First of all, consider the source, UNSW is the same outfit that sponsored the disastrous “ship of fools” aka The Spirit of Mawson.
Secondly, Dr. Roy Spencer has been looking for this for years in the satellite data and hasn’t found it.
Thirdly, radiosonde coverage in their area of study is pretty sparse. From the University of Graz:
While many users are familiar with traditional radiosonde temperature and moisture data, the spatial and temporal coverage of radiosonde data are limited, especially over ocean and high latitude areas. Satellite remote sounding provides far greater temporal and spatial coverage of the entire planet.
Fourth, if they have really found it, where’s the picture or graph of it in the press release? You’d think that would be front and center. Instead, it isn’t shown, and they don’t even mention the title of the paper or the DOI. Essentially they are saying “trust us, no need to read the paper”. I’ve looked for the paper on the ERL website, and have yet to locate it. It is not listed in today’s ERL news feed (as of this writing) (UPDATE: located, and the abstract is posted below). It’s like Lewandowsky’s seepage paper, that had a press release over a week ago, but the paper is still not published.
Fifth, Steve Sherwood is a well known climate alarmist, and his confirmation bias seems quite strong to me. For example, see this WUWT post where we state “Professor Sherwood is inverting the scientific method”.
Sixth, by their own admission, they had to throw out data, and to do a series of adjustments to station data to find the signal they were looking for. That sounds more like a selecting process in the scope of confirmation bias than science. (added) The real question is, how many stations did they keep as they define as “good”?
Color me skeptical, I’m sure Dr. Roy Spencer will have something to say about it.
From the University of New South Wales:
New publicly available dataset confirms tropospheric hot spot and increased winds over Southern Ocean
Researchers have published results in Environmental Research Letters confirming strong warming in the upper troposphere, known colloquially as the tropospheric hotspot. The hot has been long expected as part of global warming theory and appears in many global climate models.
The inability to detect this hotspot previously has been used by those who doubt man-made global warming to suggest climate change is not occurring as a result of increasing carbon dioxide emissions.
“Using more recent data and better analysis methods we have been able to re-examine the global weather balloon network, known as radiosondes, and have found clear indications of warming in the upper troposphere,” said lead author ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science Chief Investigator Prof Steve Sherwood.
“We were able to do this by producing a publicly available temperature and wind data set of the upper troposphere extending from 1958-2012, so it is there for anyone to see.”
The new dataset was the result of extending an existing data record and then removing artefacts caused by station moves and instrument changes. This revealed real changes in temperature as opposed to the artificial changes generated by alterations to the way the data was collected.
No climate models were used in the process that revealed the tropospheric hotspot. The researchers instead used observations and combined two well-known techniques — linear regression and Kriging.
“We deduced from the data what natural weather and climate variations look like, then found anomalies in the data that looked more like sudden one-off shifts from these natural variations and removed them,” said Prof Sherwood.
“All of this was done using a well established procedure developed by statisticians in 1977.”
The results show that even though there has been a slowdown in the warming of the global average temperatures on the surface of the Earth, the warming has continued strongly throughout the troposphere except for a very thin layer at around 14-15km above the surface of the Earth where it has warmed slightly less.
As well as confirming the tropospheric hotspot, the researchers also found a 10% increase in winds over the Southern Ocean. The character of this increase suggests it may be the result of ozone depletion.
“I am very interested in these wind speed increases and whether they may have also played some role in slowing down the warming at the surface of the ocean,” said Prof Sherwood.
“However, one thing this improved data set shows us is that we should no longer accept the claim that there is warming missing higher in the atmosphere. That warming is now clearly seen.”
###
UPDATE: The paper has been located. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/10/5/054007
Atmospheric changes through 2012 as shown by iteratively homogenized radiosonde temperature and wind data (IUKv2)
Steven C Sherwood and Nidhi Nishant
Letter
We present an updated version of the radiosonde dataset homogenized by Iterative Universal Kriging (IUKv2), now extended through February 2013, following the method used in the original version (Sherwood et al 2008 Robust tropospheric warming revealed by iteratively homogenized radiosonde data J. Clim.21 5336–52). This method, in effect, performs a multiple linear regression of the data onto a structural model that includes both natural variability, trends, and time-changing instrument biases, thereby avoiding estimation biases inherent in traditional homogenization methods. One modification now enables homogenized winds to be provided for the first time. This, and several other small modifications made to the original method sometimes affect results at individual stations, but do not strongly affect broad-scale temperature trends. Temperature trends in the updated data show three noteworthy features. First, tropical warming is equally strong over both the 1959–2012 and 1979–2012 periods, increasing smoothly and almost moist-adiabatically from the surface (where it is roughly 0.14 K/decade) to 300 hPa (where it is about 0.25 K/decade over both periods), a pattern very close to that in climate model predictions. This contradicts suggestions that atmospheric warming has slowed in recent decades or that it has not kept up with that at the surface. Second, as shown in previous studies, tropospheric warming does not reach quite as high in the tropics and subtropics as predicted in typical models. Third, cooling has slackened in the stratosphere such that linear trends since 1979 are about half as strong as reported earlier for shorter periods. Wind trends over the period 1979–2012 confirm a strengthening, lifting and poleward shift of both subtropical westerly jets; the Northern one shows more displacement and the southern more intensification, but these details appear sensitive to the time period analysed. There is also a trend toward more easterly winds in the middle and upper troposphere of the deep tropics.
The paper is open access: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/10/5/054007/pdf/1748-9326_10_5_054007.pdf
Here is the figure from the paper that should have been in their press release:
The SI is pretty thin, containing a single figure with no explanation: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/10/5/054007/media/erl054007_suppdata.pdf
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“Climate Change statistics travel around the world before the truth gets its boots on.”
He’ll be interested to see if the stronger winds have anything to do with the pause? Has he not ever read a paper on ENSO or hear of the “Big Jumps” affiliated with large El Ninos? This is the troposphere around 0 degs he’s talking about, right?
There is no ‘hot spot’. But that fact interferes with the agenda, so the push is on to try to pretend it exists.
The government has a vested interest in convincing the public that man-made global warming (MMGW) is happening, and that it’s dangerous. Everything they say is based on that narrative.
Their motive is obvious: carbon taxes. If they are able to pass a carbon tax into law, it will not change the planet’s temperature by one ten-thousandth of a degree. What it will do is give the government something that every government has salivated over throughout human history: taxing the air we breathe.
Carbon taxes would raise immense revenue because almost every industrial process emits CO2, which means that a huge number of dollars would be confiscated from the productive population and funneled to unaccountable, unproductive bureaucrats.
Anyone who believes that an initial carbon tax would not rise inexorably has not paid attention to the income tax, which began with a promise that it would never exceed 1% of income, and only for about the top 3% of wage earners; those making over $4,000 per year at that time. Who would have guessed the government was lying to get a new tax passed?
The ‘dangerous MMGW’ hoax is based on governments’ desire for a carbon tax. Science has nothing to do with it. The UN/IPCC is a thin pseudo-science veneer intended to give the idea of ‘dangerous MMGW’ legitimacy. Now governments all over the West, all with dollar signs in their eyes, are jumping on board. The UNSW is just a small part of the action.
Well said DB… That is really the whole point.
Andy: It might be interesting to add Figure 6 from Sherwood’s early paper which analyzed data through 2005 using a modestly different version of his latest methodology. The choices Sherwood is making greatly influence the final result.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008JCLI2320.1

Very kind of all that missing heat to congregate in one spot so that these chaps could find it!
It doesn’t matter what statistical method you use to interpolate the data if you selectively throw out data you don’t care for.
“selectively throw out” is EXACTLY what they did:
Sherwood, et. al.: “… anomalies in the data that looked more like sudden one-off shifts … {we} removed them.”
**********************
Just like those all those little “one-offs” that have no significant correlation with a certain religion….
It you torture data long enough it will confess to anything.
I love when I hear on the news about the massive amount of data and evidence for AGW. Here we have the main feedback loop that is needed to support the hypothesis that never materialized… ever. “But the glaciers are melting and plants are all confused” this is like a bad relationship where the writing has been on the wall for a while.
iteratively homogenized radiosonde temperature and wind data
==================
alarm bells should be ringing. take a picture, say the Mona Lisa. cover it with dust to obscure the image.
now, to reveal the image, since you don’t know what is image and what is dust, smear all the paint and dust together. do this repeatedly over the surface in an iterative fashion. voila, I give you the Mona Lisa.
http://www.bloodyloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/004-charcoal-canvas-2013-kwangho-shin.jpg
Looks more like the “Moaner Lisa” to me.
It’s that manic guy who used to run the IPCC
La Gioconda Kriged. Lovely.
Let’s replicate it. Not!
(nice analogy, Ferd)
I agree. “Iteratively homogenized” sounds perilously close to “iteratively tortured”. Instead of “Mike’s Nature trick” it’s “Steve’s iopscience trick”.
Here’s a half a dozen atmospheric hot spots kept in place 24/7 for surveillance.
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/5/2/3
When one of your peers can ‘publish’ utter shite to great fanfare in the ‘press’ it emboldens one to do likewise. This is lewpaper by any other name.
The IPCC’s tropical troposphere “hot spot” is over the tropics, not the southern ocean. If the IPCC are correct, the hot spot is significant enough that it can easily be found by normal methods, ie. without multiple linear regressions, data manipulations, etc. This study looks in the wrong place and has to go to great lengths to statistically manipulate a warming out of a very small amount of data. It’s interesting that researchers can only find warming where there aren’t many thermometers. There’s a lot of similarity between this hot spot and the missing heat in the deep ocean, methinks.
Not being able even with statistical gymnastics to find the missing Tropical THS, Sherwood has given up and decided that the Southern Ocean is close enough!
See his comment from 2013 during the Quest for Heat:
http://www.climatedialogue.org/the-missing-tropical-hot-spot/
Would this then be the Roaring Forties (or 50s) Hot Spot? High Temperate Zone THS? Subantarctic THS?
Guess we’ll have to wait and see where this imaginary beast dwells.
I’m waiting to see what Jo Nova has to say about this tropospheric hot spot found. She has always claimed that there isn’t any observed data presented to her about this hot spot. One of here major 4 points that the AGW people cannot provide the data to her, she maintains…
But, but…
if this “found” hot spot is only detectable by data manipulation
then is it really there?
One of her…..
You know they’re clutching at straws when they start homogenising. Especially homogenising winds. How can you “homogenise” winds? Clearly rubbish science. What does the actual raw data say?
We did not use modelling but we used “kringing”.
That is how the Arctic is warming using one station.
Sherwoods paper ignores/does not address the fact that there has been almost no tropical region warming. The fact that tropical region of the planet has not warmed supports the assertion that both Sherwood paper’s conclusion and analysis methodology is incorrect.
The tropical tropospheric hot spot is both a signature of the greenhouse gas warming and a cause of greenhouse surface warming in both the tropics and other regions of the planet.
Theoretically the tropical tropospheric hot spot warms the tropical region (surface) by infrared radiation. If A had occurred (tropical tropospheric hot spot high at 8km to 10km in the troposphere) then there should be B (significant warming of the tropical region surface). There has been almost no warming of the tropical region surface, almost all of the warming has been in high latitude regions which is the latitudinal warming paradox.
This is what the IPCC’s general circulation models predicted would occur.
Clearly as the earth is sphere not a flat table, the most amount of tropospheric warming occurs in the tropics not in high latitude regions. The amount warming due to the increase in CO2 is proportional both to the logarithmic increase of CO2 (logarithmic means the forcing effect gets less and less (half as much as the same percentage increase, again and again) at higher concentrations) and is proportional to the amount of long wave radiation that is emitted to space at the latitude in question prior to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
There is almost no theoretical direct warming in the lower regions of the troposphere due to the increase in CO2 as the lower regions of the troposphere is saturated. The saturation of the lower regions of the troposphere occurs at the long wave absorption of water and CO2 overlap. High in the troposphere there is less water so that is the region where theoretical there should be the most warming.
The warming in the upper troposphere then warms the surface by radiation. As there has been almost no tropical tropospheric warming that fact supports the assertion that there has been almost not tropical tropospheric warming at 8km.
The paper that assertion they have found the tropical tropospheric warming must explain why there is almost no tropical tropospheric warming.
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
1) Latitudinal Warming Paradox
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
The latitudinal temperature anomaly paradox is the fact that the latitudinal pattern of warming in the last 50 years does match the pattern of warming that would occur if the recent increase in planetary temperature was caused by the CO2 mechanism.
The amount of CO2 gas warming observed is theoretically logarithmically proportional to the increase in atmospheric CO2 times the amount of long wave radiation that is emitted to space prior to the increase.
As gases are evenly distributed in the atmosphere (ignoring very heavy or very light gases which biases the altitudinal distribution in the atmosphere), the potential for warming due to CO2 should be the same at all latitudes.
The amount of warming is also proportional to amount of long wave radiation that is emitted to space prior to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
Now we know that as the earth is a sphere the tropical region of the planet receives the most amount of short wave radiation and hence also emits the most amount long wave radiation to space. The tropical region of the planet should have hence warmed the most due to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
There is in fact almost no warming in the tropical region of the planet. The observed warming is at high latitudes rather than in the tropics. This observational fact supports the assertion that majority of the warming in the last 50 years was not caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2.
As it is fact that there is in the paleo record cycles of high latitude warming and cooling that correlate with solar cycle changes and solar activity has the highest in 8000 years in during the last 30 years, the no brainer answer for what caused the high latitude warming is solar cycle modulation of cloud cover.
P.S. During the next solar thread I will address the solar gate papers. There has been a cottage industry attempt to hide both the fact that the planet warms and cools cyclically and that the cyclic warming and cooling correlates with solar cycle changes.
2) The 18 year pause without warming Paradox
As atmospheric CO2 is increasing with time, the delta T (increase in planetary temperature due to the increase in CO2) should also be increasing with time. As we now that there has been a period of 18 years with no surface warming when atmospheric CO2 was increasing for each and every year we know that the majority of the warming in the last 50 years was not due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 and the IPCC general circulation model calculated warming due to CO2 is orders of magnitude too high.
The following peer reviewed paper provides the strike 1 and strike 2 observational data and specifically states the observations support the assertion that majority of the warming in the last 30 years was not due to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
P.S. The fact that there has been almost no tropical tropospheric warming also rules out an increase in TSI (total solar radiation) as the cause of the warming, in addition to the fact that TSI has not significantly increased. If TSI did increase the tropics will warm more than the poles of the planet. The cause of the high latitude warming is solar cycle modulation of planetary cloud cover which theoretically do to the mechanisms has the greatest effect in high latitude regions.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Mr. Astley must be a teacher. As a layman, even get the gist of this. But I have to keep things simple. So all of the lost heat for the past 18 years is hiding in the troposphere in one place. There must be a temperature, yes? So, what is this temperature? Sherwoods? Gore? Anybody?
The description of the methodology makes it pretty clear that they simply adjusted the “data” and used whatever statistical methods they could think of until a vague hot spot was ‘found’. Would love to see the list of what they tried before they got to kriging, which must be close to bottom on the list of ‘methodologies for desperate analysis’, and how many times they had to change their “adjustments” along the way.
Said hotspot then just looks like artefacts from the torturing of their collection of numbers (I cant bring myself to call it ‘data’ again, because it isn’t). This one will be torn apart very quickly, and they’ll be back in a few years with yet another tortured method.
It’s quite pathetic actually. That such a paper has been published speaks volumes about the journal and the lengths these alarmists will go to. Obvious contrived result is obvious.
Perhaps he should consult with Gräfenberg.
I understood the heat was hiding in the ocean. /sarc
It was too cold down there.
Guys get off their collective backs – they have 41 people working in that unit mostly Prof. or A/Prof. with a smattering of research students. If they don’t hit on some goodies the axe of austerity will fall in that relatively small university at the arse end of the world.
So this hotsh*t, (hotshot if you’re genteel), down in “ship of fools” fantasy land has managed to find a hotspot in the troposphere.
By thoroughly torturing data, eliminating the weak less attractive data, forcing the remaining data to resemble the data of their preference, these yahoos announced they found the hotspot amongst the remains.
A hot spot no one else is can see or has seen in the original unaltered historical data?
Yeah riiight.
1. Smacks of cherry picking. If you plotted surface temps from 1960 to 2012 you’d get a positive trend too. Which doesn’t change the fact that the trend over the last 18 years has been zero. So showing us two end points is meaningless.
2. The removal of “anomalies” that previously exactly balanced the warming signal strikes me as extremely unlikely. What are the chances that irregularities in the data resulted in exactly cancelling the expected trend? The odds of that would be trillions to one.
The hot spots, in the Northern Hemisphere is very close to equator and prominent but in the case of Southern Hemisphere, the hot spots moved away from the equator. This may be associated less land mass in those belts.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Maybe it is time for climate researchers who do this sort of global study based on essentially “point” data conform to the same codes of practice and reporting applied to mineral resource estimation (the JORC code).
A quick look at the “Global Radiosonde Coverage” distribution would quickly rule out the public reporting of any results over the majority of the world’s oceans.
What this study has done however is identify areas that require additional study to confirm results prior to public disclosure. Using the minerals analogy, what has been presented by Sherwood et al is a prospectus to potential investors, not an outcome.