Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my continuing wanderings through the regions cryospherical, I find more side roads than main highways. In my last two posts here and here, I discussed the curious inverse relationship between temperature and ice accumulation rates in Greenland and Antarctica. Wanting to understand the changes in the polar oceans that occur when…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I got to thinking about the idea of a temperature field. By that I mean nothing more than an estimation of theoretical temperatures given some variables like say latitude and elevation. We all know that as we go poleward it gets colder, and the same is true when we go…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach A while back, folks noticed that a couple of months after the El Nino kicked in across the Pacific, the earth would warm up a bit. Since then, people have engaged in what they describe as “removing the El Nino signal” from the global temperature record. A while back I…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been looking again into the satellite rainfall measurements from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM). I discussed my first look at this rainfall data in a post called Cooling and Warming, Clouds and Thunderstorms. There I showed that the cooling from thunderstorm-driven evaporation is a major heat-regulating mechanism in…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Following up on a suggestion made to me by one of my long-time scientific heroes, Dr. Fred Singer, I’ve been looking at the rainfall dataset from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. Here’s s the TRMM average rainfall data for the entire mission to date: Figure 1. Average annual…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been wanting to [take] another look at the relationship between net top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation changes on the one hand and changes in temperature on the other. As a necessary prelude, I finally have gotten round to an oft-postponed task, that of looking at the thermal lag in different areas…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve been thinking about temperature and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) forcing. TOA forcing is the imbalance between the TOA upwelling and downwelling radiation. The CERES satellite dataset contains observations of the TOA radiation imbalance on a gridcell-by-gridcell basis. It is calculated as the downwelling solar radiation for that month by gridcell, minus…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Despite doing lots of research and investigations over the last few weeks, I’ve written little. Well, actually, I’ve published little, although I’ve written a lot. But I didn’t publish what I’d done, there was no wonder in it, no awe. So I tossed it all out and started “simply messing…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach The CERES dataset is satellite data that is based on radiation measurements made from low earth orbit. The CERES data has two parts. The first part is observational data, measurements of downwelling and upwelling solar radiation and of upwelling longwave radiation. It is usually referred as the CERES “top-of-atmosphere” data.…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Anthony has just posted the results from a “Press Session” at the AGU conference. In it the authors make two claims of interest. The first is that there has been a five percent decrease in the summer Arctic albedo since the year 2000: A decline in the region’s albedo –…