Data Comparisons

UAH: April Colder Than March

36 Comments

Troposphere temps up or down? Yesterday, RSS said up; today, UAH says down. Here are the temperature anomalies since UAH began operation:

Figure 1: The Real UAH update for April. (D'oh!)
Figure 1: The Real UAH update for April. (D'oh!)
  1. UAH for March was 0.208 C; April’s 0.091 anomaly is C . That’s quite a drop! (In contrast, RSS rose 0.04C.)
  2. UAH for April 2008 was 0.015 C; April 2009 was 0.244C.
  3. Channeling Lubos, who seems to be a cooler, I will give the rank as coldest since 1999! Channeling warmers I will say this is the 15th warmest ever recorded!
  4. Channeling myself, I will say the trend since 2001 remains negative, and dropped compared to last month. Trends since inception and 2000 are both positive but dropped compared to last month.

Now I’m waiting for GISS, and Hadley. April was cool in Chicago. My peonies are not blooming in time for Mother’s day. I read all sorts of news stories about unseasonal snow in the US and Australia. That makes me expect a relatively cool anomaly compared to this century. But, who knows? Maybe Siberia was warm!

Update

I had a seriously “D’oh” moment and repasted in last March’s data! The post should be less stupid now.

36 thoughts on “UAH: April Colder Than March”

  1. Lucia,

    This is off topic but have you seen the posting by William DiPuccio on Ocean Heat Content at Climate Science this morning? If you are going to do trend analysis would the oceans be a much less noisy data set to examine as was done there?

  2. Any idea why the anomaly is so low given the AMSU-A daily data seems to point to a higher anomaly?

  3. Sean Wise–
    There are two reasons I don’t focus on ocean heat content:
    1) ocean heat content data from observations are not as easily available as surface temperatures (and may still be subject to corrections because the system is new.)
    2) the projections for ocean heat content are not as easily available as those for surface temperatures.

    If Josh Willis makes the observed data available, I’ll look at that and add it to the mix. However, I don’t plan to download giga-bytes of data from PCMDI to come up with my own monthly temperature series for ocean heat content any time soon. Currently, I would have little to compare the models too anyway.

  5. According to Roy, the likely reasons for the discrepancy are 1. 14 extra degrees of latitude toward the South Pole 2. RSS was colder in the base period (this is a weird “reason”-seems more like a symptom) and 3. RSS is making use of an NOAA satellite that has a decaying orbit, so RSS’s diurnal drift adjustment is agressively changing the result. AQUA, which UAH is using exclusively now, requires no such adjustment. This is probably the main reason (diurnal effects are very strong right now).

    I would be interested to see a debate between the satellite teams to see who has the better arguments for their series…

  6. Andrew_FL (Comment#13348)

    “3. RSS is making use of an NOAA satellite that has a decaying orbit, so RSS’s diurnal drift adjustment is agressively changing the result. AQUA, which UAH is using exclusively now, requires no such adjustment. This is probably the main reason (diurnal effects are very strong right now).”

    It struck me as I read this that it appears that NOAA can’t seem to get away from surface temperature measurement problems even in space! Maybe Anthony Watts should extend his surface stations project to the extraterrestrial domain – any volunteers to go check out the satellites for “siting problems”? ;^)

  7. I think your figures are messed up in your discription for “Figure 1”

    Bullet points 1 and 2 have some errors….I believe….

  9. Frank K,

    Maybe Anthony Watts should extend his surface stations project to the extraterrestrial domain – any volunteers to go check out the satellites for “siting problems”? ;^)

    They’re already on the case at this blog – see the third and fourth story down –

    http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/

    😉

  10. Actually, diurnal drift is more closely related to “Time of Observation Bias” than siting issues.

  11. “Actually, diurnal drift is more closely related to “Time of Observation Bias” than siting issues.”

    I was mainly referring to the statement…

    “RSS is making use of an NOAA satellite that has a decaying orbit…”

    which could be considered a “siting” issue…

  12. From:
    http://www.uah.edu/News/climatebackground.php

    “The orbital drift of NOAA’s TIROS satellites causes two problems with the temperature data. A spacecraft launched to observe at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. local time will drift to later local times through its operational lifetime, say to 5 p.m. and 5 a.m.

    Because a typical location on Earth naturally cools between 2 (p.m. or a.m.) and 5 (p.m. or a.m.), a satellite observing this cooling over its lifetime would record a spurious long-term cooling trend.”

    It sort of is like a “siting issue” but more like TOB in the way it causes trouble.

  13. Ocean heat content data is not all that reliable…..yet.
    Satellite may have its problems, but it can at least be quantified and calibrated to a known standard (UAH anyway).

  14. You know, it is more than a little disconcerting that with all the money spent on climate research we still do not have anything like an adequate observing network in place. Given the importance of OHC, one would think the effort to get reliable measurements would be enormous…

  16. There are at least two ways to measure ocean heat content, though. The ARGO system is a direct measure of the upper ocean. Then there is thermal expansion if you can correct for the change in mass due to land based ice melting or accumulating. This paper ( http://etienne.berthier.free.fr/download/Cazenave_et_al_GPC_2009.pdf ) attempts to do a complete balance using GRACE for mass, both of the oceans and land based ice, altimetry for sea level and ARGO for thermal and salinity changes related to expansion. I can’t see any obvious holes, although that doesn’t mean all that much. Sea level has been flat to down since about 2006, assuming that the seasonal corrections are correct.

  17. In Sweden the largest newspaper (a semi-tabloid) says it was the warmest April on record. It was slightly above 10 C for many days in a row, and that’s by definition summer! This in this article:

    “Warmer than EVER”
    http://www.aftonbladet.se/vader/article5048509.ab

    It has been quite a normal spring (probably late in the North) but until Copenhagen in December I expect a record in warming records in media.

    I think I go religious because of the climate insanity around me, but I think I know what it’s all about. Edward Markey said this in the Congress the other day, which proves that science is regarded as politics delivered:

    “…the problem back in that era was that rather than to listening to National Academy of Sciences this congress […] decided that they would […] ignoring the National Academy of Sciences. So it was not a science based decision. It was strictly political, and that’s what we now reeping the harvest of, because when you put something in your river […]”.

    ( 1:07:30 in youtube.com/watch?v=VzDutBRMsXw )

    Did NAS delivered a political program? Does even climate scientists do that? In the congress “science” apparently is the alibi for big government solution labeled “radical climate politics”, and politics itself — a discussion and the process of demoracy — shall not be regarded. We’re in fascist land. The scientists and engineers has saved us from the corrupted politics, which now even the politicians say is plain corruption where science has to take control over decisions. Or could it be the other way around…? In Gore’s pockets a little part of the 640 billions a year Vaxman bill taxes will end, or am I just cynical?

  18. Lucia: Regarding OHC data, the latest Levitus et al (2009) OHC paper and supporting data is here:
    http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

    My short post on it is here:
    http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/03/latest-revisions-to-ocean-heat-content.html

    There were at least two other papers on OHC last year: Domingues et al and Ishii and Kimoto. All had different results.

    And I agree. When they finally figure out how to reconstruct it for the past couple of decades, when they finally include Southern Ocean data for a reasonable period of time, when they finally…it might be a useful dataset. Right now OHC raises more questions than it answers.

    Regards

  19. Interesting about the daily Uah vs monthly Uah comparison. Judging by daily readings on chanel 4, April 2009 was clearly significantly warmer than April 2001, which monthly values obtained from wood for trees show as 0.257, and probably a little below April 2007, which WFT monthly value says was 0.244….

  20. Thanks for the link Bob. I was having a hard time finding data files for OHC. Virtually all the data I found was for individual floats. Not a complete gridded field.

  21. “Measurements covering the globe are very, very expensive”

    Indeed. Why waste money actually measuring the temperature, when you can pretend to know the temperature already? We have reconstructions, adjustments and models to cover past, present and future. Why worry about measuring anything? Pretending is funner and hypothetically cheaper and you never have to be wrong. Huh, No Brainer, Dude. 😉

    Andrew

  22. M Hauber: “Interesting about the daily Uah vs monthly Uah comparison. Judging by daily readings on chanel 4, April 2009 was clearly significantly warmer than April 2001, which monthly values obtained from wood for trees show as 0.257, and probably a little below April 2007, which WFT monthly value says was 0.244….”

    Whether you mean April 2001, or 2008, I can only assume you use significant in it’s non-mathematical sense………Eyeballing the difference would yield 0.1 – 0.2 degrees Farenheit . Infintessimal seems a better desscriptor than significant.

  23. The problem as I see it is that instead of wasting money improving the observing network, money has mostly been wasted on fancy computers.

  24. Michael, according to Roy:
    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/daily-monitoring-of-global-average-temperatures/

    “This web page should be used as only a rough guide, because there are some data adjustments made before we officially post the UAH monthly updated data. (I post a plot of those data here.) The biggest adjustment is the fact that we don’t even use NOAA-15 right now…we are using the AMSU data from NASA’s Aqua satellite in the final UAH product.”

    As lucia would say, the daily to monthly data is a Red Delicious to Grannie Smith comparison…

  25. If only we had a surface stations project for satellites, we could have caught the error in UAH earlier and avoided a whole decade of obnoxious “satellites show global cooling” debate. (See http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=312&print=1 for a recap, or any good skeptic site pre-2005).

    I jest, of course, but its important to remember that satellites have their own uncertainties that, in the past, have been considerably greater than those of the surface records.

  26. Andrew_FL (Comment#13367) May 5th, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    “The problem as I see it is that instead of wasting money improving the observing network, money has mostly been wasted on fancy computers.”

    Yes – it goes much further than this. Instead of doing real science, the US government (and by extension taxpayers) is wasting vast amounts of money both in academia and government labs on climate “junk” science projects, trips to Bali, substandard, undocumented software (e.g. anything GISS produces), and expensive research facilities. That’s in addition to all of the new computers we buy for them. Meanwhile, instead of doing it’s job, a group of ** volunteers ** from the surface stations project is required to do the work that the NCDC is paid to do but apparently refuses to do (i.e. actually visit their own historic network of climate monitoring stations to examine siting issues).

  27. Lucia: “Now I’m waiting for GISS, and Hadley. April was cool in Chicago. My peonies are not blooming in time for Mother’s day. I read all sorts of news stories about unseasonal snow in the US and Australia. That makes me expect a relatively cool anomaly compared to this century. But, who knows? Maybe Siberia was warm! ”

    Magnus: “In Sweden the largest newspaper (a semi-tabloid) says it was the warmest April on record”

    Yup, same here in western part of Norway, local paper says it’s the warmest April in hundred and something years..
    It may seem that the nordic countries are the promised land of global warming… 🙂

  28. I had a seriously “D’oh” moment and repasted in last March’s data!

    Well, you need better QC measures! 🙂

  29. Boris– My budget is less than 1/4 of a full time employee at NASA GISS. How can you expect decent QC with my measly budget? 🙂

  31. Boris– I actually netted $100! They sent a check for $69 and the rest should come this month. Whoo hooo!

  35. Nylo-
    I just updated the most recent three points from Roy Spencer’s blog. He seems to be pretty reliable about what’ coming when the update is formally posted.

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