2012 Global Temperatures

[The_Global_Warmer]

Friv, its nice you just posted 2011 to 2012 SST graphs...its also nice that global temperatures have risen from 2011 to 2012. You have proved absolutely nothing wrong about the global temperature dataset.

Especially when you take into account the lag associated with SSTs and global temp rise. I think you need to read up more on the interaction of El Nino and La Nina with global temp rise...its not linear and its not always the same exact lag depending on the strength, but its generally pretty close. But the weaker the rise or fall, the more other variables like solar, convection, and clouds will play a role.

Thank you for the lesson on global temp data.

(I have no problem being wrong about this issue, if it's proven I am wrong I never hide I always admit it and accept the best possible science there is. Version 5.5 is not that and until we get a paper, doesn't have to be peer reviewed. I do not dismiss rational explainations. Spencer knew the explanation they gave right now isn't enough and braced for it, almost apologizing for version 6.0 and the paper that would come with it not being ready, I flipped out because they fYkkkkkked with my reality they said they took care of this problem and then let it go all year until the spurious warming as they call it got out of control. THEY ALLOWED HUGE TEMPERATURE ANONAMLY'S TO GO PUBLISHED IN GOOD FAITH KNOWING THEY WERE GOING TO RADICALLY ALTER THE DATA. I COMPRISED IDEAS THAT WERE SOUND ON THIS DATA THAT SHOWED THE WARMING HAS COMMENCED AGAIN AGIANST GLOBAL FACTORS, SO WELL THAT IT WAS HARD TO DISPUTE. THEN THEY SAY NO IT DIDN'T HAPPEN LIKE THAT AND NOT ONLY DID THEY LOWER TEMPS THEY RADICALLY LOWERED THEM EVEN AGAINST GLOBAL CONDITIONS THAT STILL WARRANT A WARM EARTH. THEN ON TOP OF THAT THEIR RATIONAL DOESN'T PARTICULARLY FIT.

As far as nothing be wrong wih the data-set, don't be insulting to everyones intelligence here.

YESTERDAY:

Obviously, the noise in Aqua AMSU channel 5 has increased dramatically. In fact, the NASA AIRS Team stopped using Aqua AMSU ch. 5 in their temperature retrievals months ago. (BTW, the LT computation causes an amplification of the instrument measurement noise, but the relative increase in Aqua noise vs. the other satellites is not affected, which from the above plot looks like about a factor of 7 or 8).

So, you might ask, why include Aqua AMSU in our processing if the noise is so large? Well, because we use over 300,000 measurements to get a global monthly average. If the noise in Aqua AMSU ch. 5 was truly random, the huge increase in noise seen in the above plot should not cause a drift in the calibration of the instrument.

But increasing noise in a microwave radiometer can have different causes. And not all of the causes would result in truly random noise characteristics. That appears to be the case with Aqua AMSU ch 5.

So What Is the Corrected Temperature Anomaly for September, 2012?

Version 6.0 of our dataset will take care of the diurnal drift effects, but due to our other responsibilities, John and I have not quite finished v6.0. Nevertheless, we think we can we produce a preliminary update in the next couple weeks. The results suggest that there has been a spurious warming in Aqua AMSU LT which has reached close to 0.2 deg. C last month. It has been increasing over the last couple years. Do NOT expect the long term warming trend during 1979-2012 to decrease, though, because there are other changes to the long-term time series which cancels out the recent spurious warming.

TODAY:

Rather than issuing an early release of Version 6, which has been in the works for about a year now, we decided to do something simpler: remove Aqua AMSU after a certain date, and replace it with the average of NOAA-15 and NOAA-18 AMSU data. Even though the two NOAA satellites have experienced diurnal drifts in their orbits, we have found that those drifts are in opposite directions and approximately cancel. (The drifts will be corrected for in Version 6.0).

So a couple weeks went into a day? Did Christy see the September anomaly of .43C and decide to move that up, so what would of taken a few weeks took a day? That's absurd, he also just said it's hard to know what is spurious and not and throws out the warmer of the three sat's used.

WHAT DATE IS THAT? HE CONVIENTELY LEFT THAT OUT.

So Aqua has insane noise but is still giving results close to the other sat's, expecially Noaa-15. Until recently when the noise incresed.

Even worse Noaa-15 and 18 have indentical NOISE but yet Noaa-15 is quite a bit warmer than NOAA-18. From days 0-150 the differences are small vs NOAA 15 but yet So they throw out the warmer sat and keep the other two that have identical noise but show Noaa-15 as spurious warming? This

What I should have done was not place my trust into a data-set created and mostly governed by Christy's over-site. He just told bold face lies and submitted watt et all to congress, but you don't question UAH? Why?

for what it's worth I wrote Dr. Spencer against my gut apologizing for calling him a fraud, my feelings are that he has to be the public figure on this radical downward adjustment because Christy has ZERO credibility.

http://www.skeptical...s-congress.html

Misinforming Congress with Watts' Flawed Unpublished Paper

In his testimony, Christy disputed the accuracy of the surface temperature record (as he also did in last year's testimony). The accuracy of this record has been confirmed time and time again, and yet Christy refuses to accept the scientific research demonstrating its accuracy. Worst of all, as Anthony Watts notes, Christy cited the incomplete, unpublished, fundamentally flawed preliminary paper on which Watts and Christy are both co-authors:

"Watts et al. demonstrate that when humans alter the immediate landscape around the thermometer stations, there is a clear warming signal due simply to those alterations, especially at night. An even more worrisome result is that the adjustment procedure for one of the popular surface temperature datasets actually increases the temperature of the rural (i.e. best) stations to match and even exceed the more urbanized (i.e. poor) stations. This is a case where it appears the adjustment process took the spurious warming of the poorer stations and spread it throughout the entire set of stations and even magnified it"

None of the above statements are true. Christy did finally note that his paper with Watts is "ongoing" and incomplete, mentioning one of the many fundamental flaws in their preliminary paper - its failure to account for changes in time of day temperature station readings:

"This is ongoing research and bears watching as other factors as still under investigation, such as changes in the time-of-day readings were taken, but at this point it helps explain why the surface measurements appear to be warming more than the deep atmosphere (where the greenhouse effect should appear.)"

Yet if the research is incomplete, preliminary, and not reviewed, how can Christy possibly justify referencing it in testimony to Congress? There is simply no excuse, particularly since major flaws were immediately identified in the Watts pre-publication as soon as it was made public (i.e. see this post by Victor Venema published the very next day). Christy has misinformed Congress by implying that it has overturned the large body of scientific evidence confirming the accuracy of the surface temperature record.

It's problematic enough that Christy did not recognize the many obvious errors in his preliminary paper with Watts. While Watts is an amateur, Christy does not have that excuse - he is a climate scientist. Not only did Christy fail to identify clear fundamental errors in the paper's analysis which completely undermine its conclusion, but he then presented that incorrect conclusion to Congress.

This is an important point, because Christy is constantly claiming that his UAH satellite temperature record is the gold standard, contrary to other research, for example Mears et al. 2011 and Thorne et al. 2011, which note that the satellite data possibly have outstanding issues, and contrary to the Watts and Christy preliminary paper in which the amount of warming the authors claim is happening in the United States is inconsistent with the amount of warming in the UAH record. Christy also constantly argues that the surface temperature data sets have a warm bias, including in his testimony to Congress.

Yet in the paper he co-authored on the subject with Watts, Christy apparently did not know to take the first and most critical step of homogenizing the data and removing the climate-unrelated biases introduced by factors like stations moving and time of observation changing. These are factors which many different scientific groups have investigated using different methodologies, all arriving at essentially the same answer.

I guess Christy is taking care of that problem.

[ORH_wxman]

I flipped out because they fYkkkkkked with my reality they said they took care of this problem and then let it go all year until the spurious warming as they call it got out of control.

Where did they say they "took care of this problem"...all they said is they knew it existed.

Link on where they said this problem would be fixed in their dataset as it is currently published? They announced this problem last year but never once said it was fixed yet.

Post all the italics you like, but you have not once answered why you think they are wrong when their adjustments would put them in line with other datasets. You have not once ackowledged the fact that GISS/RSS/Hadcrut are much cooler in the recent past than them. You praised the satellite temps as being more thorough when UAH was spuriously warm (yet never mentioned RSS)...now when they address a known problem that they already commented on, you completely flip out.

You sound ridiculous. I'm sorry.

[The_Global_Warmer]

UAH Surely looks inline with RSS now.

2012 RSS:

2012 1 -0.0587

2012 2 -0.1213

2012 3 0.0730

2012 4 0.3317

2012 5 0.2320

2012 6 0.3381

2012 7 0.2911

2012 8 0.2556

VS 2012 UAH:

2012 01 -0.134

2012 02 -0.135

2012 03 0.051

2012 04 0.232

2012 05 0.179

2012 06 0.235

2012 07 0.130

2012 08 0.208

[The_Global_Warmer]

Where did they say they "took care of this problem"...all they said is they knew it existed.

Link on where they said this problem would be fixed in their dataset as it is currently published? They announced this problem last year but never once said it was fixed yet.

Post all the italics you like, but you have not once answered why you think they are wrong when their adjustments would put them in line with other datasets. You have not once ackowledged the fact that GISS/RSS/Hadcrut are much cooler in the recent past than them. You praised the satellite temps as being more thorough when UAH was spuriously warm (yet never mentioned RSS)...now when they address a known problem that they already commented on, you completely flip out.

You sound ridiculous. I'm sorry.

Update 1 Dec 2011 ************************* Roy and Danny are looking at a new, more robust method of calculating (empirically) the diurnal drift effect on the AMSU instruments as noted last month. In very preliminary results, it appears that the AMSU on AQUA may have a slight spurious warming in AMSU5 over the last 3 years. Since this AMSU is our backbone satellite since 2002, we have intercalibrated the other satellites to it, which means when all is said and done, we may be lowering the anomalies since 2008. However, there are still many uncertainties in the process, but I wanted to give an update on the preliminary findings. Update 8 Nov 2011 ************************* Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell are working on a diurnal correction for the AMSU channels. To date we have relied on AQUA AMSU due to the fact it was a NASA science spacecraft with on-board propulsion and thus a stable (non-drifting) orbit. AQUA will not last forever, and there are signs of increasing noise, so it will not be suitable as an anchor satellite much longer. The diurnal corrections will allow more data from NOAA-15, -16 and -18 to be utilized. At this point we terminate their use when a drift in temperature is detected: (YEAR/DAY) Spacecraft with AMSU used in UAH products as of Oct 2011 START TERMINATE NOAA-15 1998/215 2007/365 NOAA-16 2001/032 2004/233 AQUA 2002/221 Present NOAA-18 2005/152 2010/182 We are also looking to bring in the AMSU data from METOP and NOAA-19. When the testing is completed we will be issuing version 6.0 of the temperature products. We do not know when such testing will be completed.

#2411

ORH_wxman

Posted 15 December 2011 - 09:53 PM

Yeah it will be very interesting to see how RSS and UAH compare for December. Spencer's new drift correction will be in effect for December 2011 temps apparently for the first time in an operational sense...which is supposed to stabilize the temps even more on a short term scale.

I think unless we see a massive spike up on channel 5, Dec will come in minus on UAH/RSS.

I took your word for it.

Sorry if believing what you say here makes me ridiculous.

[nflwxman]

UAH Surely looks inline with RSS now.

2012 RSS:

2012 1 -0.0587

2012 2 -0.1213

2012 3 0.0730

2012 4 0.3317

2012 5 0.2320

2012 6 0.3381

2012 7 0.2911

2012 8 0.2556

VS 2012 UAH:

2012 01 -0.134

2012 02 -0.135

2012 03 0.051

2012 04 0.232

2012 05 0.179

2012 06 0.235

2012 07 0.130

2012 08 0.208

Wow that's a fairly large discrepency, how does that compare to last year? Hopefully v.6 will bring them more in line

[CoastalWx]

Hey Friv, I appreciate how passionate you are with this stuff, but promise me you'll go out and have a few beers tonight with some friends.....maybe even get your arctic oscillation on.

[Jonger]

Hey Friv, I appreciate how passionate you are with this stuff, but promise me you'll go out and have a few beers tonight with some friends.....maybe even get your arctic oscillation on.

He does his homework, with the data we have.

Of course, that's the fundamental problem. The data we have is highly tainted by UHI contamination and the arctic has 33 years of reliable data. Removing the surface station contamination reveals a insignificant warming in much of the world. We have a ice deficit in the arctic and a surplus in the antarctic.

[CoastalWx]

He does his homework, with the data we have.

Of course, that's the fundamental problem. The data we have is highly tainted by UHI contamination and the arctic has 33 years of reliable data. Removing the surface station contamination reveals a insignificant warming in much of the world. We have a ice deficit in the arctic and a surplus in the antarctic.

Russia should have a bunch of stations coming online so we'll see what that does too.

[skierinvermont]

He does his homework, with the data we have.

Of course, that's the fundamental problem. The data we have is highly tainted by UHI contamination and the arctic has 33 years of reliable data. Removing the surface station contamination reveals a insignificant warming in much of the world. We have a ice deficit in the arctic and a surplus in the antarctic.

Completely false. The major datasets, GISS, HadCRUT, NCDC, all correct for UHI. This is a basic fact that has been covered hundreds of times in this forum.

[CoastalWx]

Completely false. The major datasets, GISS, HadCRUT, NCDC, all correct for UHI. This is a basic fact that has been covered hundreds of times in this forum.

I think those revisions also keep looking at that and readjusting as well. At least it seems they have a handle on that.

[The_Global_Warmer]

Russia should have a bunch of stations coming online so we'll see what that does too.

I can't say it that will matter, but I do track Russian temps quite a bit. If they are going in Northern Siberia it will help track better during Spring when Snow cover receding make as a major difference.

But Russia/Siberia keeps getting warmer and warmer and I would expect with snow melting out faster and faster if they get top layer drying we could see some big time mid summer heat with large ridges expand over Siberia.

But I always figured losing that much snow would have huge consequential differences in temp anomaly's.

The graph shows the net snow cover change due to trend since 1979.

In fact the downward trend in snow cover is strongest during the month of June, when solar input is also strongest:

The trend accounts for a net loss of over 5 million km^2 June snow cover since 1979. That’s considerably larger than the loss of Arctic sea ice over the same time span.

[tacoman25]

UAH Surely looks inline with RSS now.

2012 RSS:

2012 1 -0.0587

2012 2 -0.1213

2012 3 0.0730

2012 4 0.3317

2012 5 0.2320

2012 6 0.3381

2012 7 0.2911

2012 8 0.2556

VS 2012 UAH:

2012 01 -0.134

2012 02 -0.135

2012 03 0.051

2012 04 0.232

2012 05 0.179

2012 06 0.235

2012 07 0.130

2012 08 0.208

Trends. Look at trends, not just monthly anomalies.

[tacoman25]

And the fact is, Friv, ALL the major temp sources have to make revisions and alterations to the data to account for different things. None of them are probably exactly right for any given month, or even a year.

Trends.

[ORH_wxman]

Wow that's a fairly large discrepency, how does that compare to last year? Hopefully v.6 will bring them more in line

Its actually not that large...especially when you factor in how cold it has been over the Antarctic regions this year where RSS has no data but UAH does. It makes sense that UAH would come in colder.

[ORH_wxman]

Trends. Look at trends, not just monthly anomalies.

He's throwing a tantrum over a sample that is ridiculously small on global temperature datasets. He still hasn't commented on why he thinks the spuriously warm UAH should be correct while the other datasets which agree more closely would be incorrect.

And friv, you are right. I was wrong that they said they wouldn't fix it sooner. They said they would, but they obviously didn't fix whatever problem it was having.

[tacoman25]

He's throwing a tantrum over a sample that is ridiculously small on global temperature datasets. He still hasn't commented on why he thinks the spuriously warm UAH should be correct while the other datasets which agree more closely would be incorrect.

And friv, you are right. I was wrong that they said they wouldn't fix it sooner. They said they would, but they obviously didn't fix whatever problem it was having.

Yes, one of many points he has failed to acknowledge or address in this thread. It gets frustrating trying to communicate with someone who doesn't appear to listen to half of what's being said.

[ORH_wxman]

Yes, one of many points he has failed to acknowledge or address in this thread. It gets frustrating trying to communicate with someone who doesn't appear to listen to half of what's being said.

An easier way to ask the question rather than playing all these "gotcha" games with what Roy Spencer said or didn't say is to simply ask "why are the other 3 data sets incorrect in the past 5 years?"

Thats what one would be claiming if they said the UAH spurious warming was fabricated...RSS, Hadcrut, and GISS must all be too cold.

[Jonger]

Completely false. The major datasets, GISS, HadCRUT, NCDC, all correct for UHI. This is a basic fact that has been covered hundreds of times in this forum.

I have seen the data corrections and they are laughable. Sorry.

Jon

[The_Global_Warmer]

Other data sets have nothing to do with this. Stop saying I am throwing a tantrum, no one has addressed one thing Iv'e said about it directly. Like always I am getting the run around, instead of having a straight forward discussion people come at this with well other data sets show this so this is is.

Why not disect and talk about what has taken place instead of making an argument that UAH should be like RSS, Giss, and hadcrut? So instead of addressing what they did to UAH we will assume it was for the best because other data sets(two of which are surface sets, and NCDC was left out, one doesn't have pole data, RSS doesn't have pole data. Only UAH vs UAH is apples and apples. I think it's find as it is.

Why leave out NCDC, oh my god, why? WHY! thats what is sounded like when you guys said I don't talk about RSS. That's funny I bet you in 2012 at least twice I was the first one to post RSS data. I can waste more time and check it but I am sick of doing all the work, so no.

But more importantly, why didn't Spencer tell us where he cut off AMSU?

Why didn't Spencer tell us exactly how much spurious warming correlated to the noise? He can't its impossible.

How does he know Noaa-15 and Noaa-18 are legit themselves? He doesn't he is guessing, they were calibrated against AMSU.

If they haven't updated their data set since 2010 for new anomaly's and over three years for orbital drift why can't they finish 6.0 in three years? Why did it take 10 more months since the December update to let us know? Spencer says time commitments, well if He, Braswell, and Christy don't have time to make sure their data set doesn't get out of hand and they end up with radical changes then maybe they need to turn it over to a new group of young scientists in the code writing climo field, say a panel of 12 scientists who treat the set with a bit more urgency and care.

As of right now the most recent data who knows what that is, Roy didn't tell us is hinged on Noaa-15 and Noaa-18 that is calibrated against the sat data that apparently was beyond saving. But that doesn't prove it's messed up?

I am surprised no one thinks asking questions and then trying to answer them ourselves is a good idea. I thought science was about endless questions, compiling ideas, looking for data and info over and over answering the questions, then doing it all over again until it's as perfect as it gets.

well right now UAH is a mess and obvious there was spurious warming, but it's also obvious there is artificial cooling when you pull out your warmest satellite(for instance if it was equally warmer than Noaa-15 was to Noaa-18 they wouldn't of pulled it and UAH would have seen slight revisions downward, but completely eliminating it creates artificial cooling. Even if it was dead even with Noaa-15 the data set would be warmer. and the truth probably is in the middle somewhere. But I am only person who is even asking a question in this thread besides Nflwxman.

[ORH_wxman]

Friv, using other temperature datasets that are believed to be reliable is a way to verify if temperatures are accurate or not on another set.

What would you be saying if UAH was trending significantly colder than average the past few years? I bet you would be screaming about how the other datasets are so much warmer and that it is clear something is up with UAH.

If you want to use NCDC, that is fine, but we can use 3 other datasets too to help support or be skeptical of any changes made to UAH. Getting perspective is important and using other temperature datasets helps us gain perspective.

We mention RSS because it is the other major satellite derived temperature data set. They both compute TLT via satellite and do not use sfc temp data as their primary method....so its an apples to apple comparison.

[tacoman25]

Other data sets have nothing to do with this.

Oh really? So even though RSS and UAH are measuring the same LT, if RSS shows a significantly cooler trend over the last 5-10 years than UAH did (mainly because UAH has been warmer in recent years) it doesn't matter?

Your blatant claims of Spencer doctoring the temperature record on UAH to fit his cool bias might make a lot more sense if it wasn't for the fact that UAH had been the warm outlier in regards to trends over the period now adjusted cooler.

All logic aside, if you have nothing but rampant speculation to base your assertions about Spencer and UAH on, which is clearly the case, then we cannot take your accusations any more seriously than those who accuse Hansen of "cooking the books".

[ORH_wxman]

Friv, post a graph of the aqua readings versus the other two several years ago (say before 2011)...you only posted 2012 on that graph which doesn't give us any reference point of how that satellite acted before its spurious warming. Of course it was the warmest in 2012....because it had spurious warming.

An actual legit scrutiny would be how warm was that satellite earlier in the 2000s before it started having problems in recent years.

[ORH_wxman]

Oh really? So even though RSS and UAH are measuring the same LT, if RSS shows a significantly cooler trend over the last 5-10 years than UAH did (mainly because UAH has been warmer in recent years) it doesn't matter?

Your blatant claims of Spencer doctoring the temperature record on UAH to fit his cool bias might make a lot more sense if it wasn't for the fact that UAH had been the warm outlier in regards to trends over the period now adjusted cooler.

All logic aside, if you have nothing but rampant speculation to base your assertions about Spencer and UAH on, which is clearly the case, then we cannot take your accusations any more seriously than those who accuse Hansen of "cooking the books".

Also glaring is that RSS and GISS adjusted cooler recently too...independent of the Aqua issues on UAH. Both of their trends were adjusted downward since 2002 in the latest updates (GISS just a few weeks ago and RSS in early 2011).

[skierinvermont]

I have seen the data corrections and they are laughable. Sorry.

Jon

The data correction is to make all urban stations have trends which correspond to rural stations. It deletes the UHI effect. In effect, urban stations aren't even used in the creation of the long-term trend.

Which is why nearly all long-time poster here on both sides of the issue, Don, ORH, taco, zucker, myself etc. all recognize the essential validity of all 5 major temperature data sets.

BEST also addressed UHI and came up with results very similar to GISS and HadCRUT.

[skierinvermont]

The main problem is his idea that you can prove one data set wrong (UAH) by using 1 or 2 or 3 others (ssts, surface temps etc.). There are no perfect correlations between any of those sources because they all measure separate entities. It is impossible to invalidate one with any combination of others.

The temperature progression this year is about what you'd expect based on ssts. That is all that can be said. I would probably expect October and November to be even warmer than September.

Correction. There is one data set that could be compared directly to UAH month to month and that's RSS, as others have already pointed out. It's the only source that is actually measuring the same quantity (lower tropospheric temperatures).

[TerryM]

This may be a foolish question, but why are we concerned with tropospheric temperatures.

I think almost everyone here has by now conceded that GG must raise surface temperatures on the earth. I think that everyone here is aware that the ocean acts as a heat sink.

Wouldn't land based temperatures, augmented by SSTs provide all the metrics needed to work out the rate of warming that the planet is experiencing?

I don't know enough about these matters to know which side this would favor, but using tropospheric measurements - especially when the measurements seem so contentious - as a proxy for land and oceanic temperatures which are available, seems to be adding one more layer of complexity to an already complex situation.

I know BEST completed an American land temperature survey, and assume they have or will be doing the same globally. Their methods and computations are all open sourced so any discrepancies can be addressed. I'm not aware of the SST numbers being disavowed by either side. Why not stick to these figures and ignore the others.

I'm probably ignoring some very important aspect that requires knowledge of troposcopic temperatures, but at the moment it seems to be more of a distraction than a means of resolving the questions around AGW forcing.

Terry

[ORH_wxman]

This may be a foolish question, but why are we concerned with tropospheric temperatures.

I think almost everyone here has by now conceded that GG must raise surface temperatures on the earth. I think that everyone here is aware that the ocean acts as a heat sink.

Wouldn't land based temperatures, augmented by SSTs provide all the metrics needed to work out the rate of warming that the planet is experiencing?

I don't know enough about these matters to know which side this would favor, but using tropospheric measurements - especially when the measurements seem so contentious - as a proxy for land and oceanic temperatures which are available, seems to be adding one more layer of complexity to an already complex situation.

I know BEST completed an American land temperature survey, and assume they have or will be doing the same globally. Their methods and computations are all open sourced so any discrepancies can be addressed. I'm not aware of the SST numbers being disavowed by either side. Why not stick to these figures and ignore the others.

I'm probably ignoring some very important aspect that requires knowledge of troposcopic temperatures, but at the moment it seems to be more of a distraction than a means of resolving the questions around AGW forcing.

Terry

Based on the physics of global warming, the lower troposphere should actually warm just as much or even more than the surface....so its a perfectly good metric to use. If the lower troposphere is not warming like the surface measurements indicate, it would imply there is something wrong or contaminated with one of the datasets...either satellite temps or surface temps. The fact that they both generally agree aside from minor differences is a good reassurance that all of our datasets are pretty valid. The satellite temperature trends have been slightly less than the surface trends since we have had both systems, but the difference is statistically insignificant at the moment. You could perhaps argue there is a very slight issue (esp if it continues for another decade), however, that is splitting hairs in the larger picture.

edit: I should also add in that its important to track tropospheric temperatures anyway not just because of confirmation of data accuracy, but if the surface was warming much faster than the lower troposphere, it would be a huge impact on the stability of the atmosphere would certainly wreak a lot of havoc on the weather itself.

[TerryM]

Based on the physics of global warming, the lower troposphere should actually warm just as much or even more than the surface....so its a perfectly good metric to use. If the lower troposphere is not warming like the surface measurements indicate, it would imply there is something wrong or contaminated with one of the datasets...either satellite temps or surface temps. The fact that they both generally agree aside from minor differences is a good reassurance that all of our datasets are pretty valid. The satellite temperature trends have been slightly less than the surface trends since we have had both systems, but the difference is statistically insignificant at the moment. You could perhaps argue there is a very slight issue (esp if it continues for another decade), however, that is splitting hairs in the larger picture.

edit: I should also add in that its important to track tropospheric temperatures anyway not just because of confirmation of data accuracy, but if the surface was warming much faster than the lower troposphere, it would be a huge impact on the stability of the atmosphere would certainly wreak a lot of havoc on the weather itself.

If tropospheric temperatures were being measured in such a way as to be above reproach I'd fully agree with you - but they apparently aren't. Since they're only being used to second guess the temperatures actually being measured on the ground, and the ground temperatures are being measured in such an open manner - at least since BEST, why bother quibbling over what is as you say a very small discrepancy being noted by what is at best a very contentious methodology.

I took it from your reply that ground temps are actually moving higher more rapidly than tropospheric, you'll have to take it as an act of faith that i was unaware of this when I wrote my last post. But were the facts reversed I'd make the same argument. Why add a level of complexity when we already have figures available that can be used by either side with some level of agreement as to their accuracy.

Terry

[ORH_wxman]

If tropospheric temperatures were being measured in such a way as to be above reproach I'd fully agree with you - but they apparently aren't. Since they're only being used to second guess the temperatures actually being measured on the ground, and the ground temperatures are being measured in such an open manner - at least since BEST, why bother quibbling over what is as you say a very small discrepancy being noted by what is at best a very contentious methodology.

I took it from your reply that ground temps are actually moving higher more rapidly than tropospheric, you'll have to take it as an act of faith that i was unaware of this when I wrote my last post. But were the facts reversed I'd make the same argument. Why add a level of complexity when we already have figures available that can be used by either side with some level of agreement as to their accuracy.

Terry

I'm not sure what you are suggesting. That satellite temps were only instituted to confirm sfc temps? I'm not sure why that is a bad thing in itself, but that is not the only reason we measure them. The atmosphere is 3 dimensional so they are there to measure the different levels. The TLT measurements are the ones most closely correlated with surface temps, but the satellite temps have far more uses such as stratospheric temps and upper troposphere temps. All very important when it comes to monitoring the climate/atmosphere of our planet.

Satellites have the luxury of measuring every spot they can see which is far greater than our surface network. Having a system that can do this accurately is only beneficial.

[Jonger]

The data correction is to make all urban stations have trends which correspond to rural stations. It deletes the UHI effect. In effect, urban stations aren't even used in the creation of the long-term trend.

Which is why nearly all long-time poster here on both sides of the issue, Don, ORH, taco, zucker, myself etc. all recognize the essential validity of all 5 major temperature data sets.

BEST also addressed UHI and came up with results very similar to GISS and HadCRUT.

Howell, MI is probably defined as rural... The site is located next to a WWTP and as with all WWTP's, there is a infrared glow when a heat sensor camera is aimed toward it.

Also, the station has had numerous businesses located near it since 1985... More then 90 years after the station was placed.

Look at it this way: There is next to no possible way a surface station can be contaminated with artificially low readings outside of foliage growth.... The inaccurate numbers can only skew one possible way.. UP!

I do agree there has been warming over the past 100 years, but the true numbers are off by the adjustment figures I have seen previously from GISS.