Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
My mind runs to curious things. Today it went to this one of Aesop’s Fables:
A man and a satyr once poured out libations together in token of a bond of alliance being formed between them. One very cold wintry day, as they talked together, the man put his fingers to his mouth and blew on them.
On the satyr inquiring the reason of this, he told him that he did it to warm his hands, they were so cold.
Later on in the day they sat down to eat, the food prepared being quite scalding. The man raised one of the dishes a little towards his mouth and blew in it. On the satyr again inquiring the reason of this, he said that he did it to cool the meat, it was so hot.
“I can no longer consider you as a friend,” said the Satyr, “a fellow who with the same breath blows hot and cold.”
What brought this to mind was looking at the temperature trends for the planet. I’ve always sort of assumed that the temperature trend varied somewhat around the world. But I was surprised to see how much of the world was cooling. Here’s a Pacific and a corresponding Atlantic centered view of the cooling, in degrees C, using the CERES satellite data starting in March of 2000.
Some of this I expected. The Southern Ocean, for example. But I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that most of South America is among the fastest cooling areas of the planet.
Here, the oddity is that almost the entire North Atlantic is cooling … didn’t see that coming. Same thing for the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Intrigued by that, I thought I’d take a corresponding look at the hot spots. Here are the same views, but this time showing the areas which are warming faster than 0.25°/decade.
The entirety of the eastern Pacific is warming fast … as is the center of the southern Indian Ocean. And Australia has it in spades.
Part of Eastern Brazil is warming fast … and western Brazil is cooling fast. Northern Africa is warming … and southern Africa is cooling. And all of Siberia is warming … say what?
I draw no overarching conclusions about this, except that I was surprised to find out that a quarter of the world is cooling …
My best to all. Me, I’m gonna stay up late on New Year’s Eve, but not to welcome 2021 in.
I’m doing it to make sure that 2020 leaves …
w.
Willis, thank you for your continuing articles, with attendant superb color plots, that give great insight into the reality of today . . . which is often quite different for what theory and computer models say.
In the case of your above article, I must conclude that the famous (infamous?) Kiehl & Trenberth diagram of Earth’s power fluxes is obviously a gross over-simplification of reality.
Have a healthy and happy 2021!
Thanks Willis, I appreciate you presenting complicated data in an easily digestible form. We need more of this, like you I’m a data sort of guy.
Good one Willis! Cheers Sir in the new year.
Willis,
Thanks for another informative article and your continuing work throughout 2020.
Many readers look forward especially to your posts,as I do.
Happy New Year to you and your family and friends.
Thanks, Herbert. In part, it is responses like yours that keep me writing.
The other part, near as I can tell, is ascribable to congenital defects that I inherited from The Captain’s Daughter …
w.
I would really appreciate to get input from Willis on the methodology on how to get from CERES fluxes to temperatures. (Already asked twice, above, without reply)
I found another post by Willis, from 2015, where he investigates the same topic, and he writes: “there is indeed a relationship between the sustained TOA imbalance and the temperature. And as one might also expect, increasing net TOA radiation is associated with increasing temperature. However, the relationship is far from linear. Instead, it varies with the temperature.”
Especially over land, the relationship is not very linear at all, see chart, which is Figure 4 from the 2015 paper.
Willis concludes: “The one solid conclusion is that the relationship between forcing and temperature is both non-linear and temperature dependent, with the temperature response generally diminishing with increasing temperature. My other conclusion is that given the significant lack of linearity, any average value for the relationship between TOA radiation and temperature is bound to be both misleading and meaningless.”
Thus, I think it would be great to get a comment from Willis on what the methodology is, and whether this issue with non-linearities over land has been corrected for (if needed) in the current paper?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/08/temperature-and-toa-forcing/
My apologies, Gabriel, I missed your question.
I used the S-B equation to go from the upwelling surface longwave to temperatures. I’ve checked the results, and they are very close to the Berkeley Earth data. The CERES data is 0.44°C warmer for the globe. Once that difference is adjusted, here is the Berkeley Earth minus CERES.
As you can see, the only regions that are more than 0.4°C different between the two are the poles … where data is scarce. I could get it closer, but it’s plenty close enough for the work I’m doing. And we have no guarantee of the accuracy of the Berkeley Earth data …
I use the CERES data because it is energy balanced with all of the other flows.
Hope this helps,
w.
Thanks Willis,
it helps.
CERES is of course superior to other data.
Thus, it’s pretty fantastic that we have such a close correlation with surface temperatures.
You haven’t mentioned albedo in the article, nor has any of the comments. Wouldn’t local deviations seen in your maps also be due to albedo effects, mainly cloud albedo? Maybe local changes in albedo over time can explain the local differences in temperatures? Could be so for the Arctic due to less ice, and could be so over the Amazones due to changes in forestation.
Some technical questions:
Thanks, Gabriel. Regarding your questions:
1) I use Berkeley Earth because it has the best coverage, and I know a couple of the people on the project. Do I trust it? No more than any of the others.
2) For the purpose of temperature, I use the surface upwelling longwave dataset.
3) Again for temperature purposes, I use the all-sky data.
As to the albedo question, in theory at least, albedo is accounted for in the CERES data … it has six albedo datasets.
Four of them are clear-sky and all-sky versions of the surface reflection and toa reflections.
Then there are the CRE datasets, the “cloud radiation effect”. There are surface and toa versions