2017 Global Temperatures

[chubbs]

On 2/27/2017 at 7:25 PM, Snow_Miser said:

Virtually certain now that the WeatherBell CFSv2 will finish with an anomaly of +0.52 for February. This would make it the second warmest February ever in the NCEP record, second only to last year. 

Feb 17 ended up 2nd warmest on NCEP. Well above any February before last year. My 2017 call may have been too cool.

[Snow_Miser]

4 hours ago, chubbs said:

Feb 17 ended up 2nd warmest on NCEP. Well above any February before last year. My 2017 call may have been too cool.

It is looking more and more likely that we have jumped to a new baseline, consistent with natural variability superimposed on the anthropogenic warming trend. If we get even moderate +ENSO conditions later this year, I think we have a shot at reaching 2016 levels once again in 2018.

Very early, but March is starting off with an even higher global temperature anomaly of +0.59 on WeatherBell. 

[chubbs]

RSS TTT v4 ticked up in February. Now that enough time has passed, both RSS and UAH are showing a weaker overall temperature spike for the 15/16 nino vs 97/98.

 

[chubbs]

SST rose in Feb for the second month in a row and remain above pre-nino levels

[chubbs]

Here is the CPC 0 to 300m heat content anomaly for the tropical Pacific used to monitor ENSO. By this metric the 15/16 nino was weaker than 97/98, giving up less heat to the atmosphere and with a relatively fast recovery. This is inline with the satellite data which show smaller temperature spikes in 15/16. This indicates that a portion of the recent warming surge is due to a reversal of the hiatus conditions and not solely to the 15/16 nino.

 

 

[Jack Frost]

 

Much better post than snowman poems....  LOLOLOLOLOLOL

[chubbs]

9 hours ago, Jack Frost said:

 

Much better post than snowman poems....  LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Thanks for reminding me

Frosty the Snowman, knew the sun was hot that day,
so he said, "Let's run, and we'll have some fun now, before I melt away."

Down to the village, with a broomstick in his hand,
Running here and there, all around the square,
sayin', "Catch me if you can."

[Jack Frost]

11 hours ago, chubbs said:

Thanks for reminding me

Frosty the Snowman, knew the sun was hot that day,
so he said, "Let's run, and we'll have some fun now, before I melt away."

Down to the village, with a broomstick in his hand,
Running here and there, all around the square,
sayin', "Catch me if you can."

 

Great tune!

[chubbs]

11 hours ago, Jack Frost said:

 

Great tune!

Glad you didn't take it seriously - we all need to step away from the same old talking points.

[chubbs]

GISS was 1.10 in February. Only the peak nino months of  jan - mar 2016 have been higher (tied with Dec 2015).

[Snow_Miser]

Noteworthy how warm we are without a +ENSO event chubbs. Not out of the realm of possibilities that we actually attain a higher number than 2016 if a moderate +ENSO event develops later this year.

 

[bluewave]

On March 17, 2017 at 10:42 AM, Snow_Miser said:

Noteworthy how warm we are without a +ENSO event chubbs. Not out of the realm of possibilities that we actually attain a higher number than 2016 if a moderate +ENSO event develops later this year.

 

 

The east based El Nino that developed this winter coupled with how weak the La Nina was didn't allow the larger temperature drop which is more common for La Ninas. You could also see how much residual SST warmth was left in the tropics following the super El Nino last winter.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-peru-floods-idUSKBN16O2V5

25JAN2017     26.9 2.0     25.9 0.0     26.2-0.4     28.1-0.1
 01FEB2017     26.8 1.5     26.4 0.4     26.4-0.3     27.9-0.3
 08FEB2017     27.2 1.5     26.9 0.7     26.8 0.1     27.9-0.2
 15FEB2017     27.7 1.6     27.1 0.7     26.9 0.2     28.1 0.0
 22FEB2017     28.5 2.3     27.3 0.7     27.1 0.3     28.0-0.1
 01MAR2017     28.5 2.2     27.1 0.4     26.9 0.0     28.1-0.1
 08MAR2017     28.5 2.1     27.4 0.4     26.8-0.2     27.8-0.3

[chubbs]

On 3/18/2017 at 0:21 PM, bluewave said:

 

The east based El Nino that developed this winter coupled with how weak the La Nina was didn't allow the larger temperature drop which is more common for La Ninas. You could also see how much residual SST warmth was left in the tropics following the super El Nino last winter.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-peru-floods-idUSKBN16O2V5

25JAN2017     26.9 2.0     25.9 0.0     26.2-0.4     28.1-0.1
 01FEB2017     26.8 1.5     26.4 0.4     26.4-0.3     27.9-0.3
 08FEB2017     27.2 1.5     26.9 0.7     26.8 0.1     27.9-0.2
 15FEB2017     27.7 1.6     27.1 0.7     26.9 0.2     28.1 0.0
 22FEB2017     28.5 2.3     27.3 0.7     27.1 0.3     28.0-0.1
 01MAR2017     28.5 2.2     27.1 0.4     26.9 0.0     28.1-0.1
 08MAR2017     28.5 2.1     27.4 0.4     26.8-0.2     27.8-0.3

Below is a long-term record of Nino region 1+2 temps. The PDO shift has allowed waters to warm in this region due to slackening trades ending the relatively cool period for 1+2 that had been in place since the 97/98 nino.

[Snow_Miser]

March is going to finish on par with, or even a little higher anomaly wise, relative to February. With WeatherBell CFSv2 dailies surging up to +0.7 and rising, this has now allowed for the monthly anomaly to spike to +0.51. February finished at +0.52. Easily conceivable that we finish higher than that. 

[wolfpackmet]

Wxbell CFSv2 global dailies up to the highest levels in nearly 12 months.  2017 should beat out 2015 for second warmest March behind 2016.

[Snow_Miser]

WeatherBell will finish off at +0.56 for the month. Extremely impressive surface warmth without a major +ENSO event. Odds are we finish higher than February, anomaly wise on GISS. The +0.56 anomaly roughly translates to a +1.06 to a +1.26 anomaly on GISS, or a +1.16 median estimate for March 2017. The entire range of estimates fall short of the March 2016 value of +1.28. 

Odds are, April finishes with a lower global temperature anomaly relative to March. The GFS is currently depicting a drop to levels comparable to what was observed earlier this month.

 

[blizzard1024]

Global UAH satellite temperatures now down to +.19C for March..... LT recovering to pre intense el nino levels.  Let the pause begin again...  

 

 

[chubbs]

10 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

Global UAH satellite temperatures now down to +.19C for March..... LT recovering to pre intense el nino levels.  Let the pause begin again... 

Well its only one month and there wasn't much cooling at the surface per re-analysis data. Below is the euro-reanalysis including the recent March update. Most of the recent surface warming has been at mid and high latitudes which are more independent of temperatures in the troposphere than the tropics. 

 

 

[lookingnorth]

21 hours ago, blizzard1024 said:

Global UAH satellite temperatures now down to +.19C for March..... LT recovering to pre intense el nino levels.  Let the pause begin again...  

 

 

Yet it looks like we've never gone this long without a below normal month before.

[chubbs]

While troposphere cooled, SST anomaly ticked up in March. Currently running between 2015+2016.

[chubbs]

From Zeke Hausfather twitter. CMIP5 models perform well against land data. Validation of models over ocean is impacted by uncertainty in ship temperature obs and different metrics in obs vs models (SST vs air over ocean)

[chubbs]

GISS was 1.12 in March up 0.02 vs Feb. Surface temperature spiked in the first quarter of 2017 driven by warmth at high latitudes.

[Jack Frost]

On April 14, 2017 at 10:26 PM, chubbs said:

GISS was 1.12 in March up 0.02 vs Feb. Surface temperature spiked in the first quarter of 2017 driven by warmth at high latitudes.

 

Prepare your bomb shelters!  

Life on earth is about to end.  Oh, maybe not.  Or maybe so.  

Of course, the science is settled.  If you believe that, place your bets accordingly....

[chubbs]

New study explains the hiatus (paywall - see blog article for summary). No major discrepancy between models and observations using updated data.

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v545/n7652/full/nature22315.html

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/global-warming-hiatus?utm_term=.jda3MNOna#.dc5GOWPLz

[WidreMann]

I don't know why the "hiatus" is such a big deal. Was it expected that temperatures would go up and up and up with no variation? I would assume internal oscillations and other random behavior might result in periods of below normal temperatures or low rate of increase, interspersed among periods of more significant increase.

[nzucker]

UAH was +0.27C for April 2017. Increase of 0.08C from March.

[bluewave]

http://news.yale.edu/2017/04/26/el-ni-o-and-end-global-warming-hiatus

 

A new climate model developed by Yale scientists puts the “global warming hiatus” into a broader historical context and offers a new method for predicting global mean temperature.

Research by professor Alexey Fedorov and graduate student Shineng Hu indicates that weak El Niño activity from 1998 until 2013, rather than a pause in long-term global warming, was the root cause for slower rates of increased surface temperature. The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, also finds that volcanic activity played only a minor role.

“Our main conclusion is that global warming never went away, as one might imply from the term ‘global warming hiatus,’” said Fedorov, who has conducted extensive research on the oceans’ role in climate. “The warming can be masked by inter-annual and decadal natural climate variability, but then it comes back with a vengeance.”

El Niño events contribute to year-to-year variations in global mean temperature by modulating the heat that is released from tropical oceans into the atmosphere, the researchers noted. That is, El Niño warms the atmosphere, while the cold phase of the phenomenon, La Niña, cools the atmosphere.

Multiple strong El Niño events occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. This was followed by much weaker El Niño activity, which lasted until 2014.

“The recent rapid rise in global temperature mainly resulted from the prolonged 2014-2016 El Niño conditions in the tropics that reached an extreme magnitude in the winter of 2015,” said Hu, who is the first author of the study. “The corresponding heat release into the atmosphere, together with the ongoing background global warming trend, made 2014, 2015, and 2016 the three consecutive warmest years of the instrumental record so far.”

Hu and Fedorov constructed a simple model of global mean surface temperature (GMST) that incorporates greenhouse gas emissions, El Niño-Southern Oscillation data, and stratospheric sulfate aerosols produced by volcanic eruptions. The model closely mirrors GMST changes since 1880, including the so-called global warming hiatus and the more recent temperature rise.

“From a practical perspective, our method, when combined with El Niño prediction, allows us to predict next-year global mean temperature,” Fedorov said. “Accordingly, 2017 will remain among the hottest years of the observational record, perhaps just a notch colder than 2016 or 2015.”

Grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the National Science Foundation, and a NASA Earth and Space Sciences Graduate Fellowship supported the research.

[csnavywx]

On 5/6/2017 at 4:14 PM, WidreMann said:

I don't know why the "hiatus" is such a big deal. Was it expected that temperatures would go up and up and up with no variation? I would assume internal oscillations and other random behavior might result in periods of below normal temperatures or low rate of increase, interspersed among periods of more significant increase.

While one should expect a decent amount of noise, I don't think the unprecedented increase in trade wind strength was expected or forecast. That changed the surface warming pattern for over a decade and heat sequestration into intermediate ocean waters. We're finding that the spatial pattern of warming over the Pacific can have a big impact on how fast warming occurs. It might be an issue of how external forcing is affecting natural variability -- and that's worth studying.

[bluewave]

6 hours ago, csnavywx said:

While one should expect a decent amount of noise, I don't think the unprecedented increase in trade wind strength was expected or forecast. That changed the surface warming pattern for over a decade and heat sequestration into intermediate ocean waters. We're finding that the spatial pattern of warming over the Pacific can have a big impact on how fast warming occurs. It might be an issue of how external forcing is affecting natural variability -- and that's worth studying.

It's interesting that that the record trade wind regime was determined to have been caused by the rapid warming of the Atlantic. Outstanding call on the part of the authors of the paper as to what would happen when the pattern ended. Funny how the paper was released right before the big jump in global temperatures that they mentioned.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-08/uons-awt073114.php

PUBLIC RELEASE: 3-AUG-2014

New research has found rapid warming of the Atlantic Ocean, likely caused by global warming, has turbocharged Pacific Equatorial trade winds. Currently the winds are at a level never before seen on observed records, which extend back to the 1860s.

Importantly, the researchers don't expect the current pressure difference between the two ocean basins to last. When it does end, they expect to see some rapid changes, including a sudden acceleration of global average surface temperatures.

"It will be difficult to predict when the Pacific cooling trend and its contribution to the global hiatus in surface temperatures will come to an end," Prof England said.

"However, a large El Niño event is one candidate that has the potential to drive the system back to a more synchronized Atlantic/Pacific warming situation."

 

[chubbs]

GISS was 0.88 in April, the second warmest April but down 0.23 vs March. Chart below from Zeke Hausfather twitter,  shows annual average GISS plus 2017 average to-date and a prediction for 2017 based on 2017 to-date and ENSO.  Per Hausfather odds of a new record in 2017 dropped to 33% with the addition of the April data. My prediction of a value near 2015 is in the bottom portion of his uncertainty band.