bdgwx

I don't know about the high risk. HRRR looks potent now, but what will things look like tomorrow? We've seen this type of over-reaction by CAMs only to curtail their outputs a few runs later or the day-of ends up being a bust. Nah...I see < 50% of a high risk tomorrow. I'll accept a good ribbing if I'm wrong though. We'll see.

^^^ 3km CAPE of 237, LCL of 372, and 1km SRH of 274. Yikes.

Those UH tracks on the 0Z HRRR are gnarly. They're also expanding at a rate of 65 mph.

Man...I'm getting up to 70 mph right movers on some of these soundings.

15Z RAP is primed with a convective melee of activity in the warm sector there in IL.

Another day and another sharp decline. The NSIDC did call the top as March 5th.

March 5 with a 5d average of 15.047 on NSIDC might be the max. I'd give greater than 50% odds at this point. We'll see.

RSS was up in February, but not as much. ERA was only up by 0.02C. I keep wondering if UAH is contaminated by what happens in the stratosphere more so than RSS. If so that would partly explain UAH's 0.13C/decade trend which is far lower than what any other dataset shows.

Maybe. I was watching aerosol optical depths closely after that eruption and while there was a lot tephra lofted into the troposphere it didn't appear as if much sulphate aerosols made it into the stratosphere. I think the Australia wildfire smoke is a better hypothesis at this point. In regards to the troposphere...volcanoes typically cool this layer. I don't know of a case where warming resulted from an eruption. And I'm not understanding the link with smoke either. I thought smoke was more effective at blocking incoming shortwave radiation than it was at trapping outgoing longwave radiation.

Hmm...Dr. Spencer is suggesting the smoke warmed both the troposphere and stratosphere. Typically aerosols cool the troposhere and warm the stratosphere. This is an unusual event in that the spike up is observed in both layers. I'm a bit skeptical of his smoke causing radiation induced warming (aka greenhouse effect) claim, but I'm open to hearing what evidence he presents. The thing is that the February troposphere anomaly is primarily the result of warming in the NH. My first thought is that the record +AO may be partly to blame with the spike.

I was not expecting that. The average ONI over the last 3 and 6 months is only 0.5 and 0.3 respectively. Somewhat interesting...the UAH stratosphere temperature spiked up this month. This is only the 3rd time a spike has occurred. The other two were from El Chichon and Pinatubo.

Definitely some export going on there. We are now at that time of year when the max could occur at anytime.

The Arctic Oscillation is once again predicted to top 6 by the Euro.

Good question. This can be found in IPCC AR5 WGI figure 12.28. For the summer minimum not much is expected to change through 2030. In fact, we might even expect a slight increase possibly lasting until mid century until a regime of more consistent declines begin down there. And the detailed breakdown for Arctic summer minimum is in IPCC AR5 WGI TS figure 17. The only scenario that gets to near 100% melt out before 2100 is RCP8.5. But even then a very small patch of ice is predicted to cling the northern tip of Greenland. And, of course, winter ice will likely persistent for a very long time...well past 2100.

I don't equate an ice-free summer regarding Arctic sea ice extents to anything even remotely close to a doomsday scenario though. FWIW the "official" IPCC prediction can be seen in figure TS.17 of the AR5 WGI report. The best guess is about 2045 for RCP8.5, 2065 for RCP6.0, 2080 for RCP4.5, and never for RCP2.6.

Gotcha. Outlier predictions like those from Wedhams are overwhelmingly rejected by mainstream science. The consensus timeline for the first ice free summer in the Arctic region is about 2040-2060 with moderate to high emissions scenarios. Note that "ice-free" means < 1e6 km^2. The disappearance of sea ice altogether would likely take hundreds of years even under an unmitigated emissions scenario. Regarding daily and annual sea ice extents...it's "supposed" to ebb and flow like this. Its best to stick to reputable sources for climate predictions or predictions of any kind in any discipline of science really.

Who is saying that daily or annual sea ice extent would only monotonically decrease?

Carbon Brief posted their 2019 State of the Climate Report. https://www.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-climate-how-the-world-warmed-in-2019

Sea ice in the SH is doing relatively well too.

I'd like to see SharpPy add some of the features that BUFKT has like momentum xfer, ptyping, etc.

Yeah. That's pretty close. That's because it is. At least post WWII it is. In fact, the anthroprogenic force has been so large during this period that it accounts for nearly 100% of the net force. The IPCC considers all agents that are modulating the climate. They have to because the energy imbalance is modulated by the net affect of all energy fluxes; not just one of them. I posted a link to IPCC AR5 WGI chapter 8 above that provides a brief summary of the agents that have contributed to the modulation of Earth's energy budget. Not always. Humans either did not exist or were not capable of influencing the climate in the distant past. But here's the cool thing about the laws of physics. They stipulate that the radiative force induced by perturbations in GHGs are invariant of the actor that modulated them. In other words, GHG molecules have the exact same radiative behavior regardless of whether they are emitted by natural agents or by human agents. That's why GHGs are crucial and essential pieces of the puzzle in solving many paleoclimate mysteries like the PETM, glacial cycles, faint young Sun problem, etc.

Yeah, pretty close. Most estimates I've seen show DWIR to be about 345 W/m^2. The EEI would then be about 0.2% of that. I'm not sure how meaningful that is by itself though. Like you said...context.

This paper is not relevant to the error for the annual OHC anomaly or annual global temperature. Nor is the quoted 0.6C figure the measurement error that can be expected from an ARGO float which is said to be approximately ±0.002C for individual measurements. The 0.6C figure is the RMS error of ARGO derived hydrographic section temperature fields. These sections are computed even in lieu of being occupied by an ARGO float at each grid cell. Using the WOA (World Ocean Atlas) dimensions we can estimated 75x30 = 2250 grid cells along the cruise line of the hydrographic section used in the paper. If you were to then answer the question...what is the error of computed mean temperature of this hydrographic section then you might expect it to be 0.6/sqrt(2250) = ±0.01C using the standard error of the mean formula. In reality I suspect the actual error to be a bit different for a variety of reasons. I'm just giving you an order of magnitude estimate based on trivial statistical principals using the RMS error of the temperature field on that single hydrographic section mentioned in the publication. Note that this hydrographic section represents but an infinitesimally small part of a much larger 3D volume containing vastly many more grid cells by which to significantly reduce the error in the global mean temperature estimate if such a method were used. I do not see anything in this publication that is inconsistent with Cheng's OHC 2σ envelope. I do see that ARGO reduces the error by a factor 2 relative to the non-ARGO era. Perhaps this is why the 2σ envelope appears to be significantly reduced in later years on Cheng's graph?

Fun with math. The ocean has a mass of about 1.4e21 kg. The specific heat capacity is about 4 kj/kg. This means it would require 5.6e24 joules of energy to increase the mean temperature of the ocean by 1.0C. This would require an EEI of +1.2 W/m^2 to persist for 300 years. A smaller +0.7 W/m^2 imbalance is causing the GMST to increase by about +0.2C/decade. I doubt the relationship would be linear but you can certainly do an order of magnitude estimate on what might happen if we added 5.6 yottajoules of energy to geosphere over a 300 year period. Hint...hothouse Earth might be something worth researching. It's a good thing then that no reputable scientific work claims that climate forcing agents are known with perfect certainty nor is it claimed that anthroprogenically modulated forcing agents are the only contributors to changes in temperature. I highly recommend reading IPCC AR5 WGI chapter 8 on radiative forcings for a brief summary of the agents in play and estimates of their magnitudes and uncertainty. ENSO, clouds, and likely a bunch of stuff that you haven't even thought of are all actively researched. I think what you'll find when looking at the academic literature is that the exact opposite of arrogance is happening in climate science.

You can see in the graph that @chubbs posted that the 2σ (95%) confidence envelope is delineated by the green error bars.