28 thoughts on “Bet on February UAH”

1. AMSU shows trop temps are now dropping.

2. But for how long?
   The direction often changes soon after the bet closing date – coincidence?

3. I wouldn’t expect it to go down at that rate for much longer.

4. What I really wonder about is the cause of the spike up in January. Has anyone seen a good explanation for that?

5. jim2–
   Much of the monthly variability is inexplicable.

6. Most of the increase in ch5 was between Jan. 1 and 5th, after that it stayed fairly flat. Ch6 and 7 also seemed to change at the same time, possibly a day or two earlier.
   I am awaiting daily UAH figures to see how much they match.
   I wasn’t watching ch5 in January but if I had been, I might have got closer in my bet.

7. I wouldn’t say inexplicable. More like “chaotic”. Roy Spencer describes one source on his website.

   These temperature swings are mostly the result of variations in rainfall activity. Precipitation systems, which are constantly occurring around the world, release the latent heat of condensation of water vapor which was absorbed during the process of evaporation from the Earth’s surface.

   While this process is continuously occurring, there are periods when such activity is somewhat more intense or widespread. These events, called Intra-Seasonal Oscillations (ISOs) are most evident over the tropical Pacific Ocean.

   During the convectively active phase of the ISO, there are increased surface winds of up to 1 to 2 knots averaged over the tropical oceans, which causes faster surface evaporation, more water vapor in the troposphere, and more convective rainfall activity. This above-average release of latent heat exceeds the rate at which the atmosphere emits infrared radiation to space, and so the resulting energy imbalance causes a temperature increase (see the above plot).

   During the convectively inactive phase, the opposite happens: a decrease in surface wind, evaporation, rainfall, and temperature, as the atmosphere radiatively cools more rapidly than latent heating can replenish the energy.

   (Lots more detail on his website of course.)

8. If you look at all the AMSU channels except the surface one, there is an altitude where the annual temp change is almost flat. Below that, the channels track each other – if one year is relatively higher at lower altitudes, the other lower altitude channels track it. But above the “flat line,” the stratosphere moves opposite the lower channels. All-in-all and generally speaking, they are all in synch, both in rate and magnitude, but not necessarily the sign of the rate changes.

9. A little perspective from the Daily UAH temperatures (actual) covering 2010 to 2013.

   There was a pretty steep downspike in temps for 3 weeks in December (especially for the Land stations and especially in the NH versus the lower troposphere here) and then there is a large spike upwards in UAH temps which really starts towards the end of December, peaks on January 8, 2013 and is mainly in the SH.

   Looking at the OLR maps, this is from extreme ENSO-like cloudiness on the southern side of the ENSO regions in the Pacific – a very large area where the clouds actually held the heat in.

   Daily UAH charted 2010-2013.

   http://s8.postimage.org/o5gabaet1/Daily_UAH_Jan2013.png

   http://cawcr.gov.au/staff/mwheeler/maproom/OLR/map.lastmonth.gif

   Quite a bit of similarity to the ENSO, AMO and Global SST numbers over the same period (keep in mind the 3 month lag from the ENSO and note my comment about the ENSO-like cloudiness on the southern side of ENSO regions in the last few months – this is how the ENSO impacts global temperatures – this area has now turned very cold since it has got no Sun for 2 months now and the clouds are now gone. Transitioning to La Nina atmospheric conditions now.

   http://s11.postimage.org/456i0jlqb/Weekly_ENSO_AMO_Glob_SSTs_Feb62013.png

   http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2013/anomnight.2.14.2013.gif

   Temps should be trending down now for at least 6 months.

10. It has been pointed out many times that the obsession with the atmosphere is misplaced. Like pre-Galelaens, we tend to see the atmosphere as the center of the climate universe because we live in it. But really, it is just the tail of the thermal mass dog. The oceans are where the action is.

11. Bill Illis, do you have a link to your source of the daily UAH figures for January 2013?

12. Ray (Comment #110183)
    February 16th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
    ———————

    tltday_5.5

    http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/

13. Bill Illis,

    Thanks,
    Unfortunately the latest file seems to be in unix manual format, which I can’t open.
    The plain text file only seems to be updated to the end of November.
    I normally use the link via the discover website:
    ftp://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/data/msu/t2lt/
    In that case the text file has been updated to end of December, but not January yet.
    Why would the .man file be updated to the end of January but not the text file?

14. Ray (Comment #110204),

    Unfortunately the latest file seems to be in unix manual format, which I can’t open.

    What are you using to open it?

15. Regarding the tltday_5.5.man file, when the file started getting posted in this format (it used to just be a .txt file),

    … I think I just saved it to disk and then set Excel as the program to open .man files. It comes out as a typical text file and then “text to columns” …

16. Ray –
    Download the file and change the extension to .txt.

17. Skeptikal,
    “What are you using to open it?”

    Nothing – that’s the problem!

    HaroldW,
    Thanks for the tip, that’s useful.

    Bill Illis,
    Thanks, I just gave up when windows said it couldn’t open the file.

18. Which will be released first, Feb UAH, or Jan Gistemp?

19. MikeN– Probably Jan GISTemp. But you never know.

20. Still no Gistemp, but Jan NCDC up a bit (0.54 vs 0.42).

    Still the second coolest monthly anomaly in the last 10.

    ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

21. Strange, I don’t recall making that second bet, identical to the first.
    John M,
    NCDC not up as much as UAH/RSS globally and an actual fall in the SH. A divergence between satellite/terrestial anomalies in prospect?
    I think that GISTemp was published by the 15th last month.

22. The bet from JCH has to be a typo.

23. My analysis of this month’s betting.
    NO. OF BETS 46
    MAX 0.424
    MIN 0.010
    MEAN 0.291
    MEDIAN 0.305
    STD DEV 0.097
    MEAN 1-23 0.316
    MEAN 24-46 0.266
    MEAN PLUS 1 SD 0.388
    MEAN MINUS 1 SD 0.193
    WITHIN +/- 1 SD (%) 67.39
    ABOVE MEAN (%) 54.35
    BELOW MEAN (%) 45.65
    Since this is only a statistical analysis, and has no bearing on the actual result, I have taken it upon myself to assume that the bet by JCH of 17c, was intended to be 0.17c for the purposes of the analysis.
    The mean and median figures are quite close this month, with a slight majority of those above the mean.

24. Hmm, I wonder how my original bet triplicated …?

    No matter, this is my latest story and I’m sticking with it. This is also, by actual count, the umpteen dozenth version of my multi-variable statistical model. For those keeping score at home, we now have eight variables, S.E. of regression=.103, AIC=-687.3

25. @KAP
    and # quatloos? You said you keep score at home 🙂

26. No, actually, I didn’t. I was just hoping someone was …

27. FWIW, model number umpteen-dozen-and-one is predicting .363 … we’ll see how that goes.

28. The January GISTemp figure seems to have been published overnight, which seems a strange time to update the files, i.e. Sunday night.
    Like NCDC, the global and NH figures are up, with a decline in the SH.

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