Guest essay by Charles Samuels
A cursory review of articles about the upper atmosphere reveals many theories about the role of CO2 on temperatures aloft. By “Upper Atmosphere” we mean the region above the surface and below 100,000 feet. Actually, in this article, we will only concern ourselves with the region from 850 millibars to 100 millibars, which is about 5,000 feet to 55,000 feet.
In the early days of Global Warming, the theories predicted that the upper atmosphere would heat due to increases in CO2. Well, that didn’t happen. One recent article by NASA says that the Thermosphere (above 100,000 ft) has cooled in recent years due to decreased solar activity and a reduction in ultraviolet light. That certainly seems reasonable. Another article stated that if the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere must cool, which makes no sense to me.
Other articles posit that as CO2 increases the level at which radiation escapes to space also increases and the upper atmosphere warms. That also made no sense to me.
I decided to take a look at temperatures aloft and reasoned that the difference between day and night temperatures in the upper atmosphere might reveal whether the nighttime atmosphere is cooling faster or slower than in previous years. If cooling slower the temperature curves at 00z and 12z would tend to converge and if cooling faster the curves would diverge. Simple, right?
Upper air data was obtained from NOAA at https://ruc.noaa.gov/raobs/ for the period 1970 through 2016. The NOAA site houses balloon data in different formats but only the standard levels of 850, 700, 500, 400, 300, 250, 200, 150, and 100mb data were used. It was felt that the best way to test the hypothesis was to use data from an upper air station where moisture levels were low in the belief that a lot of moisture would cloud the results.
Initially, Tucson was selected for its dry climate and where the 00z and 12z observation times coincided with the time of maximum and minimum temperatures at 5 pm and 5 am at that location. After downloading the data as yearly files, a computer program averaged all 00z and 12z observations for each mandatory level.
The results from plotting Tucson average yearly 0000z and 1200z temperatures at different heights were unexpected, to say the least.
Figure 1. Tucson 850mb (about 5,000 ft.) temperature graph.
As expected, the 12z curve (green) shows that the air cooled during the night on average about three degrees through 1995 and then narrowed to only two degrees through 2016. Both curves are trending upward and beginning in the mid-90s the curves tend to converge, which may support the Global Warming theories since CO2 cools slower than air. However, that would mean that Global Warming did not start until the mid-90s, which is an unlikely scenario.
Figure 2. At 700mb (10,000 feet) the temperature continues to increase as the convergence of the curves becomes more pronounced beginning in 1996.
Figure 3. At 500mb (18,000 feet) the curves became virtually the same beginning in 1996.
The question must be asked, “What happened in 1996?” El Nino was in 1997 and 1998. When this graph was created, my initial reaction was that there was a serious error in the data or the extraction program. I have been unable to find such an error.
The strangeness continues with the following charts.
Figure 4. At 400mb(24,000 ft).
We are now above 90% of the moisture, and any changes in the divergence of the two curves must be due to external forces. It is unreasonable to think that a steadily rising CO2 would suddenly make itself known in this way. The following charts are included to show that the converging curves are present at all upper levels.
Figure 5. 300mb.
Figure 6. 250mb.
Figure 7. 200mb.
Figure 6. 150mb.
Figure 7. 100mb.
As can be seen in the preceding charts something happened in 1996 that affected the atmosphere beginning at 850mb and increased in severity as we go aloft, culminating in a rather large drop in temperature at 100mb. There are two things about the preceding charts: 1. the temperature, after convergence, on each chart from 300mb and higher, cool until the curve is flat at 100mb and 2. There is little change in the curves before 1996.
The NASA article said that the Thermosphere has cooled due to a reduction in ultraviolet light from a quite sun. Perhaps it is affecting lower levels also.
Figure 8. Tucson 100mb temperature and sunspots offset by three years.
If we plot the 100mb Tucson temperatures with a three-year delay of sunspots, the graph above is the result. The correlation between sunspots and the 00Z temperature is .44.
Normally we tend to think that conditions in the lower atmosphere affect the upper atmosphere, but the charts indicate that it is the other way around and the upper atmosphere is affecting the lower levels, and that is why the biggest change is not at 850mb but at 100mb where significant cooling has taken place.
To check for errors the daily data for the years 1995 and 1996 were plotted as shown below. In these two examples, there are less than 365 observations because of missing data at the 100mb level.
Figure 9. 1995 Daily Temperature for Tucson.
Figure 10. 1996 Daily Temperature for Tucson.
This error check does show that the temperature does indeed cool in the first half of 1996 as compared to 1995.
As stated earlier, Tucson was chosen because it was dry and the observation times were ideal. But to me the temperatures changes were very unusual and to investigate further, I obtained rawinsonde data for Anchorage, Alaska, and the charts are shown below. While not as dramatic as the temperature changes for Tucson, the Anchorage charts also show a rather abrupt change in temperature, but not in 1996 but 1999. Again the biggest change was with temperatures at 100mb.
Figure 11. Anchorage 850mb.
Note how the two curves on Anchorage’s 850mb chart are much closer than the same chart for Tucson. I believe this is due to much greater water vapor in the air over Anchorage compared to Tucson. Also, the times of observation are at 3 am and 3 pm, which is not ideal but not bad either.
Figure 11. Anchorage 100mb.
While the 100mb data for Anchorage is cooler in later years, it does not have the pronounced cooling as seen in the Tucson chart and convergence occurs in 1999 as opposed to 1996 for Tucson. Anchorage charts for levels between 850mb and 100mb are not shown but are available if anyone is interested in them.
Figure 11. Spokane 100mb Temperature.
Only the 100mb chart is shown for Spokane. Note cooling in later years and the convergence started in 2006.
Figure 12. Hilo, Hawaii 100mb.
And here is Hilo Hawaii where the temperatures converged in 2011.
So now we have Tucson temperature aloft curves converging in 1996, Anchorage’s in 1999, Spokane’s in 2006, and Hilo’s in 2011.
· Tucson’s 100mb temperatures are increasing until about 1990, drop sharply until they converged in 1996 and then remain constant.
· Anchorage’s 100mb temperatures drop until about 1996, increase slightly and converge in 1999 and almost constant after that.
· Spokane’s 100mb temperature is decreasing after 1982 and then converging in 2006 and remaining constant after that.
· Hilo’s 100mb temperature curve is rather constant until it converges in 2011 and drops sharply in 2014.
These graphs raise many questions and provide few answers. Whatever the cause of cooling temperatures at the 100mb level, it is not directly related to steadily increasing CO2. It is apparent that the phenomenon is worldwide and it starts at the higher levels.
As a further check, El Paso data was used as shown in the following graph.
The plots for El Paso were almost identical to Tucson’s and also has a correlation of 0.44.
The following conclusions are pure speculation.
The sun is the main driving force for changes in temperature at high altitudes, less so for high latitude locations. It is clear that the sun is changing the temperature at high altitudes, but what about the convergence of night and day temperatures?
Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is usually correct, which means that the sun is causing both. And indeed the answer is simple. Consider that normally the radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere without heating it and all the heat in the upper air comes from below as long wave radiation. But if ultraviolet radiation is heating the upper atmosphere, we have a different kettle of fish. Since prior to the sun becoming quiet the upper atmosphere was being heated during the day, that extra heat would be dissipated at night, but without that heating, the night temperature stays the same as the day temperature.
Perhaps the radiative gas CO2, in higher concentrations, more rapidly cools the upper atmosphere, cooling the atmosphere more efficiently, through convection into the stratosphere.
Charles Samuels, It IS interesting that the data seems to change after 1996. But, this article is premature, superficial, and highly speculative. You don’t seem to understand some of the arguments for why different parts of the atmosphere might heat or cool, which means you did not do your homework. This is the kind of article that WUWT should tell the author to go back and revise and resubmit. When I see data like that, I immediately wonder if it is due to a change in how it was measured (instrument/technology, etc) or in how it was processed. Again, one needs to do more homework before coming up with theories and random “explanations”. And randomly shifting sunspot data for some type of lag, also premature if you have not ruled out instrument or processing changes.
I read the article as Mr. Samuels merely posting what he discovered from the data, not the end all, be all. A good start to some grad students’ papers doing more investigation maybe. What do you expect here, a fully funded 5 year investigative study?
This is a website where people put up interesting findings around climate related subjects, not a frigg’n repository for PhD thesis. WTF
“bill” I’ll post what I deem appropriate. Don’t read it if it’s too much for you.
I agree that the article does not seem to show much evidence of basic research and background reading.
Well since we don’t get to know which “another ” this was or what it actually said, there’s not much scope for trying to explain why it said that or whether it was correct or not. I suspect the author’s resume of what it said is probably confused. Please supply refs, citations and quotes.
It may have been saying the opposite: that a cooling stratosphere implies a warming troposphere. That does seem to happen:
If the author is confused by that, it probably just reflects a lack on understanding of climatology.
Well if it starts at the surface, why is it called UPPER atmosphere? Who defines it in that way apart from the author?
@billw1984
Every advance in human knowledge begins with someone thinking “I wonder…” Not everyone who gets the ball going has the science “chops” to get it across the goal line, but that does not lessen their contribution.
The ‘convergence’ issue seems quite odd. But in view of the constant “bias correction” which seems to be de rigeur in climate science, the first step is to study the meta data and documentation of the data sets. That is the FIRST step. Don’t spend time head scratching until you have checked there is not an obvious observational method change or some data ‘correction’ going on.
Quite possibly an equipment change which happened in different years at different sites.
“Don’t spend time head scratching until you have checked there is not an obvious observational method change or some data ‘correction’ going on.
Quite possibly an equipment change which happened in different years at different sites.”
In other words, it may be as useless as the altered historical surface data?
Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but is this radiosonde data the same information that is elsewhere referred to “balloon data”?
As in the balloon data sets that are used in many graphs, and that tend to show that the alterations to the surface temperature records and the GCMs are diverging from reality, as compared to satellite data?
And again, correct me if I have this wrong, but is it not the case that the balloon data is used to calibrate the satellite data?
Has someone cleverly found a way to cause the satellites data sets to show warmer temps than are actually occurring?
(I know this is a few giants steps and a leap, but…)
Step one in science is to make an observation. Looks like he has done that! If you see nothing there of interest, move on. If others see something, they can pursue it.
This isn’t Warmia, where we look in cracks and crevices and put on special glasses to see what we are already convinced is there!
billw1984 – Why stop there, why not ask for it to be peer reviewed !
Start your own blog billw1984 and then you can determine what is suitable for YOUR blog. This is not your blog and your declaration of what is or is not suitable for posting here is irrelevant except for what it reveals about you.
his theories have more basis than AGW ever had … so lighten up Francis …
Bill & Greg seem to be Nasty for No Reason!
The convergence is not likely caused by instrument change since Spokane convergence was 10 years after Tucson and Hilo’s 15 years after Tuscon. Unless those two sites had a warehouse of instruments to use up.
It’ll be interesting to know where the earth was in its orbit at the observation’s time.
I’m not a scientist so I wonder if distance and inclination could justify date’s shift in different location.
All of the above graphs depicts “temperatures” over multiple years (decades), ….. thus the earth’s position/location in its yearly orbit around the Sun is of no importance.
But the earth’s close proximately to the other planets, such as Jupiter, will vary considerably during said decades.
Anyone else think it is weird that the more northerly locations had a warmer temperature than the more tropical locations?
Hilo over the tropical Pacific is far coder than it is over Anchorage.
Howcumzit?
I have read some comments and discussions here on meridional airflow and wandering” jet streams. Here in Western Canada we are having a fairly cool, wet and windy spring and early summer. Reminds me very much of the 70’s. The increased winds especially as I have noted over many years now that we don’t get nearly as much wind as we used to. These exaggerated jet stream patterns make for quite variable weather and more winds as system stack closer together on and between jet stream flows.My 2 cents worth.
Exactly the right question.
Water vapor cools the troposphere. Strong thermals near the equator cause water vapor to rise higher which causes the colder temperatures. Over Anchorage, the thermals are much weaker and the upper troposphere is warmer.
The upper atmosphere isn’t a fixed height above the Earth. It’s where the the atmosphere starts heating with height instead of cooling. That is, it’s where the ozone lives – the stratosphere. And the stratosphere is at a much higher altitude on the Ecliptic plane – or the “Equator” – where the Sun rays are perpendicular to the atmosphere – than is it at the poles – and much thicker. The stratosphere is close to surface at the poles but much thinner. The Sun’s UV radiation drives ozone production. In short, you need measure the temperature to find the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. The tropopause is like spring – it’s somewhere between two extremes.
Not a silly idea. It seems like a good hypothesis to start from!
It could be verify looking at solar eclipse. If upper atmosphere cool then we prove that it’s heated directly by the sun.
Given that raobs are only launched a couple of times a day (or were when I did my PhD), I think the chances of getting a raob observation before, during, and after any specific time on any specific date are quite low. Good luck hunting.
A bunch could perhaps be sent up in August along the path of the eclipse, no?
Sounds like a good ‘speriment to me.
“By “Upper Atmosphere” we mean the region above the surface and below 100,000 feet.”
Typo? If not, the “Lower Atmosphere” has to be below the surface …
By one definition, the upper atmosphere “lies between 20 and 100 km (65,000 and 328,000 feet) above sea level”. link
I was thinking the same thing.
5000′ feet is not part of any definition of “upper atmosphere” I ever heard.
More like lower troposphere.
You could plot the Ozone levels at those heights and locations to compare to the temps.
But you must have the actual moisture as well, because it controls actual energy in the system, more so than the air. Don’t forget the Cosmic Ray theory.
I assume that all the temps are Raw Data.
You are using unadjusted radiosonde data from IGRA. Maybe you have found breakpoints caused by change of radiosonde types. Newer ones are typically less sensitive to spurious solar heating, and unadjusted, the merged timeseries would get a spurious cooling after the change..
So real data has to be “adjusted” in order to not be “spurious”?
That sounds like doubletalk to this kid.
Daytime temps are warmer, and it is also when any solar heating would happen, which would make it warmer still, and so the temps would diverge, not converge.
The same goes for radiative cooling at night if there is no shielding or insulation to ensure that what is being measured is the actual air temperature.
And as for that, if these things are not shielded or insulated in some way to ensure they are actually measuring the air temp, the readings would be as useful as a bare thermometer mounted on a pole and used to measure the surface temp.
IOW…worthless.
Maybe someone who has some actual information could explain exactly how these devices are set up, so as to ensure a reading of air temp is what is being recorded?
of course its doubletalk … you can’t correct for truly “spurious” readings anyway … thats why its called spurious …
At first glance, I would not dismiss instrumental problems like the comment above by O R on radiosonde type changes. The data has that ‘look’ – but mine is a weak argument.
Geoff.
My first thought too, just a suspicion, but need to be checked out and eliminated before going further. There is indeed a “look” to the data that suggest this. Have seen it before when an instrument went out of calibration, internal capacitor went o/c, didn’t stop the thing working so no alert just made results as indicated wrong.
I meant to add that detection of strange effects is often helped by use of formal, proper error analysis and confidence limits. These fundamental measures are done poorly or not at all in too much climate work. Geoff.
Looks to me like someone had budget cuts, instead of balloon data twice a day, runs it once, and replicates it for the other part of the day as certain software programs probably search for both records so one cannot just be omitted. Some runs twice a day with limited cutbacks would show a “convergence trend”.
Else check for volcanic eruption dust.
“Else check for volcanic eruption dust.”
There wasn’t any. And volcanic dust heats the upper atmosphere.
That is an interesting observation. It would explain the different years where data converges. It would also show the true nature of climate science.
Several comments.
Only “Air without IR emitters will never cool.” should have been in the “blockquote”, not the whole comment – sorry.
Robert, we read with forgiving eyes. Worry not and don’t post apologies for mistakes we all make.
The instrumentation changed? Then would that mean the daytime/nightime temperatures were always nearly the same and we didn’t know? Or the new instrumention is not measuring accurately and the temperatures are not converging.
funny how all the actual historic temperature data records are corrupted with sites moves or instrument changes or unicorn discharges or whatever excuse is used to justified “adjusting it” … any adjusted data before the satellite record is unfit for purpose other than grant funding fraud …
Daytime/nighttime differences in balloon-temperature measurements are a known artefact related to daytime solar heating. There is plenty of scientific literature on daytime/nighttime differences and (long term) biases in sonde temperature profile measurements, including tables for applying temperature corrections.
e.g.:
https://scholar.google.nl/scholar?q=temperature+sonde+daytime+nightime
(or other combinations of search terms)
http://www.vaisala.com/en/products/soundingsystemsandradiosondes/soundingdatacontinuity/RS92DataContinuity/Pages/revisedsolarradiationcorrectiontableRSN2010.aspx
Just one example:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50369/abstract
Or this about differences in bias between different types of Vaisala instruments.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2007JTECHA999.1
Anyway, plenty to study.
It has been known for quite some time that the ozone layer in the atmosphere intercepts solar UV and is responsible for the temperature inversion in the stratosphere.
see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer
Yeah, but the stratosphere keeps warming way above the ozone layer.
Is there any way to know if the convergence is due to a reduction of daytime temperature or an increase in nighttime?
The “great Pacific climate shift” around the millennium comes to mind…
“Consider that normally the radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere without heating it..”
Water vapour absorbs fair amounts of solar near infrared, which heats it. Upper tropospheric water vapour has reduced, which while lower-mid tropospheric has increased. With the shift being from 1995-96, it should related to the global multidecadal AMO signal.
Solar radiation in the x-ray and uv bands below about 170 nm is nearly completely absorbed within the thermosphere. That is the main reason why it is so hot.
The ozone layer is much lower down, in the lower stratosphere, and absorbs uv in the 200-315 nm range, but not all of it. Some gets through.
The near infrared provides around 49% of the total heating effect of the Sun.
“…a lot of moisture would cloud the results.”
Excellent pun!
I’m no scientist, but to me it sounds like a change in the way the data was gathered or the data has been modified.
I agree, this looks like an instrument was changed, and various sites changed their instruments (to the same type) at different times.
The National Weather Service automatically resupplies instruments to each Upper Air Station on a regular basis, as i recall it was about every 60 days.
One theory would be that the lower atmosphere is warming because CO2 is keeping the heat from escaping. That would mean the upper atmosphere receives less heat from below and therefore cools. It’s more complicated than that. WUWT
insulators don’t block, they slow the transfer of heat … GHG’s i.e. water vapor (not the trace gas CO2) is an insulator …
The question was why the upper atmosphere would cool as the lower atmosphere warms. What I wrote is a paraphrase of the ‘conventional’ explanation. The provided link shows that the situation is complicated and not all that well understood.
“Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is usually correct”
You should know that is not what it says.
Yes, it’s a bit more precise than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
In Florida, it is “usually” sunny.
But it is cloudy a lot too.
And dark a lot.
Years ago as part of a poke at climate scientists I wrote a satirical piece comparing the rise in global temperatures with the rise in air traffic.
I manage to dredge up a graph of aircraft miles per year, and overlaid it on a graph of global temperature.
Then I gave it a five year lead.
That’s when the creepy feeling started. It actually (with suitable ‘climate sensitivity’ thrown in) showed a better fit than carbon dioxide. …..
The ‘pause ‘ exactly coinciding with the global crash and slow down of the world economy and a dramatic reduction in the rate of rise of air traffic.
Well what do I know?
Contrails inject water vapour that modulates albedo at very high levels: up to 50,000 feet.
Wouldn’t it be a larf if there really was an AGW effect, but it could be fixed simply by limiting air traffic to 15,000 feet.
Leo Smith
Perhaps I have misunderstood, but if you’re saying that contrails increase albedo and thus reduce surface warming by increasing reflectivity, then, all other things being equal, shouldn’t we expect to see an ‘increase’ in surface temperatures during periods of reduced aircraft movements (i.e. more UV radiation reaching the surface)?
The same would go for any reduction in industrial output (aerosols) associated with a downturn in economic activity. Surface temperatures should have gone up, not down, shouldn’t they?
That should be more IR radiation, not UV, sorry.
I agree, it’s probably not the albedo. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. If you inject water vapor, especially at an altitude where there isn’t much in absolute terms, there should be an increased greenhouse effect.
Visible contrails mimic clouds.
The other thing with Leo’s observation is the five year lead. When air traffic halted after 911, the effect due to the lack of contrails was immediate.
Leo could be onto something but I have a nasty feeling that it’s complicated.
I’d actually like to see the graph, the data sources and the time period involved.
I think commercial air traffic may have been a factor in the 60 and 70’s cooling and that El Chichon and Mt Pinatubo aerosols provoked a purging of the build up of pollution in the stratosphere as well as ozone destruction. This lead to stratospheric cooling and tropospheric warming.
It would be interesting to see Leo’s graph.
If planes are causing global warming, then someone better tell those globe hopping jackasses like Leonardo Di Caprio, and the 40,000 who fly around for various climate conferences!
Oh, if anything would make me laugh really long and hard it would be finding out this is a fact.
Anyways, the sort of air traffic which produced a lot of contrails really began to ramp up during and after WWII. And this period was marked by thirty years of global cooling. As long as you use actual data, not the mush that they altered it into recently.
Ouch, limiting air traffic to below 15,000 ft would cause a real crimp in air traffic in both higher fuel costs (far more drag and weather) as well as congestion. The range of commercial flights would be severely diminished and the ride would be much rougher. There is a real advantage to getting up where the air is cold and thin as well as being above almost all weather. I doubt very much if trans-oceanic flights would be economically viable at those altitudes.
At 35,000 ft the air density is less than half of that at 15,000 ft.
As many corporate and private jet operators found out to their dismay during the ATC strike of 1981. Unable to get IFR clearance to fly above 18,000 feet they were forced to fly VFR at 17,500 and below, resulting in nearly double fuel costs. Non-stop transcontinental trips, such as JFK to LAX or SFO, normally easy for a Jetstar or G2 of the day became impossible, requiring a mid-continent fuel stop for even greater expense and lost time. Might as well recommend going back to the DC-3 and Pan-Am Clippers as suggest a 15,000 foot ceiling.
As corporate and private jet operators found out to their dismay during the 1981 US ATC strike. Unable to get an IFR clearance required to fly above 18,000 feet, they were often forced to fly at 17,500 and below resulting in a considerable increase in fuel burn per hour and a much slower airspeed, more than doubling the fuel cost per trip. Non-stop transcontinental flights such as JFK to LAX or SFO, normally easy for the Jetstar and G-2 of the day became impossible requiring a mid-continent fuel stop for even more expense and lost time. With a 15,000 foot ceiling the longer intercontinental flights would not just be uneconomical, they would be impossible. Might as well recommend going back to the DC-3 and Pan-Am China Clippers as a 15,000 foot ceiling.
Show your data.
Unfortunately air traffic, economic growth, GHG production and temperature all correlate with each other, because the first three are dependent on each other, and GHG is a factor in temperature(*)
*) If we believe Gavin, GHG’s are responsible for all the net warming since 1950, and more. I’m not yet convinced.
“… air traffic, economic growth, GHG production and temperature all correlate with each other…”
Malarkey.
Contrails might reflect light back to space but they don’t “inject” water vapour into the atmosphere. They are a pressure drop effect on existing water vapour. The jet engine exhaust does inject water into the atmosphere. Not sure what effect that or the contrails might have. I suspect that with the majority of people living in urban areas where flights originate and terminate, this seems more important than it really is. Most of the planet doesn’t really see a lot of jet traffic.
“Most of the planet doesn’t really see a lot of jet traffic.”
Significant portions of several continents do, however.
Remember the effects noted after 9/11 when air traffic was grounded?
Modern jets burn fuel very efficiently I think, and it is all converted to w.v. and CO2.
Lets look a few things up…
OK, a 747 burns 5 gallons per mile, and a gallon is about 6.5 -6.8 pounds.
Hmmm…better go metric…I sense Avagadro’s number rearing it’s head soon…
Ok, that’s 12 liter per kilometer, and about 0.75-0.84 kg/liter.
So that about 9.6 kg/kilometer.
or 9600 grams/1000 meters
or about ten grams per meter, very roughly.
Jet fuel is likely mostly alkanes, having a general formula of C^n H^2n+2.
Hmmm…that gets tricky…lets just look up exhaust gasses…
Hey, I found a shortcut, but I was on the right track:
” Persistent contrails are ice clouds, so they are mostly made of ice. They also are likely to contain aircraft exhaust products (including soot and dissolved gases like sulfur dioxide) , but they are overwhelmingly made from moisture condensed out of the surrounding air. In one example reported by Knollenburg (October 1972, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Pages 1367-1374), the amount of moisture released by the burning of jet fuel from a research aircraft was 1.7 grams of water for every meter of flight path. However, the total water measured in a persistent contrail produced by the aircraft was conservatively measured (that is, it was likely an underestimate) to be between 20700 to 41200 grams of water for every meter of the contrail path! Nearly all of the contrail is created from the moisture in the atmosphere…”
So John, you are correctamundo!
Contrails contain a little water from exhaust, but the vast majority is from the w.v. of the air they are travelling through.
Maybe one part in 10,000 or less is from the exhaust!
This should have been easy to guess…they do not form unless the air is nearly saturated to begin with.
But I love a good calculation.
(car exhaust contains roughly equal percentages of w.v. and CO2, but i did not get to the part about whether that was by weight or my volume…water is very light compared to CO2, and only the hydrogen is from the fuel)
https://science-edu.larc.nasa.gov/contrail-edu/science.php
That’s why they are not always produced, and when they are, all the planes leave them (I live under a busy corridor).
Yes, here in South Florida they generally do not form, and if they do they do not persist long.
Up near Jacksonville I used to see them all the time, and occasionally in Orlando.
Just about never see them here…and there are a lot of planes flying over.
The water vapor per cubic meter over the Antarctic at 32 km is around 1e-4 grams per cubic meter. tables 2,3,4,5 So, the airplane adds enough water to double the vapor in 1e5 cubic meters. That’s a lot.
the crash of 1998 ? you are serious ? … I guess thats new history for you …
Volcanic activity in 1991 (Pinatubo) is likely the cause of a drop in the upper atmosphere. This was not a step down, but a trend down for several years, eventually leveling off.
Thank you for the read. Good to see.
Possible quick spelling comment “from a quite sun.” Should be ‘quiet’ sun?
My understanding was that the ‘upper troposphere’ would be expected to heat; regions higher up, the stratosphere and thermosphere, etc would be expected to ‘cool’, not warm, e.g.: https://scienceofdoom.com/2013/01/27/visualizing-atmospheric-radiation-part-eleven-stratospheric-cooling/
The upper troposphere ‘has heated’; though apparently not to the extent predicted by the multi model mean (ignoring the very wide error margins of the current observations).
The thermosphere starts around 100km not 100,000 ft.
The thermosphere is heated by x-rays and uv from the sun…why would it cool?
Very interesting analysis. Something is clearly going on. This raises a few questions for me:
1 what is the significance?
In other words is this impacting weather or life?
2 why is the simplest answer the sun and not CO2?
Thanks
I would love to point to my much more casual approach, which of course is about more fundamental aspects of climatology. This is about (night time)cooling patterns relative to the sky condition (that is cloudiness).
http://i736.photobucket.com/albums/xx10/Oliver25/parkersburg1.png
It is based on data from the years 2015 and 2016, in this case Parkersburg, WV. (I have done a lot of other places too). 0 to 8 represents the average cloudiness throughout the night, with 0 meaning all clear, and 8 all overcast. Also I added the sample size, that is the number of nights within each category.
Could you possibly imagine how these data could help to identify the magnitude of cloud forcing?
Is the mysterious Y axis the ratio between sunset temperature and that at weird time units throughout the night?
Try doing one of these for Mount Washington, KMWN.
Yeah, sorry.. The x-axis gives number of minutes times 10, the y-axis gives relative temperature (in Kelvin) to the initial temperature.
With no clouds it only cools three one hundredths of a degree in 61×10 minutes at night?
How did you measure that amount of cooling?
Anyplace I have lived, the rate of nighttime cooling on cloudless nights depends a lot on the surface humidity levels, and how much if any wind there is.
In Florida, with low humidity and light winds, the temp can drop ten degrees or more in an hour.
And during a radiational cooling event like that, a light veil of cirrus blowing in from the Gulf can cause temps to rise several degrees in a matter of minutes.
I spent many years engaged in highly temperature sensitive commercial agriculture…and watching the temp at night from October to April was often an all night dealio.
Menincholas
Well more like over 3/100s of about 288K, that is about 10K. And yes, anything could happen, which is why we take average values, so that we do not need to bother with unique weather events. Your reasoning is not too reasonable..
My reasoning was not reasoning but observation, and your graph was poorly labelled and your explanation did not make it clear you meant a percentage of the absolute temp.
If it did I would not have said anything, because ten degrees C of cooling in ten hours does not sound out of whack.
Still…my bad, I could have just asked or pondered your words more fully (relative temp means a proportion of the initial value).
Anywho, getting to your original question Erich, which is an important one, nighttime data by itself seems unlikely to give an accurate answer.
Because clouds have the different effects depending on the type of clouds, and whether it is day or night, and a lot of other stuff most likely.
I think increased water vapor leading to increased amounts of clouds are likely to cause net cooling, and that this is why and how the Earth has had a stable enough temp for hundreds of millions of years to let complex life flourish on the surface.
No matter what has happened…huge impacts, gigantic outpourings of lava, widely varying amounts of various atmospheric constituents…
Could I suggest a glance at WUWT’s own reference page for global temperature , and in particular the charts for Lower Troposphere(TLT, Middle Troposphere , (TMT), Troposphere/Stratosphere(TTS) and Lower Stratosphere (LTS).
Ignore the trend lines and look at the slopes before 2000 and after 2000. For TLT and TMT the slope pre 2000 is positive(warming) , followed by a level “pause”. For TTS it is fairly level pre -and post- 2000. For LTS it is negative (cooling) pre 2000 , but constant thereafter .
Is this a globally averaged confirmation of the locally specific , more detailed analysis , of the original posting?
It is interesting to see how volcanic effects and el Ninos have opposite effects in both lower and upper regions of the atmosphere – and how much more significant they are (if temporary) than the underlying trends , be those of natural or anthropogenic origin.
When it is cold outside, I must add energy/heat to my house to keep it warm inside. When it is hot outside, I must add work to move energy/heat from inside the house back outside by using an air conditioner.
Energy moves by itself from high energy/temperature to low energy/temperature. Energy cannot move from low energy/temperature to high energy/temperature without adding work.
Is it hot out in space or cold?
The space station out there in space has a sophisticated radiative cooling system to move excess energy, i.e. adding work, from inside to outside. If space is cold, why is that needed?
A luminous photosphere of energy radiates from our sun in all directions out across the cosmos. When that sphere expands to the average orbital distance to the earth its dispersed luminous surface radiates a power flux of 1,368 W/m^2, aka the solar constant, with a S-B BB equivalent temperature of 390 K, 17 C higher than the boiling point of water under full atmospheric pressure. That’s hot.
Without an atmosphere the surface of the earth would be much like that of the moon, barren, dusty, pock marked, blazing hot on the lit side, sub-sub-sub-freezing cold on the dark side.
Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t keep the earth warm, it keeps the earth cool.
The Earth’s Atmosphere plus all the water keeps the Earth’s temperature more stable, ie both cooler hot temps and warmer cold temps, not just cooler.
Judging by the moon, air keeps the Earth warm.
Interesting.
The moon, which is famously airless, has half lit by the sun and hot, and half in the dark and cold.
It is reported that the average temp on the lit side is about 107C, and the average for unlit side is -153 C.
There is no cooling system on the moon, it rotates and the lit part is constantly changing.
So, the average between the hot side and the cold side would seem to be about -23 C.
Cold.
But warmer than space, and colder than a sunlit surface.
Of course, much of the part on the lit side is only getting obliquely lit, while the entire dark side is exposed to the cold of space.
The moon rotates much more slowly than the Earth so the dark side is dark for 28.5 days.
Yeah, but the lit side is lit for the same amount of time.
I would guess that the part that is rotating out of the sun cools very rapidly.
Then again, the part moving into the sunlit side would warm up quickly in the naked sunlight.
If the moon rotated in 24 hours, would the average temp be different? By how much.
But that is all be side the point…the statement did not mention factors such as rotation rate…just whether or not the atmosphere cools or warms the Earth.
What is the average temp of the Earth?
It is listed as 0.87C for the surface, and a warmer 15C for the atmosphere.
But it does not say whether that 15c is for a particular layer or height, or the whole volume…
Seems unlikely it is for the whole volume, since most of the atmosphere is way up in the sky and very cold.
In any case…the Earth is warmer than the moon, same approximate distance from the Sun.
I have no dog in this hunt, just trying to discern what is being said…
At night under clear calm skies, it cools relatively quickly at Sun set, depending how much water vapor there is, and then late in the morning as air temps near dew point, the atm emits energy stored in water vapor, 4.21J/gm, vs 1J/gm delta C. The lower the humidity is, the less of an impact the regulation has, why deserts cool so much, and why tropics don’t.
But, Min T correlates to dew point just under 98%
Yup…I used to determine how cold it was likely to get by looking at the dew point in the plant nursery days.
Once in a while it cooled below the dew point…I saw that a handful of times in ten to fifteen years.
When every cent you have and will earn for the next year is in a crop, you miss zero nights of observation during the critical periods of the year.
But any wispy clouds would reverse any cooling very quickly…we were saved from spending a lot of money numerous times by a streak of cirrus.
As I pointed out in a comment on a recent post by Kip Hansen there is a serious question whether it is appropriate to average temperatures or their corresponding energy densities . This is a case where it makes an enormous difference :
f( 107. -153. )f 273.15 _f +f >t0> |>| 380.15 120.15
t0 favg |>| 250.15
t0 T>Psb favg P>Tsb |>| 320.46
: sb ( -- StefanBoltzmanConstant ) 5.6704e-8 _f ;
: P>Tsb ( Power -- Temperature ) sb %f .25 _f ^f ; | SB power to temperature
: T>Psb ( P -- T ) 4. _f ^f sb *f ;
: favg 1p> +/ R@ur momisugly rho i>f %f 1P> ;
( Minor apologies for the “raw” character of the CoSy code due to it being right at the x86 register level . )
The temperature of a gray body in our orbit , in terms of energy , is about 278.6 +- 2.3 from peri- to ap- helion , about 5c . That appears to be about the standard design temperature for satellite instrumentation modules .
I strongly agree with the comment that the atmosphere and its GHGs massive effect is on variance rather than mean temperature .