From UAH:
February was warmest month in satellite record
Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.12 C per decade
February temperatures (preliminary)
Global composite temp.: +0.83 C (about 1.50 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for February.
Northern Hemisphere: +1.17 C (about 2.11 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for February.
Southern Hemisphere: +0.50 C (about 0.90 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for February.
Tropics: +0.99 C (about 1.78 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year average for February.
January temperatures (revised):
Global Composite: +0.54 C above 30-year average
Northern Hemisphere: +0.69 C above 30-year average
Southern Hemisphere: +0.39 C above 30-year average
Tropics: +0.85 C above 30-year average
(All temperature anomalies are based on a 30-year average (1981-2010) for the month reported.)
Notes on data released March 1, 2016:
By a statistically significant amount, February 2016 was the warmest month in the satellite temperature record, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Interestingly, however, that record might have as much to do with an extraordinarily warm month in the Arctic as it does with warming caused by the El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event.
Globally, the average temperature anomaly in February (+0.83 C) was warmer than the previous record set in April 1998 (+0.74 C) during the so-called “El Niño of the century.”
In the Northern Hemisphere, the February anomaly (+1.17 C) was a full 0.32 C (0.58 F) warmer than the previous NH record (+0.85 C) set in April 1998. Temperatures in the tropics and the Southern Hemisphere were not at record levels in February.
While the Arctic temperature anomaly is large, big temperature swings in the Arctic region aren’t unusual, especially during the winter months. Those swings are also normally somewhat transient, so the extra heat represented in February could dissipate over the next few weeks. If that happens, it doesn’t appear the heat from the El Niño by itself will be enough to continue pushing temperatures to new records later in the year, in which case this February anomaly might stand out as a singular spike in the dataset rather than part of an ongoing trend.
The warmest months in the satellite temperature record are:
Warmest Months, Global
How much warmer than seasonal norms
Feb. 2016 0.83 C
Apr. 1998 0.74 C
Feb. 1998 0.65 C
May 1998 0.64 C
June 1998 0.57 C
Jan. 2016 0.54 C
Aug. 1998 0.52 C
Mar. 2010 0.50 C
Jan. 1998 0.48 C
Mar. 1998 0.47 C
Feb. 2010 0.47 C
Warmest NH Months
Feb. 2016 1.17 C
Apr. 1998 0.85 C
Jan. 2016 0.70 C
Feb. 1998 0.66 C
July 1998 0.65 C
Oct. 2015 0.63 C
June 1998 0.60 C
Jan. 2010 0.60 C
May 2010 0.60 C
Mar. 2010 0.59 C
Warmest Februaries, Global
2016 0.83 C
1998 0.65 C
2010 0.47 C
2002 0.30 C
2003 0.25 C
2004 0.25 C
2007 0.19 C
2015 0.19 C
2005 0.18 C
2006 0.17 C
1999 0.17 C
Compared to seasonal norms, the warmest average temperature anomaly on Earth in February was over north central Russia, near the small town of Beloyarsky. February temperatures there averaged 5.20 C (about 9.36 degrees F) warmer than seasonal norms. Compared to seasonal norms, the coolest average temperature on Earth in February was over the Sea of Okhotsk, between the Russian mainland and the Kamchatka Peninsula, where the average February 2016 temperature was 3.25 C (about 5.85 degrees F) cooler than normal for February.
The complete version 6 beta lower troposphere dataset is available here:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0beta5.txt
Archived color maps of local temperature anomalies are available on-line at:
As part of an ongoing joint project between UAHuntsville, NOAA and NASA, Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, an ESSC principal scientist, use data gathered by advanced microwave sounding units on NOAA and NASA satellites to get accurate temperature readings for almost all regions of the Earth. This includes remote desert, ocean and rain forest areas where reliable climate data are not otherwise available. The satellite-based instruments measure the temperature of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about eight kilometers above sea level. Once the monthly temperature data are collected and processed, they are placed in a “public” computer file for immediate access by atmospheric scientists in the U.S. and abroad.
Neither Christy nor Spencer receives any research support or funding from oil, coal or industrial companies or organizations, or from any private or special interest groups. All of their climate research funding comes from federal and state grants or contracts.
— 30 —
Dr. Roy Spence adds from his blog:
Further Analysis of the Record February Warmth
The 1-month increase of +0.29 C in global average temperature from January to February is not unprecedented…for example, during the last El Nino (2009-10) there was +0.38 C warming from December to January.
The February warmth is likely being dominated by the warm El Nino conditions, which tends to have peak warmth in the troposphere close to February…but it appears that isn’t the whole story, since the tropical anomaly for February 2016 (+0.99 C) is still about 0.3 C below the February 1998 value during the super-El Nino of that year. In addition to the expected tropical warmth, scattered regional warmth outside the tropics led to a record warm value for extratropical Northern Hemispheric land areas, with a whopping +1.46 C anomaly in February…fully 0.5 deg. C above any previous monthly anomaly (!):
As a sanity check on the latest data, I compared our monthly anomalies to the 2m surface temperatures analysed from the NCEP CFSv2 by Ryan Maue atWeatherBell.com. His calculated global average anomalies (from the 1981-2010 mean) for January and February 2016 were +0.51 and +0.70 C, respectively, which is close to our +0.54 and +0.83 C values (some amplification of tropospheric anomalies vs. surface is always seen during El Nino). Here are the regional temperature anomaly patterns for February in the two datasets:
Even though the CFSv2 surface temperature analysis in the above plot is not “official”, I think it is a pretty good representation of what really happened last month, since it includes all sources of data in a physically consistent way within the daily weather forecast model framework. Note that on a monthly time scale we do not expect perfect correspondence between surface temperature and deep-tropospheric temperature anomaly patterns…especially in the deep tropics; the agreement in regional patterns seen above is about as good as it gets.
UAH and RSS have both joined the Vast Global Conspiracy that Wattsification has identified.
Apologies if this point has been raised already and I missed it, but the current La Niña transient may not differ significantly from that of 1998 because the baseline preceding the latter is cooler than that preceding the current La Niña.
The epicenter of the warming is close to the Yamal peninsula – it’s that darn tree again! 😉
More seriously, here’s what winter “heat” in the Arctic really looks like – the city of Salekhard south of Yamal had one single day in February with a maximum temperature of 0 C, otherwise it was unseasonally “warm”, but still well below the freezing point:
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/USDD/2016/2/3/MonthlyCalendar.html?req_city=Salehard&req_state=&req_statename=Russia&reqdb.zip=00000&reqdb.magic=1&reqdb.wmo=23330
Why a skeptic like Roy Spence would say that its a record year without making a disclaimer that this is in the last 40 years. Whilst I don’t know for sure but I suspect that February in 1930s and 1890s may have been hotter. Headlines need context otherwise we will start to sound like warmists.
And why do you “suspect” ?
There will have been moths in some regions, even such as the contiguous USA where that *may* have been the case.
But not Globally…. which is the point.
I don’t know much about moths.
But I do know a little about the Medieval Warming Period, the Roman Warming Period, the Minoan Warming Period, and the Holocene Optimum.
Please discuss.
Higher temperatures during an interglacial period of sudden rise followed by slow jagged falls is a natural variation pattern seen in ice cores as well as in other reconstructions using various flora and fauna proxies on land and in sea beds. Our short period of CO2 monitoring simply follows this ocean heat disgorging interglacial period. I see nothing outside of natural variation at work. Zooming out to 400,000 years, we are simply riding a warm peak measured at an increasing finer scale than previous warm peaks (a measurement artifact you can clearly see in the proxies). Let us not ever forget the hardships endured during the jagged fall to extensive glacial advance. Cities like New York and Seattle will still be in their infancy when the iceman cometh and scrapes every last evidence of their existence into a rubble field of metal chunks of erratics.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html
I have occasionally wondered about this.
The next ice age will come one day, but only long after everyone reading this today is dead. But it surely won’t be characterised by endless year-long snowfall from Day 1 in those industrial cities. There’ll be decades of warning (at least), and I imagine that the technology and engineering which built those cities in a few decades could also find some way to protect them from slowly advancing ice
Three month lag from the ENSO.
The El Niño peaked in mid-November so the temperature peak happens sometime in February. The El Niño looks it will dissipate fairly fast now and the global temperature will decline afterward with the same 3 month lag.
What really happens is that the warm water from an El Niño takes time to be released the tropics atmosphere. As it gets warmer, there is a huge increase in thunderstorms and cloud cover in the Tropicical Pacific. These clouds then actually hold much the extra heat in. Clouds are the strongest GHG there is.
Then the normal atmospheric circulation patterns take over. Energy moves away from the tropics to the mid-latitudes. The west to east winds in the mid-latitudes then sweep the extra heat into the northern Pacific. It moves into North America and the area between Alaska and Minnesota are much warmer than normal.
The big area from Alaska to Minnesota was as much as 9.0C above normal in February which is an astounding number. It can only happen in a Super El Niño.
The lag happens because it takes time for the energy to be released to the atmosphere, for cloudiness to increase, for general atmospheric circulation to move the energy north and south and then for the snow to melt etc. Three months is the normal amount of time it takes.
This also tells us something about how energy can accumulate and drawdown in the Earth system.
Nail meet head.
Not to be negative, just realistic – but it’s not saying much (although I’m sure alarmists will be happy).
I like the way Christopher Essex points out how the length of time we’ve been keeping surface air records, when compared to the grand scale of history doesn’t even show up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4
Anthony,
“2016”
The heading of your article should not include the “year”: there is only one February of 2016.
Regards,
WL
[Fixed, thanks. ~mod]
I quote:
“By a statistically significant amount, February 2016 was the warmest month in the satellite temperature record, according to Dr. John Christy….”
While I respect Dr. John Christy, he and all others questing for the “warmest ever” month are ignorant of the fact that there is no warming and there has been none since 1979. First, they are victims of their own unspoken consensus that if global temperature is up, carbon dioxide dunnit. Don’t look for anything else. IPCC is also to blame for this belief in greenhouse warming. To make sure everyone gets it they, along with GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT3, went so far as to falsify official temperature records and create a non-existent “late twentieth century” warming in the eighties and nineties. That wiped out the hiatus that exists there as satellite temperatures prove. Combine the consensus and this temperature fixing and small wonder they think that twenty-first century warming is real. But these high twenty-first century temperatures were not created by any greenhouse warming. What caused them was a one-time injection of warm ocean water in 1999. It came from the super El Nino of 1998. It took the form of a short step warming that in only three years lifted global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. All twenty-first century temperatures were thereby uplifted without any actual warming having taken place. The result is graphically shown as the red section that follows the super El Nino above. The sudden change of slope at the beginning of the twenty-first century hiatus is impossible for any climate models to emulate. This injection of warm water starting in 1999 caused the only actual temperature rise during the entire satellite era from 1979 to the present. If we allow for the existence of this uplift as an externality, neither 2014 nor 2015 will qualify for the warmest month or year title. To understand the full story, we need better resolution than your graph has. With better resolution we see that the blue laundry on the line to the left of the super El Nino is an ENSO wave train consisting of five well-defined El Nino peaks [1]. Their peak to peak separation is four to five years. ENSO is then followed by the super El Nino of 1998. The base of this super El Nino is only two years wide but its height is twice that of the ENSO peaks. Obviously it does not belong to ENSO. Since there is no other warming the injected warmth has to eventually wear off and cool down. ENSO remained active during this period but the first two La Ninas of the twenty-first century were partially inundated by warm water. Only as the third La Nina of the century appears in 2008 can we begin to see its profile. That La Nina of 2008 is then followed by the El Nino of 2010 and by some smaller oscillations. The current El Nino starts to rise in 2013 and reaches its peak in the winter of 2015/16. I expect the temperature trend that preceded it to return when it is over. By that time, we may also see some decrease of the general warming background of the injected warm water. If we could remove all the warm water that holds up the twenty-first century temperatures on the right the twenty-first century hiatus would line up with the one in the eighties and nineties. The entire satellite era temperature curve would then look like one long hiatus, interrupted only by the super El Nino of 1998 and the short step warming that followed it.
[1] Arno Arrak, “What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change.” (2010), Figure 15, p. 32
Looks like the argument that there’s been no global warming since the 1998 El Nino year has been destroyed by the pesky data……
@MHS:
There was no global warming for more than eighteen years — which demolishes the belief that a rise in CO2 is the main cause of global warming.
In reality there was global warming during the 18 year period that you mention. It was not quite as rapid as some earlier periods, but indeed if you fit a trend line to the ALL the available temperature data you will see that global temperatures continued to rise. See, for example, http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/ann_wld.html But again those are pesky data that the climate change deniers are finding it more difficult to explain away!