Back to betting! Updated and timestamp changed
Owing to my entering “January” on the betting form, the February bets were filed under January. I manually edited all UAH bets placed after Feb 1 to read February and added the correct date metric to the form so I fish out the correct bets. Please look it over to see if your bet is missing.
Anteros can now do his analysis.
It’s time to place your bets! Who will win the Quatloos this month?
January saw a surprising dip in temperature. Guess what? I decided to enter a bet. It’s a WAG, but it’s entered. So there! See if you can beat me and enter your bet.
[sockulator(../musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/UAHBets5.php?Metric=UAH TTL?Units=C?cutOffMonth=2?cutOffDay=16?cutOffYear=2012?DateMetric=February, 2012?)sockulator]
Cut off Day: Feb 15.(By now you know the rules.)
(Original post date 3 February, 2012 @ 12:50 by lucia )
Lucia, I can’t enter a prediction.
After clicking “submit” the page sits there for a minute or two then a Cloudfare page pops up saying the site is down.
Lucia – can’t seem to submit a value for Feb. Is the form ok?
There is a problem. I’m going to look into it…. I’d imagine it was cloudflare, but there wasn’t any problem in January. maybe it’s a password issue. (I’m not sure how it could be since the betting image is showing. But who knows?)
Lucia –
Excuse my Anglo-English unfamiliarity with Chicagoan idiom [or just my poor vocab..] – WAG?
I don’t suppose the funny nature of the ‘house-bet’ could have confused cloudfare or your software?
**
I’m pleased to see people trying to get their bets on early. There is a depressing correlation between the timing of my betting and its accuracy. The later I leave it/the more info I think I have, the worse the bet!
Wild Ass Guess=>WAG
Scientifc Wild Ass Guess => SWAG.
Believe it or not, SWAG is a military term. The Army publishes SWAG methods for doing things like estimating wind velocities by observing whether leaves are fluttering etc. My husband and his coworkers had these guidelines when working on a project to measure and observe dispersion of smoke plumes in the field. (Their team also actually measured wind speed, because they needed real numbers. You can imagine soldiers in the field might sometimes need to SWAG to figure out how to deploy stuff.)
Lucia – I worked it out…
I think the betting script is fixed. I’d added
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !POST$
To my wordpress workarounds to catch a large number of cracker-bots, but it seems this interfered with bet submissions. I don’t quite know why it let me bet while in post preview mode though. So, I’m not entirely confident this will be fixed for everyone. I bet several times (as you will see when the bets appear.)
Let me know if the script hangs up on you. That’s the way it was failing on me– the page just froze.
In the UK, WAG = “Wives and Girlfriends”, usually in connection with Association Footballers (Soccer).
I suppose it’s all in the context!
I entered a WAG successfully. In a week or so (hopefully, before I get barred yet again due to forgetting your script works based on Zulu time…) I will enter my SWAG. Anyway, the script works just fine as far as I can tell.
Not to be a bore, but when are Spencer and Christy releasing the software for calculating their TLT series?? Otherwise it really is betting against the house.
As they said about Erie stock perhaps: TLT go up says Roy and TLT goes up. TLT go down says Roy, TLT goes down. TLT wiggle waggle says Roy, and TLT wiggle waggles. We auditors need the code.
Eli –
You definitely Josh.
The software is, to this, utterly irrelevant.
It’s a bet.
About a future event.
Unknown.
In advance, all the software in the world isn’t going to help you make a decent prediction. It is irrelevant
Bunny capiche?
Eli–
If Spencer or Christy would be betting it might be against the house. As far as I am aware neither bets here.
Even if TLT is utterly loonie, based on Roy’s whims, none of us know what temperture he is going to post. If you want to see it as taking a while guess what number Roy will post, that’s up to you. But I am not Roy so betting on this is not betting against the house.
In anycase, if you don’t want to bet, don’t.
I asked you before: If I run one using GISTemp, Hadley, NOAA or RSS will you bet? If you say yes, I’ll run one. Maybe I will anyway. If you don’t bet on those we’ll continue to not take you seriously just as we already don’t.
AFPhys –
I may end up looking like a goon with this…..do I surmise that you have more than one bet? (a WAG and a SWAG) How?
Superbowl Halftime vs. Blackboard Wagering
No Brainer 😉
Andrew
Say it ain’t so. I bet and got the following-
Processing Entry
The correct sum was 17.1; you entered 27/1.5789473. You are off by 9.9 . You’ve tried 1 times.
Doug– Really? that’s weird. I’ll check on that tomorrow!
I for one would like to see monthly bets on other temperature series.
Is it too late for 2012 annual bets on those too?
HadCRUT3 too, since the MO have made a prediction.
eli. a while back one of us made an attempt to get the guts of the real software of interest
hit a brickwall known as itar.
this is your cue to say something stupid
Lucia,
I was trying to be ironically clever…. like the rest of us! My answer is correct (isn’t it), but not what the computer was looking for!
I thought cleverness might win out over skill in the bet I was going to make!
Doug–
The program is pretty stupid. I must not be stripping the ‘/’ though. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t go to the database or ‘do’ anything dangerous, but I should go filter the input. (PHP now has automatic filtering functions, so I might as well do it!)
There is nothing preventing Spencer and Christy from making their code public and yes, they do profit from the grants they are getting to run their codes.
Oh yes, Steven, you appear to have the market cornered on saying silly stuff, like the IPCC does not have a legal existence, so Eli demurs.
Eli–
I have no idea what you are on about. You are doing a good imitation of a bot posting irrelevancies at random.
* If you want to ask Spencer or Christy questions, Spencer has a blog, both have email and snailmail addresses, ask them.
* No one denies Spencer and Christy have grants, and draw salaries just as Mann and Hansen do. But this has nothing to do with our betting.
* It silly for you to put arguments mosher never made into moshers mouth and then complain he made those arguments.
* It’s even sillier to start posting your distortions of what mosher said on randomly selected posts.
It’s 9:30 am central time. Have you had too much carrot ale this morning?
The Wabett is still a Josh
Anteros: I did a WAG without looking at all at the underlying temperature/ climate data for the sole purpose of checking to see if lucia’s script was accepting bets from my type of setup, and to report that to her. I usually at least look at the underlying data before I make my SWAG. To the best of my knowledge, at least my SWAGs have never fallen in the bottom half of the betting results, though I’ve finished in the quatloos only twice.
Lucia: I am very happy to see that you chose to make a bet. I hope that your time crunch is easing a little.
AFPhys.
This weekend was actually family visits. Jim’s cousins came to see his Dad and Mom. That took up time but in a nice way. We actually watched the football game.
Jim’s Mom is in the hospital, but she’s being observed. It’s not like Tuesday or Wednesday when we were in a frazzle.
Oh. Also, I have most of the ‘bot issue ok. But I have to set a few things as cron jobs and “plugin-i-fy” but part of that can wait. I’ll likely be blogging more pretty soon.
I rather suspect that the reason that Eli is bunny hopping up and down right now is that the accidently released FODs are saying nice things about UAH and validated accuracy against other temperature sources when compared to RSS.
No doubt he is pressing for all the details he can on UAH algorithms. No connection (teli or otherwise) of course!
You suspect wrong.
Us auditors need the source code to do our auditing. Roy, John, let your FORTRAN (who knows?) go.
Eli: I think not.
Do you wish to acknowledge that what I said is true or not? Does the AR5 FODs not say that UAH is more accurate than RSS when compared to other temperature sources? Is that not validation enough for you?
Eli has no idea, and does not care. Since the software was not released the series should not be discussed by the IPCC.
Eli– Go tell the IPCC!
The IPCC AR5 won’t have much data to go on if it follows Halpern rules.
AR5 uses HadCrut4 for which the code is not released.
Nor is the code released for the error-filled GHCN v3.1 which forms the basis of GISSTEMP.
.
You’re thinking of the ZOD for Chap2. IIUC they mention one apparent bias of RSS, with a lot of references to Christy and colleagues (though I saw at least one reference to independent authors).
.
Let’s see how this pans out in the supposedly confidential FODs, when they eventually turn up as they are pretty much bound to.
Toto: Yes sorry. Alphabet soup! ZODs indeed.
Surprising that that the rascally rabbit does not accept peer review and cross calibration as a method of validation but….
I am probably getting in out of my depth here, but how is it possible to say that UAH is more accurate than other temperature sources, such as RSS, when there is no “actual” temperature against which to compare the figures?
Is it on the basis that UAH *currently* shows the greatest warming trend, which is more in line with the IPCC temperature forecasts?
Ray: It appears to be because UAH is a better thermometer than RSS when compared to other thermometer sources. Nothing to do with the actual output figures, more to do with the accuracy of those figures – whatever they may be.
Richard LH,
Thanks.
Still not sure if I understand.
By “other thermometer sources”, do you mean land based sources?
Re: Ray (Feb 8 09:52),
Other sources would be primarily weather balloon radiosonde temperature profiles. If you have an actual temperature profile, you can calculate what the satellite MSU channel readings should be.
I commenting the problem?
Lucia –
Seems to be fixed now 🙂
My joy is admittedly selfish – I have a strong intuition that my Feb wager will be right on the button, so I’m very keen for as many people to bet as possible 😉
Yes. Let’s see if it stays fixed. My theory is consistent with us seeing weird behavior on our end.
Daily UAH temperatures from 2006 to January 2012.
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/3672/dailyuah2006jan12.png
Temps dropped to -0.415C on January 21, 2012, very close to the peak low from the 2007-08 La Nina. Other than that, one has to go back to the 1999-2000 La Nina to find lower temperatures.
DeWitt Payne,
Thanks for the additional clarification.
Mosher: What kind of legal entity is the IPCC
Eli: Mosher says the IPCC doesnt exist
###################
Do any of you wonder why Eli’s students said he was the worst
professor they every had.
Eli: What is 2+2
Student: 4
Eli: wrong. the answer is 4
SteveF– No problem. When you want another post on sea level, go ahead and post!
Mosher– About Eli, yep.
That said,I don’t take web evaluations of profs too seriously. Most students don’t fill out the web form at all. So, you don’t get a very good indication of anything. Also, if someone teaches long enough and a web form exists, it’s likely a student who dislike him will say he was the worst ever.
Lucia –
Just a couple of 503 messages this morning. Then after after a serious squint or two in my direction, the soldier at the gate opened the doors for me.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Turns out ZBblock dislikes hosts with “server” in their host name. That was hanging up people hosted by a certain ISP who stupidly uses ‘server’ their. These ISP’s are less stupid than the ones who use .mail.
I commented both those out. I’m going to have to figure out how to write exceptions in ZBblock because using servers IS something that hackers do to make it easier to run their cracker-bots. So other than that huge ISP in you know what country…. I want to block everything with ‘server’ in its host name! For now, they are unblocked– but tomorrow things with ‘server’ in the host name but without “xxxx’ will be blocked by ZBBlock. (A similar thing has to be done with ‘mail’.
Comin’ down to crunch time on this one… just did an entry and apparently my quatloos have been accepted by the cashier.
I see more people are coming aboard the negative train.
Ray: Would love to see your analysis of these as you did for Jan’12!
Reviewing these at a glance, I am a bit sad I reduced my “gut” instinct of 0.023 by .02 at the last second – not for any “scientific” reason, but for the mere betting reason that I would have much much less competition at that level. A quick count is that something like a quarter of the betting folk are within [-0.02,+0.02] … that is a super tight range, and I am in it! For us to walk away with the quatloos, any of us, would be quite amazing.
Lucia: nice to see your bet there. I wish you great luck, and as of today, I like your chances better than mine!
A strange months betting. Dozens of people changing their minds [Lucia] and a big spread….and lots of quatloos wagered. Am I right in thinking lots of people have guessed on a positive anomaly, because of the Aqua5 indications?
Fools! – February! – in a La Nina year!
I agree with AFphys – if you’ve got the time Ray 🙂
And also that Lucia’s bet is looking good at the moment…
Anteros,
I think there is something wrong with the bets this month.
I will contact Lucia for clarification.
Ray–
There is somethign wrong. Note this:
Bets Placed Quatloos for UAH TTL January, 2012 Predictions.
The form that sends values to the script which logs them into the dataase lets me include which “bet perid” it is, and I wrote for January. I’m going to straigten this out in the database. But for now it’s fishing out everything for “January” which includes last months bets intermingled with this months. I realized this yesterday. I’ve done it before. It will be easy to fish out by date– but I have to do it.
This time I’m going to write a script to “auto-fish out” because… well… I’ve accidentally cut and pasted the form and forgotten to change the “bet perid” before.
But…. what with the excitement of “fakegate” I haven’t done it.
Ray –
Well spotted.
Lucia –
That explains my confusion 🙂
Anteros–
What I have to do longer term is write a script that will find all the entries that claim to be for “january” but were entered after Feb 1. Those are for February. Then I need to change those to February.
That makes changes in the database, so I like to set aside time when I’m not heavily involved in commenting.
But… right after answering Ray, I realized I can change the script to read the date and display those that were placed after Feb. 1. That does not change the database, so it’s inherently safe. I can’t permanently screw up the bets.
I need to do something similar for donations. The script on the donations page– which I didn’t write– puts a ‘1’, ‘2’ or ‘3’ in the ‘display’ column depending on a choice the donor made. But then the display part of the script utterly ignores the choice and displays all donations no matter what the donor requested. So, I need to fix that.
Lucia –
I do understand that it’s been mayhem on the commenting front for the last couple of days! I’m not completely sure why we’re all so agitated about it [apart from the detective bit 🙂 ] – especially those of us in the UK – we barely know what/who Heartland is..
Is it possible for you to arrange the bets in ascending order? Just for an eyeball of where our bets stand in relation to the whole… And then Ray’s mean, median and SD will feel more relevant…
When you’ve got a moment of course 😉
P.S. It is a very odd sensation finding myself unbanned again – it’s a little bit like being let out after a detention at school 🙂
Ged,
I’m not sure if you will see this, but regarding our discussion in the January UAH blog topic, it may be that you will be correct about the February anomaly after all.
As you are no doubt aware, the AQUA Ch5 anomaly has been falling since about February 8th,, and has almost reached a new record low for the month. Actually the pattern is very similar to that last month and even if there is a late upturn as happened in January, we could be seeing another low UAH figure, possibly lower than January.
Lucia –
Are you sure that you’ve not included some of the annual bets in with the Feb ones? Some of them look a little incongruous.
BTW, it’s Ray who’s done the SD analysis etc – I’ve just been prodding him 🙂
Anteros: “And also that Lucia’s bet is looking good at the moment…”
Now it looks quite a bit too hot – as does mine…
Anteros–
I don’t think I made that mistake. The cut off date for annual bets was Jan 20. All these bets were entered after Feb 1. While I could have made mistakes, I don’t think I made that one.
Lucia –
I probably just was led astray by 22 people betting on a positive number. What do I know?!
Niels A Nielsen – I’m glad you think Lucia’s bet is looking a bit hot as I’m in for 0.027 colder than her bet. Perhaps, finally, my dreams of quatloo riches are going to come true? 🙂
Anteros, I don’t know if you realise, but it’s all a fraud!
I’ve won the bet on temps once, and on sea ice once, and I never got my Quatloos!
steveta_uk
Hmm… clearly I need to provide an online form to withdraw quatloos from the vault. More coding. . .
Anteros here’s the list bet in order of temperature (I think all the correct crossed out names have been removed). Oppsss I seem to have gone for a high end bet. Apologies for the lack of formatting
MichaelP -0.75
ErnieP -0.286
Simon -0.25
hmccard -0.225
PeterB in Indianapolis -0.224
Skeptikal -0.22
Jeff Condon -0.213
Cassanders -0.192
Bebben -0.192
Earle Williams -0.18
Pieter -0.178
Steve T -0.17
Freezedried -0.15
MarcH -0.15
Les Johnson -0.15
RobB -0.135
John Knapp -0.132
Rick -0.13
TimTheToolMan -0.13
Don B -0.13
Scott Basinger -0.125
MikeP -0.121
PaulS -0.12
Robert Leyland -0.114
sHx -0.11
Crashex -0.103
Larry -0.102
dallas -0.08
Anteros -0.077
Lance -0.061
Peter -0.05
lucia -0.05
BigBear -0.044
Niels A Nielsen -0.043
KÃ¥re Kristiansen -0.042
Anthony -0.04
Bob Koss -0.039
hswiseman -0.037
YFNWG -0.02
Pachygrapsus -0.02
MDR -0.019
nzgsw -0.018
CoRev -0.015
Andrew Kennett -0.01
ob -0.001
George Bonser 0
Owen 0
mct 0
Peter 0
jane 0
George Tobin 0
Tim W. 0
Andrew_KY 0.001
AFPhys 0.003
Ray 0.005
John F Pittman 0.01
BobW 0.011
Hal 0.011
LC 0.015
BillC 0.02
Anton 0.021
EDs 0.056
John Norris 0.077
Paul Butler 0.086
AMac 0.089
Pavel Panenka 0.094
Denis 0.099
Nyq Only 0.1
Pdm 0.109
plazaeme 0.11
Arfur Bryant 0.12
johnonomus 0.145
denny 0.165
HR 0.201
HR –
That’s helpful.
Did you get a tip-off from James Hansen before you bet? 🙂
As usual, the range of bets is huge.
Man-O-Live! I just looked at Channel 5 to see how we all were doing. After rising smartly in the two weeks at endJan/startFeb, that temperature has sharply dropped the last two weeks. It is now 0.3C lower than the previous low temperature for this date in February! I hope the winner of my quatloos enjoys them! Bets in the -.2 range are looking pretty darned good now, incredibly enough
Anteros
Like AFPhys I was looking at the Channel5 graph. I placed my bet at about the peak in early Feb.
BTW is Ch5 the basis of the bet?
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
HR –
Some people use the Ch5 graph for some last minute hints but it can lead you astray! Also I think it only correlates about 70-80% with the final monthly anomaly (not sure why).
AFPhys – it’s low at the moment but there’s still a good chance that overall it’ll be a bit warmer than January.
Little side bet? 🙂
So far, AQUA CH5 during Feb. has followed a remarkably similar pattern to that in January, so a low UAH does again look likely.
I still don’t think it will reach MichaelP’s figure of -0.75 however, although could be be closest? It all depends on whether AQUA starts to turn up as in January, which at the moment it looks like doing.
I wonder if it will do that every month – should keep us guessing.
I will try to do my usual analysis of bets later tonight.
I agree with Anteros that Ch5 only has a portion of the final value. The UAH value published by Dr. Roy is the Tropospheric Lower Temperature, ie the lowest 10km of the atmosphere. So you have to judge from surface to Ch7. A decent surface predictor is from Dr. Ryan Maue’s site:
http://policlimate.com/climate/gfs_t2m_bias.html
Anteros: I am willing for a side bet right now that the Feb anomaly will be lower than the January… one quatloo – say the word … but I’m concerned the house may not be happy about such side bets. If you live anywhere near Central NYState, it would be better to bet a beer 🙂
Channel 5 is definitely not the whole portion of Spencer’s number. I simply like to check it from time to time for a rapid update myself.
As far as MichaelP’s -0.75 number – I suspect he intended a missing zero before the 7… I know I have made such errors in the past. It is especially easy for me to do with small negative numbers for some reason.
AFPhys –
You’re right about small negative numbers – I have to look at them twice to make sure they’re not deceiving me.
After that, I sadly have to take full responsibility 🙂
Here is my analysis of this month’s bets:
MAX 0.2010
MIN -0.7500
MEAN -0.0554
STD. DEV. 0.1334
MEDIAN -0.0380
MEAN 1-37 -0.0801
MEAN 38-74 -0.0307
From this it might appear that the predictions increased as the betting went on, but that is heavily influenced by the early bet of -0.75c from MichaelP. In fact, the predictions stayed fairly constant as time went on.
From AQUA CH5, it does seem that those at the low end stand the best chance again, but it all depends upon whether temperatures rise rapidly again, as they did at the end of January.
If Lucia doesn’t care, I will happily tell you how I arrived at my bet. I don’t expect others to do the same, and I don’t promise to do it the same ever again. If Lucia doesn’t want me to tell, I won’t.
By now there should be enough data to determine whether or not the Blackboard Hive Mind is a good predictor of anomalies 🙂
.
What happens when you compare a performance-weighted average of predictions with actual results for each month?
BillC –
I don’t want to be harsh or anything, but having taken a peep at your bet, I’m not convinced there’ll be many takers for info on how you arrived at it 😉
APHys – a quatloo’s worth of beer sounds like just the ticket, but something of a trek from London…
If such behaviour isn’t frowned upon by our gracious host, I’m certainly up for a quatloo side bet saying Feb will be warmer than January..
@ anteros – maybe, “what not to do”?
Anteros, You’re on provided we are both talking about the “anomaly” given by Roy. I’ve got low, you’ve got high. One quatloo. If we were in the same area, I would make it beer, but for sure not a full quatloo worth of beer! It is my impression that much would keep everyone in the bars of London guzzling for months! I have my 2per night, but I couldn’t finish a quatloo delivery of beer in my lifetime!
When someone here is winning quatloos on this 4 times per year or more, I will definitely be interested in their methodology! It is very easy to figure out what not to do, though…
Right now I am very impressed with Lucia’s -0.05 call, given that she has seldom fired a neuron about the question under the pressure of betting!
AFPhys – One whole quatloo it is. -0.093 the benchmark? I vote we both put a quatloo in Lucia’s tip jar in the event of a tie.
Yep – Lucia’s in with a shout with -0.05…I forsee one or two mutterings amongst the punters 🙂
Hmmm,
Even when I showed the sum the computer was looking for and acknowledged was correct, my 3 q bet doesn’t appear. OMG, I’ve already spent my winnings. What should I do now?
The new NCEP CFS Reanalysis which is based upon a very recent version of the GFS forecast model data assimilation (but coupled with the ocean), is actually very close to the #’s put out by Hadley, NOAA, NASA but fixed for the 1981-2010 climatological period.
Last month was like -0.1C for the global anomaly — so far, Month to date for February is -0.125C and the rest of the month looks slightly colder. So I would put the final tally at -0.14C for February.
toto:
“What happens when you compare a performance-weighted average of predictions with actual results for each month?”
I hope that is a rhetorical question!
Here is a chart showing the daily UAH temps over two year periods covering the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption, the 1997-98 Super El Nino and then the last 13 months of 2011-12.
Temps reached a peak low of about -0.5C, 420 days after Pinatubo (and stayed at a low level for another 13 months). Temps hit about +0.7C, 110 days after the 1997-98 El Nino peaked. The 2011-12 La Nina had two peak lows at a mild -1.15C at the end of November and the end of January.
http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4921/ensovolclags.png
Should be able to tell there is also a lot of variability in the record with the up and down spikes lasting a few weeks at a time.
Bill Illis,
Is the entire daily dataset online somewhere? I only know of the Discovery page which seems to only go back to 2002.
BillC (Comment #91582)
February 24th, 2012 at 8:32 am
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/tltday_5.4
In order of Global, SH, NH, Tropics.
Divide by 1000 to get the anomaly we are used to using. Search and replace out the -9999 or -9.999 if putting it into a spreadsheet. Usually updated 9 days after month-end.
Bill Illis – thank you. I had found the file in the meantime, but not any instructions on how to use it. Yours are what I need. Awesome.
I have a confession to make (no, not another Gleick tragedy), last autumn I thought I’d do some research before entering in order to improve my chances of making my quatloo fortune!
I took some screen shots of 2009, 10 & 11 14k, 25k & 36kft discover graphs, utilizing a freeware image bit map analyzer I computed the the pixel count above and below the temp record for each of three months Aug, Sep & Oct for each of the three years.
The idea was to compare the mean of the ratio of the pixel count over or under the recorded temp for each height/month/year with 2/3 of each month elapsed with Roy’s UAH for each month to provide a predictive model for the current month.
l felt convinced that my model would result in such accurate predictions that you would all utter mumbled Who is that devilishly handsome man & why does he always get the girl questions before donating your quatloos to an obviously superior intellect
What I actually discovered was that I had missed my vocation as I would of had a successful career as a climate modeler, my model showed zero predictive ability.
In fact I’d go as far as suggesting that, similar to IPCC sensitivity projections, I might as well have been standing in a shopping basket trying to pick myself up by the handles
Gras Albert (Comment #91757)
February 25th, 2012 at 4:08 am
————————-
The data from the discover AMSU-A temperatures page reports values which are on average -0.190C lower than actual recorded UAH temps (2002 to 2012 baseline on AMSU-A versus the 1981 to 2011 baseline of UAH).
And the difference varies by as much as +/- 0.260C on a daily basis, so one can’t really use the data reported on the AMSU-A page.
Bill
Thank you for your response, I fear you may have produced evidence that yet another avenue for a future career for me, that of author of self-deprecating humour, has a probability of success approaching zero
🙁
Gras Albert –
It worked for me 🙂
I was going to say exactly the same thing – but didn’t want to give rise to the image of me standing in shopping basket feverishly yanking at the handles.
Then again, I have supreme confidence in my new algorithm and will be applying for highly paid jobs as a climate modeller at the first opportunity
Been wondering when/whether to post this since 1) it will show how dumb I am and 2) no one cares anyway.
While obviously the Aqua Ch 5 data is not the whole picture, how good of a predictor is it? Bill Illis says that it is not a good predictor at least on a daily basis. And Spencer’s web site says there are 11 different instruments on 11 different satellites. And there are other channels or at least one other in the lower troposphere (6 and maybe 7).
Nevertheless, taking an average of the daily data from Ch 5 for this January (setting a baseline of the average of the previous 9 Januaries 2003 to 2011 compared to the anomalies) got me to within 0.002C of the actual anomaly. So it’s either a big coincidence and won’t happen again, or it’s a decent predictor. With only one datapoint I can’t tell.
That said, with 3 days of data left in February I am getting -0.15 +/- 0.01. So we’ll see.
BillC –
I’m glad you’ve posted your thoughts. I don’t have any firm information, I’ve just heard that the correlation between Ch5 and the monthly lower troposphere anomaly is ~0.7/0.8. There could be lots of reasons for that, which you’ve mentioned.
If its really that cold my side bet with AFPhys is doomed and my regular quatloos are down the tubes as well! But Ch5 is doing its best with a late surge..
Anteros – the -0.15 takes the late surge into account, if you project it straight up for 3 more days (since last update) I get -0.14. And all of this has very little bearing on my sh*tty bet of +0.02, that was based on the data at the time and a bad prediction of what it would do for the rest of the month. If I’d have just stuck with “no change” from when I posted I’d have wound up at about -0.04 I think.
As far as the correlation, that is interesting, and as you noted there are surely other variables that affect it. But as you probably know, it doesn’t imply you can scale the Ch5 average by that number.
Ch 5 captures most of the mass and thus the energy content of the lower troposphere, due to the lapse rate. Ch 6 often reads pretty similar to Ch 5. I don’t know if Ch 7 is used, being at about 11 km. Maybe I will start to do a mass-weighted composite of Ch 5 and 6 and see how it predicts. I’m more interested in this than the actual betting (though that’s fun too).
Anteros, if it were possible, I would accept your payment of 3/4 of a quatloo now and call our bet done. Unfortunately, I believe that quatloos are available only in integers, so we’ll have to follow through to the end. 🙂
AFPhys –
I’m an incorrigible optimist, but in this case I think I’d stump up the 3/4 of a quatloo..
Still, even though the fat lady has her mouth open, I haven’t yet heard the fateful noise 🙂
I wonder if I am the source of the 0.7 to 0.8 correlation statistic, between ch5 and UAH. If so, it related to the monthly ch5 versus monthly UAH figures for 2002 to 2010 (where available).
Having said that there is a similar correlation between daily ch5 figures and UAH. From a comparison between 2011 daily figures, I have arrived at an overall figure of 0.88 for 2011, although there are exceptions, for example in the case of February 2011, which produces a figure of -0.07 for some reason. I think it’s because while the ch5 anomaly fell during the latter half of the month, the UAH anomaly increased. I have also found that the correlation generally declines through channels 6-8, so including them doesn’t seem to improve accuracy.
Of course this is of little help in estimating the monthly UAH anomaly, if you don’t know the final ch5 anomaly. Even if you do guess that correctly,there is always going to be a wide margin of error. Also, you have to apply a formula to the ch5 anomaly to get the UAH anomaly. For what it is worth, I am also estimating a UAH figure of about -0.15c for February, based on the latest figures, but I would put the likely margin of uncertaintly much higher than BillC.
My +/-0.01 wasn’t meant to be a margin of uncertainty (I agree that’s much higher). It was just that with 3 or 4 days left there was about that much wiggle room depending on what the temperature did.
BillC,
Sorry, I misunderstood.
Anyway we should find out soon.
Yessir, -0.116 – Robert Leyland?
We have, Roy has spoken, -0.116
.
Edit: Props Bill, next time I’ll open my other eye and stop wasting electrons 🙁
-0.12c – quite close!
Ray- If we bet by the number in Roys titles, -0.12 would win. But the quatloos uses 3 sig. figs as reported in the body.
Lucia,
I wasn’t commenting on the results, only quoting the headline figure. I hadn’t looked at the actual figures yet.
Why does he round up in the headline???
Ray–
-0.116 => -0.12 had it been -0.114=>-0.11.
I think my 4th grade math teacher had a rule about 0.115 but her rules don’t seem to be coded into any computer programs so I ever memorised it.
( Her rule might work for 0.115000000….00000 rounding up or down. But she taught some sort of progresive method that never made any sense to me. So, 0.1149 and 0.1151 would be rounded to 0.115 and then should you need to round them you would apply the rule for 0.115 even if you had access to the original numbers to 4 digits But this never made sense to me as 0.1149 ‘should’ end up at 0.11 and 0.12. I expressed my opinion that her rule didn’t make sense and was told I was wrong. That said, this teacher once made a girl stand in a garbage can for losing too often at flash cards. I differed with her on a number of issues. But I did apply her rule to answer the tests I knew she graded. But I haven’t made any effort to remember whether ties round up or down. I just let a program do it! )
Lucia, thanks.
What I meant was, why round at all, why not just quote the
-0.116c in the headline?
But as someone has pointed out, the data files are rounded to 2 decimals, so why quote 3 decimals if the data isn’t stored in that form?
The figure will probably be revised anyway!
Ray–
I don’t know why he reports 3 digits in the posts but 2 everywhere else. But it makes the betting more fun. That’s one of the reasons to use RSS!