Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I’ve been mulling over a comment made by Steven Mosher. I don’t have the exact quote, so he’s welcome to correct any errors. As I understood it, he said that much of the variation in temperatures around the planet can be explained by a combination of elevation and latitude. He described this as a “temperature field”, because at any given latitude and elevation it has a corresponding estimated temperature value.
Intrigued by this idea, I decided to use the CERES dataset. However, rather than using latitude, I decided to take a look at how well a combination of the sunlight and the elevation can predict the average temperature. Let’s start with the average surface temperature. It’s shown below in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Average surface temperature according to the CERES dataset, on a 1°x1° gridcell basis.
To estimate the temperature, what I did was to make a simple linear function of solar energy and elevation (see end notes for details). This gave me the following estimate of gridcell temperatures.
Figure 2. Estimated surface temperature based on elevation and sunlight. R^2 = 0.94, p-value less than 2e-16. See end notes for calculation.
Now, that’s a pretty good facsimile of the actual temperatures shown in Figure 1. Indeed, the “R-squared” (R^2) of the temperature field and the observations is 0.95, meaning that the temperature field explains 95% of the variation in the observed temperature.
That’s not the interesting part, however. The fun questions are, where is the temperature NOT as expected, and why? Where is the greatest departure from the estimated temperature, and why is it there? To investigate those, I next looked at the difference between observations and the estimated temperature field. Figures 3 and 4 show two views of the observations minus the temperature field.
Figure 3. Observed temperatures minus the estimated temperature field, centered on Greenwich. Gray line shows the boundary between positive and negative values. Positive values (yellow to red) mean that the observations are warmer than expected.
I found this most fascinating, as it shows the great oceanic heat transport systems that move the energy from the tropics, where there is an excess, to the poles where it is radiated to space. I was surprised to see that the warmest location compared to expectations is the area above Scandinavia. This has to be a result of the Gulf Stream current which is also quite visible along the edge of the East Coast of North America.
I note that as we’d expect, the deserts and arid areas of the world like the Sahara, the Namib, and the Australian deserts are warmer than would be otherwise expected.
You can see another view showing the overall results of the El Nino/La Nina heat pump below in Figure 4. This is the same data as in Figure 3, but centered on the Pacific.
Figure 4. Observed temperatures minus the estimated temperature field, centered on the International Dateline. Gray line shows the boundary between positive and negative values. Positive values mean that the observations are warmer than expected.
Here we can see the area off of Peru that runs cool because the El Nino/La Nina pump pushes warm surface water across the Pacific. This exposes underlying cooler waters. When the warm water hits the Asia/Indonesia/Australia landmasses, the warm water splits north and south and moves polewards. As with the area above Scandinavia, the heat seems to pile up at the polar extremities of the heat transport system. In the case of the Pacific, the northern branch ends up in the Gulf of Alaska. The southern branch ends up where it is blocked by the shallow narrows between the Antarctic Peninsula and the tip of South America.
In any case, that’s what I learned from my wanderings. The beauty of climate is that there are always more puzzles to be solved and oddities to be pondered. For example, why are the western parts of the northern hemisphere continents warmer than the eastern parts?
My best to each of you,
w.
As I’ve Mentioned: If you disagree with someone, please quote the exact words you disagree with so we can all understand your objections.
The Math: I used the form:
Estimated Temperature = a * sunlight + b * elevation + c * sunlight * elevation + m
where a, b, c, and m are fitted constants. The results were as follows:
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -4.052e+01 7.122e-02 -568.9 <2e-16 ***
sunvec 1.675e-01 2.033e-04 823.8 <2e-16 ***
elvec -1.918e-02 7.723e-05 -248.4 <2e-16 ***
sunvec:elvec 4.354e-05 2.485e-07 175.2 <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 0.2557 on 64796 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.9479, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9479
F-statistic: 3.933e+05 on 3 and 64796 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
where “sunvec” is average gridcell solar energy in W/m2, and elvec is the average gridcell elevation in meters.
Fascinating!
I’ve always said that if I wanted to see what 1 deg of temp increase was like due to climate change, just drive a couple of hundred miles north. Seems life in Coffs Harbour is not so bad! If I wanted to see what it was like with 2 deg warmer, I need to go to Queensland, perhaps Bundaberg. 3-4 deg would take me to Townsville or Cairns….seems to be getting greener the further north I go. Perhaps global warming might be pretty good after all, bring it on!
Of course Newcastle and Sydney have greater extremes of heat and cold than Coffs Harbour.
Sunlight ?? Are you mad??
You are trying to tell us that the Sun has some effect on warming the planet??!
You wait until the SkS lads hear about this one!
> For example, why are the western parts of the northern hemisphere continents warmer than the eastern parts?
Trade winds bringing warm air from the oceans?
Frank
Yes, and he fact that the world is spinning that way.
Warm water and air flows north from the equator and the continents roll underneath it.
Then the mountains push the air up, causing water vapour to condense out and cool the air as heat is lost.
By the time it reaches the far side of the continent the air has cooled.
This assumes the initial warmer Temperatures come from the Oceans as the heat is concentrated first by Ocean currents.
Oceans hold more heat, though temperature will be cooler. Continents release heat at a faster rate than the oceans.
johnmarshall, surely that is why the heat doesn’t build up over continents?
My hypothesis is that heat is generally released more slowly from Oceans than from land but – when many warm areas flow together – at that place more heat is released.
Thus warming the air above more than continents can.
Your reply:-
Land warms faster than oceans, during the day, but looses heat at night much faster than the oceans due to the higher temperature difference. Cloudy nights over land will loose heat at a slower rate than on clear nights, which is probably due to latent heat release at the cloudbase. I do not quite see how a merging of ocean warm waters will increase heat loss. Heat loss depends on the difference of the absolute temperatures to the 4th power.
M Courtney
May 15, 2015 at 1:24 am
“Yes, and he fact that the world is spinning that way.”
Wait, Earth is rotating towards the East, but we have winds from the West, bringing warmth from the ocean on the Western coasts. So that’s not the reason.
johnmarshall, if more heat is concentrated in one place by water flowing together (for whatever reason) it will cool faster than if the heat is spread out – it seemed to me.
The temperature difference is greater when the heat is concentrated so it should cool faster.
DirkH – you are of course right. Like the Sun rising in the East I can see I am wrong.
I was stupidly leaping to conclusions there, without bothering to think about it properly.
It seems the air moves faster than the land rotates beneath it.
Yup it is, ….. here is the winds ….
http://www.msnucleus.org/membership/html/jh/earth/atmosphere/lesson4/atmosphere4a.html
Here is the reason ……..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect
Warm Japan current takes heat to near Alaska, some radiates but some makes storms that come down to California. During dry intervals, we get decending warming air from Hadley cell activity, while the East gets wet gulf of Mexico air. During winter the East gets giant cold blobs (polar air masses) from Canada sliding down the Rockies that block them from California most of the time.
Net net is the west has dry heat, so warmer, and wet cold, also warmer than frozen Canadian air and snow.
I agree, it’s probably the winds from the west which heat the Rockies (along with heat from air going up and down). The east side of the Andes in Patagonia are also warmer.
http://www.goes-r.gov/users/comet/tropical/textbook_2nd_edition/media/graphics/globe_hadleycell.jpg
Thanks AnonyMoose, that diagram is quite helpful. In fact what is probably more important is similar rotating patterns in ocean currents which are there for the same reason : the Coriolis circulation.
There are persistent ocean gyres in all the major ocean basins. They turn in opposite directions in each hemisphere so act in unison at the equator, as we see here with the wind diagram.
This is an excellent post by Willis and a very good way to demonstrate the functioning and importance of ocean currents, however he is misreading this as being Nino / Nina “pump”.
Even without ENSO the ocean gyres would transport heat in this way. Indeed the most important deviation from the simple model is shown to be the gulf stream which is in the Atlantic and not driven by ENSO. The importance of the gulf stream to the climate of Europe has been understood for a long time. Without it Halifax in West Yorkshire (UK) would be as cold as Halifax, Nova Scotia.
It becomes clear from Willis’ maps that variations in ocean currents will make significant changes to surface temperatures and we have very little data or understanding of the variability in ocean currents.
This is point that Judith Curry has been making repeatedly.
It’s also interesting to note the cooling effect of vegetation. The tropical regions of Africa and S. Am are a couple of degrees cooler.
This is well known to those who work in thermal imaging. Vegetation is generally about 2-3 deg C cooler than its surroundings, due mainly to transpiration in the leaves which causes evaporative cooling.
Ride a motorcycle under a tree canopy and it can be 10-15°F in summer.
Mike May 15, 2015 at 11:08 pm
Thanks, Mike. You are correct that the trade winds also pump the warm surface water via the wind-driven ocean gyres to the poles, as is true with the Gulf Stream.
However, they are very different kinds of pumps. The trade winds function relatively continuously in the Atlantic. But the El Nino/La Nina pump in the Pacific is more like a piston pump, with an intake stroke and a power stroke.
During the intake stroke, warm water piles up on the surface of the eastern Pacific. During the power stroke, the winds pump the warm surface waters westward, and then they split and move polewards as shown in Figure 4. The surface of the ocean is physically hollowed out when the water is pumped away. Here’s an image from my post, The TAO of El Nino.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nino-nina-tao-triton-temp-and-dynamic-height.jpg
ORIGINAL CAPTION: Figure 1. 3D section of the Pacific Ocean looking westward alone the equator. Each 3D section covers the area eight degrees north and south of the equator, from 137° East (far end) to 95° West (near end), and down to 500 metres depth. Click on image for larger size.
The critical point is that the El Nino/La Nina pump is an emergent phenomenon, one which (as you point out) doesn’t exist in the Atlantic. And as is usual with emergent climate phenomena, the emergence is related to exceeding some kind of temperature threshold. The Nino Pump cycle is a RESPONSE to high temperatures, and the response is to pump a single large bolus of warm water to the poles. This is quite different from the ongoing, relatively steady Gulf Stream transport.
Anyhow, that’s why I call it a pump.
My best to you,
w.
A similar situation as observed on the western side of the US, can also be observed on the western side of the Himalayas. Although it is way to small to see, I imagine that if we magnified Hawaii we would see a similar phenomenon occurring where Mauna Loa prevents energy transport over the volcano because water vapor heavy clouds crash into the mountain.
Mediterranean climates is the likely reason. Being on the east side of the ocean gyre causes dry conditions, and the excess heat is escaping in the places where it’s dry air.
All this all makes a lot of sense to me, because the radiational heat loss at night, in deserts, and in the Arctic is not maxed out, so the more heat there is in the tropics, the more will be transported to dry regions via Hadley cells and ocean currents, and to polar regions, where it can easily radiate away.
Simpler than that – the prevailing wind everywhere in the world is from the west because of the earth’s rotation. The western fringes of the continents are warmed by winds blowing off the adjacent ocean which raises the land temperature at night.
The reply above is to Frank de Jong.
the prevailing wind everywhere in the world is from the west because of the earth’s rotation.
____
Ideally the atmosphere should not ‘rotate’ but stand static over the surface – no friction against atmosphereless open end.
So surface+atmosphere rotate to the sun, and westerly atmosphere is cooled during whole nighttime flowing east to replace sunheated ascending air.
Regards – Hans
” westerly atmosphere is cooled during whole nighttime flowing east to replace sunheated ascending air.”
I have found that for “non-weather” days, that frequently have a small breeze during the sunny day , at night the air usually stops moving.
It was something I hadn’t realized happens until I got my ownweather station.
” westerly atmosphere is cooled during whole nighttime flowing east to replace sunheated ascending air.”
I have found that for “non-weather” days, that frequently have a small breeze during the sunny day , at night the air usually stops moving.
It was something I hadn’t realized happens until I got my ownweather station.
and coriolis is here the minor effect since the deeps and highs flow IN the westerly portion to the warmth under the sun.
Regards – Hans
Willis
“I found this most fascinating, as it shows the great oceanic heat transport systems that move the energy from the tropics, where there is an excess, to the poles where it is radiated to space. I was surprised to see that the warmest location compared to expectations is the area above Scandinavia. This has to be a result of the Gulf Stream current which is also quite visible along the edge of the East Coast of North America.”
//////////////////////
I have pointed that out to you a number of times when discussing radiating the oceans and explaining why the oceans will not freeze even absence DWLWIR.
There is tons of solar energy (an excess) going into the equitorial and tropical ocean which means that those oceans will not freeze even absence DWLWIR. The excess energy is carried polewards on the oceanic currents explaining the different seasonal freezing patterns at high latitudes.
I have pointed out to you the different freezing patterns of same latitude oceans such as around iceland and in the Baltic, and in the inland seas (such as the Sea Azov) and have told you that each area of the globe has a different energy profil because of the manner in which energy absorbed in the equitorial and tropical regions is pumped and distributed around the globe.
However, unfortunately, you were not prepared back then to look at the points that I raised (essentially just repeating the mantra of the grosss radiative energy budget). It is good to see that you are now addressing how the planet works in real world conditions.
Your series of Ceres posts have all been of interest, although I am far from convinced that there is not some data fudging/yet to be fully explained adjustments under pinning some of the data.
It astounds me that you can draw such conclusion from heavily massaged data such as this.
“you can draw such conclusion from heavily massaged data”
Conclusion? To me, it was more of a curious observation. One that I found it rather interesting, thanks.
Massaged data? To me it appeared to be straight forward math, using all of the available data, applied over the entire area. IF that’s “heavily massaged data”, you’ll likely be horrified at other’s data tortures, no?
Paul, I believe Goldie is claiming that the CERES data is “massaged”, not that Willis was the masseur.
It all depends on what you are trying to prove and how strongly you are trying to prove it.
Saying “I curve fitted some basic parameters and got a wonderful agreement that fits our knowledge of the ocean dynamics, cool” requires quite a bit less rigor than “My model proves we will die if you don’t give me a billion dollars”.
The only scientific conclusion I can draw from this is that Sunlight and Elevation are almost certainly strongly defining properties of temperature. Interesting, and it does show where there are discrepancies with the prediction. However, there are enough parameters to fit an elephant, so it’s not perfect.
The other major variable is distance from the sea, which would show up clearly in separate plots for maximum and minimum temperatures, but when looking at the MEAN temperature it appears that there is partial cancellation, e.g. between cooler summer days and warmer winter nights.
yes, distance from coast is only an important in regressions of tmax and tmin
Thanks Willis, a great illustration of the climate heat engine at work.
Regarding your question… “For example, why are the western parts of the northern hemisphere continents warmer than the eastern parts?”
Seems to be less precipitable water and therefore fewer clouds on the western edge of these continents This is a paradox, as the air has traveled across vast oceans and should be saturated when it arrives at the coast. Always another question where climate is concerned.
“Seems to be less precipitable water and therefore fewer clouds on the western edge of these continents”
Absolutely not. The western edge of Eurasia north of the subtropical high pressure zone is very wet and so is NW North America. Ever visited western Ireland, Bergen, Norway, the west side of the Olympics or Vancouver Island? The reason the western side of the continents are warmer is that warm air (and water) moving north over the Atlantic and Pacific are deflected to the right by the Coriolis effect, which is the reason for the predominately western winds in the northern temperate zone.
Note that the “Warm zone” in Eurasia is much wider than in North America because of the absence of a great N-S mountain chain like the Rockies which “wrings out” the water (and most of the latent heat) from the westerlies.
Maurice Ewing, a man who knew a thing or two about the oceans, was firmly convinced that reduced Arctic ice cover rapidly led to a cooling response – as warmer waters were exposed to the Arctic Winter night, where there is an unencumbered radiative pathway to space.
When studying possible causes of glaciation aeons ago, my favourite theory was that open arctic waters would cause more snow to fall on northern Canada & Russia as north winds absorbed moisture over the open sea & dropped it as they rose over the land. ( The U.S. the ‘lake effect’ snowfall of the Grest Lakes.)
Relatively little snow falls in arctic areas, but stays many months. If more snow fell in winter than melted in summer … Ice Age!
However, in watching for media reports of greater snowfall with more open arctic waters, I have been ‘disappointed’.
Silly man, don’t you know that the IPCC has proclaimed that the Earth’s surface temperature is due to the incoming Sun’s radiation and the back-radiation from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Therefore elevation is irrelevant, every part of the surface along a given latitude receives the same radiation from the Sun and is under the same atmosphere containing the same amount of greenhouse gases so the temperature is always the same along a given latitude. What’s more the IPCC has a world-wide scientific consensus on the proclamation. Things like elevation, gas density, the force of gravity and the old misguided Gas Laws are just so old fashion and out of date. Hadn’t you noticed that there is not any snow on a mountain top unless there is snow everywhere at that latitude?
The back-radiation arises from photons generated at the Sun-warmed surface being absorbed at selected energy/wavelength levels and re-emitted back to Earth by the greenhouse gases to cause the Earth’s temperature to increase. As a result of this fascinating effect, the whole of the Universe is increasing in temperature and we will soon all be fried. This is because everything emits radiation in accordance with its temperature so every body in the Universe be it mouse or man is getting hotter and hotter from this radiation.
Hot bodies give off radiation which raise the temperature of the surrounding colder bodies. The increased temperature causes an increase if the radiation from the surrounding colder bodies which back-radiates to the hot source thereby making it hotter still. The hotter bodies cannot tell from whence the back-radiation arose, that is, they cannot differentiate between greenhouse gases and any other cool source so everything in the Universe is receiving back-radiation from everything else and thus is getting hotter. It must be so as it is the primary cause for the IPCC urgently pressing us to shut down our coal-fired power stations and this will soon be all settled at the Paris Conference of the UNFCCC later this year.
Isn’t it great to know that the UN is so caring about our welfare!
Applause! And kudos for leaving out a “Sarc” tag at the end, if people don’t spot the sarcasm by themselves they really don’t deserve to have it pointed out to them.
Willis, the Gulf Stream is only partly responsible for the mild climate of western and Northern Europe. “But the 500 pound gorilla in how regional climates are determined around the Atlantic turned out to be the Rocky Mountains” says http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/
Willis
The K & T energy budget cartoon is (for want of a better description) junk.
It is precisely because the planet is not some homogenised average that we have the various and different climatic regions/zones and why we have weather.
If the planet was as set out in that cartoon (bathed 24/7 with diluted sunlight), we would not have the weather that we see. It is the spinning globe, the oceanic heat pump (absorbing solar in the equitorial and tropical regions) and distributing excess energy polewards (and some downwards to oceanic depth), the differences in albedo and temperature between the icy poles and the equitorial/tropical regions setting up the thermohaline circulation (enabling fresh water to melt at the poles), the difffering topography of the land (think of the monsoon) etc. that leads to the climate on planet earth behaving as it does.
The real key is that the planet is a water world since this not only enables an extremely effective heat pump to be driven, but the phase change of water is a major driver of energy distribution in 3 dimensions.
As you know, the eqitorial and tropical oceans are the key to your thunderstorm control knob.
It is the study and understanding of the oceans (which materially is also a selective surface/medium largely opague to LWIR and which unlike the land evaporates and in so doing changes the latent heat content) which is the key to understanding Earth’s climate.
The land based thermometer record could and should be dumped. The only problem is that pre ARGO all ocean temp records/measurements are junk, and ARGO is a short series and lacks spatial coverage. But going forward only ARGO and satellite data is material; the land based thermometer record having now become too horribly bastardised and corrupted by endless adjustments, station drop outs etc and being pushed well beyond the limits for which it was designed (and it does not even measure the correct measurement, ie., energy, merely a proxy for energy which is reliant upon an untested assumption that RH remains constant).
Keep up the good work with your interesting articles that are always worth reading and always thought provoking.
I am a great admirer of Willis Eschenbach and his independent thinking. I read all his climate change submissions. I wish he would now focus on the so-called homogenization carried out on the surface temperature records that Goddard/Heller spends a lot of time on and even Lord Monckton is now referring to extensively here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/14/in-the-climate-debate-hear-both-sides/
in his rebuke of Rob Varley’s one sided article.
I am still waiting for Senator Inhofe to commence the Senate’s investigation into this global warming phenomenon to assess the split of 0.8C between natural, CO2 and Man made global warming (homogenization). To me this is the global warming key issue now in view of Paris. Everything else pales into insignificance. If the Australian investigation combined with GWPF review and upcoming (hopefully) US Senate investigation all show that part of the paltry 0.8C increase is adjustment based, life will be more difficult for the Paris agitators for UN control of the World economy.
Always refreshing Willis. Your actual scientific enquiry, clearly based on ‘I wonder what if…’ with number crunching analysis and explained in the usual comprehensible vernacular, in the common tongue not to mention for the common mind. Not a whiff of ‘science communication’ (!) and we get to sit at the coal face and see the results. Its so… normal, so sciency.
Beats the hell out of some other schtuff that I hear about from other sources…..
I’m a little confused Willis, with figures 1 and 2. Are these the averages at midday? Or are they based on a 24 hour cycle? The colours don’t have a high resolution between 15c and 34c
Good question, Alex.Those are the average temperatures reported by CERES of all of the measurements made during the month.
w.
Interesting read. Thank you.
Questions: How did you code the interaction term? e.g. (sunvec – meansunvec)*(elevc – meanelevc)? What is its associated incremental R^2? How much of the interaction is due to the fact that the ocean surface is always at sea level and all of the high elevations are on land? And, is the pos effect of insolation greater at high elevations or low elevations?
How did you address the spatial auto-correlation of the residuals? It’s surely non-stationary given the mountain ranges and well-documented air and water flows.
With SH and NH as different as they are, and with all of the documented currents of air and water, I am surprised at the high R^2. But it fits with what I have read elsewhere, namely almost all of the energy flow from the surface is straight up and out to space. Or, what is transported horizontally has little effect on surface temperature after the transport.
If the coriolis effect explains the difference between the (residuals of) eastern and western edges of the northern hemisphere continents (you didn’t say it is, but it is the first obvious possibility), why is there not such an effect in the southern hemisphere?
“With SH and NH as different as they are, and with all of the documented currents of air and water, I am surprised at the high R^2. But it fits with what I have read elsewhere, namely almost all of the energy flow from the surface is straight up and out to space. Or, what is transported horizontally has little effect on surface temperature after the transport.”
Weather is just climate advected from adjacent locations
I just noticed this: (Intercept) -4.052e+01 7.122e-02 -568.9 <2e-16 ***
How did you code the main effects, as well as the interaction? How is the intercept ~ -41C?
matthewrmarler May 15, 2015 at 2:07 am says:
Thanks, Matthew, good to hear from you..
Questions: How did you code the interaction term? e.g. (sunvec – meansunvec)*(elevc – meanelevc)? What is its associated incremental R^2?
Not sure what you mean by that.
I tried estimating land and ocean separately. Didn’t make much difference.
Hard to tell, I didn’t do the analysis.
Not sure why that would be a problem.
I was also surprised by the high R^2.
Indeed, that was my question, and why I asked about the northern hemisphere.
You also say:
matthewrmarler May 15, 2015 at 2:13 am
I just noticed this: (Intercept) -4.052e+01 7.122e-02 -568.9 <2e-16 ***
The intercept is -41°C presumably because that is the best fit for what happens with zero sun and zero elevation. The R code that generated the results shown in the head post was:
lm(tempvec~sunvec*elvec, weights=as.vector(latmatrix))
This creates a linear model using the area-weighted values for the solar energy and the elevation.
Regards,
w.
And, is the pos effect of insolation greater at high elevations or low elevations?
Hard to tell, I didn’t do the analysis.
But you do have the interaction. What does it mean?
I’d be interested to see the calculation converting latitude to sunlight, and how it incorporates the Earth’s 23.5 degree tilt.
Since we’re looking at long-term averages the 23.5° tilt averages out and is not an issue.
w.
It doesn’t average out at all. If the tilt was 90 degrees then all parts of the Earth would receive the same sunlight in the course of a year. If the tilt was 0, then the points of the poles would receive zero total sunlight. The existing tilt of 23.5 degrees is an intermediate state to those, so must be included in any conversion algorithm. Perhaps you instead got the sunlight from somewhere else.
NZ Willy May 15, 2015 at 1:05 pm
Ah. I think I see what you mean. I’m sorry for my misunderstanding.
The key to the puzzle is that there is no “calculation converting latitude to sunlight”. Instead, I used the solar data from the CERES satellite, which gives monthly gridcell by gridcell values for the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) insolation.
w.
A pleasing summary of this is at http://nit.colorado.edu/atoc5560/week13.pdf , although omitting the equation of annual total insolation by latitude. There’s also a pictured heat budget at bottom showing incoming heat equal to outgoing heat.
Thanks Willis, interesting read. “The beauty of climate is that there are always more puzzles to be solved and oddities to be pondered. For example, why are the western parts of the northern hemisphere continents warmer than the eastern parts?” Could it be that in general the winds are blowing from the West over open oceans; when they hit land (elevation) condensing water (sea climate) dissipates heat. Eastern parts tend to be dryer. I am not a climate scientist.
It is wetter more north near the warm current terminus, then dryer further south where the Hadley cell air compression heats. Think Seattle rain vs Mojave Desert, or English rain vs Morocco desert Sahara. Not an east west thing, a north south thing plus water vs land.
Eastern USA is wet due to air flow off the warm gulf of mexico, so again a warm water effect. In winter frozen polar air from the descending stratopheric mass (polar night jet) covers the east USA but the Rockies protect the West coast from that, and we get our wet season from warmer current terminus near Alaska. Same air source in the night jet, but theirs is over frozen land and ours is Japan Current warmed. Look up Polar Night Jet. Then apply that seasonal air mass flow to wind and water flow, with mountain barrier between east and west.
That is why California is dry half the year, but wet and green in winter.
http://www.abasin.com/ 51″ base, snow yesterday, check out the web cams, May 15, skiing great.
want is up with that ?
weather
“I am chaos, you will never know me.”
It’s kind of funny how neither climate nor weather consistently behaves to our expectations. Kind of like life.
That’s a good thing, how boring otherwise.
The impact of the ocean circulation patterns is clear.
The ENSO has a huge impact on the climate in different regions and, of course, these will be accentuated depending on whether there is a La Niña or El Niño. The parts of the world which are most impacted by the ENSO conditions also shows up such as Indonesia/Australia and the western coast of North America. There would also be a Southern Hemisphere impacted region as well except it is just centred on the South Pacific where almost no one lives.
Gulf Stream impact is clear enough as well. Some interesting impacts next to Antarctica which require some thought.
Now take these basic principles and rearrange all the continents as in continental drift through history. Put Pangea right at the equator where the Atlantic is today and make the Pacific twice as big and everything is different. Put North America and Europe together and close off the Gulf Stream flow at 45N and close off the Arctic ocean as in 60 million years ago and everything is different.
I disproved Mr Mosher’s silly claim at the time, you can get as much as 10 to 15 degrees C difference at the same lat and elevation.
“Disproved Mr Mosher’s silly claim”? Say what? The R^2 using solely latitude and elevation to estimate average temperature is 0.94, with a p-value less than 2E-16. There’s a technical term for that in climate science. It’s called a “pretty good model”.
Yes, there are errors up to 15°C … so what? By and large the errors are quite small, with the RMS error of about 5°C. Errors of 15° occur in a whacking 0.8% of the gridcells.
You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
w.
By and large the errors are quite small, with the RMS error of about 5°C.
Glad you mentioned that. I had meant to ask and forgot. More interesting was the apparent pattern in the misfit.
Yup.
AC you did not.
you cited a DAILY data. the regression we do is for MONTHLY data.
Willis, Thanks for another thought provoking article. I liked you figures 1 and 2. You can see the Hadley Circulation and the Horse Latitudes when you compare the two figures. I was surprised that it appears the Hadley circulation actually seems to concentrate heat in the Tropics.
The Hadley cells are caused by the heat in the tropics. The tropical heat near the equator is where the primary circulation pattern of the Earth begins.
The net flow of heat poleward leads to everything else that happens.
The devil is in the details.