GISS reported a temperature anomaly of 0.73C for April, making this the warmest April and the fifth warmest month in their record. The temperature dropped relative to the current value of 0.84C for May. The trend since 1980 is 0.166 C/decade, which remains below the nominal trend of 0.2C/decade predicted for the first part of the 20th century in the AR4. The trend of 0.2C/decade currently does does fall within the uncertainty intervals for trends computed based on the residuals to the multi-linear regressing including a 3 month lagged MEI and time.
What’s up for next month? Many anticipate temperature to fall, possibly agreeing with Neven’s words when he literally posted “Good thing a La Niña is developing.”
Hat tip Neven who alerted me that GISS has updated.
Update: Neven asked if the lagged 12-month average had hit a maximum: The answer is yes. The 12 month running average for GISS and the multi-model mean from hindcasts patched to projections under A1B, all rebaselined using Jan 1980-Dec 1999 are provided below:
Note that at what seems to be the top of El Nino, the 12 month-average just matches the projection. (Bear in mind, for oscillating functions, the peak of the 12 month average will lag the peak of the one month averages.)
Remember that land temps tend to lag the ENSO index, so I’d say that next month could go either way. Satellites will probably be down, however.
Or maybe I spoke too soon; Channel 5 is toasty so far! http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Zeke– Yes. Channel 5 is toasty!
Sure, May may not be cooler than April– but it should be cooler than March. June will likely be cooler than April. Is this certain? Nope.
Is that even a relevant comparison? What do the models hindcast from 1980 – the same 0.2 C/decade? (Beyond all the other issues I have with your comparisons)
Carrot–
About 2C/decade. I could look up more specifically for you– but oddly enough, if you start in exactly 1980-now, the nominal value of 0.2 C/decades is as good for 1980-now as it is for “the first N decades of this century”, with “N” being 2 or 3 depending on which sentence in the AR4 you read. (That’s a nominal value for both periods, so it really doesn’t matter.) There are some wild oscillations for start dates in-between.
Thanks, Lucia. These monthly updates make your blog worthwhile.
So is that running 12 month average of 0.657 the highest ever recorded?
Neven–I didn’t happen to calculate that this morning. I have a bunch of other tasks today and just put up the post. Did you calculate it? (I’m guessing yes? And you know the answer? Why not just post it?)
Zeke Hausfather (Comment#42998)-The Satellites lag ENSO also, by several months. Best fit seems to occur with ~6 according to:
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/Douglass_SORCE_v1.00_text_figs.pdf
It’s GISTEMP, not GISSTemp.
Lucia, remember I said you could do anything you wanted if you put your mind to it? Come on, don’t be hard on yourself. You’re doing a great job.
I was asking more in general, to anyone who happened to know the answer straight away.
I’m not an excel master, but I’ll see if I can find a higher 12 month running average in the last 12 years.
Jeez, do I have to do everything myself?
I see a lot of people make that error. I’ve probably done it myself, though I’m mindful of it.
Neven,
Use Wood for Trees.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/from:1980
The answer is yes, it is the highest 12 month period in GISTEMP.
I’m not sure, but I think it’s highest. I got 0.620 somewhere in 2007.
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edit: thanks, cce.
Given that the 1997-98 El Nino followed a significant cooling event (Pinatubo) it should be no surprise that this year will have close to or warmer than 1998 temps.
Can you flesh that out a bit?
Lucia, there’s a typo: “The temperature dropped relative to the current value of 0.84C for May” should read March.
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If the May anomaly is higher than last year’s 0.56 the 12 month running average record will be even slightly higher, but after that the party is over. Over at WUWT they are chilling the champagne (no mention whatsoever of UAH ch05 or all those monthly records being set these past few months, of course). I hope for their sake that the theory that neutral or La Niña conditions will have a spectacular effect on the Arctic sea ice, isn’t correct. Otherwise Goddard will stand yet again in his underpants, as the Dutch expression goes.
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BTW, with “Good thing a La Niña is developing†I was expressing my hope that 2010 doesn’t completely smash the record in all datasets, because that increases the chances that we’ll have a ‘global cooling/temps haven’t risen since 2010’ meme in a few years time. 😉
Thanks Neven and CCE. Typos fixed. (I’m sure more will appear in future. I am the queen of typo.)
carrot
“Can you flesh that out a bit?”
It takes the climate a while to adjust to events. For example, you often see on this blog, comments about temperature lag to El Nino (with changes in SOI comes changes in trade winds which cause changes in movement of surface water which results in more or less upwelling which causes changes in vertical motion of air which causes further changes in SOI and etc). Volcanoes are no different. Thermal inertia of the ocean is going to be your main contributor to this, but even that causes it’s own responses.
The 97-98 El Nino, just like this years El Nino, followed a couple of years of ENSO negative conditions. But the 97-98 El Nino followed ENSO negative conditions which followed Pinatubo.
Lucia,
” I am the queen of typo”
HA! You had to introduce gender to get at my titel!
Can a few of you download the GISS data and pull out your spreadsheets, calculators, slide rules, abacuses (abaci ?) and check something? Add up the 12 monthly temperatures for 1939 and divide by 12. Ditto for 1982. My results don’t agree with theirs. This may be a minor round-off error, but would you really want to place multi-million dollar instruments on a Mars probe launched by these guys? Oh… wait…
Walter,
Months are not equal in length, so my guess – without checking – is that they are not dividing the totals by 12 but the totals of the days by 365 (or 366, depending on whether it is a leap year or not).
Except that the 1997-98 El Niño was the biggest ever recorded (according to NOAA’s Oceanic Niño Index: 13 months with an average of 1.738), much bigger than this one (10 months with an average of 1.190). Besides, I just read a piece on WUWT that sunspot activity is still not picking up.
The reason that it’s no surprise that this year will have close to or warmer than 1998 temps, is AGW.
The reason that it’s no surprise that this year will have close to or warmer than 1998 temps, is AGW.
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and the reason why multiple people here don t understand this, also is a simple one: they have their fingers plugged into their ears and shout “LALALA” when facts are presented…
Neven,
Your comment assumes that the Earth’s ocean and atmosphere respond immediately to changes in climactic events. It does not. There are many other factors at work. You mentioned one, solar. The solar cycle is in the beginning of it’s cycle, but it was at the beginning of it’s cycle in 97-98. The Arctic is a little warmer now than in 97-98 even though temps there are again in the cooling phase of it’s oscillation. Another difference this year than back in 97-98 is the Mid-Atlantic Ocean off the African coast where it’s much warmer, both due to local weather patterns and a lack of aerosols affecting cloudiness. And again, the Earth had just experienced a major eruption 5 years before the 97-98 event which slowed the warming of the mid and higher latitudes following the Pacific Climate Shift.
Lucia and Zeke
UAH Channel 5 looks more than toasty, it looks well done to me. It’s well above max May average, with everyday so far (through 5/14) above max for day.
http://processtrends.com/images/RClimate_UAH_Ch5_latest.png
Kelly– Yes. It’s very warm up there. I’m not using the word “burnt” until the ‘daily anomaly’ hits 0.89C! 🙂
Sod,
“they have their fingers plugged into their ears and shout “LALALA†when facts are presented”
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/Saturation.html
“In 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere would raise the planet’s surface temperature by five or six degrees Celsius.”
The global warming crowd has been crying wolf for 114 years.
According to James Hansen at NASA we’ve had .8 degrees of warming since the late 1800’s
Pure radiative physics without feed backs says we should see 1.2 degrees of warming from a doubling of CO2 of which 8/10ths of a degree should already have occurred.
114 years of observations and we still have no observational evidence that the hypothetical feed backs exist.
We spent 10’s of millions of dollars on ocean sensors to find ‘the missing heat’. The sensors measure to a depth of 2,000 meters and we still can’t find ‘the missing heat’.
LALALALALALA
Sod,
“LALALALALA”
http://bartonpaullevenson.com/Saturation.html
“In 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere would raise the planet’s surface temperature by five or six degrees Celsius.”
The pure radiative physics for a doubling of CO2 says the earth’s temperature will rise 1.2 degree’s C of which 8/10’s of a degree C should have already occurred if there are no feed backs.
The observed global temperature increase since the Global Warming Alarm Bell was first sounded 114 years ago has been 8/10th’s of a degree C.
A reasonably rational person might conclude that if something can’t be found after searching for 114 years it simply doesn’t exist.
LALALALALALALA
harrywr2 (Comment#43197),
I understand what you are saying, but I think the situation is a bit more complicated than that. A doubling of CO2 would represent a net forcing of about 3.7 watts per square meter, and based on just radiative physics, would increase surface temperature about 1C or 1.1C, depending on the assumed effective “blackbody temperature”. Other contributors to radiative forcing (mainly increases in methane, N2O, tropospheric ozone, halocarbons) are reasonably well known, and taken together with the current level of CO2 represent about 2.9 watts per square meter of forcing, or (2.9/3.7) = 78% of the forcing from a doubling of CO2, which suggests a warming of 0.78C to 0.86C, based on a simple blackbody response to radiative forcing, consistent with what has been observed.
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But the above ignores the delay in warming that can be expected from the accumulation of heat in the ocean (due to the effective heat capacity of the ocean, which is not well known), ignores the direct effects of aerosols (positive: soot/black carbon and negative: reflected light), and ignores the indirect effect of aerosols on cloud nucleation… all of which are extremely uncertain. Depending on what values are assigned to these very poorly defined variables, and also depending on how you assume atmospheric moisture/clouds contribute to the energy balance with changing surface temperature, you can come up with just about any level of climate sensitivity that you want…. and the climate models do indeed generate a broad range of sensitivities. The possibility of an increase in sensitivity over that calculated from simple radiative balance can’t be discounted; how much increase is the real issue.
.
The key to determining the true sensitivity is solid data on changes over time in ocean heat/effect heat capacity (ARGO) and better data on changes in atmospheric aerosols, since it is the uncertainty in these variables that allow very high sensitivity values to be considered credible. The apparent paucity of discussion of little heat accumulation (ARGO data) over the past 5+ years among climate scientists is not surprising, since these data appear inconsistent with the long ocean lags that are demanded by high climate sensitivity, and so call into question the high sensitivity predicted by most climate models. If there is any “LALALALALA” going on, it is in ignoring/discounting the ARGO data.
“During the six years of in-situ measurements [2003-2008], an oceanic warming of 0.77 +/- 0.11W/m2 occurred in the upper 2000m depth of the water column.”
http://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
I don’t know what the model-based expectation of the top 2000m is, but they calculate that thermal expansion represents about 40% of SLR, which is trending near the upper limit of the IPCC’s scenarios.
@sod
Fact 1: Giss 1998/2010 shows GW
Fact 2: Uah 1998/2010 shows no significant warming/cooling
We don’t know what part is CAGW, land use (incl. UHI), etc., sun, cloud cover, ocean… There are many other facts. Far too early to tell.
Hi Lucia,
Couple quick things on your graph. I also calculated +0.166C/decade using OLS, so you can consider that independently validated. In your y=mx+b label at the top of your chart, you’ve got a b of -32.792, not sure what that’s about. I think it should be +0.087C. Also your label shows January being circled. I think you got your circles right, but I think the label should say April.
Regarding the +0.166C / decade trend, my regression model suggests about +0.154C is from anthropogenic variables. The remainder is attributed to -0.010C ENSO, -0.017C Solar, and +0.040C volcanic (which adds up to my model trend of +0.167C). My model also suggests a current (marginal) anthropogenic rate of +0.020C / decade. My climate sensitivity calculation for Anthropogenic forcing is 0.478C/W/m^2. I think that’s on the low end of possible ranges. Of course, I don’t have every variable factored in, and it could be more or less than what I calculated.
lucia (Comment#43005) excerpt on satellite data:
Zeke– Yes. Channel 5 is toasty!
Sure, May may not be cooler than April– but it should be cooler than March. June will likely be cooler than April. Is this certain? Nope.
===========
My response: Lucia, you are forgetting the adjustments made in the UAH data for January through March, that substantially lowered the reported anomalies. The adjustments were used to try and remove the spurious seasonal cycle in UAH data. Spencer and Christy are working hard trying to fix their busted temperature record data, making huge adjustments to the data set going all the way back to 1998 and before.
They claim the impact on the annual numbers shouldn’t be significant, but the changes made so far seem to belie this statement. In any case, the net effect is to ADD an adjustment to the May and June numbers, the months where the seasonal decline in UAH anomaly was most pronounced. So based on Channel 5, plus the ‘baked in’ adjustment, it appears very possible that May 2010 could break the May 1998 record for May readings.
When the satellite readings tailed off in April, I thought it unlikely the trailing 13 month rolling average reported by UAH would set a new record high this summer. Now it appears quite likely that the UAH rolling average will set a new record high, confirming the record high in the GISS 12-month rolling average.
Clearly, the 2009-2010 “year” from July to June is setting the hottest year in the atmospheric temperature data; and the hottest ‘year’ in the last 150+ years!
Another thing that is really anomalous with the UAH satellite derived data… the April reading was held down by a relatively low SH reading. We know that the satellites show more severe swings due to events like ENSO swings or volcanic eruptions (and perhaps the drop in solar irradiance coupled with La Nina impact in 2008).
The UAH hemispheric data swings seem to confirm the AGW predictions of more warming occurring in NH winter (Dec to Mar) and SH winter Jun to Sep). Last year, the SH anomaly was very low, until winter set in, and the SH data climbed in July (0.665), August, and September; then stayed high as the El Nino impacts were felt. April’s SH anomaly fell quickly to 0.207 as the El Nino temperatures in the Pacific fell.
But now, the SH anomaly should show higher readings during the SH winter, starting in June, when AGW impact on SH winter readings factors in. Given the five month delay in ENSO impacts, the NH readings will come down slowly.
Putting all these known impacts together, along with the seasonal adjustment to correct the satellite readings, it appears May, June, and July are all in line to set new UAH records for these respective months.
Some people posting here, seem to like the woodfortrees site for temperature records. They should be aware that the database used by woodfortrees for UAH is wrong… woodfortrees seems to be simply adding data from the recent months to the old version database; whereas the old UAH database has been substantially revised.
So the woodfortrees site will generate mistaken graphs for UAH temperature anomalies. Caveat emptor!
Until the UAH team gets their act together, and gets their mistakes fixed, and the information is updated around the internet, be careful of any analyses purportedly using the UAH temperature record. One comment on this thread, seemed to think that UAH record is the next best thing to a perfect temperature record… the reality is far from that!
Paul
That might have been me, a couple of months ago. I have learned a lot since then, and am not convinced that any of the records is accurate enough to support the kind of analysis and speculation to which they are subjected.
Paul K2 (Comment#43322) May 17th, 2010 at 12:33 am
I’m surprised a climate audit didn’t pick it up earlier.