Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I got to thinking again about the thunderstorms, and how much heat they remove from the surface by means of evaporation. We have good data on this from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellites. Here is the distribution and strength of rainfall, and thus evaporation, around the middle of the planet.
Figure 1. Evaporation in W/m2 as shown by rainfall data from the TRMM. It takes about 80 watt-years of energy to evaporate a cubic metre of water, so a metre of rainfall per year is equivalent to an average surface cooling of 80 watts per square metre. The TRMM satellite only covers from 40° North to 40° South.
I have held for some time that the global surface temperature is restricted to a fairly narrow region (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th century) by the action of emergent phenomena (see references at the end of the post). Chief among these emergent phenomena are tropical thunderstorms. My hypothesis says that when the tropical surface temperature goes over a certain threshold, that thunderstorms emerge to put a firm cap on the temperature by cooling the surface.
Thunderstorms cool the surface in a number of ways, but the main cooling method uses the exact same mechanism used by the refrigerators that keep our food cold. Thunderstorms use a standard evaporation/condensation cycle. In one part of the cycle the working fluid evaporates, cooling the surroundings. In another part of the cycle in another location, the working fluid condenses. For a refrigerator, the working fluid used to be some form of Freon, nowadays it’s some other fluid. For thunderstorms, the working fluid is water. When it evaporates at the surface, it cools the local area, and the heat is moved from the surface to the clouds and on upwards.
Now, for my hypothesis to be correct, the number and intensity of thunderstorms needs to increase quickly as temperatures go above a certain temperature threshold. In addition, the change in the resulting evaporation needs to be quite large in order to successfully control the system.
With that in mind, I made a scatterplot of sea surface temperature versus thunderstorm evaporative cooling. Figure 2 shows that result.
Figure 2. Scatterplot of 1° x 1° gridcell annual average ocean-only thunderstorm evaporative cooling on the vertical axis, in watts per square metre (W/m2) versus 1° x 1° gridcell annual average sea surface temperature on the horizontal axis.
As you can see, the thunderstorms are clearly functioning to cap the temperature. When the ocean surface gets hot, thunderstorms form and exert immense cooling power. There are some points worth noting about Figure 2.
First, the red area shows the tropics. This part of the earth is important because it is not only about 40% of the planet’s surface. In addition, just over half of all the energy absorbed by the surface of the earth is absorbed in the tropical regions of the planet. As a result, the regulation of this large amount of incoming energy by albedo control is crucial to the overall energy balance of the planet.
Next, these are annual averages. However, they are also daily averages. But during the day/night cycle in the tropics, the evaporation is by no means constant. At night the evaporation is small, some tens of watts per square metre. During the day, on the other hand, evaporation is quite large, hundreds of watts per square metre, because the strong tropical sunshine evaporates the water directly, plus the thunderstorms are largely a daytime phenomenon. This means that the peak hourly thunderstorm evaporative cooling is on the order of twice the average values shown above, up to about 600 W/m2.
Next, the cooling effect of the thunderstorms is not applied blindly or randomly. The thunderstorms only form as and when the local area is above the temperature threshold. This means that the cooling effect, which can be up to 500-600 w/m2, is always located where it is most needed, on the local hotspots.
Finally, here is the most important consideration. The timing and the amount of thunderstorms are NOT a function of greenhouse gas forcing, or of solar forcing, or of volcanic forcing, or of any other kind of forcing. As Figure 2 shows, they are a function of temperature. As long as the surface-atmosphere temperature difference is large enough, thunderstorms will form even at night when the radiative forcing is quite small.
This means that their effect will be to maintain the same temperature, regardless of reasonable-sized fluctuations in the amount of forcing. Clouds don’t know about forcing, they form and disappear based on local conditions.
And this is simply one more piece of observational support for my hypothesis that emergent phenomena regulate the temperature and maintain it within a fairly narrow range.
My best to everyone. Here in California, we have about 150% of the usual snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. When it was drought, it was said to be the result of global warming … and of course, now that there is heavy snow, that is also said to be the result of global warming.
Buckle your seatbelts and keep your hands inside the vehicle, it’s gonna be a long, uphill struggle to get rid of this madness …
My best to all,
w.
My Usual Request: If you disagree with me or anyone, please quote the exact words you disagree with. I can defend my own words. I cannot defend someone’s interpretation of my words.
My Other Request: If you think that e.g. I’m using the wrong method on the wrong dataset, please educate me and others by demonstrating the proper use of the right method on the right dataset. Simply claiming I’m wrong doesn’t advance the discussion.
Some Of My Previous Posts On The Subject:
Cooling and Warming, Clouds and Thunderstorms
Data:
TRMM Data is here, see the bottom of the page for the NetCDF file.
CERES Data is here, I used the EBAF dataset.
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Willis,
You wrote:
“I’m sorry, but your uncited and unsupported claim that volcanoes “have a strong global cooling effect and the effect lasts until the dust settles” does NOT constitute “evidence that the thermostat effect of thunderstorms, while real, is not sufficient to overcome the cooling effect of aerosol forcing”. Evidence is verifiable facts and observations, Thomas, not your uncited claims.”
But I did cite the evidence to support my claim. I told you the global temperature data are from UAH and the Optical Thickness data are from the following GISS sites.
GISS Global Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness site:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/
GISS Global Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness DATA
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/tau.line_2012.12.txt
I also emailed a chart to Anthony. (I don’t know how to post an image here.)
You wrote:
“Nope. If they had, the lack of volcanoes since 1992 would have led to continual warming, but in fact the world hasn’t warmed in almost two decades.”
I disagree. There were major volcanos that increase aerosol loading, which decreased sunlight (see the GISS data) in the 80’s and 90’s but none since Pinatubo in 1992. Those eruptions clearly caused cooling, which lasted until the aerosol loading settled or rained out. We would not expect “continuous warming” after recovery from volcanic cooling. All else being equal, we would expect temperatures to recover back to their previous levels not to continue warming
As it turned out, all things were not equal. A major El Neño caused “warming” at the end of the 1990’s. I put warming in quotation marks because an El Neño doesn’t introduce more energy into the system, it just spreads around heat that had been concentrated in the wester pacific.
Nevertheless, the dramatic increase in stratospheric aerosol loading caused by El Chichon and Pinatubo are clearly evident in the GISS aerosol data and the UAH temperature data shows concurrent cooling. The mechanism is obvious, the aerosols cause less sunlight to reach the surface.
Your idea that thunderstorms act as a governor on surface temperature seems correct to me. If the surface is hot, convection causes more surface winds, the heat and wind cause more water to evaporate, causing more or larger storms, which cool the surface. Conversely, if the surface is cool, fewer or smaller storms form so the surface gets hotter.
Additional evaporation during the cumulative stage of a thunderstorm, which is caused by both increased surface wind and heat, does lower the temperature but the total heat content of the air is constant. Evaporation is an adiabatic process, meaning there is no change in total heat (called enthalpy). The cooling from evaporation is returned as sensible heat when the water vapor condenses to form cloud particles. Likewise, when air rises in a thunderstorm it cools due to expansion, but this is also an adiabatic process and the heat is returned to the surface when the air descends.
It seems to me that the only process in your thunderstorm hypothesis that actually removes heat from the atmospheric system is the fact that clouds reflect sunlight. But if clouds can cool by reflecting sunlight why wouldn’t volcanic aerosols also cool?
Anyway, it does seem to be true that your thunderstorm-governor effect is not large enough to keep the surface at a near-constant temperature when the system is forced by, for example, volcanic aerosols. Even though they lower the global temperature by only a few tenths of a degree C. The GISS data show large increases in stratospheric aerosol loading accompanied by precipitous declines in global lower troposphere temperature and those declines persist for extended periods of time (years) while thunderstorms operate on daily time scales.
It seems to me that the only process in your thunderstorm hypothesis that actually removes heat from the atmospheric system is the fact that clouds reflect sunlight. But if clouds can cool by reflecting sunlight why wouldn’t volcanic aerosols also cool?
I think there is a far more important issue here. I am probably going to get the exact physics wrong, but let me have a go.
The CO2 thesis is that GHG in the atmosphere gets itself warmed up by absorbing radiation, and then re-emits it. So in a sense CO2 warms you at night by ‘reflecting’ radiation back down. Park that for a paragraph or two..
All heat loss and gain from the earth is ultimately by radiation, so as you have surmised, things like albedo are really crucial. Albedo stops heat getting in..
However that’s not the only game in town. The earth as a complete system including its atmosphere will radiate heat to space depending on the average temperature of its ‘surface’. What is important is to realise that the ‘surface’ that does this radiation is not the Earth’s actual sea/land surface, but something like the cloud tops or a large section of the (upper?) atmosphere.
The GHG thesis says the earth is wrapped in an insulator: The CO2 and water vapour loaded atmosphere. HOWEVER a big woolly sweater will keep you warm until the wind blows, when you need a windproof jacket as well.
What does this mean? This means that any vertical circulation that carries heat from the actual surface to high in the atmosphere is actually piercing the ‘insulation’ of the atmosphere, and allowing more heat to radiate to space, unimpeded by a GHG laden atmosphere. Which makes any CO2 variation practically irrelevant. GHG will have an effect over dry deserts where there is insufficient water to do much in the way of taking surface heat to a great height, and in particular GHG will reduce night-time temperature FALLS in the desert.
But over the oceans the water cycle will dominate. Both in terms of GHG and in terms of albedo and extra radiation from cloud tops that are partially or substantially beyond the bulk of atmospheric CO2 and other GHGs.
So that ties in with your question of ‘how can the water vapour be losing heat’ And the answer is ‘by direct radiation to space’. Albedo stops the energy coming in, but cloud top radiation is how it gets out again, and with a 4th law, its a pretty non linear curve there. And that radiation is happening high up in the atmosphere, beyond a large fraction of the CO2 which allegedly acts to prevent it reaching space. We know that energy has to be being lost, because warm wet air goes up and far colder rain comes down. And at the same altitude (surface level) too, so adiabatic nonsense has been neutralised…
And this is where we see, I believe, the ultimate flaws in the AGW model, it doesn’t really take account of the water cycle as an active system, it thinks in terms of radiation from the actual earth’s surface through an insulating layer that contains a constant amount of water and CO2 and GHG, where ‘constant’ means ‘only varying on quite long times scales’ – not on a minute by minute day by day cubic kilometre by cubic kilometre basis – because the computers are not powerful enough to model that, so its parametrised and left out of the actual models except as a lump sum term.
And that is why Ellis is, in my opinion, poking into a very sensitive and useful area. If we can show that the parametrisation of water is simply inadequate in terms of the models, and that there is even a moderate chance of water and the water cycle being such a major player that it dwarfs CO2, then there is an end if AGW.
Its not necessary to come up with a competing theory that predicts the climate better, in order to invalidate AGW – all that is necessary is to show that the AGW model is based on such a simplified picture of the atmosphere that it’s useless as a predictive tool.
—————————————————
Another corollary of water cycle rather than CO2 being a major driver of climate, is that it allows us to construct a lot of models with very long time delay feedback paths, like ocean currents that push warm water to polar regions and generalised ocean circulations, and these sort of huge time delays that are seen as the PDO and the NAO and all that other stuff, renders us a model with many time delayed negative feedback loops, and with a bit of non-linearity thrown in, we have all we need to define a chaotic system with no ‘average’ temperature at all, just a chaotic attractor that is ‘more or less’ where it is now, and around which we orbit, model wise, with quite considerable variation on all time scales, before flipping to a new attractor called an ice age…and the flipping may well be triggered by e.g. a Milankovitch cycle, but that is not the cause, that’s just the trigger…we are seeing this behaviour with all the ocean cycles including the El Niño, so its real all right, but no one has made a holistic model incorporating it to predict – if not the actual temperature fluctuations – the general order of the fluctuations – i.e. on what time-scales and what amplitude might we expect, and what peak values?
I am sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I haven’t really thought through the ramifications of all this, BUT the point is to start a ball rolling in terms of people with younger brains than mine thinking about how the water cycle actually might work and what this means in the context of atmospheric CO2., because I have a gut feeling that this is the elephant in the AGW room, and we should try and sketch it out.
damn. I hate this system where on missing brace can cause a whole section of text to go bold, and you cant correct your own post.
” Which makes any CO2 variation practically irrelevant. GHG will have an effect over dry deserts where there is insufficient water to do much in the way of taking surface heat to a great height, and in particular GHG will reduce night-time temperature FALLS in the desert.”
Except there is no trace of this in the surface record, none, zip, nada.
What hold the surface temp at night is the slow cooling rate of the surface of the land, asphalt, concrete, dirt, sand, grass and trees cool quickly, asphalt doesn’t, but the air, where the ground cools quickly, falls like a rock.
https://micro6500blog.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/evidence-against-warming-from-carbon-dioxide/
Hmm. After I had posted my long post I went back and looked at Gymnopserms post about IR radiation equivalent temperatures of cloud versus open skies.
The notches in the clear sky spectra show exactly the effect of CO2 when its NOT cloudy, and exactly the effect I mentioned when it was cloudy, that in essence the cloud radiation is almost independent of CO2 concentration.
What I couldn’t understand, and still can’t fully is that his contention that clouds radiate a lot less than hot ground, is supported by the evidence. Well some of it. It fully explains warm nights with cloud cover versus cold ones without.
And that makes me suspect I may have been wring to criticise Thomas when he said that albedo would be the only dominant effect for daytime clouds, yes Thomas perhaps that is in fact the case. My bad.
Looking at Gymnopserms data and doing a rough calculation reveals that yes, the difference between ground temps and cloud top radiation terms is the same as a T^4 rule would allow for ( (290k/215k) ^4 ~ = 3.3 or so) which is of course precisely the sort of difference one sees at night.,.,. but that doesn’t gybe with the fact that overall thunderstorms cool the surface, and so do clouds, by day.
So where is all the heat going? According to gymnosperm its not radiating to space in the infra red… Thomas must be right, something greater than a factor of 3.3 must be reflecting visible and UV light (not covered by IR thermometers) back into space before it even gets near the ground. And that’s albedo. So to get a net reduction in temperature that means net outflowing radiation must be greater than net inflowing..and that means that the reduction in radiation in terms of reflected visible light must be greater than the 3.3 figure gain that the IR radiation shows.
Well as a photographer who grew up in the days of manual cameras and hand held exposure meters, for sure full cloud is two, three or four stops, depending how thick it is. Which is in incoming (visible) radiation reduction of 4-16 times! And the bulk of the sun’s radiation is at or near the visible spectrum as are some of the absorption spectra dues to GHG etc.
What does this mean – well it means that when we stop looking at local transport, we have a figure – albedo modulation – more than big enough to account for the loss of radiation due to cloud cover. By day the net energy balance of cloud cover will be to cool – often dramatically, just as by night the reverse is true.
Ergo I may have been half right, because yes, clouds do carry energy way to space to radiate there, but not as much as direct ground and a clear sky does, BUT the important thing is, that the albedo of total cloud cover is massive and more than large enough to provide overall net cooling by day.
What this leads to is a picture of thunderstorm energy balance that goes like this. Warm wet air rises, and due to adiabatic lapse, cools condenses and transfers heat to the upper atmosphere, but if it were to fall as rain, would warm up again and become warm wet air again with only a little overall cooling from the 215k cloud top radiation.
BUT what must be happening is that albedo increase absolutely stamps on the incoming radiation. Not where the IR satellites are measuring it, but in the visible and UV spectrum. That’s where the net energy balance is adjusted, and because it’s cloud tops above the GHG effect, and radiation in a band where CO2 holds no sway, CO2 et al are completely irrelevant. So with clear skies CO2 rules, but when its cloudy, it’s almost irrelevant.
What this boils down to is this: ultimately we know that the energy balance of the earth has to be – for a steady temperature – a net zero. Negative feedback has to be in place to maintain it that way or we would go into thermal runaway. Radiative effects on an assumed steady level of incoming radiation are what AGW theories deal with – the T^4 radiation means that night time radiation loss is hugely proportional to temperatures, so the AGW alarmist – perhaps we should call them scientists of the Dark Side – of the planet are correct in terms of analysing energy loss (by night) but they have completely failed to account for the energy gain modulation of incoming radiation by albedo variation by day..
If there were no albedo variation then AGW would probably be almost correct. Gymnosperms graph showing deep water vapour and CO2 notches in the IR would rule the day (or rather the night!!!) .
But what we are seeing perhaps is that where it’s really at, by day, on the Light Side, is albedo. Anything that modifies albedo will have a massive effect on surface temperature. If a volcano erupts, that’s extra albedo, If a thunderstorm happens, that is, too. And consider, if land masses concentrate in polar regions, that’s a massive increase in albedo, as not only will the tropics be open sea and therefore more albedo than land, but the polar land will be snow covered and have a higher albedo as well. Land all at the poles might very well be a high albedo snowball earth.
So whilst its true that the effect of a thunderstorm is to suck heat from the surface and chuck it up high which cools the surface, it also must be warming the upper atmosphere somewhat, and the energy hasn’t been lost, just moved. But the albedo gain will reflect massive amounts of extra sunlight away from the surface so that such radiation as there is in the 215k cloud top radiation is enough to overall cool the system because the incoming radiation is now far lower. That’s the only way it makes sense to me. And of course if that results in rain and clear night time skies, you will get a very nice extra cooling effect. Albedo is no use at night – it doesn’t cool you – just stops you getting too hot by day.
This brings a much clearer picture to me than I had earlier today, about the net effect of cloud cover..a subject I couldn’t get my brain around, which was this. Is the net effect of cloud cover overall warming, or cooling?
The IR graphs absolutely show that clouds massively reduce IR radiation which is the dominant form of heat loss by night, and of course by winter too where there is ‘more night than day’. Cloudy polar regions ought to be much warmer in winter than cloudless ones. So here where heat input is transported heat from the tropics, and the cooling is IR dominated, maybe we expect to see overall warming if its cloudy
But in the tropics, where the heat input is direct solar radiation, extra cloud cover by day will be more than enough to compensate for extra cloud cover by night (and that may go if there is a thunderstorm to ‘clear the air’) , and clouds will have a net cooling effect overall.
And that confirms my suspicion. CO2 and the GHG effect is real and it affects night time radiative LOSSES a bit, but its almost completely irrelevant by day, where albedo variations from cloud cover will dominate the energy balance, especially in the tropical regions.
And the argument from scientists of the Dark side, that water vapour will amplify temperature variations, is true. By night. And somewhat in the Polar regions. By Day its exactly the opposite effect, extra water vapour means extra cloud, and that means a lot cooler overall, in the tropics.
And as there is a lag in transporting heat from tropics to poles, that means that positive fluctuations in cloud will first cause high latitude warming, where heat loss by night dominates, before cooler ocean currents driven by cooler tropical temperatures will lead to colder winters, and then snow ice and less cloud, and a nasty big freeze up.
And so on ad infinitum Colder subsea currents will then cool the tropics, reduce cloud cover and the tropics will start to warm up again…
And it may explain why the Antarctic is somewhat different from the arctic – the heat transport there is weird. It is a land mass surrounded by sea and the circumpolar current more or less isolates that land mass from tropical heat. It would be interesting to compare polar cloud cover over the last few decades..my guess is there is less cloud in the Antarctic.
[Long analysis. Thank you. .mod]
Thank you for taking the time to put that into words.
The GHE & blanket analogies are both inadequate since they don’t account for the water cycle. If I chop wood on a cold day in a heavy coat, sweat will cool me off. If I blanket my house & don’t turn down the heater it’s going to get warm. The sun doesn’t have a thermostat, although there are both short and long term fluctuations in output. The earth does have a powerful thermostat in the clouds and water vapor cycle. However: 1) they are difficult to model and 2) not due to man.
Willis,
Your world map of the TRMM data shows the main band of thunderstorm activity (in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans) to be north of the equator.
Given that the Earth is some 5 million km closer to the sun in the southern hemisphere summer (Dec) one would expect the global average activity to be slightly south of the equator.
Is there any known reason for it to be North of the equator ?
Here in NZ the intensity of sunlight mid summer is far greater than in the Northern Hemisphere (in terms of how quickly one gets burnt by the Sun) A lot of that will of course be due to significantly lower air pollution but not all of it can be so attributed.
Bernie January 8, 2016 at 11:17 am
pete January 8, 2016 at 12:47 pm
Pete, if you add more heat to a pan of boiling water, the excess heat simply goes into evaporation.
However, as Figure 2 clearly demonstrates, the water doesn’t need to be boiling in order for the excess heat to be lost to evaporation. The key is understanding that thunderstorms actively increase evaporation. Once a local area crosses a certain temperature threshold, thunderstorms begin to form. They increase evaporation via several mechanisms.
First, evaporation is a linear function of wind speed. If the wind goes from 1 m/sec (2.2 mph) to 10 m/sec (22 mph), you get about ten times the evaporation. A thunderstorm easily generates winds of 20 mph (~ 10 m/sec) or more around the base. So a thunderstorm can change local evaporation rates by an order of magnitude.
Next, waves on the ocean and spray both on land and in the ocean each increase the evaporating surface area.
Next, the air exiting from the top of the thunderstorm tower has had almost all of the water wrung out of it. This dry air descends on all sides of the thunderstorm, delivering bulk dry air to the surface. Evaporation is a function of the difference between surface vapor pressure and the air vapor pressure, so dry air gives greater evaporation.
So those are some of the the ways that the thunderstorms cool the surface through increased evaporation. However, they also cool the surface in several other ways.
First, cold rain from aloft immediately cools the surface of whatever it hits. This cooling effect is so strong that if the thunderstorm stands still and the rain just falls directly under the lowest part of the thunderstorm, it’s like Smokey the Bear micturating on a campfire—the thunderstorm goes out. It has to move to survive.
Next, the rain is cold because it evaporates as it falls, cooling both the rain and the surrounding air. This air is entrained by the rain. Unlike the rain, it spreads radially when it hits the surface, cooling a much larger area than the thunderstorm itself. In the tropics, this cool wind is the sign that there is a thunderstorm in the neighborhood.
Next, on the ocean the thunderstorm-driven wind cause whitecaps, spray, and spindrift. These are all white in color, so they reflect incoming solar energy back to space.
Next, the thunderstorm towers greatly increase the reflective area of the clouds. This is particularly true in the late afternoon when the sunlight strikes the sides of the towers, and they cast long shadows.
So those are the major cooling mechanisms that restrict the maximum temperature in areas of tropical thunderstorms. And since the increase in evaporation is the largest of these, the analogy with boiling water is indeed apt. Yes, nothing is boiling, but the major mechanism is the same—excess heat goes into increased evaporation.
Finally, this is the beauty of WUWT. In answering your question, I’ve just realized that I have been underestimating the total evaporative cooling. This is because I haven’t included the evaporative cooling of the rain as it falls to the surface. See, I’ve been estimating total evaporative cooling based on total rainfall. But however much of the rain that evaporates before hitting the surface also needs to be counted, and it’s not counted in the rain fall because it has already evaporated.
Or at least some of it is not counted in the rainfall …. I’ll have to think about how to best estimate that evaporative cooling. However, from experiencing how cold it can be under a tropical thunderstorm on even the warmest day, due to both the cold rain and the cold entrained wind from that rain, I’d say it is not negligible.
Best regards to you,
w.
Further research and some strong number crunching shows that at a rain rate of 5mm/hr, a rain-containing atmospheric column 1,000 metres tall by 1 metre square has a total surface area of about 2 square metres. In a 1 mm/hr drizzle, the surface area of the rain is one square metre. And in a tropical downpour of 25 mm/hr (an inch per hour), the rain has a surface area of about five square metres. See here for the underlying data on raindrop size distribution.
w.
richard verney January 9, 2016 at 4:25 am
Willis
You are of course correct that there is horizontal transport of water vapor. However, over the tropical ocean the transport distance must be short and the transported amount must be small, as evidenced by the clear and quickly varying boundaries of the areas where there is rain.
The close coupling of evaporation and subsequent rainout is also demonstrated by the strong correlation of rainfall with local temperature.
No, it doesn’t mean that those areas have no evaporation. It means that they have little rain. Remember, generally in the tropics rain means thunderstorms, so as I’ve pointed out, I’m discussing thunderstorm evaporative cooling.
Ah. Actually, what you need is the latent heat of vaporization at a given temperature. I use a PDF of seawater properties from MIT, see page 7. It gives the latent heat of vaporization at ~30°C and a salinity of 35 g/kg as being 2350 megajoules (MJ)/tonne.
Next, density. Again from the MIT paper, seawater at 30°C and 35 g/kg salinity is about 2% heavier than freshwater. So it takes 2% more energy to evaporate the extra weight, or a total of 2350 * 1.02 ≈ 2400 MJ.
Now one watt is 31 megajoules per year, We need 2400 megajoules per year to evaporate the cubic metre of seawater. So … 2400/31 = 76 watts of evaporation per metre of rain. Because I work a lot in my head, and to allow for some inefficiencies, I round it to 80 W/m2.
I have listed these for you previously. However, we don’t need to understand the exact mechanism to be certain that some mechanism exists.
Let me give you actual measurements from one of the TAO buoy, on the Equator at 165°E, measurements which also agree with the CERES data. All data is 24/7 averages.
Downwelling solar radiation at the surface: 248 W/m2
Upwelling solar radiation at the surface: 12 W/m2
Solar energy absorbed by the ocean: 236 W/m2
Now losses.
Evaporation: 187 W/m2
Radiation: 473 W/m2
Total energy lost from surface: 660 W/m2
Now, you have claimed over and over that the downwelling longwave radiation (DLR) at the TAO buoy is NOT absorbed by the ocean.
My question is, if the DLR is not absorbed, then the ocean at the TAO buoy is absorbing 236 W/m2 of energy, and meanwhile it is constantly losing 660 W/m2 of energy … so why is it not frozen? In other words, All I want to know is what physical process can on a 356 24/7 basis provide over 400 W/m2 to the ocean to keep it from freezing?
I have answered your courteously posed questions, and have done so many, many times in the past. I now await your answer to my single question—at the TAO buoy at 165°E, what physical process is providing over 400 W/m2 of energy 24/7 to the ocean surface if the energy is not from DLR?
w.
And while you are at it, Richard, a second question … if the measured DLR of over 400 W/m2 at the TAO buoy are NOT heating the ocean as I say, then where are they going? They can’t be heating the air, we’d be burning up. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so where are the >400 W/m2 of DLR going if not into the ocean?
Best regards,
w.
“Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so where are the >400 W/m2 of DLR going if not into the ocean?”
First of all:
Several of the power flux balance graphics I see in Bing images including Fig 10 Trenberth et al 2011 look something like this: 340 W/m^2 ToA, about 30 % reflected, 102 W/m^2, about 78 absorbed and 161 to the surface. There is a frequently, but not always, +/- 330 W/m^2 GHG perpetual heat loop.
So where y’all getting DLR of 400+ W/m^2? Some kind of magical breeder?
Second of all:
As noted elsewhere the formation of snow/ice on the polar & Greenland ice sheets can suck up yuuugge amounts of energy Btu’s, i.e. Wh.
Willis
Good summary using 24/7/365 average values.
I would likely challenge the additional 2% density correction, as the evaporation energy reference you quoted is already using nominal (salt-solution density) seawater.
Thanks, RA. You are right that it is already using nominal (salt-solution density) seawater. But their figures are per tonne, and I need figures per cubic metre, which is the reason for the 2% adjustment.
w.
” at the TAO buoy at 165°E, what physical process is providing over 400 W/m2 of energy 24/7 to the ocean surface if the energy is not from DLR?”
The majority of the heat at the surface is the surface, then the heat stored in all the water vapor, best I can tell it’s got to be a lot.
You point an IR thermometer straight up there isn’t near 400W/m2. At 41N (what I know the best) clear sky it 80F to over 100F colder than the surface. A 50F day it was about -40F. This was at noon.
And you’re wrong about the thunderstorm line, the vast majority of the water vapor is still there, it ends up raining out over the continents, and that tropical air makes a 10 to 20F difference in temps. I have the same 20 or so F swing in daily temp, but I can have clear days a couple days apart that are 20F different max temp, separated by a line of Thunderstorms.
I m not complaining about your ability to detect the thunderstorm line in the tropics, just that I know the water that evaporates in the tropics has a big impact in extratropic and subpolar thunderstorms and air temps.
micro6500 January 10, 2016 at 2:44 pm
Thanks, Micro. Perhaps I haven’t made it clear. The actual average of the measurements of downwelling longwave radiation (DLR) from the instrumentation mounted on the TAO buoy on the Equator at 165°E is over 400 W/m2. To be more precise, it’s 420 W/m2.
Note that these observations are totally supported by theoretical calculations such as MODTRAN. Go there, it’s already set to the tropics. Set the sensor altitude to 0 km, set it to looking upwards, and choose “Cirrus clouds”. You get 418 W/m2 of DLR.
As a result, what you might have measured with your unspecified “IR thermometer” in your back yard is immaterial. We have actual observations for the area in question. They show over 400 W/m2 of downwelling radiation.
All the best,
w.
” Set the sensor altitude to 0 km, set it to looking upwards, and choose “Cirrus clouds”. You get 418 W/m2 of DLR.”
Oh, I didn’t notice the cloudy conditions. Clouds warm the sky, as compared to clear skies. What I’m measuring is the IR window from 8u- 14u to space, or whatever the optical column terminates with, but you can convert the temp to a flux rate, and add the flux rate for co2. I have seen the entire Co2 flux listed as 22 W/m2, I think that’s about 12F at -40F, but the largest measurable DLR is from cloud bottoms, I can measure a 70F or 80F difference from clear skies off cloud bottoms. So the 418W/m2 seems to be from a lot more than Co2. Even 95F humid days, the sky is still quite cold.
If you can borrow an 8-14u IR thermometer even with the limited view, I think it’s enlightening.
Willis,
Rain can evaporate as it falls but moisture from the surrounding air can also condense on cold rain droplets. This is why relative humidity at the surface often falls during a rain shower. Rain droplets are born relatively high in the troposphere, where the air is cooler due to the lapse rate. Therefore, rain is usually cooler than the air it is falling through when it reaches close to the surface. Water is incompressible so, unlike air, rain does not heat as it falls—except for some minor heating due to friction with the air it is falling through.
However, it seem to me that no amount of evaporative cooling can remove heat from the global troposphere because evaporation is an adiabatic process. Evaporation consumes heat, which cools the surrounding air, but when the evaporated moisture condenses back to liquid, the heat is returned through the latent heat of condensation. Heat is moving around in the system but no heat leaves the system.
Therefore, it seems to me that no amount of thunderstorm evaporation could overcome even a small amount of greenhouse gas heating. Greenhouse gasses “trap” radiant heat in the atmosphere, which causes the atmosphere to equilibrate at a new, higher, temperature. Evaporation and condensation are internal processes and they do not change the exchange of heat between the troposphere and deep space.
Thunderstorms can have a damping effect on global temperature but the effect would be mostly, or only, due to the fact that clouds reflect sunlight. This effect does not seem to be sufficient to overcome the cooling effect of a those rare volcanic eruption that are large enough to spew large amounts of reflective particles into the stratosphere. Those particles reflect sunlight and that causes global cooling because less of the radiant energy from the sun reaches the surface.
Since the damping effect of thunderstorms does not seem to be sufficient to counter act the cooling effect of stratospheric aerosols, I doubt that the effect could counteract greenhouse warming. I suppose it’s possible that the effect might require years to counter the rapid cooling that occurs with increased aerosol loading but I doubt that too because global temperature falls when stratosphere aerosol levels increase, then rises again when the aerosols settle out.
The two coldest years in the UAH temperature recored occurred after the eruptions of El Chichon and Pinatubo, when aerosol loading caused stratospheric optical depth to increase by as much as a factor of 24.
If nothing else it carries billions of gallons(?) of 80F water to someplace that’s 20, 30F colder.
How much heat is that compared to a dry atm column?
Thomas January 10, 2016 at 1:39 pm
Thanks, Thomas. The decrease in RH is actually from the descending dry air. This air has had the air stripped out of it as rain, and it slowly descends on all sides of the thunderstorm.
And as a result, as you point out, a thunderstorm reduces the RH of the bulk atmosphere at the surface.
w.
Willis,
At 12:56 PM you wrote:
“Next, density. Again from the MIT paper, seawater at 30°C and 35 g/kg salinity is about 2% heavier than freshwater. So it takes 2% more energy to evaporate the extra weight, or a total of 2350 * 1.02 ≈ 2400 MJ.”
The salt doesn’t evaporate. It stays in the ocean. Only water vapor leaves the surface.
Thanks, Thomas. Yes, the salt doesn’t evaporate as you point out.
But the MIT tables give the amount of energy to evaporate a tonne of salt-containing water. I need the same number per cubic metre of salt-containing water. Which is why the 2% adjustment is done.
Regards,
w.
We know that heat loss to space can only occur via radiation
We know GHGs absorb most of the radiation that hits them of the correct wavelengths
We know this absorbed radiation is mainly lost to other molecules via collisions. (At altitudes of 20km the MFP is 9.139e-07 metres and the Collision frequency is 4.354e+08 / sec)
we know that heat loss to space can only occur where the mean free path is sufficiently great and radiation finally leaves the earth
we know that only radiation from the ground which is not absorbed by ghgs reaches space
it must therefore be true for radiation from cloud tops – radiation that would have escaped from the ground will also escape from the cloud tops (clouds will emit a near BB radiation pattern). BUT radiation that excites ghg molecules will still excite ghg molecules and will be indistinguishable from the IR from the ground.
Radiation from cloud tops is therefore exactly the same as radiation from the ground from where the heat was transported.
If this is the case then I do not see where thunderstorms change the overall energy balance. Do they simply transport the heat to cooler areas. Where is the mechanism for reducing the overall energy content of the globe?
” Where is the mechanism for reducing the overall energy content of the globe?”
The energy released as water vapor become liquid water is lost to space at cloud top, if that alone doesn’t explain it, add that cloud top is on the other side of a large percentage of the atm GHGs when this state change takes place.
Consider the mechanical energy of a thunderstorm over a 20 or 39F weather front. Then account for the water carried in and condensed.
sergeiMK
“Where is the mechanism for reducing the overall energy content of the globe?”
How about the snow and ice accumulating at the poles and Greenland? Making a ton of ice sucks up 288,000 Btu, 84,407 Wh.
I think the answer is that clouds reflect visible light, which has too short a wavelength to be absorbed by greenhouse gasses. Look at a photo of the earth from space. Clouds are bright.
Thomas January 10, 2016 at 1:39 pm
Remember that the metric at issue is not the total amount of heat in the system. It is the surface temperature.
Tropical evaporation is only one of the many ways that the suface temperature is controlled by emergent phenomena. The first line of defense is varying the time of the emergence of tropical cumulus clouds, which regulates the amount of solar energy reflected into space.
Beyond that, the thunderstorms act as huge air conditioners. Latent heat is moved from the surface up to the LCL, the lifting condensation level. At that point it condenses, releasing the heat. This heat then fuels the development and maintenance of the cumulus tower. This means that much of the heat is converted into work. Finally, the dehumidified air from the surface is lifted to the cloud tops.
Bear in mind that throughout the whole process from the condensation up through the middle of the cumulus towers up to the cloud tops, the air doesn’t interact with the surrounding atmosphere. It is not radiating energy which can be absorbed by CO2 in the surrounding atmosphere. Inside the cloud the radiation goes nowhere.
And at the altitude of the cloud tops, there is very little of any of the GHGs. This means that whatever heat is left in the air at the top of the cloud towers is free to radiate to space.
Finally, it is the evaporation and deep tropical convection resulting from that evaporation that drives the transfer of heat from the tropics to the poles, where it radiates to space. So at the end of the day evaporation drives the whole shebang.
Regards,
w.
Converting a ton of water into a ton of ice requires 288,000 Btu/ton, aka 317,376 Btu/tonne.
One cubic meter holds 1,000 kg, aka 1 tonne of water. Yes, ice is less dense, but does it really matter?
The area of Antarctica is about 1.4E7 km^2, 1.4E13m^2. A meter deep layer of ice would be, duh, 1.4E13m^3, aka 1.4E13 tonne. Converting that tonne of water to ice absorbs 4.44E18 Btu.
ToA spherical surface area is 5.12E14 m^2. ToA solar input is 340 Btu/m^2. Over 24 hours the complete ToA spherical surface area would receive 1.74 E17 Watts, 5.95E17 Btu/h, total over 24 hours 1.43E19 Btu.
It would take 3.21 meters of ice to absorb the entire ToA input of 340 Btu/m^2. The additional 2.0 W/m^2 of anthropogenic RF between 1750 and 2011 could be absorbed by 0.02 m, 0.74 inch. RCP 8.5 could be absorbed by 0.08 m, 3.16 inch.
Water’s latent heat of evaporation/condensation is about 1,000 Btu/lb, 293 Wh/lb. Sensible heats: water, 1 Btu.lb-F, air, 0.24 Btu/lb-F.
This all makes it pretty clear why water vapor is the 1,000 pound/454 kilo gorilla of all the GHGs.
A similar analysis could be applied to the ocean surface.
The numbers are subject to review. Everybody makes mistakes. Want it all metric, help yourself.
@ur momisugly Willis.
“And at the altitude of the cloud tops, there is very little of any of the GHGs. This means that whatever heat is left in the air at the top of the cloud towers is free to radiate to space.”
——————————-
are you sure?
That statement says we have a real problem because above the cloud tops there is little GHG so no saturation. Increase the GHGs and you have a linear not log relationship to the GH effect.
for discussion below see 2009 Schlatter_Atmospheric Composition and Vertical Structure_eae319MS-1.pdf
1st From wiki
Genus Cumulonimbus (heap, storm/rain)
Altitude 2,000–22,900 m (6500-75000 ft)
so upper limit is about 23km
at this altitude co2 is still well mixed
http://s5.postimg.org/5mewbepqv/mixing_ratio.jpg
And collisions occur every 45ns so a photon would only be able to travel 13.5 metres so plenty of collisions of photons between GHGs before top of clouds and space. and since the mfp is only a couple of micrometres there will still be a lot of heat transfer molecule to molecule by collisions. heat transferred to non ghg molecule would of course have to be retransferred to a ghg molecule in order to escape to space.
http://s5.postimg.org/xb1jixcrb/mfp.jpg
The only ghg in short supply at these altitudes would be water vapour so that would allow some heat to escape.
” are you sure?”
Air density drops pretty quickly, ghg is a fraction of that.
Beyond that, no.
sergeiMK January 10, 2016 at 7:24 pm
Sergei, the difference regarding CO2 is not in the ratios of the gases. The difference is in the density. At an altitude of 10 km, for example, the pressure is only a quarter that of the surface. So it is correspondingly easier for a photon to make it to space unhindered.
However, the main change is that as your lovely graphic above neatly illustrates, there is very little water vapor up high. And although many alarmists would like us to forget about it, water vapor is the major greenhouse gas.
As a result, between the reduced pressure and the reduced water vapor, any heat at altitude has a much easier path to space than does heat at the surface.
Regards,
w.
Willis,
Thanks. You wrote:
“Remember that the metric at issue is not the total amount of heat in the system. It is the surface temperature.”
That’s part of the problem. GHGs should increase total heat in the system but temperature is not a measure of total heat. Enthalpy is a measure of total heat. It’s expressed in kJ/kg of dry air. At a given temperature the enthalpy will be higher when the humidity level is higher. So knowing only temperature doesn’t tell us anything about the energy in the earth’s system. The total heat on a 110 °F day in Phoenix could be the same as in Orlando when the temperature is only 80 °F. Air temperature is at best a rough proxy for total heat.
The air at the top of a large cumulus cloud might be hotter than it would be without the convective activity, even though it is still very cold. That might mean that it radiates more heat to space then it otherwise would but that depends on the distance it takes, at those rarified altitudes, for a LW IR photo to strike an air molecule. If that distance is short, there is no net removal of heat from the system.
It seems like the the only way thunderstorms could remove significant heat from the troposphere is by reflecting sunlight.
In the article you wrote:
“This means that [the thunderstorm] effect will be to maintain the same temperature, regardless of reasonable-sized fluctuations in the amount of forcing. Clouds don’t know about forcing, they form and disappear based on local conditions.”
Both El Chichon and Pinatubo ejected sufficient aerosols into the stratosphere to cause global cooling that lasted for several years. The two lowest annual temperatures in the UAH record correspond with those two eruptions. El Chichon occurred when the ENSO 3.4 index was low and it took several years for temperature to recover. Pinatubo occurred when the ENSO index was high, which might explain why the cooling was less and the recovery was faster, but it still took several years to recover to the mulit-decadal average.
(ENSO data from NOAA.)
So your posited thunderstorm effect seems to not be able to quickly overcome the forcing from stratospheric aerosols. However, it would be interesting to take a look at what happened to tropical storms directly after those eruptions. If they really did decrease, that might support your theory.
It’s been interesting discussing this with you. Thanks for taking the time.
Thomas, in response to your comments upthread I posted a list of no less than fifteen analyses of volcanic data that I have posted here on WUWT.
It is clear from your comments that you have not read them, or else you wouldn’t persist with your claims about the strong effects of volcanoes. Eruptions do have an effect on the weather, but it is much more local, transient, and short-lasting than you seem to think. For example, as I’ve shown repeatedly in my “Spot The Volcano” posts, it is not possible to identify volcanic eruptions by examining the surface temperature records. Their signature is simply too weak to distinguish from the natural variations.
So repeating your claim that volcanoes have large effects on the global surface temperatures just shows that you have not read what I wrote, and that’s no way to carry on a discussion. To move the conversation forward, let me suggest that you to read all fifteen of the articles and think hard about the facts and the logic that I present. In them I’ve discussed the volcanoes and the issues you are now raising anew.
If you find errors in my work or disagree with the ideas and claims therein, I encourage you to link to the post in question, quote my exact words, and tell us what you think is wrong with my claims. While it’s not my favorite part of science, I don’t mind being publicly shown to be wrong, it saves me untold wasted time and effort.
My best regards to you,
w.
PS—Yes, the volcanic effects can be clearly seen in the stratosphere, and to a much smaller extent in the troposphere. But down here at the surface, we just don’t seem to get much bang for our volcanic buck. Go figure.
Willis,
You wrote:
“It is clear from your comments that you have not read [your articles on volcanoes], or else you wouldn’t persist with your claims about the strong effects of volcanoes.”
There have been only two volcanoes in the past 35 years that produced significant amounts of stratospheric aerosols, El Chichon and Mount Pinatubo. (see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/). Your “Spot the Volcano” articles do not seem to address either of these volcanoes.
After El Chichon and Pinatubo, we see cooling in the UAH lower troposphere record and the GISS surface record. Both eruptions occurred when large El Niño events were forming. El Chichon happened just after ENSO peaked and temperatures soon fell to the lowest point in the entire record. Pinatubo, which was much larger, occurred when ENSO was still building and resulted in the second coolest period in the record.
I think you’re going down the wrong path looking at surface cooling due to evaporation because evaporation doesn’t result in heat leaving the system, it just moves it around. Moving heat to the poles doesn’t reduce the energy content of the system because there is much less radiant heat loss from the poles (because they’re cold).
I think it is only reflection from clouds that causes significant heat to leave the troposphere when thunderstorms form. If clouds increase, then more of the suns radiation will be reflected and that can cause overall cooling.
Actually, the “proof” of your theory may be visible in a graph of ENSO and the first few decades of the UAH temperature record. ENSOs come fairly regularly, every three to six years. Global temperature tending to rise to a peak a year after the ENSO index peaks, then temperature falls back to a low value after the ENSO passes. The temperature varies by about +/- 0.5 °C from peak to valley. This could be your thunderstorm “governor” overshooting, then undershooting, but still holding the global temperature in a fairly tight band.
When the trade winds are blowing strong, they push warm surface water into the western Pacific so it get’s warm. But that causes a lot of convective activity, which causes cooling, which slows the trade winds, so the warm water sloshes back (or water stays where it was and gets warmer due to a lack of wind?), which causes the trade winds to speed up, which pushes warm surface water to the west, which causes a lot of convective activity, which … etc.
It’s an oscillating governor. I recall that happening to an old lawnmower engine that I had “fixed” when I was younger (much). It just sat there and revved up, then revved down, then up again, then down.
If you graph it out, it looks like Pinatubo disrupted the cycle and things didn’t recover until the super El Niño of 1997.
I suggest you set aside localized evaporative cooling as a counter force to forcings and instead look at reflection and ENSO as a manifestation of your theory.
Thomas January 11, 2016 at 8:20 pm
Thomas, it’s no fun discussing this with you when you haven’t done your homework. I have written a variety of posts about the very issues that you seem to think are new, in great length. Now let me repeat what I said above:
FOR EXAMPLE: I showed that according to the Berkeley Earth data, the eruption of El Chichon started about half-way through the temperature drop that you say it caused. Not only that but the slope of the temperature drop didn’t increase after the eruption.
Now, if you disagree with that, please quote my exact words from the post where I showed it so we can both be sure we are talking about the same thing, and then tell us all why my words are wrong or makes no difference or can be otherwise explained. Simply claiming over and over that Pinatubo and El Chichon made some big difference goes nowhere. I’ve shown and graphed and discussed the exact difference they made in a variety of posts. It was small, localized, and transient. If you think not, then quote my exact words and show me what is wrong with them.
Moving on, you say:
The issue is and has always been the temperature here at the surface. For example, we don’t care if the thermosphere goes up or down a bit. And we don’t care if the total heat in the ocean goes up or down a bit. In general neither of those affect those of us living here on Earth’s surface.
But if the surface temperature changes by even one degree, that’s big news. That’s what all of the UN conferences and such are talking about—surface warming.
So evaporation is central to the discussion. And although it only moves heat to the upper atmosphere and to the poles, it is much freer to radiate the heat to space from there, so it does indeed speed up the heat loss of the entire system.
This is a common misconception. In fact, a huge, almost unimaginable amount of heat is constantly moving from the equator to the poles where it is radiated to space. How do we know this? In part because it has been measured, and in part because even If it were not measured, if there wasn’t significant radiation from the poles, with all of the heat moved there from the tropics they would be hot rather than cold. I wrote a post on this a while back, hang on … OK, found it, it’s called “The Magnificent Climate Heat Engine“. Here’s a graphic from the post:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/net-amount-of-energy-exported-poleward-or-imported.jpg
ORIGINAL CAPTION—Figure 1. Exports of energy from the tropics, in W/m2, averaged over the exporting area. The figures show the net of the energy entering and leaving the TOA above each 1°x1° gridcell. It is calculated from the CERES data as solar minus upwelling radiation (longwave + shortwave). Of course, if more energy is constantly entering a TOA gridcell than is leaving it, that energy must be being exported horizontally. The average amount exported from between the two light blue bands is 44 W/m2 (amount exported / exporting area).
This shows exactly where the heat comes from and goes to. In the tropics, there is more heat coming in from the sun than can be radiated, and the heat is moved to the poles where it radiates into space.
The other reason that there is more heat loss from the poles is that in general, in polar regions most of the water vapor has either been precipitated out or frozen out of the air. Since H2O is the main greenhouse gas, energy is much freer to move to space from the polar regions.
Finally, tropical evaporation also increases global heat loss through the creation of the great desert belts that surround the planet at about 30°N and 30°S. Remember I described above how after having the water stripped out of it, dry air descends all around a thunderstorm. In the same manner, as a result of the Hadley circulation driven by evaporation, dry air descends on both sides of the tropics. Here’s how that works in theory:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/willis_image1.png
As you can see, tropical thunderstorms drive the great rotating atmospheric “Hadley cells”, one on each side of the equator. The descending branch of the atmospheric Hadley cells comes down around thirty degrees north and south of the Equator.
And here’s a graphic from my post The Desert Finder” showing how the above theory plays out in practice.
ORIGINAL CAPTION—Figure 1. Difference between the downwelling longwave radiation (DLR) as calculated by Brunt, and the downwelling longwave radiation dataset from the CERES satellite data.
The deserts are highlighted by their lack of downwelling longwave radiation, due to the lack of water vapor. This allows them to radiate heat to space more efficiently. Increasing the tropical evaporation speeds up the Hadley circulation, which increases the heat flow from the tropics to the desert belts and thence to space.
Yes, increased albedo also cools the surface. But the heat removed from the surface by evaporation is an important part of the surface energy budget, one that cannot be ignored.
Thank you for your thoughts and ideas,
w.
Willis,
Thanks for the great post.
Sure the surface is where we live but if CO2-caused warming is going to be counteracted by thunderstorms there needs to be actual increases in radiant heat loss. More clouds reflect more visible light, so that’s one source of increased radiant heat loss. I agree with your excellent point that Hadley Cells and Polar Cells move can heat to drier areas where heat can be lost by radiation to deep space. Deserts are probably the primary source of any additional radiation loss because they are much hotter than the poles and radiation is to the fourth power of temperature.
I keep harping on about El Chichon and Pinatubo because, following these volcanoes, there were clear and significant increases in upper atmosphere opacity due to aerosols, followed by cooler periods lasting several years and both those cool periods were the coolest in the 35 year record.
Volcanic cooling is pronounced enough that one wonders if there would be an upwards trend in the satellite temperature record at all if there had been significant volcanoes in the last half of the record, or no volcanoes in the first half.
Try putting UAH temp, GISS stratospheric optical depth and the ENSO index all on one chart. It’s pretty fascinating.
After Pinatubo, the ENSO index was higher than normal for four or five years. Since a high ENSO is normally followed by a high global temp, that might be evidence of your thunderstorm effect working to counteract cooling. It might be worth your while to look into that.
willis you interesting say
“The issue is and has always been the temperature here at the surface. For example, we don’t care if the thermosphere goes up or down a bit. And we don’t care if the total heat in the ocean goes up or down a bit. In general neither of those affect those of us living here on Earth’s surface.”
Which must really upset the likes of satellite measurements quoters. Sattellite temperatures do not measure surface temperatures but at TLT levels.
Are you saying that these have no relevance to surface temps?
Spaceba, Sergei. It’s a good point and one that I had intended to make in my last post. It’s not possible for the surface to heat without the lower troposphere also heating. Willis can’t logically argue both that convection carries heat from the surface and that convection does not cause heating of the lower troposphere.
Sergei, the difference regarding CO2 is not in the ratios of the gases. The difference is in the density. At an altitude of 10 km, for example, the pressure is only a quarter that of the surface. So it is correspondingly easier for a photon to make it to space unhindered.
SMK
please see new plot
As I said and you agreed water vapour is not going to have much effect above thunderclouds. However CO2 is well mixed even at 100km so increasing CO2 will widen absorption band and reduce the transfer of heat to space. from the plot the current transmittance at 16um is still only 10% at 15km
——————–
W
However, the main change is that as your lovely graphic above neatly illustrates, there is very little water vapor up high.
——————-
agreed. The IR blocked by H2O vap will be the only change by which thunderclouds will be able to cool the planet
But you must then agree that increasing CO2 will actually cause a reduction in IR transmitted from top of cloud to space reducing the cooling effect.
As a result, between the reduced pressure and the reduced water vapor, any heat at altitude has a much easier path to space than does heat at the surface.
http://s25.postimg.org/wf2bvc7fz/ir_transmission_15km.png
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QPBQ5w4X8RkC&pg=PA88&lpg=PA88&dq=ir+transmittance+at+30km&source=bl&ots=dE3xEQmCKZ&sig=h4Qv2q1PG7TEY117cucdBuPMKpI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjb-6zD36HKAhVHWRoKHX6gDfgQ6AEIIjAA#v=onepage&q=ir%20transmittance%20at%2030km&f=false