Record temperatures are absolute – no adjusments needed. One of the biggest complaints about climate science has to do with adjustments of temperature data, such as we’ve recently witnessed from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and have been long discussing here at WUWT about what NOAA does to US and global temperature data via techniques such as homogenization which basically swamp pristine station data with questionable data from stations compromised by UHI and micro-site biases.
But, record temperatures are absolute, and there is no possible way that any adjustments can be made to such records. Otherwise, they become meaningless. So, rather than rely on adjusted temperature data, a good independent indicator of warming or cooling is the number of temperature records that have been set. While NOAA/NCDC doesn’t make it easy to track such things, I have spent a considerable amount of time manually downloading and saving the high/low records from each month of 2014 and compiling the data in a spreadsheet.
The results so far through August of 2014 indicate that on balance, 2014 has been a cool year for the USA as this graph shows:
Summer of 2014 has also been cool, with record lows outpacing record highs at nearly 2-1 (3405/1782):
In more detail, examining each month of 2014 so far, we find large differences between record highs and record lows almost every month except for two, May and August, which were comparatively balanced:
But I find this graph most telling:
The biggest gainer this year has been the category of “Record Low Tmax”, seen at the far right, with 19,593 records set this year. What that means is that generally, temperatures have not been reaching the normally expected daytime highs, and so the Tmax is the lowest it has ever been for that day.
All of these graphs and the data I’ve compiled is available in this Excel Spreadsheet: 2014_US_records_NCDC (.xlsx)
I’ll repeat this report for every month in 2014 and have an end of the year summary in January 2015.
Worldwide, NCDC reports record daily highs and record daily lows are tied:
I don’t expect that tie to last for long, as there are lots of straggler stations yet to been collated by NCDC, we’ll review this again near the end of the month and you’ll see what I mean. Those numbers will change.
Right now year to date global cooling indicators (23780+18071 = 41851) slightly outpace warming indicators (21593+18071=39664). We’ll see if that holds.
All data is available here from NOAA/NCDC: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
Stephen Hume, a columnist for the Vancouver Sun who writes about how wonderful socialism is and how awful global warming is once wrote that there will be 4 hot records for every 1 cold record. He also said there were 18 to 23 inquiries that exonerated Michael E. Mann. So there you go.
[snip – confused rant – this is a story about record highs and lows in the USA for 2014 and is perfectly valid for discussion -mod]
Climate Change? LOL
Climate and weather are synonyms for you democrats who are too lazy to google CLIMATE DEFINITION……How smart are democrats if they have just now figured out that THE WEATHER CHANGES! DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Rex,
And how exactly does your comment add to the conversation, calling half of your fellow citizens dumb and lazy?
This is a great article about a serious subject. It contains much fascinating information.
The climate changes daily, the earth warms, the earth cools, alot of it is based on the sun’s solar spot activity and this has been at a low for a few years now.
Global warming does not exist it is just a way for people to get rich. The sea levels may rise slightly but nothing to the effect of what Al Gore was talking about. He actually said 7 years ago that all the sea ice would be gone by now….
All the heat that is missing, is trapped in the Artic ice making it expand.
i’ve searched for this on wuwt but can’t find the co-author or recent thread re polar vortex, so am wondering if it has been overlooked. anyway, it is so crazy, i feel the need to post it:
2 Sept: Toronto Star: AP: Seth Borenstein: New study finds global warming, melting sea ice, connected to polar vortex
As the world gets warmer, parts of North America, Europe and Asia could see more frequent and stronger visits of cold air, a new study says
When there’s less ice, more energy gets into the atmosphere and weakens the jet stream, the high-altitude river of air that usually keeps Arctic air from wandering south, said study co-author Jin-Ho Yoon of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. So the cold air escapes instead…
Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, is skeptical about such connections and said he doesn’t agree with Yoon’s study. His research points more to the Pacific than the Arctic for changes in the jet stream and polar vortex behaviour, and he said Yoon’s study puts too much stock in an unusual 2012.
But the study was praised by several other scientists who said it does more than show that sea ice melt affects worldwide weather, but demonstrates how it happens, with a specific mechanism…
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/09/02/new_study_finds_global_warming_melting_sea_ice_connected_to_polar_vortex.html
More energy weakens the guardian Jet Stream, which then collapses toward the equator, thus allowing cold air to escape from its northern imprisonment. Well, that certainly sounds…creative.
Obviously, Mr. Yoon is funded by taxpayers. Find out who those “several other scientists” praising this study are and where their funding comes from. The corruption of science by government needs more documented exposure.
I note that Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, claims with astonishing hubris that arctic sea ice levels are up “only temporarily” this year. Meanwhile, Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is skeptical.
Can there really be a scientific consensus that the future is dire when there is no consensus on the reasons why?
The research is too fragmented for observers like me. I’d like to see all the climate oracles under one roof at Delphi, where they’d have a single website with a full-time video feed. Dire prognostications could be made in real time and archived in one place for later checks of accuracy.
Ha,ha. (That’s a ha ha for a single dire prediction) We gods never agree. And if we did divulge our direst predictions, we’d have to kill you.
There appear to be some record low highs missing from Arizona’s August data.
I compared August records for Arizona at NOAA/NCDC with NWS preliminary records for Northern Arizona.
During August, the Northern Arizona NWS reported 12 record low highs, three ties for record low high, and one tie for record high. Six of those record low highs and one tied low high are missing from the NOAA/NCDC listing, even though the temperatures appear to be valid. Whoever is confirming the records seems to have a problem with stations where temperatures are checked in the mornings and the maximum is actually from the day before.
The problem is more than just confusion with time of observation, though. Two stations–Cottonwood-Tuzigoot and Jerome–actually have their record temperatures deleted from the records available from NCDC’s Historical Observing Metadata Repository. I investigated these.
The Coop station at Tuzigoot Nat’l Monument logs temperature and precipitation data at 8am and 4pm. They logged a high temperature of 73° F on August 19 at 4pm. The temperature subsequently rose briefly, and the nighttime high recorded the next morning was 76°. The NWS took the 76° temperature to be the actual maximum and listed that as a record, which makes sense. There is absolutely no doubt the previous record of 82° set in 1983 was superseded.
The recorded maximum on August 19 at Jerome was 67°. The previous record low high was 72°, set in 1979.
There is no logical reason why the recorded temperatures were erased from the record at HOMR.
Could such data fiddling explain why August is “comparatively balanced?”
Record lows outpaced record highs 2-1. That is the surest sign of global warming. Nothing says warming like cooling.
But Al Gore promised that the ice caps would melt and coastlines would start flooding. It should already be happening. He promised.
Even if the globe manages a warming trend in the future, the cooling trend that has taken place recently proves beyond doubt that man’s contribution to global warming is insignificant. With all the pollutants, CO2, and methane man, cow, and termite alike have been injecting into the atmosphere, you’d think we’d have had at least a minor warming effect on the planet in the last 20 years or so. Even the methane leaking from the ocean has failed to contribute to warming.
Please send me some of that!
This is all about the frequencies of cold versus warm records with the cold records outnumbering the warm records. That wouldn’t negate the possibility of a record warm year, because the magnitude of these records are not taken into account. What if the majority of the warm records are substantially warmer than the previous records whilst the cold records are only minimally colder than the previous ones?
It isn’t, is it? Reality disproved all the speculation and rationalizations.
[snip . . OT . . mod]
[snip . . OT . . mod]
Wait until next spring! The upcoming winter will be one of the coldest on record in the Northern Hemisphere. Any honest climatologist worthy of a college degree can see that, given the cold summer and all the ice that has accumulated at the North Pole of late. It accumulated at record pace, incidentally. Explain how man is responsible for that unexpected phenomenon, global warming theorists. Rationalizing it won’t get you anywhere.
Those of us with an education in chemistry and atmospheric history realize how powerful an influence cyanobacteria alone have had and can have on the earth’s atmosphere. These bacteria predated plant live. What they ALONE accomplished was to dramatically transform the earth’s early atmosphere from a poisonous mixture dominated by ammonia and methane into the atmosphere we are now enjoying. Cyanobacteria paved the way for plant life and all complex life on this planet.
Knowing what this amazing organism did to the earth’s early atmosphere so long ago gives you a solid idea of its capabilities. If half of all land-based plant life disappeared, cyanobacteria would pick up the slack and still easily manage to balance the earth’s atmosphere. The cleaning job it did a cappella millions of years ago proves how capable it really is. Man is no competition for cyanobacteria. Will somebody please inform money-grubbing Al Gore and Bill Nye, the pseudo-science guy?
Anthony,
Do you have data that shows how many degrees differential the new record is from the old record? For example, if the average record low was only 1 degree below the previous or 10 degrees below versus the amount above for the new high record.The sum of the total would indicate the scale of heat energy change in the environs. i don’t think it would be valuable for any particular model, but the information could be used in seeing what shift might be needed to ASHRAE charts for cooling degree days or heating degree days.
Guess that 18071 tie was too good to last…. now global highs are just barely up 18155 to 18102…
Still, not bad for what NOAA says is the third hottest year ever….
Speaking of cooling temps, my thermometer read 43 F this morning inside my trailer. I put it outside and read 35 F. That is a drop of 12 F from the day before.
Comparing daily highs and lows are like comparing veggies and meat. Compare high and low daily highs, high and low daily lows.
The earth goes through long term and short term periods of warming and cooling. If we are warming the world, she will no doubt kick in methods to neutralize that, which unfortunately makes most of Europe and Canada unbearably and arctically cold.
It is little wonder that cold records are exceeding warm records for the past year when the background trend for the last 16 years is one of cooling for United States.
The following are monthly temperature anomaly trends per decade for Contiguous US or 48 states as calculated by the NCDC/NOAA Climate at a Glance web page for the last 16 years [1998-2014]. The figure reflect the linear trend in Fahrenheit degrees per decade per NCDC/NOAA web page data using base period of 1998-2013
WINTER (-1.79 F/DECADE) – DECLINING
DEC -1.22 F/decade (declining)
JAN -1.52 F (declining)
FEB -2.77 F (declining)
SPRING (-0.06 F/DECADE)- DECLINING
MAR +0.57 F (rising) but .dropped 10 degrees F since 2012 alone
APR -0.28 F (declining)
MAY -0.47 F (declining)
SUMMER (+0.48 F/ DECADE)-RISING
JUN +1.02 F( rising)
JUL -.08 F (declining) flat
AUG -0.01 F(declining)t flat
FALL( -0.44 F/DECADE)-DECLINING
SEPT +0.06 F (flat)
OCT -0.61 F (declining)
NOV -0.76 F (declining)
Summary
9 months are declining and 3 months are rising [ March, June and September]
TREND OF ANNUAL TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES IS DECLINING AT ( -0.36 F/DECADE)
ANNUAL ,WINTER ,SPRING and FALL have DECLINING TEMPERATURES
SUMMER has RISING TEMPERATURES ( due to June only)
since co2 increase lags temperature increase by 700-900 years, it seems that the current rise in co2 is the appropriate amount of time since the Medieval Warm Period. The time frames seems right.