Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve been thinking about temperature and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) forcing. TOA forcing is the imbalance between the TOA upwelling and downwelling radiation. The CERES satellite dataset contains observations of the TOA radiation imbalance on a gridcell-by-gridcell basis. It is calculated as the downwelling solar radiation for that month by gridcell, minus upwelling reflected solar radiation, minus upwelling longwave radiation. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the TOA radiation imbalance around the planet.
Figure 1. Average top-of-atmosphere (TOA) imbalance.
Some areas in Figure 1, such as those around the tropics, absorb more radiation than they emit (positive values). The extra-tropics and the poles, on the other hand, emit more radiation than they are absorbing (negative values). The balance is maintained by the constant transfer of heat between the tropics and the poles by means of the ocean and atmosphere .
We can also take a look at the amazing stability of the net TOA radiation over time. Figure 2 shows the month-by-month changes in the global net TOA radiation.
Figure 2. Decomposition of the net TOA radiation into the seasonal and residual components. Top panel shows the raw data, the observed monthly changes in the net TOA radiation. The middle panel shows the seasonal component, i.e. the average values which repeat every year. The bottom panel shows the observed data minus the seasonal component. Blue line shows the gaussian smooth of the raw data. Dotted horizontal gold lines show the standard deviation of the residuals.
The annual swings in the net TOA radiation are the result of the earth moving nearer to and further from the sun. As one might expect in a responsive system, the change in net TOA radiation is considerably smaller than the change in the solar radiation. When the downwelling solar radiation varies, the variation is partially counteracted by changes in the upwelling longwave and shortwave.
As mentioned, the net TOA radiation is also remarkable for its stability (bottom panel, Figure 2). The standard deviation of the global imbalance in net TOA radiation is about six-tenths of a watt per square metre (dotted horizontal gold lines). Note also that over the fourteen-year period there is no trend in the net TOA radiation.
With all of that as prologue, let me move on to my latest peregrinations through the CERES satellite dataset. I decided to take a look, on a gridcell by gridcell basis, at the relationship between the net TOA radiation imbalance and the surface temperature. It is often useful to look separately at the land and the ocean. Figure 3 is a scatterplot of the net TOA radiation versus the surface temperature, by gridcell, looking at just the ocean data.
Figure 3. Annual averages, ocean temperature versus net TOA radiation imbalance, ocean only. Blue dots show individual ocean gridcells. Red line shows a loess smooth of the data. Areas below freezing are ice-covered ocean. Dotted black horizontal line shows 30°C, which is the approximate maximum open ocean average temperature. A positive net TOA value shows that incoming solar is greater than outgoing solar + longwave.
As one might expect, there is indeed a relationship between the sustained TOA imbalance and the temperature. And as one might also expect, increasing net TOA radiation is associated with increasing temperature. However, the relationship is far from linear. Instead, it varies with the temperature.
Temperature response to forcing is largest at temperatures below freezing (steeply increasing red line at left of Figure 3). Above freezing the temperature response is roughly linear up to about 20°C or so. Above about 20°C, the temperature becomes less and less responsive to increasing radiation (leveling off of red line at top right of Figure 3).
Note that in fact, we should expect this pattern. This is in part because for any heat engine, in general parasitic losses go up as some increasing function of input energy. A car is a good example. If you double the amount of gas it’s getting, you don’t get twice the speed. Similarly, we’d expect a decreasing temperature response as the input energy continues to increase. I’ve previously shown that parasitic losses (sensible and latent heat losses from the surface) increase with temperature in a post entitled Marginal Parasitic Loss Rates.
As I mentioned above, the relationship between TOA radiation imbalance and surface temperature over the ocean is far from linear. But that non-linearity pales compared to the situation over the land. Figure 4 shows that situation.
Figure 4. As in Figure 3, but for land only.
That’s about as non-linear as I can imagine. Note how there seems to be some kind of upper limit on land temperatures regardless of the TOA imbalance. Now, some of the non-linearity comes from altitude, since the higher you go the colder it gets. The very cold data at the bottom of Figure 4, for example, comes from the high plateaus of Antarctica. However, adjusting for altitude at a nominal rate of 1°C per hundred metres of elevation only solves part of the problem. Figure 5 shows the same data used in Figure 4 after adding one degree per hundred metres of elevation.
Figure 5. As in Figure 4, but with the temperatures adjusted for elevation by adding one degree C for every hundred metres of altitude. Note the different scale from Figure 4.
As you can see, although this is a crude adjustment method, it brings Antarctica much more into line. However, it doesn’t change what’s happening up at around 30°C. Just as in the ocean, at the top end the land temperature is pretty much decoupled from the radiation imbalance.
Conclusions? I don’t have a whole lot of them. This is all part of my continuing effort to understand this marvelous and mysterious climate system. The one solid conclusion is that the relationship between forcing and temperature is both non-linear and temperature dependent, with the temperature response generally diminishing with increasing temperature. My other conclusion is that given the significant lack of linearity, any average value for the relationship between TOA radiation and temperature is bound to be both misleading and meaningless.
Best regards to all,
w.
My Usual Request: If you disagree with someone, please quote the exact words you disagree with, so that we can all understand the precise nature of your objection.
As soon as I click on ‘Read more of this post’ I get a dark blue sceen with black lettering on it which is unreadable. This has been going on for several months now. I have tried everything to get a normal black and white screen but nothing works. Can you fix this?
Roger Dewhurst
I don’t
Roger,
Something with your browser, computer, or network that you should try to fix yourself. Works fine here.
Roger Dewhurst,
It is apparently a problem on your end. If it was a site problem others would have been quick to complain. As you say this has been going on for some time it is apparently specific to your machine. I suggest your computer may be infected with malware. Running a program which checks for such things would be a good idea.
Sounds like you’re losing the RG of RGB. Might be your monitor connebtion?
What happens for me is that the titles go white(vanish) after clickin on them. Pretty annoying.
Can you try a different browser, e.g. google install opera browser.
What happens for me is that the titles go white(vanish) after clickin on them. Pretty annoying.
This goes for the mobile theme. I run android but it’s the same on all browsers (3).
My Safari browser displays no problems at all. There are also no buttons or phrases at the bottom of each teaser/summary. I click on the article’s title to open up the full article and comments. I have never had any problem through multiple upgrades of Safari on any platform including three generations of iPhone. Same with Chrome. I suspect you will get many comments saying the same thing about Windows.
The words “Read more of this post” are not contained in WUWT postings, so you must be reading this via some RSS feed or news aggregator, which typically display a brief summary and button to read further. I suspect this is causing your problem.
Try going directly to http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and if your problem disappears then the aggregator is to blame.
I also use an aggregator (http://www.ighome.com/) but don’t have any problems with it.
No problems for me, on my iPad, my android phone, or my PC laptop computer running windows 8 or my desktop running windows 7 or any of my other devices.
… or any of my other devices.
What about your smart toaster?
Well no that you mention it, it is running a little warm.
You don’t want to go messing with the toaster or this could happen.
Willis I don’t understand a quarter of what you are talking about but there is a logic and flow to it that interests me.
James Bull
There has to be a component of downwelling solar radiation that is absorbed during the process of photosynthesis, being converted to chemical energy. Is it possible to calculate (approximate) that component. Has it ever been considered.
It has to produce some, perhaps miniscule imbalance. The greatest imbalance would presumably be in the tropics.
Indeed. Always note the pieces that are missing. Out of sight, out of mind.
I too have thought this several times, but forgot it while considering Willis’ excellent visuals.
Thanks, TedM.
Well I’m not any sort of expert on photosynthesis; quite a dummy in fact; but I do know that on infrared (near) film, green plants with chlorophyll show up bright red. The color is irrelevant, but this indicates that chlorophyll strongly reflects at least the near infrared (1 micron region).
That further suggests that the process of photosynthesis in plants, requires higher energy shorter wavelength photons than even 1.0 microns. I would bet that 500 nm photons would be pretty good at energizing photosynthesis.
This would then lead me to conclude, that plant biological materials (animal too) are quite insensitive to LWIR.
A 1.0 micron photon is about 1.3 eV. So a 10 micron photon corresponding to 288 K thermal radiation, would be 130 meV, and wouldn’t even tickle any biological material.
That’s just a hunch; and my opinion. So nyet on citing this in your PhD dissertation.
G
George, do you mean 130 eV, or 130 Mev which would be ionizing radiation.
Chlorophyll absorption peaks in the red and blue, below 450 and above 600 to 700, however at 500 virtually no absorption. You’re right that LWIR is not a player.
George, you make a good case that the LWIR isn’t a player. But the energy absorbed by chlorophyll in the direct short wave radiation still needs to be accounted for.
I was also wandering about the process of geologic weathering. Could the mechanical-chemical weathering of feldspar into clay (to name one reaction) endothermic? “Most natural weathering reactions are exothermic.” The gravitational potential energy release from eroded materials moving to a lower elevation is certainly exothermic. So energy can’t be sequestered in weathering processes.
This component is ignored by NASA, as it says right on their energy budget website that for temperature to remain in equilibrium then outgoing radiation must equal incoming radiation.
But our intuition is that the radiation absorbed by plants, resulting in trillions of tons of biomass each year, would certainly be important enough to consider in the equation. You may be able to see the effect on figure one. Notice how some areas of dense vegetation absorb more radiation than areas without vegetation at the same latitudes, e.g. Congo v East Africa, Amazon Basin v deciduous forests on the coast.
I’ve also noticed higher absorption with higher elevation but I don’t know how to explain that — if anyone can that would be great — e.g. Tibetan Plateau relative to south east forests of China, the Tibesti Mountains in Chad relative to the surrounding Sahara. These areas would also be contrary to the general trend that Willis noted, of more outgoing radiation in cooler areas than in warm areas. The Tibestis could be explained perhaps by a slightly higher humidity but what about the Tibetan Plateau?
TedM May 8, 2015 at 11:54 pm says:
Thanks, Ted, interesting question. While there is a component of sunlight that is absorbed during photosynthesis, like all energy it is neither created nor destroyed in the process. And when the plant dies, the energy is released in the form of heat as the plant matter decays.
In other words, since there is energy out in the same amount (although not the same form) as the energy in, there is no permanent “imbalance”, minuscule or otherwise. We get a temporary imbalance due to the seasons and other variations in plant coverage, but there’s no permanent “leakage” or imbalance involved.
Best regards,
w.
For plant material sequestered in coal or other geologic beds, the cycle time is so long that for a giga-year or two, it represents a sink, or imbalance.
What about plant material sequestered in housing? And paper which is subsequently buried? I though we’d deforested a fair part of our planet and now we’re in the process of re-greening it?
“TOA forcing is the imbalance between the TOA upwelling and downwelling radiation.” What a stupid and unnecessary term ‘TOA forcing’ is. The term ‘forcing’ implies that there is some mass x acceleration going on due to a radiation imbalance, which is complete nonsense.
Use of the term is typical of ‘climate science’, ie trying to make something natural seem to the layman like something unnatural and harmful.
Concepts and their associated properties have to have names, else we could not easily discuss and share thoughts about them. So scientists and mathematicians are allowed to attach names to these concepts and properties.
The general rule is “Don’t make up a new name if there is already a name for that concept”. Another rule is “You can reuse an existing name for a new concept, if the concepts are similar and don’t contradict each other”.
The idea here is “Everything has a name”. This is a quote from Helen Keller’s autobiography, describing the moment when she realized that Ann Sullivan was writing “water” on her palm, while holding her other under a faucet.
So what name would you use to formally define the difference between incoming and outgoing radiative energy?
I agree the term “forcing” is a bit pretentious, suggesting some induced motion (change in temperature). Not as elegant as Newton’s definition “force”,F=dp/dt, where F is not only proportional to the rate of change of momentum p (“motion”), it is the rate of change of motion (cf. Hamilton’s notion of ‘forceless’ physics).
Note that several other fields of study have also “hijacked” this term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forcing.
But in climatology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing) we are led to believe that a forcing causes a linear change in temperature. Not exactly correct, as Willis has pointed out here.
When the subject is radiative flux as estimated at TOA, the term I most often read is energy balance, or imbalance as the case may be.
“Energy imbalance” or just “imbalance” would do. Why invent a term that implies that the imbalance is actually causing something when it may be the result of some mechanism?
Weather is a deterministic physical phenomenon. As such, so is climate. In short, everything has a cause.
Concepts and their associated properties have to have names, else we could not easily discuss and share thoughts about them.
====================
define:
global warming
climate change
two terms regularly bandied about that have no consistent meaning. the meaning changes depending upon the speaker and audience.
both terms should include the sum of natural and human induced effects, but depending on the speaker and audience they do not.
Brandon
Are you on drugs or something? BTW this is in no ways a request for you to spew your medical history or personal life on the internet.
Weather is a deterministic physical phenomenon. As such, so is climate. In short, everything has a cause.
================
for all practical purposes, only the simplest of systems are deterministic. for all practical purposes there are an infinite number of futures possible for the same set of forcings.
For example: if one was to take two identical earths, with identical solar systems and suns, and identical forcings, within a short period of time the two earths would diverge to have different futures, different weather and different climates.
As such, trying to calculate the future is a fools errand, because for all practical purposes the future is a probability with multiple outcomes possible from a single starting point. Where we will arrive is not an average of all possibilities.
Also don’t forget, the first thing a new group do in order to differentiate themselves from the ‘pack’ is to define a new language. They do this so that others, unfamiliar with the terms, will think the group know what they are talking about. In the case of climate science, they are totally unfamiliar/unschooled in any associated areas of science or engineering so they redefine commonly used terms. A simple example is their use the term forcing for feedback.
Alex,
Yes, as a matter of fact.
It’s real easy; don’t bring it up and I won’t talk about it.
ferdberple,
Even Schrödinger’s cat?
If you’re interested in keeping track of every quantum state of every fundamental particle down to each tick of Planck time, sure.
Weather will diverge immediately. As for climate, what you suggest implies an inherently unstable system. Save for things like Dansgaard–Oeschger events, comet/asteriod strikes and major volcanic eruptions, that is not what we see in the paleo record.
Chaotic behaviour does not entail a purely stochastic system by my understanding of the relevant concepts. My view is that what folks often mean when they say “random” is “stuff which cannot be predicted”. Lorentz was thinking in terms of deterministic physics when he spoke of a butterfly having an effect on the exact timing and path of a hurricane weeks in advance of its formation.
Numerical weather prediction is an initial values problem. Climate, being statistics of weather over decades of time, is a boundary value problem which is deeply rooted in the law of conservation of energy. If solar output increased 10% tomorrow and sustained that level for decades, surely you would not tell me with a straight face that over those decades the planet would more likely cool off than warm up on average.
Joe Crawford,
Pure taurine fecal material.
Citation please.
How about “Residual”
Webster def: – 1a : the difference between results obtained by observation and by computation from a formula or between the mean of several observations and any one of them
Which precisely describes this measurement imbalance.
Calling it a “Forcing” is a description implying a hypothesized mechanism.
A value of +1 W/m2 as a residual may not indicate Global Warming forcing being stored in the system. Rather it might be a measure of the mechanical, physical chemical and biochemical potential energy balance changes. The Resigual is not automatically a GW Forcing, but an unaccounted for energy expense from the balance sheet.
assuming, of course, that Residual also includes instrument, measurement, and processing errors.
“How about “Residual”
Webster def: – 1a : the difference between results obtained by observation and by computation from a formula or between the mean of several observations and any one of them
Which precisely describes this measurement imbalance.”
So how about “measurement imbalance”?
Although I think Ian W has it right when he says:
““Energy imbalance” or just “imbalance” would do. Why invent a term that implies that the imbalance is actually causing something when it may be the result of some mechanism?”
“How about ‘Residual’?”
In modelling the term residualusually refers to the difference between a model estimate and the true value, i.e. the error or incorrectly explained part of the model’s estimate.
So I think that would change the usual understanding of ‘residual’. For example, radiative forcings are used to estimate future climate temperatures, which tend to be wrong. So what would we call the unexplained differences? The “residuals of the residual”? Too confusing IMHO.
I also don’t think ‘energy imbalance’ works either, because it is too generic, referring to any imbalance of energy. Whereas ‘forcing’ seems to require a dependent object. Forcing what? It is a variable used to model (i.e. explain or predict) another dependent variable, usually temperature.
So I think we’re stuck with ‘forcing’.
I still like “Residual” as the best term.
“Forcing” implies there is something there, even though we don’t know what it is.
“Imbalance”….(cringe)… accurate, but much too close to the concept of “Tipping Point” for me.
“Error”… Charitably it isn’t error so much as un accounted for in the model. Hence Residual.
But in the interest of finding a better word, how about
“Slop”?
“So what name would you use to formally define the difference between incoming and outgoing radiative energy?”
What’s wrong with the word “difference”? It explains what is happening, therefore, it is self-defining and has the great advantage of being neutral in meaning.
The term “forcing” legitimately applies to the entire fraction of TSI that is thermalized by the climate system, not merely the radiative imbalance at TOA. It’s that fraction, which is strongly modulated by clouds, that physically produces the observed temperatures. That said, it requires considerable scientific naivete to expect a static linear relationship between TOA imbalance and surface temperatures. The CERES results displayed here are quite unsurprising.
Willis, in the last 3 lines of the body of the post you state “My other conclusion is that given the significant lack of linearity, any average value for the relationship between TOA radiation and temperature is bound to be both misleading and meaningless.”
True. But I am sure that others have read your previous posts or have looked at the relationships, or at least the nonlinear relationships, themselves.
Misleading and meaningless, yes. But I would also suggest and sometimes knowingly and deliberately deceptive. Isn’t that what a single value of CO2 forcing, or a range of CO2 forcing imply?
Mmm … thanks, Leonard, but no, I wouldn’t say folks are being “knowing and deliberately deceptive”. I try to stay away from imputations of motive, I hardly know what my own motives are.
w.
Willis,
The data you provided here is very interesting but it does not support your conclusion that global average temperature vs. forcing at the top of the atmosphere cannot be approximated as a linear response. You did point out that even though energy in minus out varies a lot with latitude, the global net difference is close to zero.
Two examples of a very close to linear relation between temperature variation and changing in solar forcing are changes in seasonal temperatures at a specific latitude and seasonal temperature range vs. latitudes.
In the Minneapolis area at 45% latitude a plot of seasonal historical mean weekly temperatures, shifted 4.3 weeks to compensate for heat storage delay, vs. solar input fits a straight line with very little scatter. The temperature range is from –12 C to 23 C and the solar input range is about 90 to 340 Wm-2.
For US mid continent data from 5 locations (Tulsa, Kansas City, Des Moines, Minneapolis and International Falls) a plot of summer to winter peak to peak solar input vs. historical seasonal temperature range was also close to a straight line. The temperature range in C divided by the range of incoming solar energy (using an albedo factor of 31%) were for the 5 locations in n delta C / delta Wm-2
0.1364 0.1360 0.1373 0.1365 0.1350
Indicating close to a linear relation. Temperature range was from 27.9 to 38.1 C and solar input from 200 to 279 Wm-2.
Even the 4th power relation of radiation to absolute temperature is close to linear over a few degrees. Approximate linearity of temperature vs. forcing is very important since it allows the use of the superposition theorem, which means temperature changes from forcings from different causes including those from feedbacks can be combined by summation. Here we are referring to only global average temperatures where many of the very complex heat transfers within the planet cancel out. But forcing and feedbacks must be expanded past just at the top of the atmosphere to include those between the surface and the atmosphere such as caused by evaporation and atmosphere absorption of solar radiation by water vapor and clouds. For example see my “Improved simple climate sensitivity model”
http://edberry.com/blog/climate-clash/g90-climate-sensitivity/improved-simple-climate-sensitivity-model/
Tried Ctrl F to find out where “Read more of this post” occurred, and it sent me straight to your email, Roger. If not there, not possible to fix!
My screen just has a little box that says “Continue Reading”, but I can also open the entire article by clicking on the title, or on the picture.
One might try to right click instead of left click, and choose “open in new tab”, or “copy shortcut” and pasting to a new browser window, or click on properties and see if the problem is identifiable.
Often describing the problem and using as a search term will lead to discussions with solutions.
Or click on this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/08/temperature-and-toa-forcing/#comment-1929933
Willis,
“My other conclusion is that given the significant lack of linearity, any average value for the relationship between TOA radiation and temperature is bound to be both misleading and meaningless.”
Does anyone make such claims about the relation between local TOA IR and local surface temperature?
The whole Hadley cell thing is based on a separation. Air rises at the tropics and radiates accumulated heat as it travels high and poleward. Then it descends and warms (as trade winds) moving back toward the equator. There is no particular reason why local TOA temperature should be linked to local surface.
Thanks, Nick. You shed some more light on the problem.
I assumed he was referring to global averages for both temperature and TOA flux.
A thoughtful post and one firmly rooted in observation – the kind of honest investigation that will eventually prevail in the climate debate, provoking further investigation to reveal, once and for all, whether the concept of a world dangerously overheated by accumulating anthropogenic GHGs is a scientifically realistic one or not.
Willis, are you aware of the paper by Chung, Yeomans and Soden in GRL from 2010?
They did something very similar to what you showed, but extend it little bit further by looking at the relation between radiation and temperature on different timescales. The paper claims that the slope of this relation is independent of the timescale with a value just over 2 W/m2/K. Because the no-feedback value of the same parameter is presumably the well known 3.6 W/m2/K, the paper concludes that the observed relation proofs the existence of positive feedbacks in the climate system.
However, I could argue (their Figure 2) that on longer interannual timescales their fit to the data is wrong: there are two outliers that cause the fit to be close to the 2 W/m2/K, but even by visual inspection the fit appears to be grossly incorrect. Disregarding the two outliers yields – by eye – a fit much closer to – or even larger than – 3.6/W/m2/K, so around the no-feedback value.
Another thing is that models appear to be much more stable than observations, which could be either due to noise in the observations or model errors/inaccuracies.
Any thoughts?
Science of Doom has a post on it.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2015/04/30/clouds-water-vapor-part-eight-clear-sky-comparison-of-models-with-erbe-and-ceres/
The paper is here (I think it is open, but otherwise you can find copies elsewhere):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009GL041889/pdf
Jos,
Individual AOGCM runs show a comparable amount of noise to observations. Since that noise on annual/decadal time scales is largely due to internal variability — the timing of which is an emergent behaviour of the models and is different from run to run even for the same model — ensemble means tend to smooth it out. What’s left over are the long term trends due to external forcings and feedbacks as well as short term things like volcanic events.
Are you speaking english or gibberish? What the hell did you just say?
Since that noise on annual/decadal time scales is largely due to internal variability
=============
more likely the result of randomizers in the code. they change the seeds from run to run.
the problem is that the model builders assume that variability is due to random noise. that without a change in forcings, average climate will not change. They fail to consider that time itself is a forcing and it is always changing. even if all forcings remain identical, in 10 years you will not be identical to what you are today.
Alex,
English apparently — ferdberple was able to respond substantively.
That model ensembles are not to be taken as representations of annual weather behaviour.
ferdberple,
I don’t know how it’s done. It’s been on my list of questions for a while, just not highly prioritized. What I have read suggests that they’re not typically randomizing each time step as that would sort of defeat the purpose. I have no specific reference for that, it’s an impression from having read a bunch of different things.
I sometimes see such language in literature and it makes me gnash my teeth. The way I best understand it is that internal variability looks like noise with auto-correlation.
I really do not understand why you would think any different.
Scratch my last comment.
Climate is generally defined by 30 years of statistics. You’re talking about weather 0.01-sigma variability.
Brandon
You misunderstand me. I have not the slightest interest in whether the temperature is going up or down , on this planet. No interest in the ‘climate change’ meme. I think it is all complete rubbish. Some people seem to be ‘into’ statistics and climate models. My interest is in instrumentation and the scientific method. I actually look into how instruments measure things. I want to know what they read and what they don’t read. I want to know the conclusions drawn by instrument readers.
ferburple sounds like a nice guy, but he is trying to convince you. He has more patience than I do and probably thinks he can get you to ‘change your ways’. That is probably why he tries so hard to understand you.
I, on the other hand, have no interest in convincing you. For some reason, you annoy me. Maybe it’s your attitude. I hope I am slightly annoying to you.
Brandon Gates
It seems you have still not learned that repetition of a falsehood does not convert the falsehood into truth.
I am annoyed that you again post this falsehood that I have corrected in the past
NO! It is not!
Climate can be stated for any period provided that the length of the period is stated.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides this definition of climate in its Glossary.
Clearly, climate can be stated for any ” period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years”.
You are confusing a statement of “climate” with the “classical period for averaging” which is 30 years.
As I have also explained to you before, the “classical period for averaging” is used as a basis for comparisons so, for example, each team that provides Global Average Surface Temperature Anomaly (GASTA) data provides each datum as being a difference from the average GASTA value computed for a 30-year period (and each team uses a different 3-year period from that used by others).
The “classical period for averaging” was established as being 30-years in 1958 during the International Geophysical Year (IGY). A length of 30-years was chosen because it was then thought there was not climate data for longer than the previous 30 years. The arbitrary length of 30-years is unfortunate because it is not a multiple of the 11-year solar cycle, or the 22-year Hale cycle, or etc..
Richard
Ooops!
Obviously, I intended to write ” a different 30-year period from that used by others)”.
Sorry.
Richard
Alex,
Perhaps.
Hmmm …
To be compelling, he’d need to knock it off with howlers such as: They fail to consider that time itself is a forcing and it is always changing.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Not so much as the sum total of wilful ignorance I perceive in this forum day after week after month after year. R. S. Courtney’s post immediately following yours exemplifies the kind of rhetoric which stokes far more than mere annoyance, and for me, breeds utter contempt and loathing. My “attitude” reflects my fury, something I believe you surely understand. This … debate … is not just about science, politics and policy, it’s also — if not mostly — about a struggle for cultural supremacy.
Reading your rhetorical question literally was my tit-for-tat trading of petty annoyances as going deeper just didn’t seem worth the trouble. I’m guessing you perfectly understand that notion as well.
Brandon Gates
I provided evidence that you are wrong. That is NOT “rhetoric”: it is reality.
I quoted, cited and linked the IPCC definition of climate and added some historical perspective.
The IPCC definition specifically refutes your assertions that
I had explained this to you previously but – as usual – you had refused to learn and again spouted a falsehood.
I shall congratulate you in the unlikely event that you one day manage to make a post which is correct and that you understand. This is a promise I make which is also not “rhetoric”.
Richard
Jos,
If you take the change in radiation from 14˚C to 15˚C it is 5.4 W/m^2 not 3.6.
If you take the actual surface temperature of the ocean of 21˚C and increase the water temperature to 22˚ net radiation does not increase, while the evaporation rate does.
Temperature change increases radiation. Argue with Planck and the others about that.
Alex, “Temperature change increases radiation. Argue with Planck and the others about that.”
Maybe you should try to improve your reading comprehension. The first part of my post gave the correct planck calculation for increased radiation.
The second part of my post made the comment that for the surface of the ocean the NET radiation doesn’t change because evaporation is the primary way the ocean loses heat, not radiation. Of course that isn’t strictly true for all conditions, but it is generally true.
jinghis
OK. So, let us prove, or disprove that statement for three specific conditions.
For a square ocean surface with 1 m/sec winds under the following conditions, what is the
A. Evaporative heat loss?
B. Net Radiative LW heat loss?
C. Convective heat loss?
1. T_Air = 30 deg C, relative humidity = 80% , cloudy skies, T_Water = 20 deg C, pressure = 1010
2. T_Air = 30 deg C, relative humidity = 50% , clear skies, T_Water = 10 deg C, pressure = 980
3. T_Air = -25 deg C, relative humidity = 15% , clear skies, T_Water = 2 deg C, pressure = 1050
RACook,
Good questions, but you left out a couple of the most important variables, the wind and the temperature below the surface. So here goes : )
For overcast conditions the radiation from the clouds is always just a few watts less than the radiation from the ocean so no significant net radiation loss. 21˚C (424.5 watts) minus 20˚C (419 watts) for a net of 5.5 watts.
For clear skies the clear sky downwelling radiation is generally 2 to 4˚C (334 watts or so). The radiation loss is simply the net between the two, around 90 watts.
This is all in the context of the ocean absorbing 35 to 40 megajoules per day, 405 watts averaged over 24 hours.
The net radiation loss from the ocean surface ranges from 1% to 22%, entirely dependent on cloud coverage (or lack of) not the surface temperature of the ocean.
Making the surface temperature warmer or colder, doesn’t change the net radiation.
5.4 is at the surface. 3.6 refers to leaving the top of the atmosphere where the average tempreature of all sources is much lower. At 235 W/m-2 average leaving, I get an equivalent temp of -19C and a change of 3.74 Wm-2/C.
My reading comprehension is adequate. Basic physics- higher temperature= higher radiation. That was my point. I was not arguing other things like evaporation and convection.
Jinghis,
“For clear skies the clear sky downwelling radiation is generally 2 to 4˚C (334 watts or so). The radiation loss is simply the net between the two, around 90 watts.”
Clear skies temps are are quite cold, 70 – 100F colder than concrete sidewalk. That 334 w number has to be the mostly cloudy sky average, unless it taken in tropical humidity.
Get an IR thermometer, measure it yourself.
Much of the evaporation takes place under clear-sky and the vapor forms cloudy sky somewhere else, so how can they use only clear-sky? Doing it the right way, like Willis has done, the result is much closer to 3.6/W/m2/K (in the window of interest).
”at the top end the land temperature is pretty much decoupled from the radiation imbalance “
This is due very largely due to the Sahara (and other deserts at the same latitudes). These areas have energy deficits since the very dry air means that radiation losses are huge, especially during the nights. Heat is continually being added by air coming from the ITCZ. This rises, loses most of its humidity through condensation, then moves north (or south) and descends in the high-pressure belts of the “desert latitudes”. Without this Sahara would be a tundra!
The nightly cooling can be quite dramatic in deserts. I have personally scraped ice off windshields in the mornings in the Australian outback where afternoon temperatures were well into the nineties.
The rather sharp “roof” to land temperatures is interesting though. In contrast to temperatures at sea there does not seem to be any obvious physical explanation.
In a round-about way tty, you’re putting into words the conclusion I have come to, namely.- that it is plants (vegetation, trees, grass, jungles, switchgrass, daisies, buttercups et al) that control the weather and hence climate. Think about the question of where did all that sand come from in The Sahara.
Farmers are presently controlling the plants. They do this by growing annuals instead of perennials, by leaving large amounts of dead plant stuff lying around and by effectively burning the rest – hence the rise in atmospheric CO2. As soon as a plant dies, the whole process of photosynthesis crashes right into reverse. Dead plant material exposed to sunlight effectively burns.
They’re doing it on 10% of the planet’s surface in places where, by definition, people live, put and read thermometers – its no surprise the readings on them have changed. And then not including all that low albedo (plowed & cultivated dirt) farmers feel they must, indeed have to, indulge in.
Then a group of extremely well meaning folks, who have been told how bright/clever and intelligent they are, right from childhood come along imagining they know all about thermodynamics and radiation and jump to the completely wrong conclusion.
Just as they do with ocean acid and did previously with ozone.
🙁
Yes, Peta. Farming is now extensive while forests and jungles are loosing ground.
All plants are CO2 green-colored storage.
” As soon as a plant dies, the whole process of photosynthesis crashes right into reverse”
I think you’ll find that photosynthesis “crashes right into reverse” every evening.
In fact, looking back on the lifetime of any individual plant, we’ll see that the carbon of its structure is but a small fraction of the carbon that cycled through it in order to create that structure.
Peta, before the advent of Karbon Lysenkoism’s politically driven capture of climate science 30 years ago, climate was classified by botanical biomes derived from precipitation, temperature and evapotranspiration indexes.
See Köppen Climate Classification System:
http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/162263/
and Thornthwaite climate classification:
http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803104427715
By the way, in North America, forest land has increased over the last century as marginal farmland is reclaimed by trees.
There is a rather interesting “blob” of land gridcells with a slight energy surplus but temperatures around zero centigrade. This disappears in the “corrected-to-sealevel” chart. Instead a blob with similar surplus appears at about 50 degrees centigrade.
I presume that these “blobs” are from the Tibetan high plateau?
“The annual swings in the net TOA radiation are the result of the earth moving nearer to and further from the sun”. My understanding is that the earth at this point in time is closer to the sun in January. Yet the average temperature of the earth in January is around 12.0 deg C but rises to around 15.8 deg C in July. This is due to the different geography between the northern and southern hemispheres. The northern hemisphere gets both hotter and colder than the southern hemisphere.
Excellent stuff. ‘forcing’ was a gift to GCM programmers who could include anything they wished in their models merely by devising/guessing/asserting a forcing effect for it. Talk about inserting conclusions as a stepping-stone for generating headlines and more funding! So, good to see someone not floating on the tsunami of billions of dollars that ensued, daring to sit and think and take a look at what he can see in the actual observations.
Thanks Willis.
I want to apologise for a comment I made on your post about radiation and half lives etc. You were correct and I was wrong. Sorry for my outburst.
Eyeballing Fig 5, shouldn’t there be as many (weighted) points to the right of zero as to the left? The left looks heavy … more points and greater value.
Also I loose then headline when I open the post
Willis, what would happen if you weighted the results by area and percentage of radiation absorbed?
The tropics and up to 60˚ latitude in the summer, absorb over 80% of the total solar radiation while the poles don’t absorb any radiation in the winter and almost none in the summer because of the angle of the sun. That is why they install solar panels upside down there.
Other than that, I think your charts nicely show the ocean evaporation rates. Which is the primary way the oceans and lower atmosphere cools.
That is why they install solar panels upside down there.
A great joke. Solar panels upside down over an igloo. A wonderful mental image.
A joke with a lot of truth behind it. In the dark, the panel gets more energy from the igloo than the sky. And in the daylight, fixed horizontal downward facing panels would appreciably capture the sunlight scattered off the snow without all that mucking about trying to pivot the panels more than 270 degrees and withstand frequent arctic gales.
Re-graph Figure 3, temperature horizontal and TOA vertical. Makes it easier to visualize that 30°C line is practically an asymptote. Along with the curvature of the blue line would indicate to me very strong negative feedback.
It’s actually a limit of absorption. Absorption is a temperature limited thing, much like emission, not much different to a blackbody curve. It’s really tricky in the visible spectrum but quite straight forward in IR. Don’t be fooled by the commonly accepted statement that all SW is absorbed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Why is Willis the only one producing this very important information from a very important and very expensive satellite.
Because it is does not fit the narrative of global warming and the satellite operators/scientists do not want to provide any evidence that does not fit the narrative. And then, Willis is the only skeptic who has the skill-set to put it together.
Critical information about how the real Earth tm operates and the only place you can find it, is in Willis’ posts here. Yet, making this point also makes me a conspiracy believer. But then, that it what it is.
Willis & Illis – a dynamic duo!
At 25 -30 Deg C the convection cycle is most active. It appears that you have shown where the real regulation of the planets heat is, water vapor. Only in areas above land do we get the occasional increase above the 30 deg C range.
Interesting point of view Willis, but I would caution that there appears to be a relationship to the convection cycle present which is also influenced by the heat of the surface areas. Considering the earth is roughly 72% covered with water it would make sense, to me any way. It would also explain why the oceans do not warm substantially.
A slight warming of the polar regions would release great amounts of heat from the earth. Willis, Have you mapped out the differential of the polar regions? It would be interesting to see just how our current situation is affecting out put (Antarctic ice locked and Arctic somewhat clear of ice). Looking at the arctic polar region during this last winter would tell the tale. I would assume that once the Northern Hemisphere cooling gets nearer equilibrium that cooling at the pole will happen very quickly.
At 30 Deg C dew point, the vapor pressure for water is a bit over 4% of atmospheric pressure at sea level. Considering that the molecular weight of water is 18 versus about 28.8 for air, there will be a fair amount of convection driven just by the high dew point. In addition, the vapor pressure will be double this when the dew point reaches 41 Deg C, with corresponding increases convective pressure and double the latent heat in water vapor.
My guess is that this what limits sea surface temperature to about 30 Deg C as the cooling power of evaporation, convection and thunderstorms rises rapidly with temperature.
Willis,
I thought there were calibration problems with the CERES instrument as is noted in the following paper by James Hansen:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110415_EnergyImbalancePaper.pdf
From the paper:
“The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-year mean imbalance of 6.5 W/m2 (Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W/m 2 (Loeb et al., 2009).”
If this is still the case, then CERES TOA measurements are worthless.
The following quote from the paper is quite stunning:
“The notion that a single satellite at this point could measure Earth’s energy imbalance to 0.1 W/m2 is prima facie preposterous. Earth emits and scatters radiation in all directions, i.e., into 4π steradians. How can measurement of radiation in a single direction provide a proxy for radiation in all directions? Climate change alters the angular distribution of scattered and emitted radiation. It is implausible that changes in the angular distribution of radiation could be modeled to the needed accuracy, and the objective is to measure the imbalance, not guess at it. There is also the difficulty of maintaining sensor calibrations to accuracy 0.1 W/m2, i.e., 0.04 percent. That accuracy is beyond the state-of-the art, even for short periods, and that accuracy would need to be maintained for decades”
Read all of Section 13.6.1. It’s an eye opener.
Sigh.
Somebody actually gets it. It’s a soup of EM out there and very little is aimed at the sensors. Yet there are people who want to discuss 2W/M^2 imbalance. I can barely sit on my chair and not fall down from laughter when this is discussed.
Norman Loeb, principal investigator for CERES, just states that the imbalance is 0.6 W/m2 which is what the Argo floats are measuring as the ocean heat accumulation. So, they are not even using CERES estimates in the imbalance numbers, it is strictly the Argo ocean heat accumulation (which is just a tiny amount at 0.6 W/m2/year or 0.002C/year in the 0-2000 metre ocean – these are NOT global warming catastrophe numbers – they are minimal long-term warming trend-type numbers).
Alex:
“It’s a soup of EM”.
That is so true. EM is flying in every possible direction at photon/second and W/m2 numbers that make the +3.7 W/m2 from doubled CO2 seem silly to even talk about. The desk your computer is sitting on is putting out 425 W/m2 right now.
it is strictly the Argo ocean heat accumulation (which is just a tiny amount at 0.6 W/m2/year or 0.002C/year in the 0-2000 metre ocean –
That’s assuming that the Argo’s are measured and processed correctly. Over the past couple of years the Argo numbers have been bent upward to match the 0.02 dec/decade from the pre-Argo trend. I smell a rat.
Please forgive me if I believe there is a good deal of “plotting your line, then plot you data to support it”.
“The Layers of meaning in Levitus.” May 10, 2013
“Ocean Heat Content – 0 to 2000 meters. Why aren’t Northern Hemisphere Oceans warming during the Argo era?
According to Josh Willis who manages the ARGO data. The raw data was showing the oceans to be cooling, he wrote several papers on it. Then he decided that the temperature sensors on the buoys had to be wrong because TOA data showed an energy imbalance so the extra heat must be going into the ocean. He also looked at the increase in sea level,(satellite altimetry) deducted the extra water from melting ice, added in a GIA factor and concluded that the extra ocean volume was caused by thermal expansion. Therefore the oceans had to be warning, therefore there was an error in the ARGO data and as a result the argo buoy data is now adjusted to match the heat ocean heat content calculations. That is why argo data now shows warming whereas a few years back it showed strong cooling. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page1.php
In short pristine data from very accurate temperature sensors is adjusted on the basis of very poor data that is itself adjusted on models on GIA, heat content etc.
The final statement in the web page above says;
“Models are not perfect,” says Syd Levitus. “Data are not perfect. Theory isn’t perfect. We shouldn’t expect them to be. It’s the combination of models, data, and theory that lead to improvements in our science, in our understanding of phenomena.”
In other words it is OK to adjust raw data to fit the models.
Also though I don’t have any proof, I really have trouble believing ocean heat content can be measured to 0.1 or even 1 W/m-2. There are calibration problems with ARGO as well:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2011JTECHO831.1
Plus, ARGO does not cover over 10% of the oceans where there is more or less permanent ice cover (arctic).
@Peter Foster
In other words it is OK to adjust raw data to fit the models.
Well if there aren’t going to believe the results from their expensive impressively precise instruments, is it OK to ask them to give back the research money?
There are lots cheaper ways to make up numbers.
I’m curious how they measure downwelling longwave radiation — or is it a calculated value?
I suppose you only need a single point measurement for incoming solar radiation and can then calculate TOA “downwelling” for each grid cell based on a spherical planet and the relative angles of incidence. But that would seem to produce a gross estimate, not a precise measurement, for how much downwelling arrives at a given point on the surface. In other words, the EM scatter you are discussing comes into play in significant fashion.
Rare direct measurements. Mostly it ‘s calculated. I’m in the process of designing a ‘point and shoot’ device, just for fun. It’s not that easy, with IR being everywhere it’s like taking a photo with a light globe inside it.
Given that albedo changes happen in northern latitudes where there is a significant change in snow cover, I wonder what the values would be for just winter or summer. Tropics should remain constant but the snow cover should show an effect though the downdwelling radiation changes too.
This is not in answer to your question, but in the Hansen paper cited above by SkepticGoneWild, Hansen uses the same curve to show both sea level changes over the past 800k years and surface albedo changes (see Fig. 4, (b) & (c)). Exact same curves.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110415_EnergyImbalancePaper.pdf
“at the top end the land temperature is pretty much decoupled from the radiation imbalance.”
Interesting that it seems less decoupled after the altitude correction.
Figure 4 shows the measurements. Figure 5 is an attempt to explain some of the nonlinearity. The temperatures in figure 5 are not ‘real’ and the points above the limit are purely due to the adjustment. While the altitude adjustment somewhat corrected the reversal of trend due to Antarctica it created artifacts in the upper temperature range.
Willis ==> Try using some graphing tricks to make the image more 3D — I suspect that the data form what is called in Chaos Theory a “strange attractor”. Compare Figs 4 and 5 — 5 seems to be a different view of the same 3D object tilted backwards at the top. Very interesting.
Nick at 12:49
Exactly, Nick. But those graphs are hardly shotgun blasts. The Willis magic may be operational here, but there appears to be a distinct trend. Are local weather phenomena sufficiently strong to couple TOA to the surface when averaged over the decade long time scale?
tty at 1:14
The 30C “roof” in Fig. 4 bothers me too. Potential instrument malfunction and recalibration funkiness (skepticgonewild at 7:45) aside, is this just an artifact of surface temperature limiting over significant portions of the globe due to wind driven cooling, so that the non coupling that Nick notes is being played out?
Thus, Alex at 6:41
Could you elaborate on your absorbtion limit comment? It’s not self-evident to me.
I’m trying to put a post together for WUWT (busy right now with moving from China to Australia).
I have spent 100s of manhours perusing information. My conclusion is that the planck curve is not just the energy emitted but also the energy absorbed. Maximum/minimum, it is not possible for a grey or non grey body to absorb more energy than the curve. Everything else is rejected. Look at Kirchoff’s law, it is a fundamental for NASA (and other’s) calculations. Even Planck derived his formula from him.
Real life examples of temperature connected absorption/emission. Mercury and the Moon and also Halley’s comet. They reach a maximum temperature and then they can’t absorb anymore energy.
I’m trying to encapsulate a lot of research in a few words, so be forgiving.
Alex,
I look forward to your post. This site is a great place to test the metal! Good luck with your move.
Thanks, Willis. Another learning experience, please keep up your good work.