GISTemp came it 0.74C which would be a record high November. Not what I expected with La Nina conditions!
This is high enough that I dashed off to clear climate code to see if Nick had ‘predicted’ GISTemp in anticipation. Did anyone else? Anyway, I can’t find any howls and shrieks suggesting someone found this high value was posted as the result of any major error.
Assuming it’s ok, then
- This temperature jumped 0.011C despite the cooling influence of La Nina.
- We’ve set an record high for November.
- The 12 month annual average remains above the record annual average set in Jan-Dec 2005. So, it looks quite likely that the Jan-Dec 2010 average will be a record high annual average anomaly for GISTemp.
- The 12-month average is just slightly below the 12-month multi-model mean for the AR4 models forced using the A1B SRES. Whether the 12-month lagging average GISTemp will end above or below the multi-model mean for 2010 in December is a coin toss! (Well a biased coin. I know the MM of A1B drops a little next month, so GISTemp will just edge out the A1B SRES unless GISTemp plummets in Dec.)
The 12-month lagging averages for GISTemp and A1B are shown below:
Update This is the map from GISS:
Wow. Maybe they quoted Fahrenheit by mistake. UAH and RSS were 0.381 and 0.312 I believe. Is GISS always larger?
Jack–
1) GISS is not always larger than UAH and RSS. Also, if we look using the same baseline, has not been higher than UAH during the El Nino. UAH soared.
2) I’m looking at maps here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/ I’m able to get 1200 km averaging for November, but not 250 km averaging. In the past, the only dramatic mistake was when a reporting agency held over Sept. data in October. (I think those were the months.) It happened for a few stations. If I remember correctly, one saw weird “blips” of horrifically- out of this world hot in the middle of a sea of not so hot. I’m not seeing that so much. But large swatches of siberia and the arctic are shwoing anomalies in the 4-10 C range right now.
Chicago looks fine. It shows us warmer than average– we were warmer than average until about T-Day. (We ain’t now!)
After looking at the map, I googled to see what I read about recent weather in Siberia:
Reuter Nov 16:
OTOH, I find this at wunderground.com:
If Omyakon hit the coldest Nov ave ever measured on earth, I’d imagine it should have a negative anomaly for Nov. Maybe that’s not what that phrase is supposed to imply?
I guess I’ll just wait for the guys who like to access all the various records to access them. For now: GISS says 0.74C.
jacck mosevich (Comment#63633)
December 10th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
Wow. Maybe they quoted Fahrenheit by mistake. UAH and RSS were 0.381 and 0.312
———————————-
It sounds like this might be some sort of mistake, because those are the figures I saw too, which showed a warm November, but not record breaking. I almost would hazard to guess its F or a simple math mistake on the output. Those things happen.
Ben–
I’d be very surprised by a C/F mistake. These things are done using scripts, and the script isn’t going to suddenly make that sort or error. The one time there was a “big” error was when a northerly region sent in Sept temperatures for Oct. temperatures. Since temperature do drop from Sept. to Oct in the north, the input at GISS was too high, and the output was high. This got sorted out and fixed.
Hypothetically, a similar thing could happen at other times, but I think Hansen is having people review stuff before letting it just post, so it seems unlikely to be due to that. So, for now, +0.74. I’m surprised- but that’s what’s posted.
This all sounds as a big baloney and brutal falsification.
First, look at “news”:
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101116/161361525.html
“The mercury rose to 3.7 degrees Celsius (38.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in West Siberia’s Novosibirsk Tuesday overnight, the highest temperature ever registered in the region in November, meteorologists said. The previous temperature record was registered in 2001, when thermometers showed 2.4 degrees Celsius.”
Now look at the historical record for November 2001 {date, Tmean, Tmax, Tmin}:
http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/NOVOSIBIRSK/11-2001/296340.htm
16 6.8 9 2.5
17 7.7 9 6.4
19 5.8 10 3
(all in degrees C)
Monthly Average -2.8 -0.3 -6.5
Now look at a witness account for the same place:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11885379
1 December 2010 Last updated at 10:04 ET
“I live in the capital of Siberia, Novosibirsk. It is situated in the middle of Siberia, closer to Mongolia and Kazakhstan. As far as I remember it was not really bad until couple of years ago. Of course, the normal temperature is range from -20C to -30C, but people do not mind. However, the last two or three years things have totally changed. Last year we ended up having -30C for three months, while before the temperature could only last for a week or so. Is it the fault of climate change? Maybe. Wealthy people are trying to escape winter by going abroad to countries like Thailand and Malaysia. Irina, Novosibirsk, Russia”
I would say the news for the warmest November is BS of GISS. Likely their program has homogenized few missing readings “999.99” as real points, hence the news.
GISS didn’t report the warmest november in Novosibirsk. That was Reuters in a puff piece about pelican’s. I happened to find that when looking for weather in Russia. It at least appears it was warm in parts of Russia– a fact not inconsistent with GISS showing it warm on their map.
Lucia, according to your weather underground link it was only unusually cold in Russia for the last week. So not inconsistent with an abnormally warm month on average.
Funny how most of their scary dark red warming is the arctic, where of course they love transplanting 1200km readings.
Re: lucia (Dec 10 16:45),
“If Omyakon hit the coldest Nov ave ever measured on earth”
Their way of saying it is odd, but I think they just mean O had the coldest temp anywhere in Nov 2010. Which is probably true every year for somewhere in Siberia.
“Funny how most of their scary dark red warming is the arctic, where of course they love transplanting 1200km readings.”
They “love” it? Really, “love”?
I got 0.73 earlier in the week.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/hide-the-incline-with-the-rank-trick/#comment-46297
0.74C ….holy jumpin’. Here is the daily record for Tuktoyaktuk which is on the north coast in the NWT of Canada. Current climatology for Nov is -20C mean. Once you factor the baseline shift with GISS it looks to be valid wrt the dark warming area of the GISS map.
NASA-GISS is standing so far besides their shoes I start to understand why some people do not believe that man was ever on the moon.
Nick-
Thanks! That’s pretty darn close.
Petem–
Well… warming is expected to be greater in the arctic. So, the scary dark red being there would be what’s predicted. It is true that there are fewer measuring stations there– but if they are showing warm weather, then that’s what we are seeing. Also, some of the “scary dark red” is pretty far south in Asia. It’s not all in the arctic.
Yes, land temperatures were very much over the average in my region of the world in November. We had a record warm November with temperatures over 16C degrees at night, often 18C instead of the usual around 10C and over 20C during the day instead of the usual 14C. This was due to a hot wind coming from Africa still seen in its effects in the
SST anomaly. That yellow in the Mediterranean sea was from hot over 20C winds coming from the Sahara and I guess ending up in Siberia.
So the difference with GISS and the satellites must be in the grid methodology of the former, how it finds and averages anomaly. I would trust that the study of satellite data can be a better global integrator. This discrepancy of 0.3C or so gives a measure of the error in this process of using grids to utilize land measurements.
It also highlights what I mean by the non-sense of using anomalies for gauging whether the climate is warming or cooling. My part of the world has about the same anomaly for November as Siberia, but not only you could swim in our seas, they stayed 18C, in contrast to the near 0 temperatures of Siberia. In addition we probably radiated about 40Watts/m^2 more than Siberia, which says that anomalies say little about energy budgets. They are a bit like gypsy prophesies: “you will meet a tall dark man in three terms ” ) term could be week, month, year ) 🙂 .
The Siberian winds came down this weekend and we have temperatures between -2 and 3C all day long. It will settle to around 5Cmin 8Cmax in the rest of the week, lower than normal but not too bad.
Lucia, if the Arctic is expected to be quite warm, why doesn’t DMI seem to agree with GISS? The Antarctic doesn’t agree either according to NOAA maps.
The Antarctic has it’s own special reasons for being different, such as the polar vortex.
Re: bugs (Dec 11 00:47),
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a_30frames.fnl.anim.html
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Neither of those products appear to agree with GISS.
Also, the expectation during El Nino is for the LT temperature to rise rapidly; comparing that to SAT is mixing apples to oranges.
The temperature did rise during El Nino. That is clear from the temperature record. Then when the La Nina appeared, it started to drop again.
??? The DMI page is pointing to daily means.
Notably, the November anomaly in the Antarctic continues the trend that was highlighted by Steig and (apparently) in the recent paper by O’Donnell. The “Western” part, especially the Peninsula, keeps getting hotter fast.
I thought you just explained why you can use anomalies to indicate if it’s warming or cooling.
NCEP / NCAR reconstruction for november 2010:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/6043/compday8422615035344158.gif
Polar view of GISTEMP:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=11&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=11&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=pol
“Wow. Maybe they quoted Fahrenheit by mistake. UAH and RSS were 0.381 and 0.312 I believe. Is GISS always larger?”
http://www.woodfortrees.org/notes#baselines
“Well, the problem arises because the four series use three different baseline periods (UAH and RSS use the same). Here are the baseline periods as reported by each source:”
0.381 UAH = 0.621 GISTEMP
Re: bugs (Dec 11 02:20),
Check you logic gauge. Both Greece and Siberia had a positive anomaly, but the heat content, what controls if the climate is cooling or heating is strongly different. What is the meaning of averaging such disparate heat contents except as a wet finger to the wind?
Bob Tisdale has a post on GISS treatment of the arctic area 65N northwards. Tisdale explains that GISS uses highly variable land surface temperature anomalies and 250 km smothing and deletes sea surface temperatures. Isn’t it plausible that this practice could create odd jumps like this?
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/05/giss-deletes-arctic-and-southern-ocean.html
They are on the same planet, with the same forcings. Local areas won’t respond identically, but the story is consistent with time, it’s getting warmer. The IPCC report does not assume that surface temperature alone is enough to tell the story, nor that the research into where the energy is transferred and why is complete.
Global warming appears to be mainly happening where no people live…..
I don’t believe that Sout america is that warm.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp8.html It was collored bleu all month. Also Nethelands was .2 colder than normal not warmer.
And the UK was blue, ergo: AGW is a hoax!
Niels A Nielsen
But it isn’t just the arctic that’s warm in Nov. That region of dark red extends down almost to Greece, and it’s surrounded by an outline of bright red. And AnnaV says it was warm in Greece. So, we don’t have anyone saying that the map seems wrong where they live. (It seems right for the Chicago area. I checked. 🙂 )
What a load of bollocks – completely unsupported, except in Hansen’s imagination. I think they will come to regret this in the next year..
Hi Neven, You are good with the new US color codes. Would you please tell us how the commies got the blue color of truth and the patriots got the color red, of the commies? For the life of me, I just can’t figure it out. Tell us what you know. I am sure it will be a good story. Who, gets to pick these things…? Probably just a commie poll.)
But that will still have bearing on sea levels where people live.
Niels:
(Inline link added by me.)
I guess this is a question for Nick Barnes….if he’s still listening.
Is this really true? Does GISS really delete sea surface data and replace them with land data?
If so, it sounds like an issue with how GISTEMP computes temperature.
Patty cake patty cake, Hansen’s man
Bake me a temp record fast as you can
Smear the heat and mark it in red
Throw it on the web , see hot like we said
AngusPangus (Comment#63668)
December 11th, 2010 at 6:27 am
Global warming appears to be mainly happening where no people live…
Angus,
Local Unobserved “Warming” 😉
Andrew
I have noticed that the tropospheric satellite temperatures are generally higher (often significantly) than the surface temperatures during a strong el nino, but lower than the surface temps during a strong la nina. I’m not sure why this is, but it seems to be a consistent pattern in recent years. See http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/offset:-.24/from:1995/mean:5/plot/rss/from:1995/mean:5/plot/uah/from:1995/mean:5 for behavior during the1998 and 2010 el ninos and the 1998 la nina.
The 2010-2011 la nina is already one of the deepest since 1975 ( see http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/ ). Surface temps at this time may well remain higher than rapidly falling tropospheric temps, as is characteristic of la nina conditions.
Owen–
Yes. Sattellite data appears more variable. It’s also not precisely the surface temperature, so the difference may very well be real and based on the somewhat different physics.
Carrick, take a look at the discussion of Tisdales post at Watts. Nobody in the discussion seems to be disputing that Giss deletes available sea surface temperature data wherever there is seasonal icecover and uses land based measurements and 1200 km smoothing instead. GISS in a way inflates the land area and deflates the ocean area by using this procedure, as I understand it.
Bob Tisdale writes: “By deleting the Sea Surface Temperature anomaly data, GISS relies on the dataset with the greater month-to-month variation and the much higher temperature anomaly trend for its depictions of Arctic temperature anomalies. This obviously biases the Arctic “combined†temperature anomalies in this area.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/31/giss-deletes-arctic-and-southern-ocean-sea-surface-temperature-data/
Lucia, take a look at this picture:
http://i50.tinypic.com/28j9u6u.jpg
The bulk of the dark red matches the areas framed in purple by Tisdale where GISS deletes arctic sea surface temperature data and instead uses land based measurements and smoothing.
The argument used to be GISS was in “good agreement” (ala Tamino’s spaghetti graphs) with all other global temperature products. Is that still the case or has the paradigm shifted to everyone else is wrong?
It has been argued that GISS Arctic temps match DMI Arctic temps for the “long term trend” and that DMI actually has a higher trend. However, the two quite clearly have nothing in common since at least 2005, and in 2010 they are completely disconnected.
Dr. Hansen said in 2005 that ocean heat content was the true measure of global warming, the ubiquitous “smoking gun” based on “precise” ocean data. Has that been scrapped now in favor of unmeasured data?
slimething (Comment#63692) December 11th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
“Dr. Hansen said in 2005 that ocean heat content was the true measure of global warming, the ubiquitous “smoking gun†based on “precise†ocean data. Has that been scrapped now in favor of unmeasured data?”
Ocean heat content measurements inconveniently flattened.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2009-time-series/ohc
On Steven Goddard’s Blog
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/page/2/
we can see the graph that Luzia does not dare to show us: How the anomalies of UAH, RSS and CRU go steeply down and the one of GISS goes steeply up.
Bearing in mind the massive and ongoing expansion of the Chinese economy and its attendant aerosol black and brown carbon emissions, is it at least possible that GISTEMP is picking up a non-CO2 anthropogenic forcing?
The extent of the Chinese ‘brown cloud’ seems to be hard to pin down, but it looks at least plausible that it might be a contributory factor here. Studies (including Hansen) suggest that its sign will be positive (see below).
I am aware of the methodological issues with GISTEMP at higher Northern latitudes as examined by Bob Tisdale and others.
It is obviously vital to quantify CO2 forcing accurately to avoid inflating the estimate of climate sensitivity.
Warming trends in Asia amplified by brown cloud solar absorption (Ramanathan et al. 2007)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7153/full/nature06019.html
[Emphasis added.]
Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos, Hansen and Nazerenko, PNAS (2003).
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/2/423.long
[Emphasis added.]
Re: Alexej Buergin (Dec 11 15:23),
Steve Goddard’s plot does not have the anomalies on the same base and uses some unspecified smoothing. Here is a plot on the same base and without smoothing. Nothing special uppish about GISS – it has gone up in the last two months against the trend, but went down steeply Mar-June.
I love the way these guys color their maps.
The data is accurate enough to show a range of 0.3 deg as yellow (ie 0.2 to 0.5), but they show everything from 4 to 10 degrees – a range of 6 deg – as uniformly threatening deep deep scarlet.
“But that will still have bearing on sea levels where people live.”
I don’t think Siberia being warm or the northern sea ice melting raises sea level. Point to me on a map where you have any evidence of this or apologize for fear mongering.
In the meantime: Weather Service Warns of 8-State Midwest Blizzard in the US of A.
Carrick, when available sea surface temperature anomalies are discarded in the entire area where the annual sea ice melt occurs and these stable anomalies are replaced by highly variable land surface temperature anomalies (also at times of the year where there is open ocean at a spot and available sea surface measurements), that will introduce considerable extra variability into the combined product and it may lead to, or contribute to, odd jumps in the anomaly reports for the combined global product that is not a reflection of real temperature fluctuations. Isn’t that true?
The difference in varability between land surface anomalies and sea surface anomalies is huge:
http://i46.tinypic.com/1zpheme.jpg
Nick Stokes (Comment#63703)
If I would be looking at your curves without knowing what they represent, I would throw out GISS as an outlier. But knowing that it is GISS, I would throw it out because it is GISS.
liza (Comment#63709
You and Luzia pretend to be naive. What AngusPangus was saying is: One cannot cheat as easily with temperatures of places where many people live; they might protest.
Nick Stokes (Comment#63703)
December 11th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Eyeballing that chart, it looks like GISS currently is ~0.1-0.15 deg warmer than everyone else. Since warming is ~ 0.15 deg/decade, I guess Hansen really is a man ahead of his time…or at least his database is. 🙂
Anyway, in all seriousness, since these month-to-month and year-to-year numbers are for all intents and purposes “headline” numbers, (“Step right up folks and look at the W-A-A-A-RMEST YEAR EVE-R-R-R-R!!!”), which of those databases do you figure will show 2010 as a record year?
(I’ve got my hunch.)
Happening fastest, anyway. That’s the full half of the glass. The empty half would be that global warming is happening fastest where there is the potential for a huge swing in the albedo as well as multi-gigaton stores of frozen carbon (http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2010/12/post_209.html).
Oh balogna! Robert. Stick your gloom and doom where the sun don’t shine. lol
This website says that Alaskan wildlife depends on wildfires.
http://www.wc.adfg.state.ak.us/index.cfm?adfg=fire.fire5
And the wooly mammoths didn’t have fire departments did they? So wild fires in the Earth’s past could have burned for months and even years over vast areas of land.
Is there any reason why the satellite sensors record El Ninos so prominently? I thought I saw a presentation somewhere (can’t remember where) which said that there is a specific reason for this.
Robert (Comment#63715)-“where there is the potential for a huge swing in the albedo”
You are forgetting the fact that radiatively speaking albedo is highly misleading, as sure, there will be less reflected radiation percentage wise, but that percentage is of the part of the world where the least radiation is incident anyway.
“as well as multi-gigaton stores of frozen carbon”
This concern ignores several facts that suggests that this effect is greatly overestimated:
Firstly, that despite the idea that this should cause large amounts of methane to suddenly be released, methane concentrations have seen a general decline in their derivative, that is they seem to be rising slower over the years, rather than faster.
Second, recent research suggests that the thaw of permafrost from increasing air temperatures could be significantly offset as changing vegetation-due to warmer air temperatures-actually cools down the soil temperatures:
Blok, D., M.M.P.D. Heijmans, G. Schaepman-Strub, A.V. Kononov, T.C. Maximov, and F. Berendse. 2010. Shrub expansion may reduce summer permafrost thaw in Siberian tundra. Global Change Biology, 16, 1296–1305.
Indeed, Blok et al actually say:
“Global temperature data show that the mean annual air temperature in northeast Siberia increased by 1.5–2°C between 2001 and 2007, compared with the 1951–1980 average. This is much higher than the observed 0.5°C average global surface temperature rise during this period. Permafrost temperature records, however, do not show a general warming trend during the last decade, despite large increases in surface air temperature. Data from several Siberian Arctic permafrost stations do not show a discernible trend between 1991 and 2000. Our results suggest that an expansion of deciduous shrubs in the Arctic triggered by climate warming may buffer permafrost from warming resulting from higher air temperatures.â€
Thirdly, more sophisticated permafrost models also suggest that this idea is blown out of proportion:
Delisle, G. 2007. Near-surface permafrost degradation: How severe during the 21st century? Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L09503, doi:10.1029/2007GL029323.
Previous models only went about 10 feet deep with rather thick “layers” this one used 600 layers going down some one hundred yards. The results from this effort suggest:
“Based on this result and on the presented analysis, it appears that all areas north of 60°N will maintain permafrost at least at depth. North of 70°N, surface temperature values today are in general below -11°C. These areas should maintain their active layer. It appears unlikely that almost all areas with near-surface permafrost today will lose their active layer within the next 100 yearsâ€
Re: John M (Dec 12 10:44),
John, that plot is from this post, where I maintain this tracking plot. And it says, yes, GISS is likely to be a record, NOAA a good chance, and UAH a slight possibility.
Eyeballing, yes, if you slide GISS forward 3 months, it does fit better with the others. Ahead of its time.
Nick Stokes (Comment#63719)
You say that GISS is 3 month ahead of its time. So what you are prognosticating is that the others will show a steep increase of temperature in February 2011. Most of us here believe the contrary; due to La Niña, 2011 will be cooler.
DMI shows that the Arctic north of 80 deg has been unusually cool (compared to last decade) last few months. At the same time ESRL has been showing quite warm conditions on the edge of the Arctic, and the sea ice extent has been at near record low. This reflects synoptic patterns that have had some quite big surges of southerlies reach the outer Arctic, but none of them seem to penetrate very deep. I suspect that November was a month with a warm Arctic edge, and cooler middle, and that GISS has overestimated Arctic warmth due to its 1200km extrapolation.
Of course in other months GISS will make opposite errors that will tend to cancel out, unless for some reason there is a long term trend towards more warming in the outer Arctic, and less warming in the central Arctic.
Michael Hauber:
I think this is true, too.
Some here are likely to defend to the death GISTEMPs right to extrapolate 1200-km. I see it as problematic, but the errors it produces “average out in the wash”.
I don’t think that any of the standard reconstructions are reliable for periods of less a year.
“We use ocean temperature change only in regions that are ice-free all year (a map of this area is included in the Appendix), because our data set is intended to be temperature change of surface air. Surface air temperature (SAT), measured at heights of 1.25-2 meters at meteorological stations, is of most practical significance to humans and it is usually SAT change that is reported in climate model studies. Change of sea surface temperature (SST) should be a good approximation to change of SAT in ice-free ocean areas; climate model simulations [Hansen et al., 2007] suggest that long-term SAT change over ice-free ocean is only slightly larger than SST change. However, ocean water temperature does not go below the freezing point of water, while surface air temperature over sea ice can be much colder. As a result SST change underestimates SAT change when sea ice cover changes. Indeed, most climate models find that the largest SAT changes with global warming occur in regions of sea ice [IPCC, 2007]. Thus we estimate SAT changes in sea ice regions by extrapolating actual SAT measurements on nearby land or islands; if there are no stations within 1200 km we leave the temperature change undefined.”
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper/gistemp2010_draft0803.pdf
The trouble with this logic is that while temperatures above the ice may be colder than the ice, temperatures on shore can be warmer.
It’s my impression in general that the temperatures used by GISTEMP for the high arctic trend higher than the air temperature reported by the buoys.
My concerns about the accuracy of intraannual variability as reported by GISTEMP comes from studying it’s temperature fluctuation spectrum. Compared to NCDC’s reconstruction (which I personally think is done in a much less ad hoc fashion), even annual variability seems suppressed by GISTEMP.
In other words, “it just gets it wrong.”
(If you want to view GISTEMP as a tool to measure long-term climate change, that it might be in error in reporting short-period climate fluctuation isn’t much of an issue. If the tool wasn’t designed to measure something, and accurately measures what it was intended to measure, you can hardly criticize it on that account.)
There was really warm in november in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Anomaly map for november in Central Europe (1961-1990 baseline):
http://gfspl.rootnode.net/BLOG/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/201011.png
It’s made from CLIMAT reports and other data. Mean anomaly for this region hit in november +2.1C.
There was +4.4 deg.C anomaly in Moscow (1971-2000 baseline), +7.5 in Verhojansk, and “only” +1.3 in Ojmiakon. There was much cooler at the end of this month, in fact anomalies for 1-25 nov was about 9-10 deg.C in Verhojansk. November temperature anomaly in Nuuk (Greenland) hit 5 deg.C.
Verhojansk:
november 2010:
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsynres?lang=en&ind=24266&ano=2010&mes=11&day=30&hora=23&min=0&ndays=30
november 2009:
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsynres?lang=en&ind=24266&ano=2009&mes=11&day=30&hora=23&min=0&ndays=30
December is really cooler than november, but in Ojmiakon 1-12 dec 2010 is about 6.4 deg.C warmer than normal. There was an unusually warm at 11dec, when temperature rose up to -8 deg.C (32 deg. C above normal max for this day, daily mean temp was about 24 deg.C above normal).
http://pogoda.ru.net/monitor.php?id=24688
GISStemp results always are what Hansen needs them to be to get press coverage for his “trains of death” advocacy message.
Whatever credibility GISS may have had went down the drain in several gurgles years ago [h/t CA] and I can’t for the love of me understand why we are still discussion this junk as if it were serious science.
@tetris
This is very funny, because GISS has much lower anomalies than UAH in 2010 (jan-nov with respect to the same baseline).
pd
One of the fundamental rules of data management/statistics is to discard the outliers.
When you have a source like GISS coming in with anomaly values that are some 200% above other relaible and continuous data sources, you simply discard. You don’t engage in a to-and-fro about whether they actually are meaningful.
Well that map is definitely strange in north and east France .
They appear yellow-orange while the region has beaten cold records this year .
Orleans measured in november – 15°C what is an anomaly of 22°C and was the coldest temperature measured since WWII .
The profile of november temperatures was steep – coming from average temperatures beginning november to siberian temperatures end november .
The november monthly anomaly for Orleans is around – 4 or – 5 °C.
December sofar is around 10°C below average and what is announced for this week is a cold wave that should be even icier than what we have right now .
So no , on the color scale of the map , N and E France should be dark blue .
@tetris
“When you have a source like GISS coming in with anomaly values that are some 200% above other relaible and continuous data sources, you simply discard.”
UAH november anomaly is about 0.17 lower than GISS (with the same base period).
UAH was +0.38 for 1979-1998 period, and GISTEMP is 0.73 for 1951-1980 period. GISS november anomaly for 1979-1998 period is +0.18, so GISS anomaly for november 2010 with respect to 1979-1998 period is about +0.55, 0.17 higher than UAH.
Jan-Nov 2010 has average temperature anomaly +0.53 in UAH and +0.66 in GISS. When we change base period for GISS to 1979-1998, we will get anomaly about +0.45 for GISS. So for jan-nov 2010 GISS is about 0.08 LOWER than UAH.
So, i don’t know what are you talking about.
@TomVonk
Cold was only last days in november. The rest of the month was quite warm:
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsynres?lang=en&ind=07249&ano=2010&mes=11&day=30&hora=23&min=0&ndays=30
You can calculate your own average temperatures from SYNOP reports.
If you check CLIMAT reports, then you see that anomalies in France were very different (but remember that anomalies are in respect to 1961-1990 base period, not 1951-1980)
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gclimat?lang=en&mode=1&state=France&ind=07249&ord=REV&verb=no&year=2010&mes=11&months=
Re: TomVonk (Dec 13 05:12),
The Ogimet site has the CLIMAT records for France (and other countries) for November 2010. Orleans is not there, but here are some other towns in N and E France:
  Town (Mean daily Temp Nov( (Ave 1961-90)
  Abbeville 6.3 6.7
  Lille         6.1     6.2
  Reims     6.6     6.0
  Rouen     5.9     6.4
Pretty much average.
pd
You appear to be using “Carrick’s Law” which states that the period over which something is measured shall be such as to support the argument being made. Are you serious expecting anyone with a basic understanding of stats to buy into comparing UAH 1979-1998 data with 1951-1980 GISS data with 1979-1998 GISS data and Jan-N0v 2010 data?
The GISS November anomaly is some 200% off the other sources, therefore an outlier: discard.
@Nick Stokes
And anomalies for Germany (with respect to 1961-1990)
http://www.bernd-hussing.de/Archivdateien/Klima112010.htm
And 1-12 December
http://www.bernd-hussing.de/TT13.jpg
@tetris
So, your way to compare this both datasets is comparing with different base periods? Nice.
Nick Stokes
As anyone who lives in Western/Northern Europe knows from daily experience, over the past weeks many new temp lows have been established, in a good number of cases new absolutes. Snow in southern Sweden as early as October 19th? The UK frozen solid and the Netherlands likewise? Minus mid-20sC in central and eastern France? Some 40 people frozen to death in Poland, and the list goes on.
Most of us understand that weather is not climate [unless of course when there are highs to be held up as “proof” of AGW], but the proverbial “boots on the ground” right now tell us something quite different than GISS “adjusted” calculations. In any event, the GISS number is an outlier and should simply not be counted.
tetris–
But this weeks temperatures will be reflected in December’s average, not November’s.
Yes, that’s there on the map. It is not so significant compared to the much larger areas of warming.
@tetris
“GISS “adjusted†calculations”
If you don’t like “Carrick’s Lawâ€, you can run ccc-gistemp on 1979-1998 base period.
UAH Jan-Nov 2010: +0.53
GISS Jan-Nov 2010: +0.42
@lucia
Yes, it’s quite cold in Poland now, and december will be below average (about 4 deg as i think), but november was very warm. This was sceond or third time in november in last 60 years, when temperature in Wroclaw was higher than +19 deg C.
Were Russia and Siberia so hot just days before this chart or is GISStemp enhanced by 1200km smoothing?
Compare surface temps in this chart and you cant help wonder should temperatures not be represented by combining different methods? – currently most of the world is cold and it did not just begin in december
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_30a.rnl.html
PKERR–
Maybe they were warm and then got cold. Chicago was warm early in November, we’re now suffering arctic blasts. November is always a variable month here, and I had to look up our weather forecasts to see if I thought the map was about right for Chicago. It’s so cold *now* (mid-dec) that it’s really hard to remember what it was like in mid-nov.
I do know it was cold *by thanksgiving* because we thought the turkey might freeze in the garage when we were brining it. But at that time, we also knew it has been warm very recently– because we grilled and didn’t put the grill away until after thanksgiving. (We like to grill our turkey.)
what is the GISS team saying: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2010november/
IMHO, carrick got it right: GISTEMP was designed for discovering long term, large area temperature trends and it was designed 25 years ago. (Jim Hansen must be a genius that the approach shows its “evil effect” now ! And that is working even with open source, documentation, complete raw data, free reimplementations etc., wow. ) That is particularly true for 1200km smoothing. Using the 250km radius, like the GISS team showed in the article (only the land stations), we find the extremes very nicely.
Now the punchline: in contrast to that idea of GISTEMP, “skeptics” always debate with short-term, local data. That is wrong, simply dishonest, and tedious.
@lucia
the 250km radius version is working fine. It’s climate science, take your time 😉
tetrtis:
You don’t have to be an a$$hole.
I explained why I used the interval I used. If you can’t follow, admit it.
Carrick (Comment#63682): You asked Nick, “Is this really true? Does GISS really delete sea surface data and replace them with land data?”
Carrick, I wouldn’t manufacture something like that. In the post, there’s a link to the GISS webpage where GISS explains that they in fact delete SST data. They also update it. In the event a grid has ice one month, it is, from that moment on, considered land.
Dominic (Comment#63699): You wrote, “It is obviously vital to quantify CO2 forcing accurately to avoid inflating the estimate of climate sensitivity.”
It’s also vital to account for the secondary effects of ENSO properly, and most analyses do not. Twenty-five percent of the global ocean surface area (60S-65N, 80E-180) can warm (cumulatively) in response to El Nino and La Nina events when an El Nino is followed by a La Nina. See the following post and the links within it:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/06/la-nina-is-not-opposite-of-el-nino.html
Also, the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension is a secondary source of El Nino-released heat, and that release takes place during the La Nina. This prevents No Hemisphere temperature anomalies from dropping fully during the La Nina.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/12/enso-related-variations-in-kuroshio.html
Hi Bob,
I wasn’t doubting your claim, just looking for something definitive on it. CCE provided that with his post.
just_me–Yes. I saw the 250km is displaying this morning. It wasn’t displaying when I posted. I don’t know if they suppress display if they don’t have enough data or what. But I had wanted to see it to see if there were obvious “red dots” in the middle of “blue seas” or vice versa. That’s what we saw the time the GHCN had been supplied Sept data in October for a few regions and so downstream computations were mistaken.
This is simply untrue.
Well… maybe it would be wrong to only discuss whatever length you consider “short term”, but skeptics don’t do it. You are either mistaken or… simply…. uhmm… what are those adjectives starting with “d” and “t”… let me think…
Lucia, some of the skeptics do gravitate towards short-term, local data. Watts blog is full of posts that do exactly this.
Then again so do the warmingists like Joe Romm (think summer heat waves in Russia).
The main part I disagree with “just me” on is the use of the word “always”. I’d say “frequently” instead, and I would disagree that it’s just skeptics.
I couldn’t even just say laypeople because Romm, as a physicist, should know better but either doesn’t or doesn’t care.
In terms of GISTEMP, by the way, it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that they smooth out the true intraanual variability, just compare them against other reconstructions… for periods less than one year their reconstruction looks like 1/f noise (no peaks at 1/2, 1/3, … year periods for example).
Lucia,
I was referring to November temps. Not December temps.
FYI: All across Europe [except Greece for some reason – thsi may or may not have to do with their economy- who knows] November was overall one of the very coldest in record. I have been just outside of Nice, France,for the past 6 weeks and the folks around here are starting to realize that this is the 4th year in a row – just like the UK- that temps are way below the norm. And yes, we all know that weather is not climate, but when the great unwashed start paying attention -like here and on our island off the BC coast where all those who have gardens have noticed a delay in plant development over the growing season since 2006-2007, that`s way more real than counting pro milles in anomalies.
Carrick,
My comment about your `statistical` methods should not lead you to telling me to take a leak -as you did last week- or classifying me as one of your orrifices.
You and a good number of other commentators of your ilk think nothing of comparing apples to oranges to grapefruits in order to make your point¸-invariably something to the effect that AGW or ACC is real. Lemons, Carrick. Lemons.
And pls remember the thing about manners. This is the third time you are calling me names. As Lucia`s favourite Viscount might have it and in my family too: you keep this up and I`ll see you next week one early morning, and since you are the one calling me names, my choice of hardware.
Bugs
I trust you mean the oceans -Argos data notwithstanding- or Antarctica -ref. Steig et .al. Or maybe McIntyre and his equally qualified compadres just shot that one out of the air..
I gather you are still suggesting that Hansen`s data is credible. Faith is a hard thing to reform.
Carrick–
But just me used the word “always”. There was no “some” or “sometimes” in there. It’s bad enough that people can’t agree who is or is not a “skeptic” or what it means. But it’s worse if people start saying “skeptics” (whoever the might be) “always” do “x” with “x” being some sort of bad dishonest thing.
Tetris–
Just remembers, all duels must be fought at Weehauken, NJ. That’s a rule.
Carrick– I haven’t been watching for name calling. If you’ve been doing it, stop. (If others have been doing it, stop that too.)
I highly recommend watching The Duellists, before you guys actually duel. 😉
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075968/
Andrew
@Lucia -thanks , yes of course , but Dec will be interesting bet
@Carrick – weather watching is so interesting (unless its the summer and then it seems to be clmate)and eventually it may tell you something about the climate.
In this case that many of the most most populated parts of the world are not affected by progressive global warming in this past decade
Lucia,
I have plenty of frequent flyer points and N.J would be no problem. 🙂
And we would of course need a qualified umpire… You`re it. 🙂
Andrew_KY
I know the movie very well, indeed. Very real in all its dimensions and highly recommended to all on this thread. If Lucia hasn`t seen it, she might want to make a point of doing so.
Without going into details, over the past decades I`ve found that challenging someone to back up his bluff with something more substantial than mere words tends to focus the mind. Somewhat like asking the true eco warriors to actually live the way they preach. Not just us other folks, but they themselves. 🙂
tetris,
I hear you. But we have to be patient with our Eco-Warrior friends. Facing up to and then recovering from serious error is not always easy. One hand should not have a weapon in it, but be open so we can help lift them up when the time comes.
Andrew
This proves again that anomalies are rubbish and that it is impossible to take the temperature of the Earth.
That would be the RHI (Rural Heat Island) factor. I wonder where I can apply for a $1 Mio grant to investigate that?
Once again, this is an outrage. The GISS temperature is in direct option to RSS, UAH and HADCRUT. What are the measurements even based on, I know they are not based on thermometer data…
I’m just going to start using “paint” like GISS does, click the paint bucket tool (color blue of course) and dump it all over the map and say, “oh looky, temperatures are rapidly falling”.
Lucia, let me answer your question. I am skeptic because I found out Michael Mann made a fake graph and then the editors of Nature and Science were found to be rejecting papers simply because they are in opposition to global warming science.
Of course, this goes hand in hand with what I have been saying to deaf ears all this time. Scientists who support global warming do not want people to know that there has been more co2 in the atmosphere and they do not want people to know that the temperature has been higher, especially in the MWP because there was no significant human contribution of ghgs. And this defeats the entire global warming hypothesis because data exists that shows a 1000 ppm drop off of carbon dioxide, accompanied by a 7 degree increase in temperature. Can’t wait to read why I am wrong and how this must be a result of oil companies tampering with temperature records.
Ah! Handbags at dawn, wherez me popcorn?
Why aren’t there any error bars when it comes to institues that issue global temperatures?
Tetris:
It wasn’t a comment about statistic methods, it was demand from you that I do a calculation for you. If you think the calculation is interesting, perform it and post the results.
Stop saying “waiting for Carrick to…” and just do it yourself.
LOL.
“Commentators of my ilk”? I suppose we’re to take that as an example of your “polite” behavior.
How about your “polite” little cross posting to this thread about me and my statistical methods:
I think that’s where I suggested you were behaving poorly. The descriptor may not have been politely crafted, but it was apt, and it wasn’t name calling.
I see no reason to pretend civility towards people like you. If you want somebody to hold your hand, get a girlfriend.
PKERR:
I like to watch weather, in fact I do research involving violent weather.
My comment about GISTEMP and weather is more about using the right tool.
GISTEMP wasn’t really designed for this task, and I think is an inappropriate application for it.
Hoi Polloi:
One of my complaints too.
I’ll point out that NCDC does post error bars.
“Global warming seems to be happening where few people live”
Here in Wrexham (North Wales, UK) temps have varied from -10c to +8c in the space of a few days.
When I was a geography student there was an understanding that the ‘Trade Winds’ as they were then called, would periodically shift and introduce colder air across Europe and other areas. The corollary was that the Arctic would be warmer.
How many measuring stations did GISS have in the Arctic back in the 1960s, for example, compared to now? What are its supposed anomalies based upon?
GISS has a new page up discussing how their November reading came out high despite cold spells in some densely inhabited places.
James Hansen got out of jail long enough to put up another page?
Nick Stokes (Comment#63771): On the page you linked, GISS notes, “The extreme warmth in Northeast Canada is undoubtedly related to the fact that Hudson Bay was practically ice free. In the past, including the GISS base period 1951-1980, Hudson Bay was largely ice-covered in November. The contrast of temperatures at coastal stations in years with and without sea ice cover on the neighboring water body is useful for illustrating the dramatic effect of sea ice on surface air temperature. Sea ice insulates the atmosphere from ocean water warmth, allowing surface air to achieve temperatures much lower than that of the ocean. It is for this reason that some of the largest positive temperature anomalies on the planet occur in the Arctic Ocean as sea ice area has decreased in recent years.”
To maintain a point that has been presented throughout this thread, that conclusion could/should be rewritten as, “It is for this reason that some of the largest positive temperature anomalies on the planet occur in the Arctic Ocean” where GISS deletes sea surface temperature data (including the Hudson Bay) and replaces it with land surface data, which has naturally occuring higher variability and trend.
As discussed above
GISS seem keen to explain the GIS temp and the new page along with the 250km image is easy to understand with regard to the ice free areas giving disproportionately high readings compared to earlier last century. Is that not a flaw in methodology?
With regard to the the 2sd margin of error going back in time it is obviously much larger given how few sations there was in those areas
Hansen himself had much to say on these matters in his 1987 publication when he discussed the global surface air record –
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1987/1987_Hansen_Lebedeff.pdf
‘The number of stations as a function of time is shown in
Figure 4,’quite limited in the polar regions early 20th century, and much discussion re
‘the ambiguity inherent in combining sea surface temperatures with surface air station data’
A very interesting comment on the maps displaying data from higher latitiudes which must be still relevant
‘The greatest warming occurs in the Arctic, but note that the area of that region is exaggerated by the map projection.’
Bob Tisdale:
Yes I would agree with this… replacing marine temperature with land would tend to do both of these. My argument that you can “just wait” and average longer periods doesn’t fix the effect of the introduced bias in the GISTEMP measurements.
I like to watch the weather too. It’s friggin’ cold here.
The Squiggly Line says it’s warming, though. 😉
Not today.
Andrew
KY Climate Report Dec 14:
“Departure From Normal:
MAXIMUM -23
MINIMUM -16
AVERAGE -19”
Andrew
tetris (Comment#63729) December 13th, 2010 at 3:39 am
GISStemp results always are what Hansen needs them to be to get press coverage for his “trains of death†advocacy message.
Complete nonsense since Gistemp can be independently calculated by anyone, in fact Nick Stokes came out with the November value before GISS announced it.
Sorry Nick Barnes not Nick Stokes!
“Gistemp can be independently calculated by anyone”
Yes, Phil. But do you know if the numbers are accurate?
Andrew
Phil,
What is the point of calculating the temperature if the data is faulty? Tetris, you are of course exactly right. Once again, this ties in with other scientists trying to eliminate the MWP. Tetris, it really isn’t worth arguing with Phil if he is going to defend GISS. There is a significant loss of credibility attributed to anyone who tries to defend GISS measurements. Somebody pointed out that GISS deletes ocean temperatures in certain areas and replaces them with land based temperatures. Now to Phil, this is A OKAY. In contrast, my response is “If you do not have precise measurements, let alone a device out in that specific area to measure, do not post anything. Put a big question mark up to signify that there are no records for that area.
Bob,
that paragraph that you cite is very interesting. Hidden in plain view is an acknowledgement from GISS that what they are measuring in the high latitudes is not CO2-induced warming. Instead, they are picking up the effect on coastal stations of their being adjacent to open sea, instead of sea ice. If this highly localised, anomalous, non-CO2 warming is then smeared around a 1200km area, then I would agree with PKERR that this must surely be flawed methodology.
Is there a map of high latitude stations used by GISS? Given the decrease in sea ice, it seems obvious that any coastal station will be contaminated by a one-off, very large uplift during months that become ice-free. Now fair enough, if it is on average warmer there than in previous years, it can and should legitimately form part of the record. The problem comes if you then extrapolate that local effect over an area of thousands of square miles. That is bound to result in an exaggerated warming signal (sea ice increasing) or an exaggerated cooling signal (sea ice increasing).
Maybe we can call these Sea-ice Heat Island Temperature Excursions? In which case, I submit that GISS is contaminated with SH***
🙂
Everybody here agrees that the temperature of our earth changed by 0.2°C from September to November. There is just a slight disagreement about the sign: GISS says it has gone UP by 0.2°C, UAH and RSS say it has gone DOWN by 0.2°C:
http://myweb.westnet.com.au/ncgstokes/blog/ind5_12.jpg
(The other 2 are missing in Stokes’ graph).
When I was teaching physics, I used to give half a point to those who got the numbers right and the sign wrong. But here I am tempted to score NIL for NASA.
shoosh:
It is what it is. They tell you want it is, tetris is wrong yet once again when he claimed:
You said of tetris’s comments “Tetris, you are of course exactly right'”.
He’s wrong here, demonstrably. Dead wrong. For probably the 20th time in two separate threads.
And of course you and Andrew agree with him because you guys are so “rational” that if you agree with his conclusion, then whatever means he used to arrive at it must be right.
That’s not skepticism, that’s something completely different.
Now, GISTEMP is completely open about how they calculate global mean temperature, anybody with math skill can work out what the effects of their substituting land temperature for marine air temperature in the Arctic. I haven’t done it, because it isn’t a simple thing to do. Neither do I think has Bob Tisdale (it isn’t enough to show fault, you have to demonstrate whether the magnitude of the error is meaningful or not).
And further, if you really don’t like their method, then by all means, Mr PhD guy, create your own, more accurate series, just like a number of other people on this and other groups have done.
Alexej:
I see your course didn’t include anything about the effect of short-period fluctuations.
If you look at the Earth’s surface temperature field, then then anomalized version of that contains a lot of short-wavelength structure in it.
If you had a very high-resolution set of measurement of the surface air temperature (so that there was no possible issue of spatial aliasing), and we could ignore the influence of measurement error, then everybody who calculated the global mean temperature would get the same answer. (It’s just a surface integral of the anomalized temperature field over the Earth divied by the area of course .)
But we don’t have very high-resolution measurements, and we are relying on spatial correlation to allow us to (to some extent) get around the undersampling problem. One thing that helps this is, the longer you average over, the larger the spatial correlation is. If you look at 1-day mean temperature, maybe it’s 25-km. For 1-month it’s maybe 250-km. The point is, averaging over time increasing the “overlap” between adjacent measurements.
One further complexity is that not only is the surface undersampled (with respect to the measurement interval, which for sake of arguments, let’s say is 1 hour), but it’s irregularly sampled, and the spatial distribution and the number of the sampled points changes over time.
Different groups address this in different ways, but it is very easy to see how the short-period climate noise will average differently as you change the algorithms for how you address the weaknesses in the data.
The point of this is, comparing monthly series to each other is practically meaningless. What a monthly value is for a particular series compared to other series is little more than a trivia game.
You want to do substantive meaningful comparisons? Choose a measurement interval that is long enough that the choice in how you estimate the surface integral stops mattering as much, and then you look at central values ± their uncertainties when making the comparison.
No physicist worth his salt is going to say this one measures “+0.2” and this one measures “-0.2”, so they must disagree, without ever looking at the error bounds.
For yearly estimates, NCDC gives an uncertainty of ±0.1C. At best the uncertainty in the monthly series is going to be inflated by that by the sqrt(12) or maybe ±0.4C.
(The other thing to remember is that not only is there error in the measurements, but serial correlation exists in the measurement error too. This means you will end up with a series that looks much smoother than the true uncertainty of measurements.)
“And of course you and Andrew agree with him because you guys are so “rational†that if you agree with his conclusion, then whatever means he used to arrive at it must be right.”
Carrick, it’s as if you don’t really read my comments. 😉
I agree with his conclusion because it’s obviously true. Do you think someone who incessantly pushes the religious belief in Global Warming is going to produce Squiggly Lines that show something else?
It’s not rocket science, dude.
Andrew
The November divergence between satellites and GISS confirms the pattern that satellites are more sensitive to El Nino/La Nina events, while being otherwise very similar to GISS (at least if you use a common baseline).
.
Useful hint for future quatloo-grabbing!
Alexej Buergin (Comment#63783) December 14th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Everybody here agrees that the temperature of our earth changed by 0.2°C from September to November. There is just a slight disagreement about the sign: GISS says it has gone UP by 0.2°C, UAH and RSS say it has gone DOWN by 0.2°C:
http://myweb.westnet.com.au/nc…..nd5_12.jpg
(The other 2 are missing in Stokes’ graph).
When I was teaching physics, I used to give half a point to those who got the numbers right and the sign wrong. But here I am tempted to score NIL for NASA.
Of course they aren’t measuring the same thing, RSS and UAH are measuring a tropospheric temperature centred about 14,000′ whereas GISSTEMP is using measurements collected about 2m above the surface. In general they correspond fairly well but it has been noted that the tropospheric measurements show more extreme fluctuations during El Niño/La Niña events than the surface. The monthly data from UAH are somewhat variable since Spencer made ad hoc adjustments when the satellite changed to adjust the monthly values. Your ‘temptation’ appears to reflect your personal bias not any rational basis.
toto:
This is consistent with Phil’s comment that they measure a higher altitude than the surface measurements. As you go further up into the atmosphere, the relative influence of ENSOs is larger (local weather patterns have less of an effect on the observed temperature fluctuations).
Phil:
My opinion (whatever that is worth) is UAH monthly is pretty much useless.
Carrick,
I’m not disagreeing you on whether or not the values can be calculated. My point is that they shouldn’t be substituting sea temperatures with land temperatures. What should they do, you ask? Again, I believe they should put up a question mark for areas where there are no measurement devices. Personally, I have come to believe that you write in very technical terms about useless nuances. Example: spatial correlations, map resolutions.
This has nothing to do with what I am talking about. Also, I would love to do some of my own measurements, unfortunately I don’t have surplus cash in the thousands to fly out to the middle of nowhere and build a surface station. And since Hansen is a quack (look at his predictions cmon!) I simply will not accept any of his premises.
Carrick:
Nee I remind you that there is a fundamental diffference between the use of the word “ilk” and the word “asshole”. But then again you may simply not have enjoyed the education the appreciate the difference.
You are very fortunate indeed to not be living in the age depicted in “The Duellists”.
Phil,
Pls get back to basics before you shoot your wad [as much as that may feel good right then and there..]
tetris, substantively there is no difference. You’re mistaking polite language for polite behavior. Rude behavior dressed in polite language is much more disturbing than just honestly stating what you feel.
Make your own choice of words for the behavior, but that crack about Carrick’s law and to bring it forward from another thread….
Yeah, I guess that makes you a real gentleman, because you hid your incredible rudeness in a veneer of polite language.
Typhoid was rampant for one thing. And it was much colder back then. And no internet.
Shoosh:
My point is you can calculate the error associated with this. It’s not sufficient to point to a “wart” in their method without some indication of whether it’s a mountain or a mole hill.
This is exactly of language one should be using when estimating the effect of replacing
seamarine air temperature with land temperature for example.You don’t need to build your own station, the data you need to analyze this question is online already. Just adding more surface stations isn’t going to provide any answers, not anytime soon anyway.
tetris:
More of tetris’ patented “gentleman behavior”.
Carrick,
Yes, it was very much colder back then. More proof of AGW, no doubt?
How about this: back then calling someone something crude or packaging it into something somewhat more poetic had the same effect: call a man an asshole any which way would have caused you to face him within spitting distance [blade or pistol] pretty soon thereafter.
You can continue to pretend that this is not so, or that somehow I am the one offending you. Fact is, you have been the one calling me names several times over and most tellingly our host has asked you to stop doing that.
So everything else being equal, why not abide by her wishes, and let it be.
Re: Bob Tisdale (Dec 14 06:34),
Bob,
Actually, I thought GISS’s point there was interesting. It’s true that sea temp in Arctic non-summer is much higher than land, so even short extensions of ice-free time shows up as strong warming, which will be reflected even in maritime land readings. There’s a cause/effect issue – freezing is postponed because the air is warm. But there’s a strong basic fact – November water in Hudson;s Bay⇔warmth.
You talk much of NASA “deleting” SST readings, which has a Rose Mary Woods feel to it. In fact no-one deleted anything – they just can’t figure out how to use them. Can you? What can you do with a location where you have a few months of steady “warm” sea temps and then months of unmeasured extreme cold? It seems to me that any attempt to extrapolate in time to cover the gap would be much more unreliable than extrapolating in space from a place with year-round readings.
tetris, back then your remark about “Carrick’s law” likely would have gotten you called out. So please stop with the high and mighty impersonation.
And yes, you are being offensive, and obviously intentionally so. You know quite well you are being ill mannered. I can only assume you think we are too stoopid to notice, which is an insult in itself.
Nick Stokes:
This is a good point. What does SST under the ice tell us about marine air temperature?
Moving on, can we discuss the importance of feedbacks in the climate system? Especially, I would like to know why some believe cloud and water vapor feedbacks are positive or negative.
Oh, before I forget. This is a question more for Toto and Bugs. Carrick might know something about also. As far as I can tell, nobody really has challenged Lindzen’s claims about feedbacks in the climate system. At the last congressional hearing, I heard Dr. Cicerone say that Lindzen is fighting a basic tenant of physics but then Lindzen slapped him down and said that what he was talking about had nothing to do with a fluctuating atmosphere. So they will disagree but they will not say why or what he is wrong about. Someone please explain for me.
Carrick,
“We”? Carrick in plural?
Naming a law after you would by most back then have taken as a compliment, no matter how “stoopid”.
Not worth the powder, I’m afraid.
tetris:
Nice try at roll back. I see you can’t follow your own advice and let it drop.
Shoosh, can you point to a written document by Lindzen?
Here’s my understanding.
Clouds act as negative feedbacks if they increase the net albedo. They act as positive feedback because they trap more IR.
Low heavy clouds act as a net negative feedback, high thin clouds act as a net positive feedback.
Water vapor is generally a feedback, because its molar concentration changes in response to surface temperature. It is also unique in the sense that for a non-condensing column of moist air, there is a “first principles” calculation that will tell you how much amplification you will get from the increase in moisture driven by an increase in radiative forcing.
As I understand it, the claim is that most of the environmental sensitivity of CO2 comes from the water vapor feedback (as we know the general number bandied about for “no feedback” CO2 climate sensitivity is around 1°C/doubling, including all forcings, it’s thought to be between 2-4°C/doubling).
Lindzen is wrong (at least based on your characterization) in that fluctuations in the atmosphere affect the albedo and net radiation balance, and certainly influence global mean temperature.
Lucia tries to remove these from her published temperature trends by assuming they are purely additive effects (because these fluctuations affect the radiation balance, their effects cannot be purely additive however).
Carrick: “This is a good point. What does SST under the ice tell us about marine air temperature?”
Why do you think Bob Tisdale suggests using SST under the ice??
Well can we all agree, based on the above discussion, that there are considerable problems associated with all the methods of assessing the temperature of the Earth and that we cannot base future policy on such dubious measurements?
Niels:
Well GISS would claim that, let me put it that way. From CCE’s quote:
That is the actual claim. Let me address it this way: Bob do you agree that the arctic SST measurements read warmer than marine air temperature (SAT) when there is ice present?
“As a result SST change underestimates SAT change when sea ice cover changes.”
Yes, and then they treat the entire area as if it was covered with ice all year round. Or as if it was land with measurement points very far apart. That has got to introduce a bias in the direction of more warming and more short term variability.
I still don’t think GISS even considers using SST under ice but I could be wrong.
It’s interesting that with all the suspicion of temperature data coming from urban heat islands, suspicion now is directed to temperatures coming from where no people live. I think high anomalies just generate suspicion no matter where they come from.
Dave Andrews (Comment#63807)
December 14th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
“Well can we all agree, based on the above discussion, that there are considerable problems associated with all the methods of assessing the temperature of the Earth and that we cannot base future policy on such dubious measurements?”
Actually, when you do a plot of 4 or the 5 major determinations of average global temperatures on Wood for Trees (NCDC data not being provided), it amazes me how closely the surface-based direct temperature measurements (and their different models for extrapolation to an average global temperature) parallel the satellite-base tropospheric temperatures. Truly amazing and such coherence greatly increases my confidence in the measurements.
@tetris
“I was referring to November temps. Not December temps.
FYI: All across Europe [except Greece for some reason – thsi may or may not have to do with their economy- who knows] November was overall one of the very coldest in record. ”
November was below normal in northern and western Europe. In south (and especially in south east) was very warm, only last few days was cold.
In north west regions of Poland november was near normal, in southern was very warm with maximum daily temperatures over 20 deg.C.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/regional_monitoring/1ctan1.gif
Wroclaw,Poland:
http://www.ogimet.com/cgi-bin/gsynres?lang=en&ind=12424&ano=2010&mes=11&day=30&hora=23&min=0&ndays=30
Central Europe:
http://gfspl.rootnode.net/BLOG/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/201011.png
So your claim that “All across Europe (…) November was overall one of the very coldest in record.” Is simply not true. In fact, you’re lying.
Edit:
“One of the coldest november” in Poland:
http://www.imgw.pl/klimat/mapy/%5BMapy_2010%5D/Mean_Temperature_2010/2010_11_MeanTemp_Anomaly.jpg
Pd,
Mea culpa for my lack of diligence.
That said, liar is a big word and I don’t know whether I should tank you for putting me right up there in the Pantheon of “climate science” liars like Jones, Mann, Thompson, Steig, Briffa, Wang and the rest of the long list of other IPCC backed luminaries.
At least I can plead can plead sloppiness. They on the other hand can only plead purpose.
Hey! On Nova last night, I learned we can use fractals to fight Global Warming! Hooray for Science! 😉
Andrew
tetris:
Duel! Duel! Duel!
A liar lying about lying. How very meta.
To the charge of dishonesty, tetris pleads carelessness and ignorance. As with so much “skepticism,” the question is “Stupid or dishonest?” and the answer is “Who cares?”
Robert,
Are you always completely careful about the words you use? Perhaps you sometimes say or write something that is not precise. You are, after all human are you not?
Or do you think it is only sceptics who over – egg the pudding?
Nick Stokes (Comment#63797) wrote, “You talk much of NASA “deleting†SST readings, which has a Rose Mary Woods feel to it. In fact no-one deleted anything – they just can’t figure out how to use them. Can you?”
No one deleted anything? SST anomaly data is masked year round in areas with seasonal sea ice. In other words, it’s not included in the GISTEMP LOFTI product, which means it is, in effect, deleted from their end product. To answer your question, Nick, if the SST data is available, use it. GISS monitors sea ice from the same dataset, so they know what’s open ocean and what’s sea ice. What’s difficult about that?
Carrick (Comment#63784) wrote, “Now, GISTEMP is completely open about how they calculate global mean temperature, anybody with math skill can work out what the effects of their substituting land temperature for marine air temperature in the Arctic. I haven’t done it, because it isn’t a simple thing to do.”
The SST and LST anomaly data is available. The Sea Ice Area data is available. The land and ocean surface area is available. It should be a relatively easy ratio of LST to SST that varies with amount of open ocean surface area.
Nick Stokes (Comment#63797) “Actually, I thought GISS’s point there was interesting. It’s true that sea temp in Arctic non-summer is much higher than land, so even short extensions of ice-free time shows up as strong warming, which will be reflected even in maritime land readings. There’s a cause/effect issue – freezing is postponed because the air is warm. But there’s a strong basic fact – November water in Hudson;s Bay⇔warmth.â€
Here’s the November 2010 Reynolds OI.v2 SST anomaly map for Hudson Bay:
http://i51.tinypic.com/4hyvxy.jpg
And here’s the map for the November 2010 GISS land surface temperature data (250km radius smoothing) for the surrounding area:
http://i51.tinypic.com/mv0uw9.jpg
And here’s the map of the November 2010 GISTEMP LOTI data for the same coordinates:
http://i54.tinypic.com/py7g8.jpg
One would think the SST anomaly data should be having a cooling effect on that LOTI data but it’s not because it’s excluded, Nick.
Carrick (Comment#63808) asked, “Bob do you agree that the arctic SST measurements read warmer than marine air temperature (SAT) when there is ice present?”
I never suggested using SST data under the ice when ice is present, Carrick. If the SST data is available, meaning there is open ocean, then use it. That’s how the Hadley Centre handles it.
http://i52.tinypic.com/2r6lfmu.jpg
That’s how NCDC handles it.
http://i52.tinypic.com/nn00hx.jpg
It’s not that difficult a concept.
Re: Bob Tisdale (Dec 15 21:17),
Well, Bob this is an old and silly argument, but the clear purpose of saying that GISS “deleted” the SST readings is to imply that they made them unavailable. But you’re displaying them.
But anyway, think about what your Hudson’s Bay SST plot really means. You can’t measure SST when ice has frozen over. So what do you make of cells that are part-frozen? And what is the anomaly relative to? To the average for that month over years when SST was observed. If this is a partial set, it’s an average over warmer years.
If you can figure out how to thread a path through these biases, please do so in detail. It’s no use just saying “use it!”.
Nick Stokes (Comment#63869) wrote, “Well, Bob this is an old and silly argument, but the clear purpose of saying that GISS “deleted†the SST readings is to imply that they made them unavailable. But you’re displaying them.”
I’ve displayed the source data (Reynolds OI.v2) in my map above, but GISS does not use it in their end product. There’s nothing old or silly in that argument.
You continued, “But anyway, think about what your Hudson’s Bay SST plot really means. You can’t measure SST when ice has frozen over. So what do you make of cells that are part-frozen? And what is the anomaly relative to? To the average for that month over years when SST was observed. If this is a partial set, it’s an average over warmer years.”
The processing of sea ice for the OI.v2 SST data is discussed in detail in Reynolds et al (2002):
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/oisst/papers/oiv2.pdf
The anomaly data presented by NOAA is relative to the NOAA/NCDC SST climatology, which has known values:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/oisst/papers/aoiclim_6190.pdf
You ended, “If you can figure out how to thread a path through these biases, please do so in detail.”
What biases? The Reynolds OI.v2 data also presents sea ice concentrations. If the grid is covered by sea ice, the OI.v2 SST value equals the climatology. Recall on the “GISS Surface Temperature Analysis” webpage…
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/gistemp.html
…they state, “Areas covered occasionally by sea ice are masked using a time-independent mask. The Reynolds climatology is included, since it also may be used to find that mask.”
Nick Stokes: Let’s return to your series of questions: “But anyway, think about what your Hudson’s Bay SST plot really means. You can’t measure SST when ice has frozen over. So what do you make of cells that are part-frozen? And what is the anomaly relative to?â€
Let’s look at another example. In September 2007, vast areas of Arctic Ocean were free of sea ice. Many of those areas were not free of sea ice during the periods used to determine the climatology. Yet the SST datasets all presented anomalies.
Another example, let’s say the North Pole (85N-90N) were to be ice free in some year to come. How then does NCDC determine the SST anomaly for the newly exposed sea surface? The NCDC SST climatology for 85N to 90N varies annually from about -1.725 to -1.8 deg C. The newly exposed sea surface is then compared to the climatology to determine the anomaly.
Re: Bob Tisdale (Dec 16 06:03),
Bob,
The paper by Reynolds et al seems to contain the reason why GISS would not want to use SST’s in marginal sea ice zones. The SST folks haver a simple fix here, described on p 1616. Where >90% ice is present, they set SST to -1.8°C. That’s fine for a sea temp estimate, but obviously hopeless for a SAT proxy. Yet if GISS used SSTs in this region, those values would get into the SAT index.
If Arctic or Antarctic temperatures are so important, why hasn’t anyone built probes that could be placed by air drop with GPS and satellite communication (Iridium, e.g.)? You couldn’t use solar power in the winter, but maybe a wind generator would work.
Owen #63812,
Are you really saying that GISTEMP, using stations extrapolated over 1200km gridded squares, ie 1,440,000 km, can say accurately what the temperature was over that area?
Dave Andrews (Comment#63888)
December 16th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
“Owen #63812,
Are you really saying that GISTEMP, using stations extrapolated over 1200km gridded squares, ie 1,440,000 km, can say accurately what the temperature was over that area?”
Dave, I don’t think I am saying what you said above. Let me quote from a 2010 paper (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_etal.pdf ):
“The GISS analysis specifies the temperature anomaly at a given location as the weighted average of the anomalies for all stations located within 1200 km of that point, with the weight decreasing
linearly from unity for a station located at that point to zero for stations located 1200 km or farther from the point in question.”
In other words, temperature anomalies within 1200 km of a specified location are used to determine the anomaly at that location, but in a weighted fashion. As the distance increases, the weighting decreases. Thus, an anomaly at 1200 km away has a weighting of zero.
Hansen has demonstrated that anomalies correlate well over distance, even where temperatures may not.
Nick Stokes (Comment#63885): “Yet if GISS used SSTs in this region, those values would get into the SAT index.”
Why would it “get into the SAT index”? If the SST equals the climatology, they could use land surface temperature and if the the SST data is showing an anomaly, they could use the SST data. This isn’t difficult.
DeWitt Payne
Maybe because the Artic is not ice free yet and shows no signs of doing that any time soon [as we have been told will happen 10, 8, 6, 4 years ago] and that Antarctica [for the third of fourth year in a row] has more ice than ever before. Taking that hard data into account might bias the conclusions the wrong way. Better to work with 1200 km extrapolations like GISS or massage the data like Steig, et. al.
🙂
Owen,
As I understand it GISS uses only one station above 75N. How can this represent the temperature over 14million square kms?