Data Comparisons

Where it’s Hot: Anomaly Map

41 Comments

Remember I said it’s cold in Chicago? But RSS came out hot? AnnaV found a nifty web site that displays temperatures and anomalies on nice graphs. I selected anomalies and plotted them:

Figure 1: Where it's hot.
Figure 1: Where it's hot.

Yep. It’s cold even for winter in Chicago. Nathan said it’s hot even for summer in Melborne– and there we see it truly is! (By the way, my Dad’s in Florida. I hope he has an electric blanket. The weather readers were predicting freezing conditions.)

If you want to play, the link is Weekly Mean Temperatures.

41 thoughts on “Where it’s Hot: Anomaly Map”

  2. Fred–
    Sitting in the midwest, it’s so hard to believe it’s warm anywhere! Still, I get that feeling in mid January all the time. . .

  3. I’d imagine that surface temps will be fairly close to satellite temps (normalized to the same baseline, of course) given that they were converging over the last two months or so and there isn’t a strong ENSO either way. But, that said, I’m still not really sure what is causing the divergence between surface and sat measurements, so we will see!

  4. Lucia, on analyzing models vs data, reference to principles of scientific forecasting may help. See:
    Climate Change Forecast Validation: Green, Armstrong, & Soon (International Journal of Forecasting, forthcoming), http://publicpolicyforecasting.com/
    Their summary guidelines for scientific forecasting:
    1. Open Include all submitted evidence relevant to forecasting principles that meets scientific standards (objectivity, full disclosure of methods and data, and clear writing).
    2. Useful Provide information and materials likely to be helpful to practitioners, teachers and researchers.
    3. Timely List new information as soon as it becomes available.
    4. Objective Rely on evidence rather than on opinions. Avoid puffery and endorsing particular products.
    5. Understandable Ensure that normal human beings can make sense of the site’s content.
    6. Civil Maintain a courteous tone.
    7. Free Provide core content as a public service.

    International Institute of Forecasters
    http://www.forecasters.org/
    Rule-Based Forecasting
    http://userpages.umbc.edu/~adya/rbf.html

  5. From the map, I think the anomolies are a result of the Al Gore effect. It was cold in Europe and North America where he gets lots of press coverage, but warm in Southern Eurasia where he doesn’t. 😉

  6. Doesn’t China’s coast get a breeze from the Pacific at this time of year, so with the PDO in its American “cool” phase China gets warmer air from the warm zone in the western Pacific?

  7. Something wrong with this graph. Here in Montreal, the last weeks have seen temperatures 5-8C below normal (as per the TV meteorologist himself), staying in the range -20 to -10C consistently. It’s still -18C as I write. Yet it’s a yellow dot on the map. A bit further north, they had temperatures in the -40’s C.

    I don’t know where these data come from, but they do seem odd.

    Fortunately for me, winter ends tomorrow, as I’m heading for OZ for a few weeks!

  8. FrancoisO-
    Squnting at the map, it does look like the Eastern portion of Erie and Ontario is warm. So, you say no? And here I was envying the residents of Buffalo. . .

    (Did I mention we moved from El Salvador to Buffalo NY when I was 6 years old? We arrived in early January. Brrr!!!! The snow was above my head!)

  9. It shows my part of the world (Alberta/sask) as being 10 deg warmer than normal.

    I have to call les grande merde on that…..

    It also shows that the 10 deg of warmth is SURROUNDING a cooler than normal spot. As this is all flatland, that is highly suspicious.

  10. I’m afraid that Francois O is incorrect. For the period Jan28 to Feb3, per map above, Montreal’s (per Env Can website) mean temp was -9.3 C. The 1971-2000 normal mean temp for that period is around -10.35C.

  12. Interesting from the wunderground site, I get mean temp of -10.5C for Montreal for 1/28-2/3 (weird start and end for a week btw. To do this, I averaged the daily mean temps since wunderground uses a more normal Sun-Sat reporting week. So definitely not 5-8C below normal, but not slightly above normal either (at least based on the daily averages). Goes to show that getting a global temp anomaly is no easy task.

  15. I’ve often wondered how one properly weights various stations when a global average land temperature is computed. The map shows a strong warming in China but I believe that there is also a less noticeable band of anomalously cold across upper Asia, which of course is also larger than it appears due to map projection issues. It seems like there could be some pretty complicated trigonometry involved in getting a representative average.

  16. One thing to consider in the RSS temperatures for January 2009 is the ‘sudden stratospheric warming’ over the Arctic that emerged halfway January.

    http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/50mb9065.gif
    http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/

    This – apparently – unusually strong event started somewhere halfway the month with an increase in stratospheric temperatures of more than 25 degrees Kelvin. If you click around on the NOAA site, you will see that such events travel down from the top of the stratosphere. So by now it has already vanished from the upper stratosphere, only to reach its maximum amplitude in the lower stratosphere.

    Although the MSU temperatures are not very sensitive to the stratosphere, they are also not completely insensitive. Especially the lower stratosphere may have some effect on MSU tropospheric temperatures, also the LT-temperatures. A warming event with such a large amplitude thus can have an effect on tropospheric MSU temperatures. I have not taken a closer look at the MSU vertical weighting functions, but I noted on junkscience.com that the warming only occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, in particular in the Polar region, thus suggesting that this sudden warming has something to do with the MSU MT/LT warming.

    If true, one might expect that Februari may still be warmer than average as the warming event is in full swing in the lower stratosphere, but that by March it has vanished and temperatures will drop again.

    Assuming all else remains equal, obviously …

  17. Jos–
    That’s interesting. Still, we are seeing lots of warm on the ground too.

    HankHenry
    There is some geometry involved– but luckily, no one needs to work out the geometry each month.

    Trying to gauge by eye in very difficult. The projection shown here distorts and makes things nearly impossible. To me, the equatorial areas look warm, so I mentally weight that more. The map does seem warm over all. Chicago is cold.

  20. Lucia
    So question number 2. When we speak of an anomaly, I assume that is relative to the records of a particular station as of a particular day or week in the year? And what’s the value of such a map since so much of the area is unknown- being over oceans?

  21. Fred: the previous week’s hot spot, appears to be a little south and/or west of this weeks cold spot.

    At a guess, one is Medicine Hat or Cypress, the other Moose Jaw or Regina.

    Anyone know where the digital data is, for this chart? I couldn’t find it on the sites home page. Id like to look a little closer. There should not be a 10 deg delta on the prairies, averaged over a week.

  22. Hank– I think it’s mostly just a fun map. When we read the anomalies, most of use want to relate our local experience to the world experience.

    When I mentioned it’s freakin’ cold here– but the world anomaly is high, Nathan mentioned is blippin’ hot in Melbourne. AnnaV pointed to the map. So, you can compare to places where other people live.

    But nobody could really figure out the anomaly based on that map only.

  23. Lucia
    Kewl, thanks for the insight. I am long corn and soybeans. I wonder what the map says about the prospects for the South American crop…. Also, being a farmer, I am really intrigued by the whole sunspot thing. Just the kind of thing for a farmer to think about waiting for the seasons to change.

  25. Lucia- I’ll bet you have been in that shop. I wondered how long it would take you. My wife and I took over the shop from the previous owner who still gives lessons but who also needs more personal time to raise her adopted child. We moved to a new location south of the tracks and on the street rather than up a flight of stairs. Drop in again sometime and introduce yourself.

  26. Here in Boston, we’ve been seeing high temps sitting at about the normal lows, and already twice as much snow as in the average winter season. I would love some local warming right about now.

  30. And Nathan, let’s see whether this prediction is worth anything:

    “As cold expanding high pressure expands south into the lower 48 next week, it will suppress the jet stream and its associated still active storm track well south resulting in a MEMORABLE wintry weather period that will in the end when taken together with the cold in December and January have this winter remembered as an old-fashioned 1960s like winter. Many places deep into the south and east will see heavy snow and ice while unseasonably cold air dominates across the north.”

    http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog

    I’ll bet you 1,000 quatloos and a six-pack of your favorite brew that it is more accurate than any prediction made by GCMs or the AGW-freaks of your choice!

  31. That’s interesting for my area in Australia. It shows us slightly (pale yellow) above yet only today an old local said “I’ll be glad when summer arrives” We’ve been around 25 – 30 C yet normal according to locals is 30 – 35C

  32. Fred,

    I live here and I can assure you that the temperature never rose above -10C during that period. I don’t know where they get a mean of -9 C. Makes no sense.

    I do know that there was a day when the temperature on the island of Montreal (and probably at Dorval airport) was about 8C warmer than in all the surrounding area. But that seemed to be an extremely local phenomenon, and it didn’t last longer than a day. But maybe that was enough to skew the mean.

    We definitely had a colder than normal January, and by a large margin.

  35. Janama
    I doubt the 30-35 for you area would be average. For Perth in Feb (the hottest time of the year) the average max is 31.

  36. Reporting from sunny Melbourne – one place that is anomalously hot. 46.4C today – hottest day ever here, and following a very hot late January.

  40. hmmm
    Would it be possible to incorporate the Argos-data into the “anomaly-grapher”?

    Pielke Sr has a very interesting and (IMHO) important entry on his blog today.

    I think his main points are:

    *Descibe the model (with it’s/their underlying simplifying assumption(s))
    *Calulate the expected results from the model(s)
    *Check if the results match the real world data.

    A very simple. decent and straightforward “theories of science” 101.

    So what do one do if (or when) the results are significantly different from the model predicions?

    Standard procedure is to adjust, patch, or try to resolve the descepancies within the current scientific paradigm.

    However, if departures from models are significant, or if the departures are related to the “anacalyptic assumptions” (the very hypotheses the models are supposed to test), the appropriate thing is to “go back to the drawing board” (sensu Hedgepeth).

    Here is a relevant, very entertaining and illuminating paper:
    Hedgepeth, J. W. 1977: Models and muddles. Some philosophical observations. Helgoländer wiss. Meeresunters. 20: 92-104

    While the paper is on models for predator-prey relations, methinks the general structure should be highly relevant for the current state of affairs in climate science.

    Cassanders
    In Cod we trust

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