Brownie Bet:
Guess the value the GISS October Anomaly that will be posted when GISS updates their table in December. Post your guesses in comments.
The rules are pretty much what they were for the Nov1-7 NH ice bet except applied to the GISS anomaly.
- The deadline for betting will be the day before NOAA or Hadley post their November updates, but in no case before Midnight Nov. 13. (That way, if Hadley or NOAA post today, there can still be betting.)
- The metric of interest is this one: GISS October Anomaly. The winner is whomever guesses the value they post when they update in December, which is expected around Dec. 10, 2008. (If they update in November, that won’t count. We need to guess the value that appears after any update occuring on Dec. 10, 2008 or later. )
- Ties go to the first person to bet a value– so check the previous comments. No changing bets!
- Employees of GISS are disqualified on the basis of having possible insider information.
Miscellaneous information on the GISS October Anomaly
The uber-high temperature GISS October temperature anomaly, which represents a record for October anomalies, seems to be driven by the rippin’ heat wave in Northern Asian, including the region often called “Siberia”.
There were other hot spots in October as well. For example, England was warm, see below:
So, did Asia have a hot spell?
Accuweather, reports that Asia did have a hot spell; Siberia was warm:
In October, this region, the northeast of Siberian Russia, shared in the relative warmth that otherwise stretched from Arctic to India and from Far East into eastern Europe. In absolute terms, it was warmest, with respect to normal, in a swath straddling the Ural Mountains. In the Siberian “pole of cold”, meanwhile, mean monthly temperature was about 5-10 degrees F, or roughly 3-6 degrees C, above normal. At Verkhoyansk and Oymyakon, to notoriously cold settlements at the heart of the “cold pole”, mean monthly temperature for October was 6.3 degrees F/3.8 degrees C above normal. The city of Yakutsk had mean monthly temperature 9.3 degrees F/5.2 degrees C above normal.
So, yes, parts of Northern Asia were between up to 5.2 C warmer than normal. That’s somewhat less than the 15.7C upper-bound on the anomalies suggested by the GISS map, but it’s still warm.
There are rumors of problems with the GISS records.
(This may be the same Chris who tells us he lives in Central England, which suffered unseasonably cold weather.)
Based on the information in the link provided by Chris, I computed the monthly average temperatures for Turuhansk from 1977-2007 and determined that an average of 8.1 C in October would result in a positive anomaly of 13.4C for Turuhansk. (That would save the Turhanskian’s plenty on heating oil. That’s got to be good for the carbon balance, right?)
It turns out that, due to a poorly understood, but empirically observed climate phenomena referred to as “the late fall to early winter transition” Turuhansk’s October average temperature is 10.9 degrees colder than September’s. So, if the 8.1C recorded as the October average temperature is just heldover from September, then we might expect the correct anomaly for October to be closer to the September value. That was +2.1C. That would be a positive anomaly, but not +13.4 C.
What about other hot spots?
Still, it appears the problem is rather widespread and may also include England. Steve McIntyre and John S. both looked at the GISS record in more details, and many Russian records appear to be held over.
But does this problem matter?
Who knows if it matters? Sure, the 13.4C anomaly for Turuhansk is suspiciously close to the anomaly values indicated by GISS for the general Siberia region. Sure Northern Asia is a vast region.
However, maybe the excitable elements in the blogosphere are getting too excited. For all we know, GISS correctly tagged the held over temperatures as “missing” in the full computation. There was a hot spell in Siberia; maybe the October anomaly is a record high.
What do I Bet?
I’m betting the anomaly drops to 50/100s. My theory is someone forgot to run a quality control script, which surely must exist. I also think if that happened, it was just an honest mistake.
Update
Nov. 11, 11:41 Central time: GISS posted this:
2008-11-11: Most data posted yesterday were replaced by the data posted last month since it looks like some mishap might have occurred when NOAA updated their GHCN data. We will postpone updating this web site until we get confirmation from NOAA that their updating programs worked properly. Because today is a Federal Holiday, some pages are still showing yesterday’s data.
Chalk me up for 0.46 for December’s update to October anomaly.
I see you are going low! You must be inspired by RSS?
Absolutely. A comment at CA indicated that GISS has pulled the October data. One can’t generate any October maps at this time. Three cheers for the blogosphere!
Best title for a blog post on this subject:
October, The Warmest September On Record
Steve @ CA just posted a Statement from NASA:
2008-11-11: Most data posted yesterday were replaced by the data posted last month since it looks like some mishap might have occurred when NOAA updated their GHCN data. We will postpone updating this web site until we get confirmation from NOAA that their updating programs worked properly. Because today is a Federal Holiday, some pages are still showing yesterday’s data.
“Chris commenting at WUWT noticed that some of the GISS temperature data records for Northern Asia at GISS show identical readings for September and October.”
Thanks for the mention Lucia. I do believe I was the first person in the world to post about the identical readings – brownies would have been the ideal reward i think, but i’ll settle for recognition 🙂 🙂
Chris (15:57:03) :
Well that’s interesting!…………
John Goetz (16:43:06) :
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit forwarded me an email from John S. that said:……….
I’ll take 0.35C anomaly.
I’d like to pick 0.52 please.
Lucia have you checked the source of Accuweather temp data? you may find it was in fact GISS or NCDC so NOT relaible once again. What is your issue with Satellite data? Bet 0.20C but of course thats too low for GISS! LOL
I’ll take another stab. Same donation of any brownie winnings, Lucia. With the current listings of a 0.61 anomaly, given a full month to fix there data, with the entire blogosphere breathing down their necks, I’ll go with 0.25, to be relatively close to UAH and RSS. Anybody seen HadCRUT? I’d actually like to see their number. If they’re warmer than UAH or RSS, GISS will come closer to them so they can say they have support.
Keith– you think they’ll over compensate? Heh!
My bet is 0.47.
I’m more interested in seeing what the good Dr Hansen will say about the data mistake.
Paul
Lucia, I don’t think they will heavily overcompensate. That 0.25 is still 0.08 degrees warmer than RSS and UAH are listing. But, if they come in more than a full tenth of a degree warmer than than anyone else, people will still think that they are smoking crack or cooking the books. HadCRUT is going to be the big key here, in my opinion. If they are close to RSS and UAH, then GISS will be no more than 0.10 degrees warmer than the average of the three. If HadCRUT comes in a good bit higher than the satellite temperatures, then GISS will be a little bit warmer than HadCRUT, and be able to cite that they are not out of line with another respected authority.
Imaginary phone conversation… colony side only…
Hadcrut? Ya this is GISS here. Could you please give me a little inkling of the anomaly you will publish for October???…. Ya well, we have a number but we would really kinda like to get your take on it too…. Ya that way we can come up with something that will at least not sound too crazy, ya know what I mean… Ya… That LOW huh??.. well ok… I guess we’ll have to be a little higher than that, do you think you might be able to bump that up a bit???….. No? Ha ha ha… I was just kidding…. Oh well thanks for the sneak peak… Tally ho and cheerio and all… thanks again….
I’ll take .54 C for the combined land/sea anomaly.
Arthur
I’ll bet 0.42 C, I think they will still be a very high outlier. They alone, will show 2008 as among the 10 warmest years.
My bet is that GISSTemp will plunge deeper into redundancy.
While I agree with Martin’s sentiments…..
GISS has now posted their Nov numbers and they claim the Nov anomaly is the same as the Oct anomaly, or 0.58 C
Which I believe means my guess of 0.54 C is the closest.
Arthur
Ahhh! Well, I have to bake brownies tomorrow. Today, I have to go shovel snow. (I just returned from Glencoe Illinois. I think I left just in time to avoid the largest batch of snow. But I need to go cleear some to avoid suffering later.)
I’m sure I could make composite graph using these numbers, but I think I’ll wait until after the December numbers.