by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
New Record High Temperatures and a Weird Month
July 2023 was an unusual month, with sudden warmth and a few record or near-record high temperatures.
Since the satellite record began in 1979, July 2023 was:
- warmest July on record (global average)
- warmest absolute temperature (since July is climatologically the warmest month)
- tied with March 2016 for the 2nd warmest monthly anomaly (departure from normal for any month)
- warmest Southern Hemisphere land anomaly
- warmest July for tropical land (by a wide margin, +1.03 deg. C vs. +0.44 deg. C in 2017)
These results suggest something peculiar is going on. It’s too early for the developing El Nino in the Pacific to have much effect on the tropospheric temperature record. The Hunga Tonga sub-surface ocean volcano eruption and its “unprecedented” production of extra stratospheric water vapor could be to blame. There might be other record high temperatures regionally in the satellite data, but I don’t have time right now to investigate that.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
The Version 6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for July 2023 was +0.64 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean. This is well above the June 2023 anomaly of +0.38 deg. C.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 now stands at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).
Various regional LT departures from the 30-year (1991-2020) average for the last 19 months are:
| YEAR | MO | GLOBE | NHEM. | SHEM. | TROPIC | USA48 | ARCTIC | AUST |
| 2022 | Jan | +0.03 | +0.06 | -0.00 | -0.23 | -0.12 | +0.68 | +0.10 |
| 2022 | Feb | -0.00 | +0.01 | -0.01 | -0.24 | -0.04 | -0.30 | -0.50 |
| 2022 | Mar | +0.15 | +0.28 | +0.03 | -0.07 | +0.22 | +0.74 | +0.02 |
| 2022 | Apr | +0.27 | +0.35 | +0.18 | -0.04 | -0.25 | +0.45 | +0.61 |
| 2022 | May | +0.17 | +0.25 | +0.10 | +0.01 | +0.60 | +0.23 | +0.20 |
| 2022 | Jun | +0.06 | +0.08 | +0.05 | -0.36 | +0.46 | +0.33 | +0.11 |
| 2022 | Jul | +0.36 | +0.37 | +0.35 | +0.13 | +0.84 | +0.56 | +0.65 |
| 2022 | Aug | +0.28 | +0.32 | +0.24 | -0.03 | +0.60 | +0.50 | -0.00 |
| 2022 | Sep | +0.24 | +0.43 | +0.06 | +0.03 | +0.88 | +0.69 | -0.28 |
| 2022 | Oct | +0.32 | +0.43 | +0.21 | +0.04 | +0.16 | +0.93 | +0.04 |
| 2022 | Nov | +0.17 | +0.21 | +0.13 | -0.16 | -0.51 | +0.51 | -0.56 |
| 2022 | Dec | +0.05 | +0.13 | -0.03 | -0.35 | -0.21 | +0.80 | -0.38 |
| 2023 | Jan | -0.04 | +0.05 | -0.14 | -0.38 | +0.12 | -0.12 | -0.50 |
| 2023 | Feb | +0.08 | +0.17 | 0.00 | -0.11 | +0.68 | -0.24 | -0.12 |
| 2023 | Mar | +0.20 | +0.24 | +0.16 | -0.13 | -1.44 | +0.17 | +0.40 |
| 2023 | Apr | +0.18 | +0.11 | +0.25 | -0.03 | -0.38 | +0.53 | +0.21 |
| 2023 | May | +0.37 | +0.30 | +0.44 | +0.39 | +0.57 | +0.66 | -0.09 |
| 2023 | June | +0.38 | +0.47 | +0.29 | +0.55 | -0.35 | +0.45 | +0.06 |
| 2023 | July | +0.64 | +0.73 | +0.56 | +0.87 | +0.53 | +0.91 | +1.43 |
The full UAH Global Temperature Report, along with the LT global gridpoint anomaly image for July, 2023 and a more detailed analysis by John Christy of the unusual July conditions, should be available within the next several days here.
The global and regional monthly anomalies for the various atmospheric layers we monitor should be available in the next few days at the following locations:
Lower Troposphere:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Mid-Troposphere:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt
Tropopause:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt
Lower Stratosphere:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txtâ€
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
According to the graph, that is lower than 2016 and therefor confirms global cooling.
I am dismayed, but not surprised, that not a single CAGW advocate in this thread has addressed the issue I brought up that comparing year-to-year monthly temperatures is comparing WEATHER and not climate. In Kansas this year, July temps were determined by a stagnant high pressure system. Last year July temps were not influenced by such a situation. Attributing the change in anomaly to “CLIMATE CHANGE” is just idiotic in the face of such facts.
Month-to-Month comparisons over any time period you like are highly influenced by the weather patterns in existence when the temperature readings were taken. Unless you can somehow normalize those weather patterns so you are comparing apples-to-apples, trying to tease out a “climate change” signal is a lost cause. And since that holds for *every* month, it means that even annual comparisons using monthly averages are highly influenced by WEATHER! patterns
It is WEATHER PATTERNS that climate science should be recording and studying, not temperatures. Temperature is just a very poor proxy for most anything! Climate science should take heed of what other disciplines are doing such as agriculture science, who are studying first frost and last frost dates across time – i.e. WEATHER PATTERNS (whether they realize that or not). People who live in nature, people like farmers and ranchers, have known this forever. It is weather patterns that are important, not the temperature. The weather pattern includes *all* the variables – wind, humidity, pressure, etc. – as well as temperature.
My guess is that not a single CAGW advocate on here will even understand what I am describing but intentionally not defining.
While driving through central Kansas last week, we experienced the
climateweather pattern firsthand — 105°F in Wichita (40+ °C). But the corn sure likes it, big stalks everywhere, totally green.That corn has been getting a lot of rain.
Send some of that rain this way! 🙂
I went out on the deck and tried flapping my arms to move the rain south – but it didn’t work!
It’s just like every year. Some places are great, some are good, and some are poor. It all depends on the prevailing weather patterns for the year and very little on peak summertime temps.
It’s a global average. So to have the warmest global average July is not just like every other July, is it?
So what does a global average in July tell you. You have made no analysis of the information available.
Remember, it is summer in the NH but winter in the SH. Have both hemispheres warmed an equal amount? Has winter warmed in the SH? Have daytime temps warmed and where?
You jump to conclusions like most climate scientists and journalists.
All the talk is about NH hot temps, but if you read Dr. Spencers blog;
• warmest Southern Hemisphere land anomaly
• warmest July for tropical land (by a wide margin, +1.03 deg. C vs. +0.44 deg. C in 2017).
Doesn’t look like hot NH outside the tropics had a lot to do with the end result!
Do you happen to know what exactly is the definition of “the lower troposphere” is, as defined by the volume of space used to obtain the UAH data?
I also seem to recall it does not cover the highest latitudes but cannot recall the specific cutoff points.
IOW, how high into the atmosphere does this data represent?
It is important to remember that the LT temperature (singular) does not exist because of the lapse rate: air temperature decreases with altitude from the surface.
The NOAA satellite microwave sounding units (MSR) respond to oxygen microwave emissions that vary with temperature and pressure. For the LT, the MSR channels are tuned to respond to O2 emissions corresponding to about 5km, but the finite bandwidth of the detectors results in a Gaussian response (versus altitude) with tails at 0km and 10km. Thus the LT temperature measured is a convolution of this Gaussian and the lapse rate.
Mountainous regions effectively block part of the response Gaussian (Himalayas, Andes, Rockies) which cause the LT numbers to be artificially lower than the rest of the planet.
The biggest weakness IMO is the scanning behavior of the satellites which are (circular) polar orbits with orbital periods of about an hour. Surface spots are scanned as the satellite orbits and the Earth rotates underneath.
The UAH process imposes a spherical grid of 2.5 x 2.5 degrees, which corresponds to a total of 10,000+ scanning bins. As a result, the area of the grid pixels/bins is non-constant and varies with latitude—by a lot. This is a graph of the UAH pixel area from the equator to the poles, which is more than an order-of-magnitude.
Consequences of the scanning geometry:
1) Grid points in polar regions are scanned multiple times each day
2) At latitudes greater than 85 degrees the scan spots overlap and this data isn’t reported
3) By 30 degrees latitude, as many as 3 days can elapse between scans, and is worse in equatorial regions
As a result, the satellites cannot capture daily highs and lows in general, and considerable interpolation is needed to span the data gaps.
At best, UAH can only be considered to be some kind of an index, it certainty isn’t a “global average temperature”. Because of the issues you lay out it’s use as an index is questionable as well.
Instead of considering these technical issues, Bellman accuses us of claiming the UAH is “wrong”, which is another one of his wild fantasies. He simply lacks the necessary skills.
bellman lives in “statistic world”. It has no point of congruency with actual reality.
Wrong is subjective. Is UAH different than surface measurements? Undoubtedly. However it does have a common protocol used throughout and each time. It does allow relative comparisons.
Right, this is its big advantage
Relative comparison of what? Cloud cover? Different cloud cover at any specific point in time at any specific location being scanned then gets translated into irradiance differences which gets translated into temperature differences.
If it is useful as an index then it is only useful down to the significant digit that represents possible cloud cover variation over time. Is that the tens digit? The unit digit? The tenths digit?
Multiple passes over a month provide an averaging function. Remember I only said it allows relative comparisons.
I think the UAH is “wrong” as are all models of temperature. They can’t all be correct or they would all show identical trends. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful.
But if you claim the uncertainty in any monthly value is greater than the entire range over 40 years, and if you claim it’s impossible to know if temperatures are rising or falling over the last 40 years, and if you claim the primary thing it’s measuring a global average has no meaning, you aren’t just saying it’s “wrong”, you are saying it’s useless.
By employing the word “wrong” you reveal your lack of even the most basic skills/knowledge of metrology: an honest measurement is not wrong, it can never be wrong***.
The only way a measurement can be wrong is if the true value is known; you still can’t grasp the concept that true values are unknowable.
In other words, you are still stuck in the mire that uncertainty is error. All indications are you will always be stuck in the mire because of your pseudoscientific agenda.
And you have the temerity to lecture Pat Frank about uncertainty!
***Unlike the common climate science practice of adjusting historic data, which is not honest (i.e. fraudulent) and is thus wrong.
You nailed it!
bellman doesn’t understand the difference between wrong and inaccurate. Never has, never will. Willfully ignorant.
“an honest measurement is not wrong, it can never be wrong”
Ha! Could you point me to the definition of “wrong” in this postmodern engineering dictionary?
To my old fashioned way of thinking it doesn’t matter how honest something is, if it’s wrong it’s wrong.
“Unlike the common climate science practice of adjusting historic data, which is not honest (i.e. fraudulent) and is thus wrong!”
Are you saying UAH doesn’t adjust historic data?
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/version-6-0-of-the-uah-temperature-dataset-released-new-lt-trend-0-11-cdecade/
As I wrote, you will be forever mired in your agenda, unable to grasp these concepts.
Error is defined as the distance a measurement is from the true value of the quantity being measured.
In order to know if a measurement is wrong, i.e. in error, you have to know the true value.
You don’t, something you have never come to grips with.
UAH adjustments are based on known changes in the MSUs and satellite orbits, as clearly stated in the quote you dug out. This is completely and totally different from how the climastrologers twist and distort old air temperature records.
Why is this so hard for you to understand?
“In order to know if a measurement is wrong, i.e. in error, you have to know the true value.”
Knowing it’s wrong and being wrong are not the same thing.
“UAH adjustments are based on known changes in the MSUs and satellite orbits, as clearly stated in the quote you dug out.”
What, including the part which says
“To my old fashioned way of thinking it doesn’t matter how honest something is, if it’s wrong it’s wrong.”
This isn’t old-fashioned thinking, it is new-fashioned thinking, originating with you!
What can be wrong is using the wrong instrument to measure with. What can be wrong is using the wrong protocol to measure. What can be wrong is using the measurement for a purpose for which it isn’t appropriate.
“Are you saying UAH doesn’t adjust historic data?”
Calibrating is not adjusting. In UAH, the actual measurement remains. The conversion process from the measurement to a different product is what changes. UAH doesn’t adjust the base data the way much of climate science does.
See this: “involve decisions regarding methodology, and different methodologies will lead to somewhat different results. This is the unavoidable situation when dealing with less than perfect data.”
Your lack of reading comprehension skills are showing again. The methodology isn’t adjusting the measurement, it is adjusting how it is used. If climate science were to change their methodology to properly account for measurement uncertainty no one would say a thing about it, it would be applauded.
“This isn’t old-fashioned thinking, it is new-fashioned thinking, originating with you!”
You just need to point to your definition of “wrong”. Maybe you are thinking of it in a moral sense. But I’m just using it to mean something that isn’t correct.
If someone honestly thinks 2 + 2 = 5, then they are not a bad person, just factually wrong.
Still it’s good to see you and karlo have progressed from saying Spencer and Christy are producing data that isn’t fit for purpose, and describes something that doesn’t exist – to saying it’s not wrong and can never be wrong.
“If someone honestly thinks 2 + 2 = 5, then they are not a bad person, just factually wrong.”
You just can’t seem to get *anything* associated with the real world right, not even this analogy! Adding constants has nothing to do with measurements.
Measurements would give you something like (2 +/- 0.5) + (2 +/- 0.5). What is the answer for this addition?
“Still it’s good to see you and karlo have progressed from saying Spencer and Christy are producing data that isn’t fit for purpose, and describes something that doesn’t exist – to saying it’s not wrong and can never be wrong.”
You *really* just live in an alternate reality, don’t you? KM and I have *never* said anything other than NONE of the databases are fit for purpose, let alone the analyses done using the data!
Why do you think KM has laid out all the uncertainty factors associated with UAH, or at least the ones able to be discovered?
This has *NOTHING* to do with being wrong. UAH *is* measuring something. Therefore the measurement has to be taken as being correct. Whether it is fit for purpose is a totally different thing. You can measure manhole covers accurately but that doesn’t mean your measurements can be used to determine the size of the sewer pipes below!
UAH consistently measures the same thing everywhere, O2 irradiance, with the same device. Are there vagaries in the measurements? Sure, clouds for one. One must assume that cloudiness over the whole earth occurs consistently. This makes for some uncertainty. Does it measure latent heat? Nope, neither do thermometers. So its not a panacea for determining energy transfer throughout the atmosphere.
The microwave wavelengths (60GHz) used are not effected by clouds.
Of course it’s not. Trends in monthly (and indeed annual) average global temperatures over the long term are strong indicators of change over time.
That’s climate, not weather.
You make an assertion with no explanation. Tell us what you attribute a change to. CO2 by humans? A long term cyclical variation? A change in variance that makes the time series non-stationary?
Malarky! You seem to be trying to say that temperature drives weather instead of the other way around. It is weather that determines temperature. And weather patterns are driven by what?
If you don’t account for weather patterns then you can’t normalize temperature comparisons. If you can’t normalize temperature comparisons then you are comparing apples and oranges. It’s like comparing coastal temperatures with inland temperatures! They have vastly different variances in their temperature data due to differing weather patterns and if you can’t account for that then any comparison of temperatures, including anomalies, is just garbage.
At it’s base it’s why climate science ignoring variances when trying to form averages makes their averages into garbage. If the variances were propagated according to standard statistical practice it would soon become apparent that the variances become so large that any conclusions about the average value is pretty much impossible, especially at the resolution climate science claims (i.e. in the hundredths of a degree).
Good points, Jim.
But Warmistas never did have to concern themselves with such sticky wickets, did they?
After all, they did not look at data and reach conclusions based on them.
Oh, no! The started with the conclusion, fully formed and pre-settled!
Global warming was never a mere hypothesis to them, it was fact, practically a law of nature.
It was only all of Earth history that contradicted the idea.
Leave it to the leftists to dream up a way around that dilemma.
They did what they always have done, they erased history and replaced it with lies.
Luckily, it is not so easy to erase a history etched into all the rocks on every inch of a planet. So much more stubborn that easily-burnable books and such.
How badly wrong you are.
Let us count the ways, and detail them:
The word climate is defined as the thirty-year average of the weather over a specific location on the surface of the Earth.
As such, it has always been specifically used to eliminate any consideration of month to month, and year to year variance. Or even from ne decade to the next.
For a climate to change, the 30 year average has to change.
Also, by definition, the average temperature of the globe has nothing to do with climate. There is no such thing as global climate. Climate refers strictly to conditions in a specific location on the surface.
Therefore, a measurement of anything but local surface temperatures have not got anything whatsoever to do with climate itself, unless it can be shown the entire air column above every point on the surface correlates precisely with the surface temp of that location.
The global warming hypothesis itself, to the extent it has been clearly enunciated by the supplicants of the religion, posits that thermal energy is trapped by CO2 within the atmosphere. Not specific locations and not only on the surface. As such, measurements of the entire atmosphere are of far more relevance when attempting to gather data to confirm or refute the hypothesis.
And let us not forget for even one second that nothing about CO2 concentration in the air, as a heat trapper leading to global warming, and thus the idea that CO2 is the thermostat of the atmosphere, and hence the entire conception of the belief that humans can control the temperature of the Earth, all of that ridiculous string of illogic was only ever a conjecture about heat and thus temperature.
There is not a single part of the belief in CO2 causing global warming that says a single word about “climate change” in general, or any specific climate in particular, let alone the idea that all of Earth has a thing called “global climate”.
There is no such thing as a global climate.
The term is almost an oxymoron.
Climates are defined to mark one region or location as distinct from the rest of the world, or from some other particular place.
Climate is not weather.
The volume of atmosphere which delineates the “lower troposphere” has nothing at all to do with any climate, anywhere.
And what is this malarkey about month over month changes being a “strong” indicator of long term change?
Besides for the Captain Obvious-like nature of observing that month to month change is “a strong indicator” of change, the statement is meaningless.
Every month of different from the previous one. There may in fact be zero months that were identical to the previous one, so how is a month to month change indicative of anything besides for it being a new month?
We have a mechanism to keep the month to month noise from being confused with a trend, and that is the smoothing mechanism denoted by the red line.
One that that can be seen over the entirety of the satellite record is that it frequently happens to be the case, that the sharpest trends are instantly reversed and go the other way in an equally sharp countertrend, which is often of greater or equal magnitude to the previous trend.
The 1998 el nino spike is a great example of this: Prior to the record high in 1998, was a very low value that is nearly the very lowest in the past 25 years. The only month lower in 25 years, in fact, came right after the 1998 high when that trend promptly reversed itself and went right down to a value that was even lower than the low that was reached just prior to 1998.
We went directly from a low value of over -0.4, to the el nino high, right back down to a low that was even farther below -0.4!
Which all by itself proves one thing very clearly…not a speck of that record heat was trapped, since the very next thing that occurred was a lower value than where we were before that spike began!
And by golly, what happened after that?
The commencement of the global-warming-fraud-busting looooooo-oooo-oooo-ng pause in temperatures.
So long, so pause-y, that it forced the adoption of a complete change in alarmist narrative, from global warming to climate change!
But it was not changing!
This was of course before the idea had been dreamed up to call ordinary weather, “climate change.”
Turns out it takes time to dream up new lies, let alone sell them as same as the old lies.
Well stated.
“The word climate is defined as the thirty-year average of the weather over a specific location on the surface of the Earth.”
Who defines it so? Source?
People get confused with the use of a 30-year period for defining climate normals, for use in anomaly calculation. That is a very restricted application.
What is even more astounding for me is that they all seem oblivious to the fact that all of the variability and warming seen in the 43 or so years of the UAH data, is well within the range of variability seen in the previous 120 years, and in fact the amount of overall warming seen over the entire period is roughly identical to the amount of cooling known to have occurred in the decades prior to the start of the UAH data.
Simply stated, even if it is exactly accurate, it only shows a return to the conditions that existed in the 1940s to 1950s.
Additionally, surface data shows very clearly that for nearly every single location on the planet, there have been times in the past when it was both a lot hotter and a lot colder than anything we have recorded recently.
IOW, we are now seeing a long period of reduced variability in local extremes.
Now, what is well known to lead to less extreme temperatures, both warm and cold?
The answer of course is water vapor, the most significant by far of the radiative gasses.
It is entirely logical that a molecule that allows transmission of energy by thermal radiation, will tend to even out temperatures by radiating energy from where it is hot to where it is cold.
But global milding does not sound very scary, does it?
Neither does having less extensive and less frigidly frozen and deathly cold polar wastelands.