Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s an old saying about models—“All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”
It’s often used to justify the existence of climate models. However, the obvious corollary to the old saying is “All models are wrong, and some models are useless.”
I’ve been told several times that it’s not enough for me to put together my theory that a variety of often-overlapping emergent phenomena act to govern the temperature of the planet. I also need to show that this is not already included in mainstream climate theory and expressed in climate models. And it’s true, I do need to do that. Hence, this post.
Let me digress for a moment to explain my theory. When I began seriously studying the climate 25 years ago now, everyone was looking at why and how much the global average surface temperature was rising. But because of my experience with a variety of heat engines, I was struck by something completely different. I looked at the earth as a gigantic heat engine. Like all heat engines, it has a hot end (the tropics) where the energy enters the system. It then transports the energy to the cold end of the heat engine (the poles), where it is rejected. In the process it converts some of the energy into physical work, driving the endless motion of the atmosphere and the oceans.
Now, when you analyze a heat engine, say to determine its efficiency or any other reason, you have to use the Kelvin temperature scale. That’s the scale that starts at absolute zero (-273.15°C, or -459.67°F). The units of the Kelvin scale are called “kelvins” (not “degrees kelvin”), and one kelvin is the same size as one degree Celsius, which is also called one degree Centigrade. The kelvin is abbreviated “K”.
With that as a prologue, here is the oddity that attracted my attention. Over the entire 20th century, the temperature of the planet varied by less than 1°C, which is to say, less than 1K. And with the surface temperature of the planet being about 288K, that represents a variation of about a third of one measly percent … I found this stability to be quite amazing. The cruise control on your car can’t keep your car speed within that small a variation, well under 1% peak to peak.
Note that this stability is not due to thermal mass, even the thermal mass of the ocean. At 45°N in the mid-Pacific, the sea surface temperature sometimes changes up to 5K (5°C, 9°F) in a single month. And the land changes temperature even faster than the ocean.
So I started thinking about what kind of governing mechanism could keep the temperature so stable over an entire century full of El Nino events and volcanic eruptions and all kinds of things you’d expect to disturb the temperature. Because I was looking for something that would lead to long-term stability, I spent a long time contemplating slow processes like the gradual weathering of the mountain rocks changing the CO2 content of the atmosphere, and the buffering of the CO2 content of the ocean via calcium carbonate precipitation.
During this time I was living in Fiji … hey, the waves aren’t going to surf themselves, someone has to do it. And hanging out outdoors a lot in the tropics, I got to noticing the repeating daily weather pattern. I realized that I was looking at the hour-by-hour emergence of various phenomena that put a cap on how hot it could get. And I realized that if there are emergent phenomena that prevent a day from overheating, they will also prevent a week, a year, or a millennium from overheating
Let me borrow an explanation of what I saw from a previous post of mine.
At dawn, the tropical atmosphere is stratified, with the coolest air nearest the surface. The nocturnal overturning of the ocean is coming to an end. The sun is free to heat the ocean. The air near the surface eddies randomly.
Figure 1. Average conditions over the tropical ocean shortly after dawn.
As you can see, there are no emergent phenomena in this regime. Looking at this peaceful scene, you wouldn’t guess that you could be struck by lightning in a few hours … emergence roolz. As the sun continues to heat the ocean, around ten or eleven o’clock in the morning there is a sudden regime shift. A new circulation pattern replaces the random eddying. As soon as a critical temperature/humidity threshold is passed, local “Rayleigh-Bénard” type circulation cells spring up everywhere. This is the first transition, from random circulation to organized circulating cells that characterize Rayleigh-Bénard circulation.
These cells transport both heat and water vapor upwards. By late morning, the Rayleigh-Bénard circulation is typically strong enough to raise the water vapor to the local lifting condensation level (LCL). At that altitude, the water vapor condenses into clouds as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 2. Average conditions over the tropical ocean when cumulus threshold is passed.
Note that this area-wide shift to an organized circulation pattern is not a change in feedback. It has nothing to do with feedback. It is a self-organized emergent phenomenon. It is threshold-based, meaning that it emerges spontaneously when a certain threshold is passed. In the wet tropics there’s plenty of water vapor, so the major variable in the threshold is the temperature. In addition, note that there are actually two distinct emergent phenomena in the drawing—the Rayleigh-Bénard circulation which emerges prior to the cumulus formation, and which is enhanced and strengthened by the totally separate emergence of the clouds that mark the upwelling columns of air in the circulation.
Note also that we now have several changes of state involved as well, with evaporation from the surface and condensation and re-evaporation at altitude.
Under this new late-morning cumulus circulation regime, much less surface warming goes on. Due to the increasing clouds, the earth’s albedo (reflectivity) increases, so more of the sunlight is reflected back to space. As a result, less energy makes it into the system to begin with. Then the increasing surface wind due to the cumulus-based circulation pattern increases the evaporation, reducing the surface warming even more by moving latent energy up to the lifting condensation level.
Note that the system is self-controlling. If the ocean is a bit warmer, the new circulation regime starts earlier in the morning and it cuts down the total daily warming. On the other hand, if the ocean is cooler than usual, clear morning skies last later into the day, allowing increased warming. The system is regulated by the time of onset of the regime change.
Let’s stop at this point in our examination of the tropical day and consider the idea of “climate sensitivity”, the sensitivity of surface temperature to radiative forcing from either the sun or from CO2. The solar forcing is constantly increasing as the sun rises higher in the sky. In the morning before the onset of cumulus circulation, the sun comes through the clear atmosphere and rapidly warms the surface. So the thermal response is large, and the climate sensitivity is high.
After the onset of the cumulus regime, on the other hand, much of the sunlight is reflected back to space. Less sunlight remains to warm the ocean. In addition to reduced sunlight, there is enhanced evaporative cooling. Compared to the morning, the climate sensitivity is much lower. The heating of the surface slows down.
So here we have two situations with very different climate sensitivities. In the early morning, climate sensitivity is high, and the temperature rises quickly with the increasing solar insolation. In the late morning, a regime change occurs to a situation with much lower climate sensitivity. Adding extra solar energy doesn’t raise the temperature anywhere near as fast as it did earlier.
Moving along through the day, at some point in the afternoon there is a good chance that the cumulus circulation pattern is not enough to stop the continued surface temperature increase. When the temperature exceeds a certain higher threshold, another complete regime shift takes place. Some of the innocent cumulus clouds suddenly mutate and grow rapidly into towering monsters. The regime shift involves the spontaneous generation of those magical, independently mobile heat engines called thunderstorms.
Thunderstorms are dual-fuel heat engines. They run on low-density air. That air rises and condenses out the moisture. The condensation releases heat that re-warms the air, which rises deep into the troposphere.
Figure 3. Afternoon thunderstorm circulation over the tropical ocean.
There are a couple of ways to get low-density air. One is to heat the air. This is how a thunderstorm gets started, as a strong cumulus cloud. The sun plus GHG radiation combine to heat the surface, which then warms the air. The low-density air rises. When that Rayleigh-Benard circulation gets strong enough, thunderstorms start to form.
Once the thunderstorm is started, the second fuel is added to the fire—that fuel is water vapor. Counter-intuitively, the more water vapor there is in the air, the lighter it becomes. The thunderstorm generates strong winds around its base. Evaporation is proportional to wind speed, so this greatly increases the local evaporation.
This, of course, makes the air lighter, and makes the air rise faster, which makes the thunderstorm stronger, which in turn increases the wind speed around the thunderstorm base, which increases the evaporation even more … a thunderstorm is a regenerative system, much like a fire where some part of the fire’s energy is used to power a bellows to make the fire burn even hotter. Once it is started, it is much harder to stop.
This gives thunderstorms a unique ability that, as far as I know, is not represented in any of the climate models. A thunderstorm is capable of driving the surface temperature well below the initiation temperature that was needed to get the thunderstorm started. It can run on into the evening, and often well into the night, on its combination of thermal and evaporation energy sources.
Thunderstorms can be thought of as local leakages, heat pipes that transport warm air rapidly from the surface to the lifting condensation level where the moisture turns into clouds and rain, and from there to the upper atmosphere without interacting with the intervening greenhouse gases. The air and the energy it contains is moved to the upper troposphere hidden inside the cloud-shrouded thunderstorm tower, without being absorbed or hindered by GHGs on the way.
Thunderstorms cool the surface in a host of ways, utilizing a combination of cold water, shade, wind, spray, evaporation, albedo changes, and cold air.
And just like the onset of the cumulus circulation, the onset of thunderstorms occurs earlier on days when it is warmer, and it occurs later (and sometimes not at all) on days that are cooler than usual.
So again, we see that there is no way to assign an average climate sensitivity. The warmer it gets, the less each additional watt per meter actually warms the surface.
Finally, once all of the fireworks of the daytime changes are over, first the cumulus and then the thunderstorms decay and dissipate. A final and again different regime ensues. The main feature of this regime is that during this time, the ocean radiates about the amount of energy that is absorbed during all of the previously described regimes. How does it do this? Another emergent phenomenon … oceanic overturning.
Figure 4. Conditions prevailing after the night-time dissipation of the daytime clouds.
During the nighttime, the surface is still receiving energy from the GHGs. This has the effect of delaying the onset of oceanic overturning, and of reducing the rate of cooling. Note that the oceanic overturning is once again the emergent Rayleigh-Bénard circulation. Because there are no clouds, the ocean can radiate to space more freely. In addition, the overturning of the ocean constantly brings new water to the surface, to radiate and to cool. This increases the heat transfer across the interface.
As with the previous thresholds, the timing of this final transition is temperature-dependent. Once a critical threshold is passed, oceanic overturning kicks in. Stratification is replaced by circulation, bringing new water to radiate, cool, and sink. In this way, heat is removed, not just from the surface as during the day, but from the entire body of the upper “mixed” layer of the ocean.
There are a few things worth pointing out about this whole system.
First, this is what occurs in the tropics, which is where the largest amount of energy enters the hot end of the great heat engine we call the climate.
Next, sometimes increases in incoming energy are turned mostly into temperature. Other times, incoming energy increases are turned mostly into physical work (the circulation of the ocean and atmosphere that transports energy to the poles). And other times, increasing energy is mostly just moved from the tropics to the poles.
Next, note that this whole series of changes is totally and completely dependent on temperature-threshold-based emergent phenomena. It is a mistake to think of these as being feedback. It’s more like a drunk walking on a narrow elevated walkway. The guardrails are not feedback—they are a place where the rules change. The various thresholds in the climate system are like that—if you go over them, everything changes. As one example of many, the ocean before and after the onset of nocturnal overturning are very different places.
And this, in turn, all points to one of the most important control features of the climate—time of onset. How much energy the ocean loses overnight depends critically on what time the overturning starts. The temperature of the tropical afternoon depends on what time the cumulus kick in, and what time the thunderstorms start
With the idea of emergent thunderstorms and cumulus fields in hand, let me note that we can determine where this phenomenon is happening. In areas in the tropics, the warmer it gets, the more clouds appear—first the cumulus fields, then the tropical thunderstorms. As a result, the warmer it gets, the higher the tropical albedo gets, and the more energy is reflected back to space instead of warming the surface. In other words, in the tropics, the albedo and the temperature are positively correlated.
Outside of the tropics, the opposite goes on. The colder it gets, the more we get storms, ice, and snow. As a result, the colder it gets, the higher the albedo gets. Outside the tropics, the albedo and the temperature are negatively correlated.
And this is clearly revealed in the CERES satellite dataset, as shown in Figure 5 below.
Figure 5. Correlation of albedo and surface temperature. Perfect correlation, where both variables move in total unison, has a correlation value of 1.0. Perfect anti-correlation, where one variable increases whenever the other decreases, has a correlation value of -1.0. A correlation of zero means no relationship between the two variables, albedo and temperature.
Some things of note about Figure 5. As predicted by my theory, in much of the tropical ocean the albedo is positively correlated with the temperature, but this is true only in a few isolated areas outside of the tropics. The arctic and antarctic are strongly anti-correlated (negative correlation), with a correlation of ~ -0.6. In the tropics, on the other hand, the average correlation is zero. Land overall has a strong negative correlation, ~ -0.5.
The tropical correlation of zero is of interest because this is what we would expect if the tropics are regulating the temperature—the earth would warm until a slight increase in temperature pushes the albedo/temperature correlation positive, whereupon the earth would tend to cool.
And that brings us to the question of how useful the models are. I went and got the historical runs of the MIROC-ESM model, which covers the period from 1850 to 2005. To compare with the CERES data, I looked at four separate 21-year periods, the same time span as the CERES data. Here is the first of those periods, 1850 – 1870, showing the results in model-world. I’ve included the real-world data (left graphic) for comparison.
Figure 6. As in Figure 5, but using data from the MIROC-ESM climate model
The most obvious difference is that in model-world, the polar and sub-polar regions both have some areas of positive correlation that do not occur in real-world. There is also much less positive correlation in the tropics, model-world correlation of -0.15, versus a real-world tropical correlation of 0.0.
Another way to look at the differences is by averaging the correlation by latitude. Figure 7 shows that result.
Figure 7. Average correlation of albedo and surface temperature, by degree of latitude, CERES and MIROC data.
As you can see, model-world is very, very different from real-world.
My next question was, just how stable over time is this correlation between albedo and temperature, both in the real world and in model-world. To investigate this, here are the first and second halves of the CERES dataset.
Figure 8. Correlation of temperature and albedo, first and second halves of the CERES dataset.
Note that all of the correlations of different geographical areas, and of land and sea, are within 0.01 or so of each other. So this is a very stable relationship. Next, here are four different 21-year periods from the start to the end of the MIROC model output.
Figure 9. Correlation of temperature and albedo, four 21-year periods of the CERES dataset.
As with the CERES data, these are all very close. Here are the average correlations by latitude of the four MIROC model results and the two CERES results.
Figure 10. Correlation between albedo and temperature by latitude, four 21-year periods from the MIROC model results (1850-1870, 1900-1920, 1950-1970, and 1985-2005) and two 10-year periods from the CERES satellite data (2000-2009, and 2010-2019).
The relationship between albedo and temperature in both real-world and model-world is very stable, even over a period as short as 10 years, indicating that this relationship between albedo and temperature provides a meaningful insight into how the climate system actually works. And all of the model results are very different from the CERES satellite data.
Conclusions:
• My theory that the temperature control of tropical albedo via emergent phenomena exerts a thermoregulatory effect is supported by these findings.
• The gridcell size of current climate models is far too large to simulate individual thunderstorms. For this among other reasons, it is unlikely that the models incorporate realistic representations of the thermoregulatory effects of tropical thunderstorms.
• At least in the case of the MIROC-ESM model, the model representation of the correlation of temperature and albedo is quite unlike what happens in the real world.
• The geographic stability of the correlations over time, in both the real world and in model-world, indicates that this is a persistent diagnostic feature of the climate.
w.
MY USUAL: I can defend my own words and am happy to do so. I cannot defend your understanding of my words, so please, when you comment quote the exact words you are referring to.
By the way, a better aphorism — one that accurately describes the situation in science — is: All models are wrong, but some models are predictive.
as somone with zero claim to understanding the comments in this article- way over my head- but if as you say “some models are predictive”- now all you need to show is which models are successfully predictive
If there are say 100 climate models- I bet some might seem to be predictive with good results once enough time has passed – that still doesn’t prove the model is correct- it might have been nothing but good luck
Been thinking much the same. It would seem that of all the models, the Russian models appear to be consistently closer to observational data. I wonder if WE has access to output from those models, to rerun the comparison with Ceres. The question the I always come back to – if the Russian models appear to be more predictive – why?
None of the climate models are predictive, Joseph/David. They’re all predictively useless.
I was thinking more generally of physical models, such as QM or Thermodynamics. They predict observables, and can be tested against them.
again, this technical stuff is way over my head- but, I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t because the Russians prefer to get to the truth- whereas the rest have a mission to demonstrate “the crisis” to enhance their careers
just saw another video showing how Russia is looking forward to some warming- because most of its territory is dam frigid- and, if the arctic region opens up, they’re preparing for that with all their ice breakers- they want a warmer climate and all the ports that will be open in their arctic territories but they see no reason to exaggerate “the science” – the closer they can predict what will really happen will give them a strategic advantage- it appears they are making little effort to de-carbonize and they’re enjoying playing “bad boy” to the desperate Europeans following the climate religion
It seems that all the models except the Russian one(s) run hot.
I find this quite surprising. In searching out Russian models on the interwebs, my experience is that they are all hot.
Under Stalin, Russians suffered from Lysenkoism with the political models of Lysenko. So they are adhering closer to science.
Now the West is suffering under “Climate Change” aka “majority anthropogenic global warming”. Will the West recover from its modern Lysenkoism?
The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory (forbes.com)
“During the nighttime, the surface is still receiving energy from the GHGs. This has the effect of delaying the onset of oceanic overturning, and of reducing the rate of cooling.”
There is no greenhouse effect over the ocean. It does not receive IR energy from GHGs, day or night. Water is very opaque to IR, and the paper-thin surface layer that absorbs it is cooling the surface by evaporation.
This vid is an IR camera view of the Spitzer space telescope launch. The rocket goes thru a cloud layer, and the bright exhaust plume is completely snuffed out by the water droplets in the cloud. Launch begins about 10 seconds in.
https://rockyhigh66.org/stuff/Infrared_Launch.mp4
When you put a pot of water on the stove, the pot gets hot and transfers its heat to just the thinnest layer of water that is in contact with the pot. So how does the bulk of the water in the pot get hot? Before the skin layer of water next to the pot can get close to the boiling point that water is very quickly mixed into the rest of the water by convection. You don’t see bubbles of vapor (evaporation) forming on the pot’s bottom surface until the bulk of the water gets much closer to the boiling point. It’s the same with the ocean, the IR from GHGs is absorbed in the thinnest layer at the surface but the surface layer gets quickly mixed into slightly lower layers before the IR could cause the surface to warm enough to be evaporated away.
“So how does the bulk of the water in the pot get hot?”
It’s called conduction. Water at the bottom of the pot has difficulty evaporating. Not what’s happening on the surface with IR.
Brief refresher on water temperature. The molecules are not all the same temperature, some hot, some cold, some in between. Were they all the same, we wouldn’t have evaporation occurring. The temperature we measure is the average of all the molecules.
When a warm or hot surface molecule picks up enough IR energy to leave, it takes with it not just the energy it gained, but all the energy it had above the average temperature. This drops the average, thus cooling the very thin layer. The time elapsed between gaining the energy and departing the surface is a fraction of a second, not enough time to mix with the water just below the surface. Even if the surface layer did mix, it is cooler now, not warmer than the layers below.
Water is indifferent to GHG presence. What IR that doesn’t get absorbed for evaporation, get reflected back up.
Your answer is pure bullshi+. There is a small amount of conduction in water but conduction of heat through water occurs very slowly. Almost all of the heat transfer in a warming pot of water on the stove is caused by convection. You do know that they have boiled water in micro-gravity where the heated water stays close to the heated element (it doesn’t rise from buoyancy so convection is much lower) and the water further away stays much cooler than it does in a gravitational field (conduction is always low). The thin layer of heated water next to the heating element boils very rapidly but the vapor stays right next to the heater further insulating the heater from transferring energy to the bulk of the liquid. That’s what makes heat transfer in zero-gravity so challenging – lower convection.
Don’t try to BS me. I used to teach thermodynamics at a major University for years. I know about the statistical distribution of energy in liquid water particles at 20 deg C and I know that only a tiny fraction are energetic enough to evaporate.
The IR striking the ocean doesn’t impart enough energy for most molecules to leave the surface except for the very TINY fraction of molecules that were almost hot enough to leave the surface anyway and then only those molecules that were about a mean free path (distance a water molecule travels between collisions) of ~2.5 Angstroms from being right on the surface. *Almost all* of the IR that is absorbed adds heat to molecules that don’t evaporate. The thermal energy of the water molecules causes them to move about, collide with other molecules, and they exchange their energy (thermalize) with other molecules extremely fast. Almost all of the molecules very quickly share any IR-added energy with other molecules and the evaporation rate is almost exactly the same as that from a VERY slightly warmed ocean. That’s why I can’t quickly evaporate a pan of water with the IR source in my night vision goggles thus cooling the remaining water by evaporation but I can, albeit very slowly, warm the pan up.
The IR-added heat thermalizes quickly and then moves downward into the ocean by bulk motion in convecting cells of water that are far, far bigger than the IR absorption depth. Read Willis’s article again. Try learning something.
Data?
Pretty simplistic arguments from a former professor of thermodynamics at a major university (in Fairfield, Iowa?). Most of the IR that hits the surface is reflected back up, not adding heat to the paper thin layer, which is cooling by evaporation regardless of any IR absorption.
“I know about the statistical distribution of energy in liquid water particles at 20 deg C and I know that only a tiny fraction are energetic enough to evaporate.”
Professor, are you saying that a fog at 20 C must last forever?
Years ago, here and in a few other blogs, a number of different experiments were described in detail wherein IR heat lamps from above were used, attempting to heat water even the tiniest distance below the surface skin. They could not measure any temperature increase. Evaporation apparently removed the heat too quickly to allow any deeper heating. There was one setup that compared clean water to water with a thin oil layer on top, preventing evaporation. The oil slick one allowed the water to be heated. Then there are those claims that wave action will sufficiently mix the surface and deeper water, broiling all life therein.
Do you have reference to any experimental data that backs up your claim?
Eventually, in response to these postings, the Skeptical Science blog people reported that they had done an experiment that produce a very small temperature increase a short distance below the surface (as a “proof of concept”). In true climate science fashion they refused to release either the experimental procedure or the data.
Gracias. AndyHce. I was beginning to feel unloved.
“It’s the same with the ocean, the IR from GHGs is absorbed in the thinnest layer at the surface but the surface layer gets quickly mixed into slightly lower layers before the IR could cause the surface to warm enough to be evaporated away.”
No. The layer that absorbs DLR is cooler than the water immediately below it. Mixing down cools not warms. Take a look at the ocean’s skin in detail.
The reason increased DLR might warm the ocean is that it provides some of the energy that the ocean must radiate according to Stephan-Boltzman and so it needs to provide less energy from the bulk to do that. Over time.
On the other hand that DLR must increase evaporation all other things being equal, so the net result is not obvious.
Mike,
The video is interesting. You seem to be confusing water vapor GHG with condensed water vapor (cloud) which is in a liquid state. What your linked video seems to show is that the condensed vapor (cloud) is acting as a black body and absorbing the IR thus converting it to heat energy. Brings up a point that I have made in the past that the base of a cloud is acting as a black body thus it emitting energy downwards is based on the cloud temp while absorbing energy is based on the actual ground surface temp LWIR with the difference being converted to sensible heat.
No, not confusing the two. The hot plume in the cloud converts the droplets to transparent vapor. A ways out from this transparent region, the surviving droplets are reflecting the IR.
The clouds at night do reflect IR back to the surface, making cloudy nights warmer than clear nights.
Mike McMillan January 30, 2022 3:24 pm
Nope. Clouds are essentially a black-body for IR. They ABSORB IR from the surface, which makes them warmer, and inter alia increases their radiation downwards back to the surface.
But it’s NOT reflected. Or to be more precise, the majority of the mere 4% or so that is reflected immediately hits another water droplet where 96% of the 4% is absorbed, leaving 0.16% reflected, which hits another droplet … like I said, basically a black body.
w.
Not true, Mike. See my discussion in my post “Radiating The Ocean“.
w.
Hi Willis. You have this annoying habit of looking at actual data to back up your claims.
In your post, Argument 2, you ask: “So if the DLR is not heating the ocean, … then where is it going?”
It’s going back into space. We have three options, absorption, transmission, reflection. Some we know is absorbed, none is transmitted, the rest is reflected. Water is an excellent reflector of IR. We can see this in a still from the rocket launch video where the rocket has not yet hit the clouds, but the underside is brightly lit in IR.
In later frames, you can still see the reflection of the cooling exhaust plume on the underside of the clouds.
Mike
Mike McMillan January 30, 2022 2:22 pm
The final statement is not true at all.
You are correct that for the ocean there are only two possibilities—absorption and reflection. But the absorptivity (which by Kirchoff’s law must equal the emissivity) of the ocean for longwave infrared is very high, ~ 0.96. This leaves only 4% reflected, which is far too small to explain where the downwelling IR is going.
Regards,
w.
Willis, Interesting research as always. Is data available from weather buoys and or Island weather stations in the tropics to assess hourly/daily variations?
Well done Willis.
I’m not a climate scientist but I lived and worked in Apia, Samoa for 7 years, 1968-1975.
The temperature there has remarkable stability. It sits about 29 C. all day, every day and night. When it dropped 2 degrees we put cardigans on. Once it got down to 26 degrees and people described it as having snow in the region!
What I can confirm is the cyclic daily weather pattern: clear, clouds, stormy, repeat.
The towering cumulus were amazing and we we could see what you have ably described.
I wanted to make this comment separate from my previous one so they don’t get confused. You say there must be some sort of thermal regulatory mechanism for Earth. Yep i agree. Now consider, without GHG’s there is no energy loss from the tropopause. Without that cold junction the heat engine that is the Hadley cell cannot function and that means convection stops. Evaporation must be met by precipitation but precipitation (falling water) represents mechanical work and without a heat engine mechanical work is not possible. So precipitation becomes impossible and with it ongoing evaporation. We end up with a vertically isothermal atmosphere (since the lapse rate is maintained by convection and without convection the lapse rate collapses) which is 100% saturated wrt water vapour. That also means no clouds and no dust. The result is Earth would be absorbing not the current 243 watts/sqM but closer to 343 watts/sqM. That would give it an “average” (whatever that means) temperature of around 279K compared to the current 288K. Not the 255K claimed by warmists. So all the various GHG’s actually raise Earth’s temperature not by 33K but by around 9K and the negative feedback component (the thermal regulatory mechanism you referred to) is clouds.
As GHG concentration increases less energy is lost directly from the surface to space (wasted heat like an unlagged boiler in heat engine terms) and thus more is coupled instead into the working fluid. Most of which will be via increased evaporation of water. More evaporation means more clouds which reflect more of the incoming solar radiation which offsets the claimed temperature rise from increasing GHG’s. Now the impact of GHG’s is logarithmic with concentration and if the total cumulative impact of all the various GHG’s including all the impact from water vapour and CO2 raises Earth’s temperature by 9K how much can one doubling of CO2 (when we are about 10 doublings beyond saturation) alone raise it a further 3C?
“We end up with a vertically isothermal atmosphere (since the lapse rate is maintained by convection and without convection the lapse rate collapses)”
The temperature lapse rate is maintained by gravity, not convection. Convection is nature’s attempt to restore deviations from the lapse rate.
No Mike: with increasing altitude the pressure drops which means the air expands and thus cools which is probably what you are thinking about but that’s dynamic (ie: driven by convection). If the air is static you could assume there is an initial temperature gradient but the air column will eventually all come to the same temperature due to conduction in the static air. Once that happens the energy content of the air is rising with altitude which is kind of like a temperature inversion which would preclude convection. If you want a simple indication consider that there is a dry lapse rate and a moist lapse rate and the two are different due to water vapour condensing in the latter. If it was due to gravity why would there be two lapse rates. Easy to look up dry lapse rate and moist lapse rate in wikipedia
I knocked heads with Willis and rgbatduke a while ago on the subject of lapse rates. I put together a page with my arguments in favor of gravity.
https://www.rockyhigh66.org/stuff/adiabatic_lapse_rate.html
Well written and easy to understand, especially if one already agrees with most of it. This one line, though, I do not agree with:
“During the nighttime, the surface is still receiving energy from the GHGs.”
I see a lot of frost around here. Every day, this time of year. If the temperature is 0C, the frost does not melt until the sun hits it or the temperature increases. It can last a whole week of sunny days, yet the sheltered from the sun areas maintain frost. I have photos of it.
If there was ANY downwelling radiation that could ‘heat’ or deliver energy to the surface, that frost would not have a chance. I see this literally every day, as the sun moves around, it uncovers lines of frost which promptly melt. No sun no melting. Radiation works by heating whatever it strikes. Frost would not be immune to that. I have done experiments also, but that doesn’t matter. Frost/ice has a melting point, and, barring wind, the downwelling ‘radiation’ has no energy to deliver.
As explained to me in my Heat Transfer class (lo these many years ago), the shape of the droplet of water, radiating to the black body of space, provide heat loss in excess (it’s not that there is none, it is just not sufficient to exceed) of any heat gained via either conduction or convection with the atmosphere. That’s why/how frost can form even if the air temperature is above 0° C, but only on a still night, any wind will provide the heat transfer to the droplet to keep it liquid.
That was not the point. I’m talking ONLY about that frost that is visible on the ground and roofs after sunrise, before the sun hits it and melts it. THAT frost, if struck by radiation, should melt, even if more slowly. It does not melt at all. It can last a week, which I have photos of. If that frost can’t be melted by ‘back radiation’ that back radiation can’t ‘heat’ the earth either.
I would say that’s possible only if the air remains still during the day (I don’t believe in “back radiation” either, but there is some heat in air which will warm up the water droplets if there is enough convection, i.e., air movement), and the nights remain clear during that week. The persistence of the frost need only be one day, come nighttime, the frost can reform if the sky remains clear.
I may be misunderstanding the location of your “persistent” frost, aren’t you talking about frost in the shade, where sunlight doesn’t hit it directly?
Frost is small crystals of water ice, and ice needs a certain amount of energy to make it melt. Given that there is no good reason to assume the energy from downwelling radiation must always exceed the threshold for melting ice, there is no good reason either to argue that “frost should not have a chance” with downwelling IR around. If the downwelling IR is merely enough to bring the frosted surface up from, say, -3 deg.C to -1 deg.C, still below the melting point, that would not change the existence of the frost in the least. IIRC the estimated amount of downwelling IR is only a small fraction of what direct sunshine provides. Whenever the downwelling IR is strong enough to melt the frost (or prevent it from building in the first place by keeping the surface slightly above 0 deg. C after sundown), you simply see none in the early morning even before the sun goes up.
I originally stipulated that the frost is at 0C. (If the temperature is 0C, the frost does not melt). It is ALREADY at the melting point. It does not melt from back radiation, it only melts when the temperature exceeds the freezing point. 0.1C. It melts from ambient temperature, not from some fictitious ‘back radiation’.
What do you think the sun does, then? Warm up the ambience I’d guess, in particular the material of the frosted surface, and that melts the frost. The frost itself is transparent and most sunlight goes through it without much effect, so the earth or whatever else is under it will warm first. Back radiation does a very similar thing: It warms up the ambience. We just can’t observe it coming and going like the sun’s warmth because it is always there, day and night, also it’s diffuse and leaves no shadows like the sun does when it passes over different bits of frosty ground, melting one spot now and another a few minutes or hours later. At night, we can observe what the ambient temperature is without sunlight. But there is no time of day where we can observe the ambient temperature without back radiation. Because the latter is an effect of the atmosphere around our planet that always remains in place, day or night, summer or winter. We can’t switch it on or off either to measure its effect: If we try to block it by putting any object between the surface we want to measure and the outer atmosphere, that “shading” object will merely become a new source of back radiation. In other words, we have built an actual greenhouse then – as opposed to the figurative one invoked to describe the natural atmospheric back radiation – whose effect will considerably exceed the natural one instead of blocking it.
The only relevant part “to take away” from such an experiment would be that a greenhouse of the thinnest transparent film traps and back-radiates the incoming heat almost as effectively as one of solid glass, as long as the film is sealed on all sides. Adding thicker glass only changes the effectiveness very little. Looking at the “atmospheric greenhouse” we should expect something similar: Once enough “greenhouse gases” are established in the atmosphere to keep the ambience from cooling abruptly every time the sun sinks, adding more of them should change very little. That point of the (of course, always dubious and oversimplified!!) “greenhouse analogy” of the atmosphere is generally ignored in the Alarmist version of the story. Only when the atmosphere becomes so depleted of GHGs that incoming sun warmth can no longer be held inside the atmosphere at night, the temperature would drop. Probably drastically and dangerously so, like in a man-made greenhouse without a roof (not that anyone would be left to worry about that – without water and CO2 that are both not only GHGs but also essential ingredients of all living things, the earth would have been reduced to a barren piece of rock at that point anyway). But once the system works as advertised, like it has done for at least as as long as there is life on Earth – probably longer, to allow life developing in the first place – adding more GHGs ought to make little, and progressively less difference (aka: The Law of Diminishing Returns).
Multiple experiments going back at least as far as the beginning of the 20th century have concluded that physical greenhouses work by preventing convective cooling, NOT by trapping IR.
Look at the attached image. I’ll think you’ll see that H20 (frost included) absorbs a lot of the sun’s insolation.
You stipulated that your frost is at the melting point, but then provided no evidence the frost you have observed, and used as an example, was actually at that temperature. You are using a hypothetical to support observations.
A couple of images that illustrate some of what you are saying. Please notice on the left one that the scales are vastly different, by about 1000 times. Also on the right one how much of the sun’s energy that H2O absorbs.
OK, I’m with you so far, but what about reaching that zone where there are so many thunderstorms, they begin to organize and then persist, to form hurricanes (or cyclones, if you prefer)? Is this just the next step of emergent phenomena? Does the organization of thunderstorms into hurricanes support or refute your hypothesis? And why did you not say something about cyclones in your write-up(s) so far?
Cyclones need convective potential to spin up. Once they build their intensity they are self-sustaining providing the ocean surface temperature is warm enough to supply the latent heat and get more water into the atmosphere.
There are now global maps of convective potential freely available:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=cape/orthographic=-305.58,-22.77,345/loc=69.622,-18.129
This shows the early formation of a cyclone in the Indian Ocean. The CAPE at the point identified ia 2091J/kg. The cyclone gets spun up as the CAPE is extinguished. Whether it is sustained depends on the water surface temperature.
Cyclones start out through the same mechanism as thunderstorms but they do not need CAPE to keep going, just warm water. The track of a cyclone will be 3Cto 4C cooler than the water was before the cyclone passes. The high air turbulence increases the evaporation.
Of course cyclones cannot occur close to the Equator because the Coriolis acceleration is low. Most convective potential is developed near the equator.
Is this due to the heat given up to the cyclone, or is this because the high winds cause high waves that greatly increases the depth of mixing (destratifying) with the cooler water below? I vote for some ratio of both, but how much is each? See, I occasionally see estimates of the total heat dissipated by a particular storm, and I always think, how do they come up with that? Well, turns out they don’t really know either, they’re just guessing.
There are three factors at least in reducing the ocean temperature in their track.
Red, I discussed some of this in my post Drying The Sky.
w.
Broken link.
Drying the Sky, Eschenbach, Jan 7, 2020 WUWT
Drying The Sky – Watts Up With That?
Willis, you have (at least) one hidden assumption, that the ocean surface is a constant. This is not so.
If you ask Charles the Moderator to look out my submission for the asked for theories you will find an image of what turned out to be tens of thousands of square miles of polluted ocean surface from abeam Porto to a couple of hundred miles short of Madeira. This smoothed surface suppressed wave breaking up to force 4.
Fewer salt aerosols so the strato cu would form later. Less water mixing, plankton having difficulty finding CO2 and nutrients. Less DMS. Reduced evaporation, late cu nims. Do water aerosols get polluted by oil/surfactant, changing their ability to coalesce?
Where did the oil/surfactant come from? Was it lipids released by dying phytos as the Azores high starved them out? Spilled oil as per SeaWifs?
The smoothed area was virtually cloud free and the unruffled surface would warm more with a lower albedo.
Etc etc.
Have a look at Baikal, Michegan, Tanganyka, Sea of Marmora, all warming faster than models predict, all polluted with oil and nutrients, the latter encouraging diatom (full of lipids) growth.
Something has its finger on your ocean thermostat. I guess pollution. And diatoms.
Oceana rules.
JF
Comments re models’ gridcell size may be correct, but they are a red herring:
Weather models, in spite of their much greater accuracy than climate models, cannot predict more than a few days ahead. What that means for climate models is that within a very few days in a model run, all of the value of the initial conditions has been exhausted. From then on, the models’ core – their grid system – becomes just a random-number generator within a controlling mechanism. The controlling mechanism is the set of parameterisations that are coded into the models.
Given that a climate model runs for years not days, all initial conditions are effectively irrelevant, and all of the grid system iterating on small time-slices (typically 20 minutes) is equally irrelevant, regardless of grid size. All of the climate models’ output comes from the parameterisations. All of the time and expense of running the models is wasted, because all that is needed is to see what results the parameterisations are designed to achieve.
I agree with w that the models are useless, and his work exposing it is very valuable, but I think the underlying reason is a lot simpler.
A number of years ago a paper described the fairly large range of outputs from a general circulation model run multiple times with initial temperature inputs that varied over a small range in steps that were, I believe, only 1 12-millionth of a degree different each run. Each run produced a significantly different projection, although not with as great a range as a normal ensemble run.
Now, these models are chaotic, not random. That means they are deterministic, varying only by virtue of different inputs. Run multiple times, each with exactly the same input, every run will produce exactly the same output (which doesn’t mean that any output matches reality).
This seems to strongly suggest that the inputs, rather than the parameters, are responsible for what a model run produces. If I understand your claims, they are not consistent with the experimental results.
Unless I am way off base, parameters are constants and do not vary. That would mean with constant inputs and constant parameters, constant outputs would be the result. Why do you think Dr. Frank determined that they devolve into linear projections?
It is not the parameter values, which themselves could be valid or stupid. It is the uncertainty associated with them, and with the variables, that increases with each step of calculation. Also, from what I’ve read, add hock “corrections” are added any time the model detects the chaotic results moving too far outside the programmer’s desired range, which could be hundreds or thousands, or any number of times, during a run.
Parameters are not constants. Parameters are ‘variables’ that are assigned a value by the user. Different runs can use different parameter values to test the results of those differences. Different users can decide that different parameter values are more valid according to their idea of how something might work.
I didn’t mean to imply that parameters are absolute constants like the speed of light. They are variables that are set by programmer and used throughout a period of a run. As such they are not recalculated by other parts of the program as calculations are being done. In other words, to the program they look like constants.
It is my experience that weather predictions are good with respect to temperature; however, it is not clear to me if they are much better than historical averages. Again, based on my subjective experience, I think that the weak point of weather forecasts is that they tend to have high error rates with false-positive precipitation forecasts. That is, if no rain is forecast, there are few surprises. However, if rain is forecast, it often fails to materialize. Typically, I don’t put a lot of stock in rain forecasts more than 24-hours out. Sometimes I look out the window and don’t see rain even when it is claimed to be raining. The exception is the SF Bay Area, where it would be raining over all of northern California during the Winter. However, California only has two seasons, dry and wet.
For the most accurate weather predictions see
Judith Curry’s Climate Forecast Applications Network Technology (cfanclimate.net)
It gives forecasts out two weeks.
Willis,
In Florida, there are times when there is high pressure aloft which suppresses cloud formation. It can get into the mid to upper 90sF without the formation of thunderstorms. The air feels dry but the relative humidity is still high. How do these upper level high and low pressure system affect your theory?
Very good.
My single column atmospheric model that I use to determine the level of free convection and cloud persistency over tropical oceans has a vertical resolution of 100m. That is orders of magnitude finer than climate models.
Climate models will never be able to resolve the physics of convective instability and cloud formation without this level of detail.
Having accepted that the ocean surfaces are temperature regulated to upper limit of 30C and lower limit of -1.8C, what is the role of the Greenhouse Effect in the global energy balance?
How ever you choose to describe the Greenhouse Effect, you have to conclude it plays no role in Earth’s energy balance if there are powerful temperature limiting processes that have nothing to do with the “Greenhouse Effect”.
Discussing a “Greenhouse Effect” in a an analysis of Earth’s energy balance and climate is as pointless as discussing the number of fairies able to dance on a pinhead.
I believe Willis has made some very good points, but I’m not sure he realizes the import of his biggest conclusion…
Let me put my interpretation on that… the thunderstorm punches a hole right through the greenhouse gasses, making the level of CO2, water vapor, CH4, manmade aerosols or anything else in the atmosphere completely irrelevant!!!!!! This, all by itself, completely eliminates The Church Of Catastrophic Global Man-Made Climate Change!!! But he has never said that, and doesn’t respond when I say that. Maybe someday it will sink in.
The temperature limit aspect of thunderstorms and the cirrus cloud that persists after the storm is entirely dependent on limiting the surface insolation. They act as ocean shutters.
Once the ocean surface reaches 30C the incoming surface sunlight is balance by the surface heat loss. All surface energy above a 30C open ocean surface leaves as latent heat and exits that atmosphere at about 250K.
Cloudburst over an ocean is like the shutters being slammer shut because the surface has got too hot and the high level moisture above freezing altitude solidifies to cirrus cloud as the water vapour condenses. The persistence of the cloud increases as the surface temperature increases. The process is not that complex. The shutters close and then gradually open to allow more sunlight. Once precipitable water exceeds 45mm, the process cycles regularly; alternating from slammed shut to progressive opening, to clear sky then back to slam shut.
OK, yes, the clouds play a huge part in limiting and then admitting insolation. But that wasn’t my point. When a thunderstorm forms it is, as Willis said, a heat pipe right through the atmosphere, transporting heat to the tropopause where it can radiate to space, a black body. The actual composition of that air is COMPLETELY 100% IRRELEVANT!!!!!! OK, enough of the flame war. Even though CO2 is a GHG and a weak one at that, it doesn’t matter, there is a bypass, a relief valve, that short circuits heat transfer completely around it. Therefore, ipso facto, QED and thusly, case closed.
Their is no direct exit path for long wave radiation over tropical oceans above 24C. There is so much water vapour that that the LWIR gets absorbed in the first kilometre or so.
Once the TPW reaches 45mm and cyclic cloudburst ensues, there is enough water vapour above the level of free convection, around 7000m that all LWIR leaves above the level of freezing because it all leaves via ice.
The radiating power over a tropic warm pool at 30C is about 200W/sq.m: Shown a number of times in this paper:
http://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Bomwatch-Willoughby-Main-article-FINAL.pdf
I’m not taking a side, just pointing out that the described actions on one part of the globe do not necessarily mean that other factors do not outweigh it somewhere else. If that be the case, then one has to look to where the balance lies.
Don’t minimize the effect of water vapor everywhere. Just because it is in a vapor form doesn’t mean it can’t absorb more of the sun’s incoming energy preventing it from reaching the earth and then carrying it higher where condensation release that accumulated energy.
Good stuff Willis!
I’d like to point out that emergent phenomenon are observed in nature in other areas. The one that comes to mind is the transition from laminar to turbulent flow, which can be predicted with the dimensionless Renolds number, Perhaps there is another dimensionless number that might be applicable here? Maybe one used in natural convection heat transfer.
The heat engine analogy is also a good one. When cold air high in the troposphere is compressed as it moves towards the surface in a high pressure system, is then heated near the surface, and expanded when is rises in a low pressure system, it is in fact a Brayton cycle heat engine. Not an efficient one, but still a heat engine. And if water vapor is heated, expanded in the rising column, and condensed to produce rain or snow, it is a Rankine cycle heat engine. In both cases it is doing the thermodynamic equivalent of buying low and selling high – compressing cold and expanding hot. This earth system heat engine, which I suspect is mostly a Rankine cycle, produces our winds.
Part 2 of the linked paper explains the process of convective instability and the factors that control it:
http://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Bomwatch-Willoughby-Main-article-FINAL.pdf
It is primarily a function of the buoyancy of water in air. But there are subtle aspects such as the rapid reduction in the ratio of saturated water vapour mass to air mass with altitude and the fact that the relative humidity can be anything from 0 to 100% at any altitude. These factors enable the formation of a level of free convection that is above ground level. Cloudburst relies on the formation of convective potential. The precipitable water has to exceed 30mm for that to occur and cloudburst becomes cyclic once TPW reaches 45mm.
Convective potential is well known but I believe the linked paper is the only paper that gives the physical parameters that enable its formation and discusses how cloud persistency limits surface insolation.
Aye de mi! How I remember bicycling around Singapore dockyard with my Wanchai Burberry on the handlebars. Hotter the day, earlier the huge tropical rainstorm flooding the monsoon ditches. Happy days
Anyone who has spent even a day in Singapore, near the equator, knows that this is absolutely true, every day. It is thermodynamics in action.
But what is the climatological significance?
For climatic effects, there must be at a minimum multidecadal variation in thunderstorm formation.
That’s a good question, John. The Argo buoy data seems to indicate that there is more rainfall than expected over the oceans. Is there sufficient data available for thorough temporal analysis of the data to have occurred, and, if so, how does this compare to the various models?
Haven’t you been watching the news? It only takes from a few hours to a few days of some weather activity to prove it is climatic!
Completely new question: What was the cause of the cooling from 1940-1970. NASA has said it is due to aerosols that overpowered the global warming. What are your thoughts on this. I’m sure this has already been debunked but I’ve looked specifically for a rebuttal for this and haven’t found one.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GISSTemperature/giss_temperature4.php
Anyone know what happened to the engineer who retired in Thailand who has some excellent posts on climate change? He has not posted in several weeks.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2022/01/05/holocene-global-warming-and-climate-change-cycles/
Are you he?
If it’s hunting season or the fish are biting maybe he has better things to do! 🙂 Possibly a hot babe?
Or COVID? Any number of reasons a person might take a break.
Willis says:
‘My theory that the temperature control of tropical albedo via emergent phenomena exerts a thermoregulatory effect’
Willis, I think that you can simplify your theory as follows:
The tropical oceans naturally oscillate between two states of thermal-instability.
When the water surface temperature is cold there is not enough heat transfer, under normal sunlight, to cool the ocean and the ocean warms. When the water surface temperature is warm there is excess cooling capacity and the ocean cools. System inertia ensures that the transition from one state to the other will, almost always, overshoot what would be a stable temperature.
You are right to identify water vapor as the key to this phenomena. A 5 C increase in water temperature will increase the rate of water evaporation to the air (assuming stable relative humidity) by 1/3. As you note, water vapor has a density approximately 65% of that of dry air, thus increasing concentrations of water vapor drive density differences between air masses, which are the driving force for wind. When the wind increases the rate of evaporation increases even more creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. What you didn’t note is that if the winds become sufficient to cause waves, the surface area available for evaporation can be orders of magnitude greater than that of a flat surface, again greatly increasing the rates of evaporation, and thus evaporative cooling. In the most extreme cases, as in hurricanes, the self-reinforcing feed-back loop becomes ‘explosive’.
Thus, when the water surface temperature is low and the water surface is calm, evaporative cooling (in combination with the other heat transfer modes), which in this state is controlled by the rate of mass transfer of water vapor from the water surface to the air above it, is insufficient to off-set the heat input from the tropical sun. The water temperature increases.
As the water temperature increases the mass transfer rate gradually increases, due to both the increasing vapor pressure of water and the low density of water vapor which drives wind. It takes a while to ‘wind-up’ the system, and the water will continue to heat until the rate of evaporative cooling increases sufficiently to slow the rise in temperature, and then to begin to cool the water. But the system, once ‘wound up’ takes a while to unwind. Thus the rate of evaporative cooling will exceed that which is required for a stable temperature, and the water will cool well past the temperature needed for thermal stability.
If the winds that were developed during the warm phase are sufficient to cause waves, the rates of mass transfer become so high that the rate of evaporative cooling is no longer controlled by mass transfer from the surface, but by the rate at which warm water can be delivered to the surface by convection from within the water body itself. Thus in the transition from the warm phase to the cool phase, the entire body of water, not just the surface, can be cooled.
In summary, what we see is system that constantly oscillates between two unstable states, a cold state, where cooling is insufficient to off-set the incoming solar energy, leading to warming, and a warm state where cooling vastly exceeds what is required to off-set the incoming solar energy, leading to cooling. ‘Tropical albedo’ may play a role, but I think that the vast differences in the rates of evaporative cooling between cool and warm waters is more than enough to drive this oscillation.
While in this post you deal with the daily temperature oscillations, the mechanism described above is, I believe, the basis of the El Nino/La Nina oscillation. As Jim Steele noted in his recent post at WUWT (https://perhapsallnatural.blogspot.com/2022/01/how-global-warming-is-driven-by-pacific.html), the cooling phase is accompanied by strong trade winds, while the warming phase is accompanied by much weaker wind conditions, which is a clear indication of vastly different rates of evaporative cooling.
And the best models (with a bias towards warmth) are the swimsuit models.
In the head posting, you wrote:
“The gridcell size of current climate models is far too large to simulate individual thunderstorms. For this among other reasons, it is unlikely that the models incorporate realistic representations of the thermoregulatory effects of tropical thunderstorms.”
Given that the whole focus of successful modern physics is on finding a *predictive* model, why should we necessarily even look for enhanced realism in the form of smaller grid cells?
Even with better realism, any detailed models would presumably have so many ‘hard to measure’ coefficients that errors would be sure to propagate and accumulate to the point of uselessness (at least, useless to the extent that anyone wanted to predict anything).
Now, if you observe a certain kind of stability, and can use that to successfully predict something about stability in the future, maybe that could amount to a truly refined sort of theory, even if patently unrealistic in some ways?
Cyclic convective instability requires TPW o 45mm. That is the threshold for the surface temperature regulating process to set in.
A level of free convection can form once the TPW reaches 30mm and small anvils will form irregularly but for cyclic instability, where cumulonimbus clouds form on a daily basis, requires 45mm.
Rick, over the ocean it seems that the limiting factor is simply temperature …
Note that area at the lower right, where given enough temperature, every single gridcell has rain.
w.
The Persian Gulf regularly exceeds 35C in the boreal summer. The process depends on the atmosphere sustaining a level of free convection.
You will find that the cyclic instability depends on the TPW reaching 45mm.
So there are other conditions that depend on surface temperature and surface pressure but surface temperature alone is not sufficient to establish convective instability.
Thunderstorms are rare in the Persian Gulf and there has never been a cyclone recorded in the Persian Gulf despite the SST regularly exceeding 28C.
If you understand the process then you know where to look for the exceptions and why the temperature limiting is so precise.
It would take enormous amounts of any additional atmospheric gas to alter the surface temperature limiting process because the temperature limit is a function of the surface pressure as well as surface temperature. Once you understand that, you know why the Cretaceous period had higher tropical ocean surface temperature.
So when said and done, in my opinion reinforced by what I’ve been reading here, Mainstream Climate Science is no further advanced than when Anstophoupopoulopoupololopis ## (the famous guy from Ancient Greece who) actually started Climate Science.
What he noticed as he clambered from his bed every morning, was how The Morning started clear and calm but ‘some hour‘ later, the wind picked up and clouds started forming.
Then, come late afternoon and some ‘some hour‘ before sunset, the clouds cleared and the wind dropped away.
Sometimes, being the naughty child that he was, stayed up late and noticed that the calm winds and clear sky persisted all through the night.
He wrote something down to record these observations and thus, Climate Science was born.
This was easily 4 and 5,000+ years ago and it would seem, ‘we’ are no further advanced.
The main question being, what was the determining factor for ‘some hour‘?
iow: What caused calm and stratified air at the surface to become convecting.
Was it temperature, humidity, barometric pressure or some mix of those.
## He really did exist but I can’t recall his exact name. It would have been something like that 😀
This is not true. Climate science has made huge strides into the world of make-believe. Real world observations are no longer relevant. The only certainty in climate science is that the models are correct. Observations that disagree with the models are incorrect and need to be adjusted to agree with the models. Climate models are the sacred cows of the new religion.
I have actually had a climate modeller from Australia’s CSIRO tell me that their model producing tropical ocean temperature of 307C is “middle of the road” so is obviously as good as all the others. When I point out that that is a physical impossibility on Earth with its current atmospheric mass they do not care. There are deep into consensus on the BS.
There can be an ocean at 307C?
Meant 307K,. 34C
This is what Australia’s CSIRO were predicting with CMIP3:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/itas_csiro_mk3_5_sresa1b_150-180E_-5-5N_n.png
Willis,
Very interesting post and a succinct encapsulation of your ideas with an excellent test against observations.
I think it might be interesting to see your correlation graphs by latitude shown for land only and ocean only for both model and real observations.
Regard,
TS
I liked the shark.
Not really counter intuitive, a molecule of H2O weighs about half that of an N2 molecule.
Shark? It was only a couple inches long on my screen! It must have been an anchovy.
This is an excellent analysis and I’m particularly impressed with how you were able to contrast reality with the models. The regions around the Aleutians and near Greenland are particularly damning.
I think that your regulatory model is in fact a control system. It’s not linear feedback in the classical PID control theory sense. It’s closer to a simple bang-bang control system, like a home thermostat. An even better analog would be a non-linear oscillator, such as neurons in the gastrointestinal tract, or electronic oscillators, such as jolly-roger electronic oscillators. I have memories of frequently having to replace the quartz crystals in Apple ][ computers, what ran at the blazing speed of 1 MHz (!!!!!).
I think that you are right in that the elephant in the Troposphere is the heat of vaporization of water, that is required to create water vapor and is released upon condensation (a very complex process in its own right). Now ponder this: what is the impact that the heat of fusion is so much lower than that of vaporization? For vapor, you have to break ALL of the hydrogen bonds. Liquid water, however, has roughly 80% of the hydrogen bonds that exist in ice. Water is the strangest chemical known to man!
Once there is enough sunlight to take the surface temperature above 30C, the process gives a response very much like you would get with a good analog feedback control system that has on-off modulation. There are two cooling mechanisms involved. The clouds act as shutters initially and their persistence as they dissipate to cirrus is a function of the surface temperature because that sets the altitude of the cirrus cloud formation. The secondary surface cooling process is the sudden cooling from rainfall. Warm pools that are limiting to 30C are convergence zones so get much more precipitation than the evaporation they produce.
The linked paper has three charts on page 6 that display data from three moored buoys in three tropical oceans all limiting to 30C in the same way:
http://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Bomwatch-Willoughby-Main-article-FINAL.pdf
@chris Hall
I don’t think truer words have been spoken!
Right up there with ammonia.