The Blackboard

Roy has posted the UAH temperature for August. Despite the death of El Nino, Augusts UAH recorded value rose relative to July. Also, August 2010′s recorded temperature exceeds August 2009′s temperature, making it the 2nd warmest August in the record, and lifting the 12 month average closer to an all time record for 12 month average.

I’d anticipated the 12 month average would begin a steady decline until the start of the next El Nino. But since that appears to be back in play, I’ll show the 12 month average in this months UAH post:

(Note– despite the apple/oranges element of comparing surface temps to UAH, the multi-model mean for A1B is shown. Both observations and projections are use the Jan 1980-Dec 1999 baseline.

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As summer grows old
my red hot peppers ripen
I need recipes!

Tags: gardening, NH ice, Weather
Comments: 331

I just wanted to give a quick shout out for MoshTemp, frequent climate blog commenter Steve Mosher’s new blog. He’s focusing on temperature reconstructions, providing code in R and discussing R issues in general. Welcome to blogging Steve!

Comments: 34

HadCrut and GISTemp have both reported their July anomalies. The HadCrut NH/SH anomaly of 0.529C represents a very slight drop from July’s 0.532; the GISTemp anomaly of 0.55C is a somewhat larger drop from July’s value of 0.58C. Below monthly anomaly values since 1980 are shown for HadCrut, and GISS respectively:

Comments: 166

A recent guest post by Willis Eschenbach over at WUWT addresses the temperature record in Nepal, with a focus on a particular line in the recent IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Working Group 2. In table 10.2.2, the IPCC reports that temperatures in Nepal have been increasing by “0.09°C per year in Himalayas and 0.04°C in Terai region, more in winter”. Unfortunately, they do not provide the period in which this impressive 0.9 C per decade trend holds, and the papers referenced are hard to find, so I figured I’d look at the available temperature records to see 1) if temperatures in Nepal have indeed been warming rapidly and 2) what is the minimum period needed (up to present) to show a warming rate of 0.9 C per century decade.

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Comments: 151

Congratulations to Steve, Ross and Chad for * **McKitrick, Ross R., Stephen McIntyre and Chad Herman (2010) “Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Series” in press at Atmospheric Science Letters. (in press).

Comments: 156

Today, Roger jr asks for a “naive forecast” for a mystery process providing us a data set and ask us how we would create the naive process. The only thing we know about the data is that observations have been made over some periods of time, our goal is to suggest what we would predict based on knowledge of the past observed behavior. The data might be stock prices, wheat futures, height of Illinois corn on August 9, or anything. We don’t know.

I’m game. Since this is a game, I’m not going to provide a lot of caveats for my method.

I’ve provided my “best” naive prediction for future values: Shown in brown. These are based on simple linear extrapolation. No assumption the 52 values are 52 weeks or anything like that. I’m assuming being close to 52 weeks is a coincidence.

(Update: When I updated, I added someone else’s naive projection from Roger’s blog. It was made using “minitab”.)

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Comments: 132

UAH has posted the anomaly for July. At 0.489 C, July is the 2nd hottest July in UAH series 5.3,edged out by July 1998 set the July record at 0.510C. However, it’s still warmer than July 2009′s 0.429C. Those who watched the daily UAH TLT temperatures are not surprised to discover July’s anomaly was warmer than June’s.

The monthly anomalies since 1980 are shown below with July anomalies circled:

Now for the important stuff: Who took home the quatloos?

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Tags: UAH
Comments: 51

Place your on the August UAH value that will be posted at Roy Spencer’s blog in early September bets here:

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Tags: UAH
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Today, I’m going to try something that may reduce the memory problems– but it may also make things worse temporarily. I am going to set “SuperCache” to create a preload cache of every blog post. This could reduce CPU and memory by eventually make the blog deliver static pages when people (and mostly ‘bots and crawlers) hitting the older posts. I’ve got comments closed on all those anyway. It’s a bit wasteful to be using any CPU or memory to run php to deliver those pages to people.

Tags: blogging
Comments: 27