Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
On another post here on Watts Up With That, a commenter pointed out that NOAA says that September 2014 was the warmest September ever on record. The commenter asked, “Is NOAA wrong?”
Sadly, as near as I can tell the answer is “Quite possibly”.
Here is the NOAA graphic in question, showing their idea of the current year to date in black, and the five warmest years in color.
Figure 1. NOAA’s graphic showing the progress of the year to date. SOURCE
Man, they are squeezing it to claim this year’s average up to September was the warmest average up to September, looks like a three-way tie to me … but I digress.
Now, I have read in a lot of places that we currently have good agreement between the satellite temperature data and the ground temperature data. Each time I read that, I just laugh. While the two measurements are closer than they have been in the past, there are still great differences. As one of many examples of the differences, consider the corresponding graph of the UAH satellite temperatures for the globe. I’ve used the same colors for the years as in Figure 1 for easy comparison:
Figure 2. My UPDATED graphic showing the UAH MSU T2LT lower temperature data. Sadly, lack of sleep took its toll, and I showed the individual monthly values in my previous graphic, rather than the year-to-date average. My error has no effect on the conclusions of the post. Note that the MSU anomalies have been re-baselined to match the NOAA anomalies. Data Source.
Now, we expect the lower troposphere temperature to vary more than the surface temperature, so the larger variation of the satellite data is no surprise. But far from showing this September as the warmest in the record, the MSU dataset has this September as being tied for eighth warmest September, and that’s only since 1979.
What is the reason for this huge difference in the surface and tropospheric records? I think it is a result of two things—the endless upwards adjustment of the surface data, along with the always-growing urban heat island effect.
But whatever the reason, it is clear that the satellite record tells a very different answer than the one given by the practitioners of the dark art of post-hoc historical temperature adjustment. Given my choice, I’d say that the satellite record is the better of the two … and while YMMV on that question, at a minimum we can say that the development of climate science is in such an early stage that we still don’t have general agreement on even the recent temperature history of the planet, much less the earlier temperature record. “Settled science” at its finest, I suppose.
Finally, acknowledgement is due to the originators of the method of satellite temperature measurements, Drs. Roy Spencer and John Christie. It is thanks to them that we have a satellite-based atmospheric temperature record to act as a reality check for the oft-adjusted surface temperature record. Very well done, gentlemen.
Best regards to everyone on this Friday night, and what could a working fool enjoy more than Friday night? There’s rain forecast for tomorrow, said to be the first real storm of this year of drought. The sky has been sending signals and signs all day. Now the wind has backed to the southwest, the dry earth lies quiet, the air smells of rain …
w.
The Usual—if you disagree with someone, please quote the exact words you disagree with. This allows everyone to understand what you think is incorrect.
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2014 Year-to-Date Average Global Temperature from the Figure 1. NOAA graphic
2014 low – Feb +0.55 C
2014 high – Sept +0.68 C
2014 YTD Avg temp – +0.615 C
If my calculation is correct, 2014 is sucking hind teat on that list of “five warmest years ever” and will surely end up at the bottom as #6.
Willis, perhaps you can write an article analyzing and explaining the adjustments made by NOAA/NASA? Chiefio and you have a knack of making complex topics understandable to non-technical folks. Thanks.
A person can be wrong because they are mistaken. That can happen to any of us, we are, after all, only human. Mistakes can be corrected and forgiven.
A person can be wrong because they are deceitful, i.e. lying, representing something to be true when they know it is not or have strong reasons for doubt. That is unforgivable.
Here’s a nice view of the divergence between GISS and the two satellite data sets over the past 5 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2009.75/plot/rss/from:2009.75/to/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2009.75/normalise/offset:0.4/trend/plot/uah/from:2009.75/plot/uah/from:2009.75/trend
Thanks, that says a lot. I do not think this divergence has ever happened before. If it had Nick Stokes would be posting it all over.
There was considerable divergence between UAH MSU and surface temperatures when it was first produced due to errors etc., when the necessary corrections and adjustments were made by Spencer and Christy the agreement was much better. RSS was produced in response to that as I recall.
It is strange that NOAA focuses on potential 2014 global temperature records , while completely ignoring the fact that YEAR TO DATE to SEPTEMBER trend for CONTIGUOUS US average temperature is -0.42F/decade since 1998 and is at the lowest in 17 YEARS in 2014 with an anomaly of -1.23F .The globe may be warm but Contiguous US has been cooling for17 years now You will rarely hear about the cooling trends from NOAA, only the warming
If they calculated confidence limits on each of those lines in figure 1, they would have to admit “too close to call” like margin of error in political polls conducted by different parties. The bias is evident.
Yes and if there is any leeway to be exploited, you can be sure it would be. The NOAA measurements definitely represent the highest number that can be decently reported. Probably the competing measurements are the lowest that can be decently reported. Remember, Hansen started them all looking for new world records in 1998 with the super El Nino and it took a drastic adjustment by GISS to push the late 1930s-early 40s down several tenths. He realized that 1998 may be the only chance in several years to find such a record. Now it’s standard climate science to jigger the temps (all of them) every year – old ones down, new ones up.
Re UHI and the temp record – an experiment. It would be most instructive to take a highly accurate thermometer to each of the urban, close to urban, airports…used in the long term USHCN sites and syncronize the readings. Then march it off to an ideal suburban site of the same latitude and elevation and take readings at the correct times. Compare these with the corresponding adjusted temperatures used for the USHCN and see what we get. Why is this not being done anyway. It seems that fieldwork is something to be avoided by modern scientists.
They are to busy with broken models… 🙂
this appeared so obvious to me i thought i had missed an even more obvious reason it was not the correct way to compare. i think i spent too much time reading on nick stokes site trying to understand the apparent faith he has in the fantasy temperature generation game.
as you say,why has this simple exercise not taken place .could be a good wuwt crowd sourced project.
Seems that the ‘methodology’ was busted here … Australian summer maximums “warmed” by 200%
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/10/australian-summer-maximums-warmed-by-200/
You’ve essentially described the pairwise homogenization process, the results of which can already be quantified simply by downloading both the raw and adjusted data from USHCN (or GHCN) and comparing them. The experiment you’re actually proposing is verifying the raw data by taking independent measurements. To get any meaningful result, you’d need long-term emplacement of your highly accurate thermometers. And you’d need quite a few of them.
I thought the errors on these values were actually large enough such that you cannot differentiate between values such as 0.64, 0.65C, thus NOAA should not be stating one September is warmer than another when they are so close.
Also why would NOAA not provide a value for Sep 2014 on the first chart, that’s a really strange approach.
OT: Willis, how do you do the rounded corners and drop shadows on your images?
I work on a Macintosh, and I use a screen grab progrm called “Snapz Pro X”.
w.
Thanks, got it.
Scaning comments, I didn’t see anyone point this out, but Willis, you read the graph wrong. It shows the year to date average, not the average for individual months.
Actually, it was pointed out twice already.
I’ll take your word for it. Safari for I-phone needs a text search feature. That’s why I prefaced my comment.
What is happening is that the homogenization process is regressing the land (surface air) temps that are around 15˚ C to the Sea Surface average temperature that is around 22˚C.
They have 7˚ C in the pipeline to work with, and it is a semi plausible adjustment.
[snip – Epiphron Elpis is yet another David Appell sockpuppet.]
The primary error NOAA makes, and just about everyone else, is presenting a single temperature for the entire globe. Physically irrelevant.
My thanks to all of those sharp commenters who pointed out that I was showing the monthly anomalies, not the YTD averages as NOAA had shown. It is one of the joys of writing for the web that my mistakes don’t last long without being spotted, which typically saves me weeks of work chasing blind alleys.
However, doing it the way NOAA did it just makes the difference between the two datasets even larger, viz:
This getting up at 5:30 and doing demolition work up in the rafters of a ten foot ceiling is affecting my sleep, and not in a beneficial direction. However, the good news is that Monday is my last day on the job, and I can go back to being a self-employed builder.
Regards,
w.
In addition to Willis’ assessment: “But far from showing this September as the warmest in the record, the MSU dataset has this September as being tied for eighth warmest September, and that’s only since 1979,”
there are a couple of other good reasons to question NOAH’s records:
(1) ‘Unhomogenized” temperatures (i.e., without NOAH’s ‘adjustments’) ‘Unhomogenized’ records (Shen, 2011) show 5 years of substantially higher temps than the 1998 temp and two years about the same as 1998. NOAH doesn’t consider these because they not only adjust recent temps upward, they subtract from earlier temp records, especially in the 1930s when it was warmer than recently. So from these data, we can say that 2014 will be 8 + 7 = 15th warmest on record.
(2) the Tmax (maximum temp) records (which can’t be tampered with) clearly show that 2014 will only rank as the seventh ranking warmest year of the past century. At present, it looks like 2014 will set about 1500 maximum temp records, whereas in the 1930s, Tmax records reached about 3800, 3200, 2300, and three years above 1500.
NOAH’s claim that 2014 will be the warmest year ever is not credible.
Well, heaven bless the satellite data. My guess is the satellite record doesn’t
go far enough back to “colden” the past and warm the recent without exposing a
blatent bias. I’d like to think there’s maybe a enough integrity left that
someone would let the data lead to a conclusion rather than the reverse. A child
of the 60’s I grew up loving NASA and stories of data fiddling toward an agenda
make me cry a little inside. I wish they (NOAA/NASA) understood that integrity
is a bit like virginity, that it (virginity) is hard to keep, easy to lose and
really, really hard to get back.
NASA loving disclaimer: My opinion is we did indeed go to the moon but the money
shots were done in a studio. So I also believe: Never A Straight Answer . Maybe NOAA could be N O Accuracy Alowed
The special effects technology of that period was not up to the task of faking video to make it look like it was shot on the moon. SciFi films from that period really look fake, even laughable, by today’s standards. In fact, they looked fake compared to the video beamed live from the moon at that time. Video remained in a very primitive state until the mid-70’s. Digital manipulation was not possible until much later, obviously. I was a young adult at the time in a position to know those pictures and telemetry came from a signal originating from the moon. Let go of urban myths.
Mythbusters did a program dedicated to the urban myths surrounding the moon program which pretty much debunked all the claims of faked shots. Its worth watching, but I don’t remember the episode date.
You were too polite to call NOAA’s shameless manipulation of station data what it is, but good on you for exposing it.
Who disappeared 1934 and why would we accept it?
Willis, your problem is you resist admitting that since they play by their own definitions, they can make anything mean anything without regard for reality. They don’t even tell us what the definitions are so they can change them on a whim.
Reblogged this on leclinton and commented:
they are not wrongheaded they are lairs nuff said ;>(
Somewhere other than the USA is contributing.. And has a lot to make up for.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/national-temperature-index/time-series?datasets%5B%5D=uscrn¶meter=anom-tmax&time_scale=ytd&begyear=2005&endyear=2014&month=9
Chuck L makes a good point We need an authoritative summary of all the “adjustments”, “homogenizations , etc. to help explain this to others, including Congressmen and Senators..
I am waiting for Mosher to explain just one stations T adjustment from Iceland.
At risk of being tedious and repetitive, nobody has ever even come close to measuring the global surface temperature of the earth at any time since 1850.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
Therefore, nobody knows by how the average global surface temperature of the earth during the thirty Septembers between 1901 and 2000 differs (+/-) from the average global surface temperature of the earth during September 2013, and ALL of NOAA’s global surface temperature anomalies are no better than stabs in the dark, such that nobody knows by how much they deviate (+/-) from the reality, that they are supposed to represent, precisely because nobody has ever even come close to measuring the overall surface temperature of the earth.
If you’ve never counted the number stars in the universe, how do you know how far your estimate of the number of stars in the universe differs (+/-) from the actual number of stars in the universe ? if there is even such a thing as the number of stars in the universe at any given moment. By the time you’ve finished counting them, there could be more or less of them than when you started counting them. Everything, including the earth’s overall surface temperature, is in flux. I find myself thinking of the blind man in a dense forest on a moonless night searching for the black cat that isn’t there.
Oops. Sorry. I meant to write “the one hundred Septembers between 1901 and 2000”
Except no one measures the temperature of the Earth — they’re measuring the temperature of their _model_ of the Earth. It’s the model temperatures that are setting records. Most non-scientists don’t know this, and it almost always gets lost when written about for the layman.
[snip – Epiphron Elpis is yet another David Appell sockpuppet.]
Nice post. Again NOAA’s known
AGW bias comes shining through!