coastie says:

Willis; wonderful movies!
Any chance of showing a version centered on the Atlantic view?
I know, so many requests, so little time…
At least there isn’t new analysis for this one.
I also know, the Pacific is the big kahuna, Tisdale has flogged that through my thick skull.
I’d enjoy seeing the ‘Gulf Stream’, and maybe the ‘Bermuda triangle’.
For that matter, should I be noticing any Gyre-ations ?
Regards,
RR

104. george e. smith says:

Well Willis, I haven’t digested the significance of your various new physics SI units, but I’m inclined to agree with this observation:….””””….Dang, I like that …”””””
The movies are a lot better than Hollywood.
I may have missed it somewhere, or it’s not there, but your final fig. 5 trend line Joules per decade, could be converted to some sort of Watts per square meter net input storage rate to the total ocean surface, and/or extrapolated to the whole earth surface, to get a net earth energy gain rate.
Any idea what that rate might be. And I agree, your trend rate and the Levitus version, both agree with each other, given, your error bands.
A nice essay to wake up to this morning , Willis.
I only know OHC as either “Overhead Cam”, or “Oxygen free Hard Copper” , and I presume yours is something else ??

105. Stephen Wilde
You said above:
“If energy is being added to the system then El Ninos become more prominent and discharge energy from the oceans more rapidly.
If energy is being lost by the system them La Ninas become more prominent and retain energy in the oceans for longer.”
Have you ever studied emergent phenomena in things like plasmas or even chemical reactions? The plasma analogy is actually quite apt to ENSO.
In contained plasmas, there is a point where a critical amount of energy input into the plasma causes a sharp and often chaotic-like transition to coherent voltage oscillations. These oscillations may start off as a mixture of periodic and chaotic but with an increase in power become more periodic. The increase in power is very slight however, for instance input anode current changing from 1 A to 1.02 A.
Below this threshold the plasma just exhibits random noise with no periodic voltage oscillations. The transition is related to acoustic effects where the ions start to oscillate slightly with electrons still being the major charge carrier. But put enough power and suddenly the ions will cause negative resistivity, as in it looks like current is travelling backwards. In effect the ions become the major charge carriers, but it requires a lot of power.
The commonality with the Earth’s climate would be that you have two elements that can carry heat: a slowly charging one, the ocean; and a quickly changing one, the atmosphere. So ENSO could actually be a consequence of a certain power coming from the Sun, that is enough to cause oscilllations in the ocean that are defined by the shape of the ocean bed itself and the geoid. This may be a reason why ENSO appears in the Pacific.
Now if heat is removed from the system, ENSO itself, according to this idea, would become more erratic, with larger pulses and longer times between cycles. Until it would disappear entirely. The atmosphere would uncouple from the ocean in this respect. Put much more energy in and you may find ENSO is more stable but has larger temperature variations.
Having studied plasma interactions, especially discharge plasmas, and seeing that the Earth has acoustic characteristics (a contained ocean) maybe we should be looking into ocean oscillations and their history. If we are seeing less periodicity it may be signalling a cooling world.
But this is just a theory based on observations in another field. It may be different like you say and in effect the Earth’s climate balances itself.

106. george e. smith says:

Forget it, I got it; it was posted on the front door !!

107. Ulric Lyons says:

Stephen Wilde says:
“The late 20th century warming spell showed high solar activity, reduced global cloudiness, a poleward drift of the climate zones and jets..”
Sorry, but poleward jets means faster trade winds.

108. mickyhcorbett75
I don’t exclude any of that.
As system energy content declines I would expect the ocean cycles to slow down, just as you say, but I think the oceans would still control the atmosphere until they shrank to a fraction of their current size.
Once the oceans do shrink to a point where they lose control then I would expect a more vigorous atmospheric circulation to develop to maintain system equilibrium.
On Mars, for example, we see periodic planet wide dust storms which alter albedo to act as a negative system response to excess warming.
My contention is that whatever forces seek to destabilise the thermal behaviour of a planetary atmosphere that atmosphere will reconfigure its circulation in a full and complete negative system response. otherwise the atmosphere could not be retained.

109. george e. smith says:

“””””…..Stephen Rasey says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:17 am
In agreement with tty at 1:38.
The margins of error might not be considerable, but are uncomfortably close in size to the signal.
The trend in this data (6.9 ± 0.6 e+22 joules per decade)
That indeed looks very precise. 69 ± 6 ZJ. or 0.022 ± 0.002 deg C / decade
(at 27.5 ZJ per 0.01 deg C for 0-2000 meters)
Can we believe we have that much precision to 0.002 deg C / decade? And we have not yet measured a full decade. With 4,000 Argo floats, 130,000 sounding per year, with one Argo float for every 200,000 km^3 of ocean.
That is remarkable precision, especially when the average temperature of the entire 0-2000 column runs from 0.000 – 10.000 deg C and the surface runs from 0.000 to 30.000+ deg C (extra decimal points added to make a point)……”””””
WHAT remarkable precision, are YOU talking about ???
From 6.9 +/- 0.6 E +100! Amps per kelvin, I get about 8.7% precision !!
What on earth do the units have to do with precision ??
If you CALCULATE the temperature change per attosecond, you are NOT suddenly getting Guinness world record precision !

110. Ulric Lyons said:
“Sorry, but poleward jets means faster trade winds.”
Can you substantiate that ?
I’m sure that a recent thread here on WUWT confirmed that the trade winds had recently increased whilst the middle latitude jets have become more equatorward / meridional.
which confirms that the trade winds were slower during the past warming spell of poleward jets but are now stronger with more equatorward jets.
“an unprecedented strengthening of the equatorial trade winds appears to be largely responsible for the hiatus in surface warming observed over the past 13 years.”
and we all know that the jets stopped drifting poleward around 2000 don’t we ?

111. george e. smith says:

per Nick Boyce
“””””…..(9) Therefore, the temperature of the world’s oceans, to a depth of 2000 meters, increased by 0.09°C, from 1950 to 2013……”””””
I make that 0.0143 deg. C per decade, compared to Willis’s 0.02 deg. C per decade.
So what was the point you were making, again ??

112. Willis Eschenbach says:

rgbatduke says:
March 2, 2014 at 7:02 am

The only comments I have to make are these:
a) 4000 buoys for 70% of the Earth’s surface is an absurdly sparse grid. The ocean covers roughly 400,000,000 square kilometers. 4000 buoys means that each buoy represents on average 100,000 kilometers. That is a square 300 km — around 200 miles — per side. If the distribution of buoys were either random (Monte Carlo selected fixed locations) or regular, this might be adequate to get a decent estimate. However, they are not — many of the buoys are free-floating and follow the currents. But are the currents themselves random samples of oceanic temperatures, or are they likely to be systematically biased?

Well, somewhere in between, but it’s not bad. Here’s the current distribution:

I analyzed the total number of samples ever taken (as of 20120 in this graphic:

ORIGINAL CAPTION Figure 2. Number of temperature profiles ever taken by Argo floats in various areas of the ocean. Percentages in the second row refer to the percentage of the total ocean area having that number of temperature profiles. Percentages in the third row refer to the percentage of the ocean area from 60°N to 60°S having that number of temperature profiles. Click on image for larger version. SOURCE
You can see that the sampling is not totally even … but it’s not bad. Note the undersampling in the area of the ITCZ. I assume this is from diverging currents at depth.

What is the scale of “features” of oceanic temperature (sea surface or otherwise). Would the state of North Carolina (in comparison) be well-represented in the land surface record by no more than three thermometers?

Mmmm … no clear answer. Given the results in Figure 1, which are on a grid 60 nautical miles on a side at the Equator, I think we have enough samples to make some conclusions. You can see pretty fine-grained stuff in Figures 1 & 2.

b) Twelve years is an absurdly short interval in climate science. Here we know some of the time constants. Thermohaline circulation — which surely is a major if not dominant factor in the time variation — has a cycle time on the order of 1000 years. That means that a significant fraction of any observed variation has nothing to do with what is going on now — the mid-ocean heat at depth visible in the Atlantic, for example, has to be decades to centuries old, for example. We know that there is no reasonable physical mechanism for transporting heat from the surface straight down to 2000 meters in a decade, or even two or three decades. The ocean is thermally stratified and (past a few tens of meters from the top) effectively opaque to solar energy, and the salinity variation that causes thermohaline turnover and mixing due to surface winds does not generally cause deep mixing, although there are specific sites where the thermohaline circulations turns over and warm surface currents descend into the depths for return. The movies above are indeed nifty, but they are like looking at gust of wind on a windy day and trying to conclude that the wind is rising as a climate feature. Are we looking at noise? Signal? Detrending on a decade’s worth of data doesn’t even catch one of the decadal oscillations that surely have a “trend” of their own.

While all of that is certainly true, in climate science we are always faced with datasets that are too short … I do note that the statistical significance of the trend is clear.
For me, the key is precision, not accuracy. If I can see small coherent physically logical features and details in the graphics, that’s what counts. In general I’m looking for understanding, not accuracy.

c) As always in climate science, no error bars. Everything is smoothed. We cannot see which parts of the globe are oversampled (because ocean currents create an eddy that collects more than its share of buoys) and undersampled (because prevailing currents push buoys away, or because currents are depleted by buoys trapped in eddies). We do not get any feel for the granularity of the actual measurements. It might be more interesting to recreate the same map with each buoy’s results represented by a small patch of pixels along its actual trajectory in color — that, I suspect, would eliminate the smooth contours and impression of homogeneity produced by the maps above, and would give the viewer a much better idea of the probable error in the contours.

I considered putting in error bars, but I didn’t have enough information to do it—I don’t know how many individual Argo measurements were made per gridcell.
I can tell you that (assuming that the individual gridcells have either no errors or symmetrical errors) the standard error of the mean of each month’s global average surface temperature is on the order of tenth of a degree …

The point being, 0.02C/decade — is that 0.02 ± 0.1 C/decade, or is it 0.02 ± 0.01 C/decade or is it 0.02 ± 1 C/decade?

I probably should have included the following in the head post, which answers the question …

As always, of course, this is the statistical accuracy …

The answer to that one is simple. HADCRUT4 represents what, tens of thousands of reporting stations, including all of ARGO to represent the sea surface, and claims (probably egregiously, given the lack of UHI correction) 0.15C accuracy.
That’s the fundamental problem. I rather suspect that the reported warming is 0.02 ± 1 C/decade, which is a number that ought to be reported as “0″ no matter how many “joules” one wishes to discover in the deep ocean. Or at the very least, it should be reported with an error bar, and some empirical and statistical justification for the error bar should be provided.

For the surface temperature, there are N = 29407 gridcells, and an area-adjusted standard deviation of 15°. By the usual calculations, that’s a standard error of the mean of about a tenth of a degree [ stdev/sqrt(N) = 0.09 ]. As you might imagine, the deeper you go, the smaller that gets. Here are the results for the surface. Note that there is no significant trend in the surface data.

For the average down to 2,000 metres, you have 27 times the number of samples, and the standard deviation is smaller ( ~12° ), so we get a SEM of about a hundredth of a degree.
Look, I have my own very real concerns about the accuracy of the OHC data, see Decimals of Precision.
And I am aware that the sampling is sparse, and the dataset is short. I am also aware that what I am reporting is the STATISTICAL uncertainty, and not the accuracy of the results compared to the actual reality. All I can do is report what I find.
I don’t think, however, that the warming is 0.02* ± 1°C per decade …
Thanks as always,
w.

113. Willis Eschenbach says:

ferdberple says:
March 2, 2014 at 8:41 am

tallbloke says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:26 am

Interesting to compare the post-adjustment data Willis uses to Craig Loehle’s 2009 work which shows cooling from 2004. I wonder if the folk at Colorado.edu have one leg shorter than the other.

The Argo data is suspect because they selectively turned off the low reading floats, without turning off the high reading floats. In other words, they changed the data to match expectations.

Egads, ferd, don’t make that kind of claim without a citation. What is your basis for the claim?
w.

114. TC says:

“Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface. Every 10 days they wake up and slowly rise to the surface, taking temperature measurements as they go. When they reach the surface, they radio their data back to headquarters, slip beneath the waves, sink down to a thousand metres and go back to sleep …”
A naive question perhaps but are they all synchronised in some way? Just askin’

115. Willis Eschenbach says:

TC says:
March 2, 2014 at 11:48 am

“Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface. Every 10 days they wake up and slowly rise to the surface, taking temperature measurements as they go. When they reach the surface, they radio their data back to headquarters, slip beneath the waves, sink down to a thousand metres and go back to sleep …”

A naive question perhaps but are they all synchronised in some way? Just askin’

Good question. The answer is no.
w.

116. are the reported temps at all affected by the sinking and rising actions or by passing through different temp zones? or so they sink, wait a few to stabilize, record and store THEN rise and transmit after fully risen with no recording during transit?
I don’t know enough about them to really phrase the question well, sorry.
just concerned the sink/rise action may skew the results.

117. george e. smith says:

“””””…..RichardLH says:
March 2, 2014 at 5:37 am
Speed says:
March 2, 2014 at 4:41 am
“Averages are sometimes useful, sometimes not. My nine year old car has operated at an average speed of 1.14 miles per hour over its lifetime. This reveals almost nothing about the car or how I drive.”
But averages per day, month or year may well provide data that is of interest as to usage……”””””
My 2012 Subaru Impreza, has just reached 10,000 miles. It’s average (moving) speed for that 10,000 miles, is just 16.0 mph. On a level road with engine fully warmed up. it goes 15 mph, with my foot off the gas pedal, at engine idle speed. I have never driven 16.0 mph in my life, for more than ten seconds per instance.
For that 10,000 miles, of actual moving, I have averaged 24.6 mpg.
The car has never been above 300 feet above MSL (no hilly driving).
On my typical freeway and expressway roads, where most of that 10,000 miles went, I drive between 45 and 60 mph. Over that speed range my instant mpg averages 55, down to 45 mpg. Yes it dips, if I go over an overpass. Yes I am very good at high mpg driving, and no I do not hold up traffic; quite the opposite, as my averages confirm.
Averages tell you something about ANY set of already accurately known numbers. Tells you nothing about any unknown numbers.
On average, Hurricane Sandy, from birth to death did very little damage anywhere. Well you can cherry pick, and find some small parts of its total path, area, where it did some observable damage.
Planet earth (Mother Gaia) does not compute averages; she integrates everything, but if something breaks, it may take a while to fix.

118. Paul Westhaver says:

I don’t see how 4000 devices can produce a 4-dimensional (x,y, temp, time) image that has that level of resolution in each frame.
I assume about 30,000 pixels per frame (in the oceans) and taking into consideration Harry Nyquists rule, there ought to be about 60,000 sensors to yield the given frame, also assuming they are producing data for each frame.
There must be at least an order or magnitude plus of interpolation to produce the animation. Since interpolation isn’t real data, I would like to see an animation of the real discrete data without averaging and wizz-bang-edness. I suspect the real data is not as fancy looking.
Or am I completely wrong.

119. george e. smith says:

Wow, people are concerned about only 4,000 Argo buoys. Darn side better than one Yamal Charlie Brown Christmas tree !
Hansen says Thermometers are good out to 1,000 km, that’s more than 3 million sq. km per buoy, or 12 billion square km total.
Why all this sudden interest in the Nyquist sampling theorem ? Nobody in Climatism, pays any attention to the theory of sampled data systems; well they probably don’t even know that the climate is a (multi-variable) sampled data system.

120. Kevin O'Brien says:

The view from living in New Zealand of Figure 2 is fascinating, particularly as slowed down by Steve Keohane (http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=12519p1&s=8#.UxOKHs63sas)
We can see our typical yearly, cyclical, regional, seasons clearly: February being the hottest and August the coldest. NZ is about 2000 km long and you can see why the north of the country has become a population magnet.
Figure 2 That says nothing about measurement but does show that the surrounding ocean temperatures have a commonality with our seasonal weather at the macro level.

121. Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 11:48 am
Egads, ferd, don’t make that kind of claim without a citation. What is your basis for the claim?
=========
The original Argo data showed cooling. The problem was attributed to a problem with some of the floats and these were removed. After the data no longer showed cooling. I believe the source for this was a published interview with Dr Willis, but it is too long ago to be sure. As far as I’m aware it was fairly well publicized at the time that the Argo record was initially showing cooling, which was seen as a problem because it was not what was expected. So a correction was done because the data did not match expectation. This points to an experimenter expectation problem in the design of the experiment.

122. Ulric.
In my original post I made no comment about strength or weakness of the trade winds so why did you raise the issue ?
I see that a negative AO gives weaker trade winds and a positive AO gives stronger trade winds but that is not inconsistent with my original post
However it is inconsistent with the other WUWT thread but that is not my position.
My position is that it could go either way depending on the relative strengths of the top down solar effect and the bottom up oceanic effect.
If both are in phase (inactive sun and cool oceans or active sun and warm oceans) the trade winds would be weaker but if they are out of phase (inactive sun and warm oceans or active sun and cool oceans) the trade winds would be stronger.
A the moment we have a weakening top down solar effect allowing the global air circulation to become more meridional.
At the same time we still have relatively warm oceans in historical terms so they are pushing poleward against the solar effect pushing equatorward.
Thus stronger trade winds whilst sun and oceans are in opposing phases.

123. george e. smith at 11:41 am
WHAT remarkable precision, are YOU talking about ???
From 6.9 +/- 0.6 E +100! Amps per kelvin, I get about 8.7% precision !!
What on earth do the units have to do with precision ??

I honestly don’t understand your point.
Willis reported:

The trend in this data (6.9 ± 0.6 e+22 joules per decade)

Personally, I dislike the practice of measure OHC in units where you must watch the exponent and prefer to convert to Zeta Joules (10^21 Joules), so I rewrote it in units I prefer without changing the percentage precision.
69 ± 6 ZJ.
and then converted to the units of original measurement:
0.022 ± 0.002 deg C / decade
(at 27.5 ZJ per 0.01 deg C for 0-2000 meters)
[Willis, thank you for the charts converted to deg C in your 11:43 am reply to rgb.]
I said: 0.002 deg C / decade ” is remarkable precision, especially when the average temperature of the entire 0-2000 meter column runs from 0.000 – 10.000 deg C [one part in 5,000] and the surface runs from 0.000 to 30.000+ deg C “, and there is one Argo per 200,000 km^3 of ocean. Furthermore the Argo’s have a measurement precision of 0.005 deg C, a recorded drift in some tested bouy’s of 0.003 deg C in four years.
Not to mention what processing, cleansing, and adjusting might go on behind the scenes.
ferdberple at 9:34 am raises some concerns there, but citations are needed.
Maybe I didn’t express clearly enough that an uncertainty of ± 0.002 degC / decade is below our ability to measure it and is therefore somehow too small.

That’s the fundamental problem. I rather suspect that the reported warming is 0.02± 1.0 C/decade, which is a number that ought to be reported as “0″ no matter how many “joules” one wishes to discover in the deep ocean. Or at the very least, it should be reported with an error bar, and some empirical and statistical justification for the error bar should be provided.

Like Willis, I don’t think the uncertainty is as bad as ± 1.0 C/decade, but I don’t think it can as good as ± 0.002 C/decade.

124. [correction to 12:55 pm]
units I prefer without changing the percentage precision.
69 ± 6 ZJ.

125. Paul Westhaver says:

george e. smith says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:36 pm
Why all this sudden interest in the Nyquist sampling theorem ?
____________________________________________________
George,
My interest in adhering to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem requirements is not driven by what clownish so-called climate scientists do rather, is driven by the discipline of proper scientific behavior. Also, it isn’t all of a sudden for me. When I leaned about confidence levels, sampling sizes, s/N, and error analysis, in my graduate work I became more fastidious about how I represented my work and more critical about “scientific vs artistic” renderings without the appropriate disclaimers. If the rendering is 10% data and 90% artistic, then it should be watermarked or annotated as such in my opinon. Sloppy science by Michael Manna and Phil Jones does not mean we ought not abide by scientific principles ourselves.

126. Willis,
in your Fig. 3 you give the change in ocean surface temperatures in the years 2005 to 2012 as +0.03 K/decade (global). There are quite a few SST data around. I took ERSST from KNMI:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs2.cgi?someone@somewhere
and find (globally) quite a different number, on a rough estimate something like -0.05 K/decade for those years.
So I wonder about the ARGO data quality for SST data.
Sincerely, Werner Weber
physics, TU Dortmund University, Germany

127. RE: George E Smith: 12:36 pm.
George E. Smith brilliantly introduced Nyquist into the ARGO precision debate Jan 27, 2012 8:16 pm in the Decimals of Precision thread.
Wow, people are concerned about only 4,000 Argo buoys. Darn side better than one Yamal Charlie Brown Christmas tree ! +10

128. RichardLH says:

“Planet earth (Mother Gaia) does not compute averages; she integrates everything”
A running average IS an integral (of sorts). Calculates the area under a curve over a given time span. 🙂

129. AJ says:

Nice work Willis!

130. Ulric Lyons says:

Stephen Wilde says:
“In my original post I made no comment about strength or weakness of the trade winds so why did you raise the issue ?”
Because stronger trade winds means La Nina, and that is during positive AO, which is when the jet is more poleward.

131. Willis Eschenbach says: “Egads, ferd, don’t make that kind of claim without a citation. What is your basis for the claim?”
Thanks, Willis. (Not the Argo Willis, the other Willis!)
ferdberple says: “The original Argo data showed cooling….”

That is 100% correct, ferd. The collective trend was downward.
“…The problem was attributed to a problem with some of the floats and these were removed….”
You may be right, but I don’t recall their being removed.
“…After[wards] the data no longer showed cooling….”
That is also correct, by my recollection.
“…This points to an experimenter expectation problem in the design of the experiment.”
As I remember it, Dr. Willis had a (heh-heh) “come-to-Jesus-moment” one night and realized that there must be something wrong with the numbers. The next day, he made some sort of “adjustment” and (vwalah!) the problem disappeared.
Another, more complete viewpoint is here: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/argo-the-mystery-of-global-warmings-missing-heat/
And, better yet: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
From the latter: Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”
There’s more, regarding the XBT drop devices. See the last link.

132. Willis Eschenbach says:

ferdberple says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:40 pm

Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 11:48 am

Egads, ferd, don’t make that kind of claim without a citation. What is your basis for the claim?

=========
The original Argo data showed cooling. The problem was attributed to a problem with some of the floats and these were removed. After the data no longer showed cooling. I believe the source for this was a published interview with Dr Willis, but it is too long ago to be sure. As far as I’m aware it was fairly well publicized at the time that the Argo record was initially showing cooling, which was seen as a problem because it was not what was expected. So a correction was done because the data did not match expectation. This points to an experimenter expectation problem in the design of the experiment.

So based on nothing more reliable than a vague memory, you accuse Josh Willis of an “experimenter expectation problem”?
A bit of digging finds this. It discusses the underlying issue, which was that the ocean heat content data didn’t fit with the sea level data. They found two problems.
One was a subset of Argo floats that were reading too cool. The other was a problem with the calculated falling speed of the XBTs. The second of these is of no interest to this discussion.
The part that doesn’t fit your preconceptions is that Josh Willis had already written about the recent ocean cooling … so he was surprised and had to retract some claims when he noted that the purported cooling didn’t agree with the sea level data he had accepted as valid.
Near as I can tell, the 2005 inaccurate floats were removed, the data was corrected, and since then there haven’t been issues. Since the data I used starts in 2005, seems like none of this applies.
In any case, I fear that based only on your memory, you’ve made an unsubstantiated, unpleasant, and untrue accusation of scientific malfeasance against Josh Willis …
w.

133. jeffguenther8,
That is also correct, by my recollection.
That’s my recollection, too. In fact, here is a pre-adjustment ARGO chart.
It’s funny how every government ‘adjustment’ of the data ends up showing either faster warming, or turns raw cooling data into warming. I am at the point where I don’t believe any of it.
The government needs to show us the raw, unadjusted data as a starting point. Then show how and why it was adjusted. We can figure out the rest.

Willis, many thanks for creating the animations. Having to work on something else this weekend, I found myself drifting back regularly to watch the “breathing”, “gurgling” and other movements. Even while I reminded myself that these are just computerized images and simplified depictions of two variables yet another level removed from reality, I kept having the same impression of a living organism that others here described.
It is fascinating how a spinning wet rocky spheroid orbiting a ball of plasma can create something so unlike Newton’s “universe as a machine”.
We are in debt to you for sharing not just your scientific inquiries but also the beauty you know how to find in a pile of data tables.

135. Willis Eschenbach says:

Stephen Rasey says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:55 pm

Like Willis, I don’t think the uncertainty is as bad as ± 1.0 C/decade, but I don’t think it can as good as ± 0.002 C/decade.

I just report’em as I calculate them. I gave the standard deviations and values for N above in the response to Robert Brown (rgb) above.
w.

136. iron brian says:

and if the weight of a man were concentrated onto a shovel, the the blade would pierce 6 inches deep into the soil, the weight of a man normally piercing him little therein.
iron brian
<soarergtl says:
<March 2, 2014 at 2:26 am
<One of the responders to my Groan comments quoted Levitus at me:
<“Levitus (2012) thankfully puts it in context for the measurement-challenged:
<If this heat were instantly transferred to the lower 10 km of the global atmosphere it would result <in a volume mean warming of this atmospheric layer by approximately 36°C”

137. OK, I read the link Willis provided above, and it sounds reasonable. However, their chart shows the discrepancy happened well before the time frame in this link.
Like most, I want to believe the data. It’s OK by me if there is the slight ocean warming shown by the current ARGO data. In fact, it really doesn’t matter to me if there is runaway global warming. I just want to know what’s happening, and why. But NASA/GISS and others have been so manipulative with their data that it is very easy to assume the same thing is happening here.
Anyway, those are some excellent graphics, which show the various temperature changes. Very interesting. Also, not very alarming at all.

138. Willis Eschenbach says:

Paul Westhaver says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:26 pm

I don’t see how 4000 devices can produce a 4-dimensional (x,y, temp, time) image that has that level of resolution in each frame.
I assume about 30,000 pixels per frame (in the oceans) and taking into consideration Harry Nyquists rule, there ought to be about 60,000 sensors to yield the given frame, also assuming they are producing data for each frame.
There must be at least an order or magnitude plus of interpolation to produce the animation. Since interpolation isn’t real data, I would like to see an animation of the real discrete data without averaging and wizz-bang-edness. I suspect the real data is not as fancy looking.
Or am I completely wrong.

You’re looking at Nyquist backwards. Since it’s physically sampled at ~30000 samples per frame, we can’t detect anything changing on a smaller plysical scale than that. In fact, we can’t really detect anything changing on a smaller scale than twice that size …
But all that does is limit the resolution of what we can detect in the final image.
w.

139. Willis Eschenbach says:

Regarding the question of errors, I had an interesting thought …
There are ~ 3,500 Argo floats. They are on a ten-day cycle. That means that there are no more than 10,500 samples taken at each level per month.
Now, before I said that the standard error of the mean on the monthly averages was about a tenth of a degree … but in fact, that was assuming that because there are 29,404 gridcells in the ocean measured by Argo, that the number of samples was N = 29,404 … where in fact N is not more than 10,500, only about a third of that.
Hang on … let me recalc … OK, the errors need to increase by 1.7 [ which is the sqrt(29,404/10,500) ]. So the standard error of the mean of the monthly average surface temperature increases to 0.17°C, and for the average to depth increases to .02°C …
Note again that these are estimates of the MINIMUM uncertainty, because it is purely the statistical uncertainty. It does not allow for uneven coverage, particularly at depth. It does not measure the accuracy of the averages.
The same is true of the trends, that the stated uncertainty is the statistical uncertainty.
w.

140. Willis Eschenbach says:

Werner Weber says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:12 pm

Willis,
in your Fig. 3 you give the change in ocean surface temperatures in the years 2005 to 2012 as +0.03 K/decade (global). There are quite a few SST data around. I took ERSST from KNMI:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs2.cgi?someone@somewhere
and find (globally) quite a different number, on a rough estimate something like -0.05 K/decade for those years.
So I wonder about the ARGO data quality for SST data.
Sincerely, Werner Weber
physics, TU Dortmund University, Germany

I’m surprised by that level of agreement, actually. I just found the numbers you cited and analyzed them. They show a slight cooling, not statistically significant, of -0.03° ± 0.03°C per decade. The Argo data says it’s 0.01° ± 0.02°C per decade. Neither one is statistically significant, nor are they statistically different from each other.
w.

141. George E. Smith says:

“””””…..RichardLH says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:24 pm
“Planet earth (Mother Gaia) does not compute averages; she integrates everything”
A running average IS an integral (of sorts). Calculates the area under a curve over a given time span. :-)…..”””””
You clearly do not understand what the integral of a function (sequence of events) is.
It is the sum total of the consequences of everything that happened (in that sequence); which doesn’t need to be a continuous or closed form function, it can be discrete events.
If I light a candle once a day, and measure the flame height, and do that for a million years, The effect of that on the table I put the candle on, will not be very significant (on average).
But if next 4th of July, instead of a candle, I set off a one megaton bomb on my table, the result on average will not change much. The integral of all those events will be quite different.
That difference is exactly what is wrong with climate “science”.
Earth’s weather and climate does NOT result from a continuous input of 342 Watts per square meter, on each and every single square meter of the earth surface 24 hours per day and 365 days per year, which is exactly what Kevin Trenberth claims it does; even in the dead of the Antarctic winter midnight. Earth is NEVER in a state of thermal equilibrium.
Watts is A RATE OF ENERGY FLOW / input /output / conversion / whatever ; INSTANTANEOUS !!
A megawatt for one second, does NOT produce the same consequences as one Watt for a million seconds.
The TSI is 1366 W/m^2, not 342 W/m^2, and as a consequence, points on the earth surface, reach Temperatures, that they could never even approach, at 342 W/m^2, so THINGS HAPPEN that absolutely never happen under Trenberth’s view of the earth.
On average, NOTHING happens.
The climate is NOT a linear system.

142. Brian H says:

Many buoys read cold, but none read warm? Uh, yeah, OK. Not.

143. Mac the Knife says:

Willis,
A really illustrative presentation of the ARGO data! I’m mesmerized by Figure 2, having ‘zoomed’ it to max magnification to watch the 2D+time macroscopic circulation of ‘heat’ in the respective ocean basins and between them. The flow patterns I observed as a boy laying on creek banks in Wisconsin and watching small scale flow around obstructions, eddy currents, standing waves and more are all represented on the global scale in Figure 2.
Fascinating!
Mac

144. Goldie says:

Interesting because it’s not so much the averages but the differential ocean warming that causes changes in local climate. Writing this from Western Australia, it’s easy to see why the last few years have been so warm during summer, whilst the rest of the planet isn’t.

145. Willis Eschenbach says:

George E. Smith says:
March 2, 2014 at 3:25 pm

“””””…..RichardLH says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:24 pm

“Planet earth (Mother Gaia) does not compute averages; she integrates everything”
A running average IS an integral (of sorts). Calculates the area under a curve over a given time span. :-)…..”””””

You clearly do not understand what the integral of a function (sequence of events) is.
It is the sum total of the consequences of everything that happened (in that sequence); which doesn’t need to be a continuous or closed form function, it can be discrete events.

Actually, a definite integral and an average are very, very closely related measures.
$\displaystyle{DefiniteIintegral=\sum_{t=1}^n f(x)}$
and
$\displaystyle{Average=\sum_{t=1}^n \frac{f(x)}{n} }$
In other words, the average is the integral divided by n … it’s not crucial, just sayin’ …
w.

146. Paul Westhaver says:

Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:39 pm
Paul Westhaver says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:26 pm
I don’t see how 4000 devices can produce a 4-dimensional (x,y, temp, time) image that has that level of resolution in each frame…
Willis Eschenbach then says:
You’re looking at Nyquist backwards. Since it’s physically sampled at ~30000 samples per frame, we can’t detect anything changing on a smaller plysical scale than that. In fact, we can’t really detect anything changing on a smaller scale than twice that size …
___________________________________________________________________________
Nope. I don’t think so. In order to detect a frequency f you need to sample at roughly 2 x the frequency f.
In Figure 1, if that animation is generated with Argo data which is only 4000 buoys then the actual image resolution belies the implied artistry. If rather, the image is generated with a satellite imagery, with a higher resolution sensor array, say 60,000 cells, then the 30,000 pixels seem approximately reasonable.
Since the image is titles 0-2000 meters, then it can’t be sub surface temperatures if a satellite sensor was used. I assume Argos were used.
So either the Figure 1 is generated with a satellite OR it is at least 90% an artists’ rendering.
So. Was the image in Fig 1. generated with ~4000 thermometers, or ~60,000?

147. George E. Smith says:

“””””…..Paul Westhaver says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:58 pm
george e. smith says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:36 pm
Why all this sudden interest in the Nyquist sampling theorem ?
____________________________________________________
George,
My interest in adhering to the Nyquist-Shannon ……””””
Paul, you didn’t catch that my question was chastisal; not at you, but at the level of ignorance among people who deal with data samples.
We are all here chatting on a communication network, that simply would not exist, but for the fact that communication engineers, DO NOT neglect their Nyquist duties. Not familiar with Claude Shannon having much to do with the Nyquist theorem. He of course does have his own pedestal, when it comes to the signal to noise ratio of bandwidth limited systems, and data capacity of noisy channels.
All of the gee whizz statistics that climatists do on measurements of weather/climate variables, is total nonsense, when they don’t even have valid samples being input as data.
The spectrum foldback of undersampled signals, results in spurious signals that are now inside the signal bandwidth, so they are impossible to remove with filtering, without also altering real signal information, which itself will corrupt the measurement.
And as Willis pointed out, if you under sample by only a factor of two, the spectrum folds back all the way to zero frequency, which gives aliasing noise at zero frequency, which happens to be the average of the signal; exactly the information that was being sought; that no longer is valid.
No amount of statistical prestidigitation, can buy one a reprieve from the consequences of a Nyquist violation.
[The mods admit this is only the second chastisal comment ever submitted to the web. 8<) Mod]

148. Billy Liar says:

Willis (E) said:
The part that doesn’t fit your preconceptions is that Josh Willis had already written about the recent ocean cooling … so he was surprised and had to retract some claims when he noted that the purported cooling didn’t agree with the sea level data he had accepted as valid.
Willis (E) – do you think (J) Willis was right to throw out actual measurements from Argo floats because he believed some satellite fiction about sea level? Envisat, of course, agreed with the floats but didn’t last long enough.

149. Billy Liar says:

Tag failure! Italic is supposed to stop after first para.

150. George E. Smith says:

“””””…..Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 3:37 pm
George E. Smith says:
March 2, 2014 at 3:25 pm
“””””…..RichardLH says:
March 2, 2014 at 1:24 pm…..”””””
OK ! I surrender.
Clearly, nuking Hiroshima, and Nagasaki didn’t do anything much; on average. well just divide by n and you will see it’s not much.
So sorry for the kerfluffle Dr. Trenberth; yes the sun does shine 24/7/52 continuously but dimly, at the south pole. How could I have gotten so confused ? Of course an input trickle of energy, no matter how small, will produce as high a Temperature as you like; you just have to wait a while for the average to add up. It’s a Heisenberg thing: dT x dt >= h / 2pi

151. Paul Westhaver says:

George,
I understand your point and I’ll even ‘ll go one further and acknlowledge that W.E. is entitled to do whatever he wants regardless of Nyquist. My persistence was 1) to encourage due diligence on our part because we should and are able and 2) to get some actual detail about the data set source details. It seemed way to pretty a plot based on the number of available coincident/(same depth notwithstanding) temp measurements.
In any event, no personal chastisement taken…. today.
Cheers.

152. Here’s the original paper by Josh Willis showing the sharp reversal in ocean heating to cooling in the original data when the ARGO system came on board in 2003-2004:
Figure showing the original data:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y0SBIZuHTsI/UxPRKFEi68I/AAAAAAAAFzI/dtHsmluws6Y/s1600/www.junkscience.org+Greenhouse+heat_2006_1.pdf.png
The paper and the correction published the following year [all in same pdf]:
http://www.junkscience.org/Greenhouse/heat_2006_1.pdf
The suggestion of ocean cooling in the 2006 paper caused quite a stir in the climate community, so a “software problem” was found in the cold floats and the data was thrown out for those. Did any floats run too hot?
Draw your own conclusions on the merits of throwing out the cold floats from the published correction above.

153. Mike Wryley says:

This was a pretty good blog so far, esp with WE’s epiphany on samples per month, lots of good points from divergent disciplines,

154. RoHa says:

“The top two kilometers of the ocean are warming at 0.02°C per decade … can’t say I’m worried by that.”
O.K., smart Alec. So what are we doomed from now?

155. george e smith says:

WE’s map of the Argo distribution from 2-mar 2014 sure looks like a quite reasonable poke around the oceans. I suppose one could deduce from knowledge of their exact locations, what the likely maximum useful bandwidth of spatial signals would be. Remember that under sampling simply hides you from knowing what went on in between samples (Argo buoys).
I’m more than elated, with what WE’s movies how about Wattgoseon out there in the oceans during a typical year.
Yes if I lived on an islet in the middle of an Argo hole, I’d feel jilted. So I’d ask for a grant to get our own Argo buoy for the eyelet. But remember that -2,000 meters, doesn’t get you very close to too many islets.

156. Mervyn says:

About those 4,000 Argo floats in the ocean… I seriously worry about the maintenance program relating to these Argo floats. I really do! And so should everyone else.

157. Matthew R Marler says:

Willis, thanks again. I have not had time yet to read all comments and replies — I check back later.
Two questions: 1, what is the function that is fitted to the data to get the seasonal variation? 2, Is the “residual” the difference between the Loess smooth and the fitted seasonal variation. Sorry if I missed that.
I sympathize with everyone on the issue of standard errors: yes they would be good, but they are hard work for spatio-temporally correlated data, especially when the “space” is 3D, not merely 2D as with Kriging. It’s even harder when, as with the Argo floats, they are drifting.
I think everyone understands that you understand that the conversion from temps to heat is an uncertain process. It is still useful to do something first, instead of postponing every detail until later. You could work with these data a long, long time. God Speed!

158. ECK says:

I am truly impressed with the volume of responses generated in response to Willis! It’s gratifying to see that a person so versed in statistics and math is so widely read and (mostly) appreciated. Keep it up Willis! I enjoy these discussions even though I’m not quite up on the math any more (I’m old).

159. Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:27 pm
In any case, I fear that based only on your memory, you’ve made an unsubstantiated, unpleasant, and untrue accusation of scientific malfeasance against Josh Willis …
===========
nonsense. I’m talking about the process not the people. I’ve pointed out that making adjustments based on the observed trend cooling trend is a form of experimenter expectation bias. It is reminiscent of using thermometer data to selectively eliminate some sets of tree rings during “calibration”.
Statistically the floats that are “too cool” are telling you something. They are telling you that the Argo data is likely not as accurate as believed. If there are floats that are “too cool” then there may be undetected floats that are “too warm”. These later would not trigger a search, because a warming trend would match expectations.
This was the problem with tree ring calibration. It gave a false statistical measure of accuracy. It made the tree rings that passed calibration look more accurate statistically than they were. In reality the tree rings that did not pass calibration were telling you that tree rings were not accurate thermometers.
As for my memory:
jeffguenther8 says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:12 pm
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
“Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”

160. Selectively including/excluding floats or tree rings based on temperature is “selecting on the dependent variable”, since it is temperature you are seeking to study, under the assumption that floats or tree rings provide a measure of temperature.
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/nbeck/q2/geddes.pdf
Most graduate students learn in the statistics courses forced upon them that selection on the dependent variable is forbidden, but few remember why, or what the implications of violating this taboo are for their own work.
http://poli.haifa.ac.il/~levi/pitfalls.html
This is the basis for warning about the hazards of “selecting on the dependent variable”. This expression refers, not only to the deliberate selection of cases according to their scores on this variable, but to any mode of selection correlated with the dependent variable (i.e., tending to select cases that have higher, or lower, values on that variable) once the effect of the explanatory variable is removed. If such a correlation exists, causal inference will tend to be biased (Coolier, 1995, 461).”

161. Ed, Mr. Jones says:

Willis,
It appears, during the period of the animation, that the warmest waters achieve higher latitudinal amplitude in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern. I wonder if this holds over longer periods . . .
Sometimes I visualize the NH & SH as two horizontally opposed cylinders connected by a single intake/exhaust manifold . . . .

162. Um, if they nap at 1000m, how do we know what the temperature is at 2000m? Same program as alleging that the deep ocean warmth is trapped beneath a salinity inversion in Antarctica. The fresher water is how deep? The temperature/salinity/density relationship is non linear and the amount of freshwater is trivial in comparison to ocean volume.
Beware the constant effort to bury the missing heat in the deep ocean. The Argo floats were clearly designed to measure the mixed layer. Kick me, please, but I suspect they just extrapolated down another thousand meters.

163. A couple more questions and observations.
What is the vertical resolution in meters of the temperature readings in each sounding?
Figure 2, from the 11:42 am reply to rgb has 42% of all the ocean with between 1 and 24 soundings over the entire period. That is at best 4 per year. But do they tend to cluster; 2 or 3 ten days apart then a long hiatus before the next bouy drifts into the cell?
Does the data show the time of recording as well as the date?
The long and short of it is, is there a diurnal component to the surface temperature and is it recorded?
if an ARGO sample the surface at 13:30 on one day, will it be about 13:30 ten days later or does it let the time drift? Do they sample the surface around the clock?
Figure 2 shows much more blotchiness in the SH Pacific than I would have guessed for 6 years of data. Perhaps there is some divergence and convergence of float paths at 1000 m where they drift. Downwelling draws floats to concentrate, upwelling disperses them. If that is true, then floats would be preferentially sampling downwelling, saltier warmer water than the up welling water. An interesting test would be if High concentration cells show a slightly warmer temp than nearby low concentration cells.

164. On ferdberble’s caution that floats that are too cool may sometimes be discarded,
An interesting test would be to see for each ARGO ID (there must be one in the data), are there any missing dates in its history?

165. Michael Whittemore says:

This blog post, averages out the the temperatures from 0- 2000 meters, but isn’t science (peer reviewed) saying that the lower part of the ocean is seeing an increase?

166. george e smith says:

“””””…..Ed, Mr. Jones says:
March 2, 2014 at 8:58 pm
Willis,
It appears, during the period of the animation, that the warmest waters achieve higher latitudinal amplitude in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern. I wonder if this holds over longer periods . . .”””””
Couldn’t possibly be that northern winters occur around perihelion, while southern winters occur at aphelion, and are therefore colder and longer ??
Nah ! Can’t be that easy; must be some other reason.

167. george e smith says:

“””””…..Paul Westhaver says:
March 2, 2014 at 4:17 pm
George,……”””””
Paul, you realize, I wasn’t criticizing Willis in any way. He ingeniously presented the available data from Argo, to give us some insight that would be hard to get by other means.
But he never claimed or intimated to reveal anything going on in between the buoys. So he accepted the spatial signal bandwidth that the Argo sampling dealt him. It was the suggestion by others, that some regions are under represented, so things are going on in there that we don’t know about (they are), but Willis did not try to expand his level of detail knowledge, beyond the resolution (or bandwidth), that the Argo arrays provide for.

168. Willis Eschenbach says:

ferdberple says:
March 2, 2014 at 7:43 pm

Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:27 pm

In any case, I fear that based only on your memory, you’ve made an unsubstantiated, unpleasant, and untrue accusation of scientific malfeasance against Josh Willis …

===========
nonsense. I’m talking about the process not the people. I’ve pointed out that making adjustments based on the observed trend cooling trend is a form of experimenter expectation bias.

So if I understand you, you’re saying the process is suffering from what you call “experimenter expectation bias”?
To me that sounds like something suffered by … oh, I don’t know, perhaps an “experimenter”, AKA Josh Willis.
In any case, you have provided zero evidence that he was “making adjustments based on the observed trend cooling”. The citation I provided shows exactly why he looked for errors in the data.
w.

169. Paul Westhaver says:

George,
No I made no assessment about what you said to that effect at all. I didn’t consider what you said beyond the words you wrote.
My questions (as of yet unanswered except by you) was one of clarification precipitated by my knowledge of signal processing and image analysis.
It seems to me that the animation really should be considered and “artist’s simulated rendering” rather than a plot of data. The space filling is fine with me, but [it] should be labelled as such. Before I made such a claim, I wanted to be sure I understood the data set.
So. I consider the animated plot an vague approximation rendered by an artist base on a limited data set. Were this in a scientific journal, authored by a fat, go-tee sporting, megalomaniacal climate Nazi, I would be less congenial.

170. Michael Whittemore says:
March 2, 2014 at 9:33 pm
This blog post, averages out the the temperatures from 0- 2000 meters, but isn’t science (peer reviewed) saying that the lower part of the ocean is seeing an increase?

Those are the claims. But there are no measurements across the oceans, in the deep oceans showing any of those guesses are actually true. further, there is absolutely NO evidence of ANY historical trend backing up those claims over any period of time.
Worse, even ‘IF’ there were historical evidence of any heat energy from the atmosphere getting “stored” into the deep oceans, heat transfer is – at EVERY energy change – ONLY a function of the difference in temperature or state. Water is 1000 denser than air,and has a different heat coefficient. If the atmosphere heats up by 1/5 of one degree, as it “might have” heated up between 1975 and 1998, the ocean – AT MAXIMUM – can only heat up by 1/1000 of that amount or about 1/1000 x 1/5 or 1/5000 of one degree in those same 25 years. Because the atmosphere has NOT heated up at between 1997 and 2014 due to CO2 – or ANYTHING ELSE – over a 17.5 year period, then the ocean could not have heated up at during that same period. “IF” something else (unknown) prevented the atmosphere from heating up during those 17.5 years since 1997, but drove ALL of that energy into the oceans between 1997 and 2014, the mechanism remains unknown. What “changed” between 1945 (when cooling started and CO2 began increasing recently) and 1973 (when heating started but CO2 continued to increase or 1997 (when heating stopped but CO2 continues to increase) or 2014 to cause “some” of the heat to go into the ocean (somehow) and “some” of it to go into the atmosphere at different rates over different periods of time obviously must also be unknown.
Now, even “if” the deep ocean were to warm by 1/5 of 1/1000 of one degree, then IT could only heat the air again at the end of the cycle by 1/5 x 1/1000 of one degree. In others, nothing.
These government-paid “scientists”: are getting paid billions of dollars per year to issue government-needed propaganda for their government-funding sources in the government-granting bureaucratic heads in the White House. Not facts, not science. Propaganda.

171. Ulric Lyons said:
“Because stronger trade winds means La Nina, and that is during positive AO, which is when the jet is more poleward.”
I can’t go along with your implication that El Nina or El Nino conditions determine the state of AO.
It seems clear that AO responds to the top down solar effect as well as to the bottom up oceanic effect.

172. mickyhcorbett75 says:
March 2, 2014 at 11:01 am
—————————————
Very nice explanation.

173. Ed, Mr. Jones says:

george e smith says:
March 2, 2014 at 9:56 pm
“Couldn’t possibly be that northern winters occur around perihelion, while southern winters occur at aphelion, and are therefore colder and longer ??
Nah ! Can’t be that easy; must be some other reason.”
Sure, makes sense and is a convenient explanation – but is it necessarily true? What if, on larger time scales that behavior alternates? What could be learned by posing and seeking an answer to the question?
It would seem to me that if your explanation were correct, over time the NH would experience an accumulating ‘heat surplus’ (for lack of a better term), and that it would likely lead to some sort of “flow”, perhaps Pole-To-Pole.
I’m just being inquisitive.

174. Geoff Sherrington says:

A suggestion that these time lapse graphs make it hard to pick up on January each year (for example) so the eye can lock in with seasons.
Could a sound be added, like a voice saying 09 10 11 …. each time a new year arrives?
Ecen a dot at the side that comes on in January would be a great help.
BTW, I can’t see how the top animated gifs are consistent with the trend maps for the sea off West Australia. My eye cannot see a change on the blink graphs with colours at 6 deg separation, yet there is supposed to be a trend there of about 1.4 – 2 deg in the surface data. Can’t see it. Must be my eyeballing getting bad.

175. RichardLH says:

Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 3:37 pm
“Actually, a definite integral and an average are very, very closely related measures….
…In other words, the average is the integral divided by n … it’s not crucial, just sayin’ …”
Thank you Willis. That was the point I was making. In fact, depending on the sampling rate used, an average is a very close approximation to the true of a curve Integral over the same time period (divided by ‘n’ as you correctly observed – but that is just a scaling issue).

176. RichardLH says:

EDIT: …true Integral of a curve…
Damn fingers….. Behind my brain as usual.

177. RichardLH says:

george e. smith says:
March 2, 2014 at 12:36 pm
“Why all this sudden interest in the Nyquist sampling theorem ?”
Because to go from a point sampling instrument (in either time or space) to a field that in-fills between those instrument readings requires that you honour Nyquist?
As almost all our instruments are not continuously recording, full area coverage, ones – then Nyquist is being assumed to have been met all the time (pun) without that necessarily being so.
You can observe an instrument has changed its readings over time (when compared to itself) and be without challenge. To suggest that a field that the instrument is sampling has changed with the same/similar parameters over the same time span is just a bit more difficult (to get accurate anyway).

178. HankHenry says:

Is the heat in the atmosphere even a significant portion of the heat of earth’s surface? If I recall my eighth grade science correctly, the weight of the atmosphere amounts to the weight of thirty-three feet of fresh water. These Argo floats are measuring two thousand meters of ocean. The weight of the atmosphere represents just half a percent of what Argo is measuring.

179. Ulric Lyons says:

Stephen Wilde says:
“I can’t go along with your implication that El Nina or El Nino conditions determine the state of AO”
It is well established that the trade winds tend to be stronger during more positive AO conditions, that means La Nina with a more northerly jet stream, and not El Nino as you propose. I did not imply which determines which.

180. Peter Foster says:

So cool reading buoys were excluded because they affected the result to such an extent that they could not account for the sea level changes. Hmmm, we have been able to measure temperature accurately for many years now. On the other hand the sea level data is very suspect. The tide gauges have all sorts of problems but collectively give a sea level rise only on half of that shown by the satellites. But then NASA has admitted that there are serious problems with the altitude measurements from the present satellite as it has no Earth reference point by which it can calibrate to account for changes in the atmospheric layers the radiation passes through.
I would have thought that temperature was the accurate measure and question the accuracy of the sea level data, rather than the other way around.
Were any of these “cool reading” buoys ever retrieved and tested ?

181. Coach Springer says:

I’ve been nagged since previously reading this. So, the oceans have warmed without pause while the lower atmosphere has paused? What does that mean? The science is only the first of my requirements to trust anyone who wants to “do something” about “catastrophic global warming,” but it seems there is rather less of a pause and more of a shift?

182. RichardLH says:

Willis:
Any chance of a look at the code for this? I assume it is in R. If so, did you use ‘maptools’ or something else for the plot?

183. george e. smith says:

per Ed,Mr Jones
“”””””…..Sure, makes sense and is a convenient explanation – but is it necessarily true? What if, on larger time scales that behavior alternates? What could be learned by posing and seeking an answer to the question?…..”””””
Ed, I don’t have the foggiest idea, if it is true, or not, although I presume it is one or the other.
When I went to school, it was called “problem solving.” You took the information you had, been given, and you applied logical thinking, bounded by the laws of nature, to try and rationally explain, a possible mechanism for the results. It was then a task, either for oneself or others, to devise and perform experiments to test the thesis for validity.
You asked the question, and cited your observation of the apparent behavior. I didn’t even check to see if I agreed with your observations (still haven’t). I merely took what I know of the system (earth’s elliptical orbit), to concoct a plausible mechanism. It is well known that earth has a very large north/south asymmetry, in many ways. The orbit, is a potential cause for many of these.
But I don’t know.

184. george e. smith says:

Well it is said; “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
So I opined, that “Climate” is the integral of “weather” ; integral, being a simple summation of discrete values or events, or a continuous summation of infinitesimals.
Willis E. assisted by Richard LH disagreed with that, and asserted that an integral (climate) is just n times the “average” of the weather. Well they actually said you divide the integral of the “weather” by n to get the average., which is the “climate”.
Well I’m getting a little rusty these days, so does anybody have a reference for a reputable graph of “weather” plotted versus time, that is for a long enough time, to qualify as “climate”.
Just a simple graph; time on the x-axis, and “weather” on the y-axis, so I can try to approximately integrate it, using Simpson’s rule or something to get a reasonably good value for the “climate”.
I thought it would be simple to understand; weather events happen, a tornado over there tears down a shopping center, a heavy rainstorm over there, washes a hill into a river and changes its course, a hurricane over there, rips up some shallow bottom, and seals off a current path, to re-route a major tidal current; and so on. It seems trivial to add up all these disparate events, and see an overall reshaping of everything; but I’m having a hard time plotting it on a graph to figure out the area. How do you average a tornado, and a heat wave ??

185. Dr Burns says:

Willis,
Is the 4000 Argo float data homogenous?

186. Ferd….
Your conspiracy doesn’t make sense. The ARGO devices were each calibrated in the lab for accuracy before they were deployed. They were first deployed in 2003. They achieved the target of 3000 operational units in 2007. Each device had, at the original time of the launch in 03, a projected 4 year life span. Some of the devices were replaced in 2007 because of a glitch, which produced a strong cooling trend in the data….
But! Even after the data from the suspect units was removed, there was STILL a slight cooling trend as of July 2008. Here is what he said at the time:
“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant”.
That’s from March 2008, after the data had been scrubbed.
So it doesn’t seem like Dr. Willis was trying to scrub the cooling, or else it would have been completely eliminated.
Now, keep in mind that the ARGO units were at the time coming to the end of their projected lifespan. It is quite possible that the early units, as they aged, did indeed deviate from accuracy. It’s quite possible that the error would indeed be dominantly in one direction, especially if the thermometers had the same defect. I work in the spa repair industry, and have spent many years replacing electronic temp sensors that have fallen out of calibration… Things break eventually. The typical failure of the temp sensors that I’ve seen in almost 20 years in this career is for the faulty device to measure water temps on the cool side, sending data to the control circuit saying the spa is say, 101, instead of the correct accurate temp of 104, thus causing the spa to get too hot and tripping the high temp safety circuit and shutting down the spa. That is much much more common than the temp sensor reading too high.
Getting back to ARGO. Now, those units that were found to be inaccurate were replaced. But they would have been replaced eventually anyway because of the inherent lifespan of the first generation devices. So it’s not as if those specific devices would still be in operation now. Further, if the devices were not faulty, and they only scrubbed the data, and the oceans were indeed still cooling, the newer ARGO devices would STILL be detecting a cooling trend, and since the data has not been scrubbed since the 2008 series, that trend would STILL show up.
Since you made an assumption here, I’m going to make one of my own. I haven’t read the details of exactly how many devices were discarded or reprogrammed in the 2008 purging. But I’d bet top dollar that one of the determining factors was to subject each device to a standard temperature check in a lab to see if the device indeed was still reading the accurate temperature. That is a very easy test to do, and if it fails calibration, then the data used from that device must be thrown out.
Lastly, I do find it interesting that many skeptics didn’t have much of a problem with the adjustments when they were fresh in 2008, but only now wish to discredit them when the results since the adjustments have made the “slight cooling” disappear.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/28636.html

187. PS. I’m also a skeptic, but I don’t appreciate others using the term skeptic to throw around baseless accusations. It only give the rabid alarmists more ammo to use against us.

188. RichardLH says:

george e. smith says:
March 3, 2014 at 2:39 pm
“So I opined, that “Climate” is the integral of “weather” ; integral, being a simple summation of discrete values or events, or a continuous summation of infinitesimals.
Willis E. assisted by Richard LH disagreed with that, and asserted that an integral (climate) is just n times the “average” of the weather. ”
I think you have misunderstood what it was I said. I observed that an ‘average’ is the equivalent of a ‘step wise integral’ (i.e. counting the squares on a graph paper of the area under a curve over a given time period).
I agree that over longer periods of time Weather will blur into climate., indeed I consider 15 years to be long enough to split the available data into two bins, Climate (i.e. greater than 15 years), and Weather, Seasons, Annual, etc. (i.e. less than 15 years).
This seems to be a workable and useful distinction.
It produces outcomes such as
http://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/combined/
where some order can be observed in what is happening.

189. SteveP says:

ChrisQ says:
March 2, 2014 at 7:32 am
“From what I remember reading, argo floats have a resolution of 0.005C, which is by far the most accurate system for ocean temp measurement ever.”
Resolution is not the same as accuracy. Let’s say the temp is 10C but I measure it as 11C. It then changes to 10.005C and I measure 11.005C. I have a resolution of 0.005C but an accuracy of 1C.
I agree also with rgbatduke’s comments (March 2, 2014 at 7:02 am) re error bars. As always, no measurement uncertainty quoted. I also wonder whether the effects of long term stability (aging) of the electronic equipment have been considered. I don’t expect someone calibrates the floats every year 🙂

190. RichardLH says:

SteveP says:
March 4, 2014 at 1:51 am
“Resolution is not the same as accuracy.”
Indeed it is not.
If I have a water bath with a heater, a cooler and a stirrer in it then with just one high precision instrument I will not get close to a true picture of the contents of that bath. Depending on the distribution of the various factors I may require a sample for every 10’s cubic km before I get close to that and Argo is a LONG way from there right now.

191. Jack Simmons says:

It looks like this stakeout for the missing heat is turning up nothing.
Where do you think the Captain wants us to look next?

192. george e. smith says:

“””””…..RichardLH says:
March 4, 2014 at 1:50 am
george e. smith says:
March 3, 2014 at 2:39 pm
“So I opined, that “Climate” is the integral of “weather” ; integral, being a simple summation of discrete values or events, or a continuous summation of infinitesimals.
Willis E. assisted by Richard LH disagreed with that, and asserted that an integral (climate) is just n times the “average” of the weather. ”
I think you have misunderstood what it was I said. I observed that an ‘average’ is the equivalent of a ‘step wise integral’ (i.e. counting the squares on a graph paper of the area under a curve over a given time period)……”””””
I haven’t misunderstood anything Richard; but both you and Willis have.
I asserted: “Climate is the integral of weather.” That is it.
You and Willis, want to count squares under a graph, or the equivalent of that.
So why don’t you show us a picture of a typical weather graph you would count the squares under.
I said not a word about Temperature, or rain fall, or wind speed, or cloud height, or hurricane names, or anything else. I said “weather.”, so show me a curve of weather, that you averaged to get climate.

193. Gail Combs says:

Village Idiot says: @March 2, 2014 at 5:11 am
….I think the amount of heat stored could be described as “quite a lot”, especially as we’re being lead to believe that the Earth is undergoing a statistically significant and rapid cooling.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The question becomes what is driving the heat in the oceans? It certainly is not CO2.
GRAPH 1 and GRAPH 2

194. RichardLH says:

george e. smith says:
March 4, 2014 at 4:17 am
“so show me a curve of weather, that you averaged to get climate.”
The lowest resolution graphs I have time wise are for Annual as otherwise that signal totally dominates the picture, Obviously Seasonal and Weather are finer than that.
Last 34 years
Since 1800
Methodology
http://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/first-post/

195. Gail Combs says:

ferdberple says: @ March 2, 2014 at 12:40 pm
Willis Eschenbach says: @ March 2, 2014 at 11:48 am
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Bob Tisdale Note the significant drop in samples in 2010. I have not found an explanation for this.
From a different WUWT: Where in the World is Argo? February 6, 2012 by Willis Eschenbach

tallbloke says: @ February 6, 2012 at 11:48 am
The index page for the repository tells us that:
“Argo data made available through the repository is a translation of original Argo with information removed. ”
Translation? information removed?
Does anyone know where the metadata containing details of these intriguing terms is kept?
We know Josh Willis had problems with ‘bad buoys’ which showed strong cooling in the early days, and it seems a term was introduced to cope with the apparent downtrend iin the dataset as a whole which ‘couldn’t be really happening’ – according to AGW orthodoxy. So where are the details of these ‘adjustments’?

And in another one of your post Willis you say “The curiosity is that the Argo average ocean surface temperature data is significantly cooler than the other datasets, half to three-quarters of a degree …” (WUWT: Jason and the Argo Notes Posted on February 9, 2012 by Willis Eschenbach)
Finally a Tallbloke article on the matter: ARGO: The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat “This 2008 article holds an important historical truth about the adjustment of ARGO data. I suggest everyone copies and pastes the original article….”

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus.
Read the rest of the article here: The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat by Richard Harris

So that is the data behind Ferd’s statement.

196. Gail Combs says:

Any reason my short one liner @ March 4, 2014 at 4:23 am has been MIA for two hours?

197. Retired Engineer John says:

Village Idiot says: @March 2, 2014 at 5:11 am
Gail Combs and others
There is one piece of information that everyone misses. It is about the freezing of Ocean water and how the temperature of the Oceans depths are between freezing and 4C. Now after you read this, go look at the Chemistry books and the explanation on the heat of hydration of sodium chloride.
When fresh water freezes, it starts expanding at 4C, and continues to expand until it freezes. When Ocean water reaches 4C, the sodium and chloride ions prevent it from freezing and it does not expand. It has to lose the heat of hydration for sodium chloride before it will freeze. This is the reason that the freezing temperature of salt water, Ocean water, is lower than fresh water. The sodium and chlorine ions play a game of musical chairs with the H2O molecules and they will not start freezing until all the heat of hydration has been removed. At 4C the heat of hydration, 4 kjoules of energy per mole of sodium chloride, starts to be removed. This exothermic reaction helps to stabilize the temperature at 4C since this is the point where additional energy must be supplied to continue cooling the Ocean water to freezing. When you look at the Ocean temperature profile and apply this factor, the possibility of hidden heat in the Ocean seems remote.

198. Retired Engineer John says:

I should have said, This is the point where additional energy must be “removed” to continue cooling the Ocean water to freezing.

199. Retired Engineer John says:

I really liked this post. You can clearly see that the upwelling waters along the West coast of Central and South America follow the Sun. The real unexpected thing was in the 0-2000 meter water temperature. The global change was .02, Northern Hemisphere was 0, the tropics were .01, and the Southern Hemisphere was .04. The .04 for the Southern Hemisphere a location far removed from the real activity, the burning of carbon based fuels and the Earth’s population, shows that the increase was due to natural cycles.

200. Michael Whittemore says:

@RACookPE1978 says:
March 2, 2014 at 10:45 pm
Resent studies have shown that 97% of anthropogenic global warming is going into the ocean with a large portion of recent heat been found between the depths of 700-1800m. “In recent years, from 2004 to 2011, while the upper ocean is not warming, the ocean continues to absorb heat at depth (e.g., Levitus et al. 2012; von Schuckman and Le Traon 2011), here estimated at a rate of 0.56 W m-2 when integrating over 0–1800 m.” This graph explains it (http://skepticalscience.com//pics/LymanJohnson13Table1.png)

201. Retired Engineer John says:

Michael Whittemore says: March 4, 2014 at 5:40 pm” Resent studies have shown that 97% of anthropogenic global warming is going into the ocean with a large portion of recent heat been found between the depths of 700-1800m.”
Evidentally, you didn’t read Willis’s post. Based on actual Argo float data down to 2000 meters, during the time the Argo floats have been active, there has been only .02C increase in OCEAN temperature. You need to find some actual data to back your claims,

202. Retired Engineer John says:

Was there a post like this “@RACookPE1978 says:March 2, 2014 at 10:45 pm” made on WUWT? My computer shows no such post.

203. Retired Engineer John says:

Now, I find the post. I looked closely for it the first time. I don’t understand how I missed it.

204. Mike Alexander says:
March 3, 2014 at 5:22 pm
Ferd….
===========
I said nothing about conspiracy. Please pay attention to Willis’s own rules:
SAME OLD: If you disagree with something I or anyone said, please quote it exactly, so we can all be clear on exactly what you object to.

205. jeffguenther8 says:
March 2, 2014 at 2:12 pm
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
“Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”
=============
So, the floats are supposed to be highly accurate, but because they were cooler than the less accurate surface data, Willis decides they are “too cool”.
Question, did Willis also look for floats that were warmer than the less accurate surface data? Because if he did not, that would be evidence of experimenter expectation effect adding bias.
How can the Argo floats be so accurate, and yet the less accurate surface data is used to determine which Argo floats are accurate and which floats are not? And then only to determine which floats are too cool, not which floats are also too warm?

206. The smoking gun. How can less accurate surface data be used to determine which of the highly accurate Argo floats are too cool? Was the same test applied to determine which of the Argo floats were also too warm?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page3.php
“Basically, I used the sea level data as a bridge to the in situ [ocean-based] data,” explains Willis, comparing them to one another figuring out where they didn’t agree. “First, I identified some new Argo floats that were giving bad data; they were too cool compared to other sources of data during the time period. It wasn’t a large number of floats, but the data were bad enough, so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”

207. Willis Eschenbach says:
March 2, 2014 at 10:19 pm
In any case, you have provided zero evidence that he was “making adjustments based on the observed trend cooling”
================
Prima facie evidence
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page3.php
“so that when I tossed them, most of the cooling went away. But there was still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging.”
The word “cooling” denotes a trend over time. The phrase “still a little bit, so I kept digging and digging” make it clear the author was trying to eliminate the “cooling”.

208. agricultural economist says:

Willis,
there is some discussion on the metric out there. Joules vs Degrees Celsius. One might say, Joules don’t tell us anything about the quality of the change, while Degrees Celsius obscure the magnitude.
You have the data on your table: is it possible to calculate a time series of global OHC (in J) in percentage changes … that could combine the merits of Joules and Degrees and might be an effective way to communicate these measurements.

209. Michael Whittemore says:

Retired Engineer John says:
March 4, 2014 at 8:08 pm
Willis states that 6.9 ± 0.6 e+22 joules per decade are going into the ocean. This is the 90% of anthropogenic global warming. The information and graph I linked comes from this paper http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/OHCA_1950_2011_final.pdf. This next graph and paper shows why focusing on warming in the atmosphere is not a good indicator of the true affects of anthropogenic warming, https://www.skepticalscience.com/warming-oceans-rising-sea-level-energy-imbalance-consistent.html

210. agricultural economist says:

I just did the percentage calculation myself, taking some key figures from Lubos Motl’s blog:
Heat capacity of the ocean 0-2000m in J/K (Lubos)
4.0E+24
Average temperature ocean 0-2000m in Degrees C (Willis)
6
Total heat content 0-2000m in J
4.0E+24 x 6 = 2.4E+25
(this may be nonsense, as it assumes that the heat content at 0 Deg.C is zero, right?)
Change in heat content since 1960
2.6E+23
Heat content change since 1960 in %
2.6E+23 / 2.4E+25 * 100 = 1.08
% increase in heat content if ocean were to warm 1 K
4.0E+24 / 2.4E+25 = 16.67
So to arrive at this 1 Degree C (K) warming would take roughly …
16.67% / 1.08% x 50years = 769 years
at current ocean warming speed.
But as I am not a physicist, I guess there is a rotten rat somewhere in my calculations …?

211. Retired Engineer John says:

Michael Whittemore says: March 5, 2014 at 4:43 am
Michael, I am glad that you read Willis’ post and find that you agree with it. You should look at the details of where the Ocean is heating- It is in the Southern Hemisphere. See my post above. The heating appears, based on it’s location, to be natural cycles.
Also, read my post on the heat of hydration for sodium chloride and see why the distribution of Ocean temperature is very controlled at greater depths.

212. Richard M says:

IIRC, the Argo project was somewhat in jeopardy. The Climate Cartel actually threatened to not use any of the Argo data in research papers because it simply couldn’t be right. Logically, that would eventually mean the funding for the Argo project would disappear. A reasonable conclusion … the only way to keep active funding would be to bring the data inline with expectations. One can see why J. Willis would be motivated to get rid of that nasty cooling.
Look, no one knows for sure what is correct, however, when one looks at adjustments to Argo, XBT, sea level, land ice, GHCN, etc. they all go in only one direction … to support AGW. The odds of this happening by chance is starting to approach zero.

213. Michael Whittemore says:

Retired Engineer John says:
March 5, 2014 at 8:57 am
Willis states that his 6.9 ± 0.6 is close to 7.4 ± 0.8 provided by Levitus, I have not passed an opinion about Willis blog post as being right or wrong, he can have it peer reviewed to determine that. Regarding your claims about ocean warming being natural, you are welcome to link me to a peer reviewed paper regarding your claims?

214. Retired Engineer John says:

Michael Whittemore says: March 5, 2014 at 11:25 pm
” I have not passed an opinion about Willis blog post as being right or wrong, he can have it peer reviewed to determine that.”
Michael, climate change or global warming is a highly political subject. The fact that blogs like WUWT exist is because technical people including scientists do not believe what they are being told by the professional researchers in the climate field. I am a retired electrical engineer who worked in the aerospace industry on space flight hardware. I was not involved in the science. I have been retired 15 years. I was not aware of the controversy over global warming until I started reading about the deep decline in Solar activity in 2007. I started reading about the Science out of curiosity. About 2 years ago, Willis posted an article on the 30C degree limit in Ocean water. All the discussion was on wind, ocean currents, etc. I did not believe the consensus, which was the same as the peer reviewed or the professional researchers. Since that time I have bought a number of used Physics, Chemistry, and Environmental textbooks. I find a lot of “loose ends” in the science. The post that I referred you to about the heat of hydration of sodium chloride is an example.
After all of this, my message to you is to go back and study the basic Physics, Chemistry, etc. of the climate if you want to know the truth. You cannot trust the peer reviewed literature. Check out
“Richard M says: March 5, 2014 at 11:09 am” about the politics surrounding the Argo floats. If you think that you are not smart enough to figure the science out for yourself, go back in the Physics books and look at how a lot of the details on the stability of atoms was discovered. There are very few geniuses and the rest of us can figure it out if we simply apply ourselves. It makes a great hobby and it is good to be able to recognize the truth.

215. Michael Whittemore says:

I am currently completing a post grad in climate adaptation. I am not one to just believe that science is a lie. Good luck with that argument.

216. Retired Engineer John says:

Michael Whittemore says: March 6, 2014 at 2:37 pm
“I am not one to just believe that science is a lie. Good luck with that argument.”
Science is not a lie. We all have ways of thinking; they are called ‘paradigms’. In most cases they represent the majority opinion. The real breakthroughs are made by people who can see the limitations and change the paradigms. I have a book “Sun, Weather, and Climate” first published in November 1977 which detailed the best knowledge on the climate as of that date. It has a lot of information that is contrary to current knowledge. A lot of paradigms have changed. Dr Lief Svalgaard, who is a respected scientist, contributed to the book. Since that time, he has changed his opinions on many of the subjects. Does that make the science a lie? No. It just means we got smarter. Climate science is a complex field and is not mature; irregardless of what some people think.
Good luck. Watch out for the politics, and learn to play the game.

217. Michael Whittemore at 11:25 pm
I have not passed an opinion about Willis blog post as being right or wrong, he can have it peer reviewed to determine that.
By publishing here at WUWT, it is have his work peer reviewed.
There are more statisticians, programmers, physicists, geologists, chemists, climate scientists that read and comment upon this work than will ever pay attention to it in one of the obscure “peer reviewed’ journals.
“Peer reviewed” journals suppress and delay science as often as advance it.
By the way, Anthony, when are the peers going to let your station siting paper see the light of day?
An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends
See:
Initial on-line peer review draft and 1000 comments:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/

218. Ralph Alexander says:

That’s a brilliant analysis and illuminating animation, Willis. I’m a latecomer to this discussion, but are you aware that Josh Willis’s Argo float data was shown in 2010 to indicate a DECREASE in OHC since 2003? You can find that in a paper by University of Rochester physicists Knox and Douglass – both well-known climate researchers – at http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperDownload.aspx?paperID=3446&returnUrl=http%3a%2f%.
Knox and Douglass summarize the results of several OHC analyses based on Argo data: by Craig Loehle, Roger A. Pielke Sr., a French group, and themselves. All the analyses except the French study find the rate of change of OHC to be negative, ranging between -0.15 and -0.24 W/m2. One of the results is based on data supplied by Josh Willis himself (by private communication) to the authors.
So in your ongoing discussion with Ferd, Jeff Guenther and others, it is not clear who is actually correct.

219. The best analysis of the changing OHC is at
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/OHCA_1950_2011_final.pdf
Look at table1. This shows that the heat flux from 0-100 m dropped 90% when the period 1983 – 2011 is compared with 2004-2011. The flux at deeper levels also declined substantially. Trenberth’s hidey hole for the “missing ” heat is in reality non existent. This shows that, as one might expect on a cooling earth, the oceans are cooling from the top down.

220. @Dr Norman Page at 1:22 pm
Thank you for that report.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/OHCA_1950_2011_final.pdf
I want to draw people’s attention to Figure 5 at line 750.
It is a very useful chart of the uncertainty in OHC as a function of time and Depth Interval.
Very useful… and unbelievably optimistic in accuracy.
The authors of this chart say that for the period 1970-1990, the uncertainty in OHCA is in the range of 20-25 ZJ for 0-1800 meters. That means our uncertainty in the deep ocean temperature, before ARGO, before ALACE is less than 0.01 deg C.
SHOW ME THE DATA of where and when NOAA made temperature measurements of the 1000-2000 meters interval, particularly in the southern hemisphere and away from the submarine patrol zones. A measured accuracy of 0.01 deg C for 0-1800 meters in 1970 is fantasy. Even with ARGO in 2013, Willis’s Figure 2 in the head post shows average NH at 6.7-6.8 deg C, SH at 5.7-5.8, Tropic of 7.1-7.2 deg C depending upon season.
○ See Discussion at ClimateEtc Starting at March 4 to March 6.

RE: NOAA Atlas NESDIS 60: WORLD OCEAN DATABASE 2005
http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds285.0/docs/wod05_introduction.pdf
Check out Page 60, 61, in particular Fig. 3.2.
Just as I said.
Geographically clustered
mostly submarine patrol zones,
N. Atlantic, NE, NW Pacific, hugging the continents.
Much too sparsely sampled in the Southern Hemisphere,
half prior to 1990,
a small fraction prior to 1980,
a small fraction below 1000 m
Pages: 73-74, Fig. 4.4 XBT soundings.
Fig.4.4: The map is over saturated. Can’t tell if it is one sample or 1000.
But it is clear that south of 40 S, the sampling is sparse.
But much fewer than 1% of all XBT worldwide were deeper than 1000m. And we don’t know where and when the deep ones were.

See also Figure 1 (b 1960) and (c 1985) maps in Abraham, J. P., et al. (2013) (pdf).

221. Ralph Alexander says:

Thank you Dr. Norman Page and Stephen Rasey for bringing this discussion (and me) up-to-date. As Dr. Page says, that NOAA paper from Lyman and Johnson clearly demonstrates recent ocean cooling, consistent with the less comprehensive paper by Knox and Douglass that I mentioned above. It’s a little old now, but I touched on this question among many others in my 2012 book “Global Warming False Alarm”.

222. Brett Keane says:

@Michael Whittemore March 5, 2014 at 11:25 pm : Bob Tisdale’s work would be a good start. Brett Keane

223. Martin Lewitt says:

The Abraham paper mentioned by Stephen Rasey above is a good discussion of Argo float accuracy issues, including a warming bias not reported until 2011 that perhaps should call into question papers before then.
“When APEX float pressure is uncorrected, Barker et al. [2011] found a net global positive temperature bias, although the signal was mitigated through compensating pressure drifts from floats utilizing different pressure sensor models. Globally averaged temperature bias reached a magnitude of 0.02°C at the base of the mixed layer.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rog.20022/full