New Blog

I’ve started a new blog with Australian winemaker and climate expert Erl Happ.  It can be found here: climatechange1.wordpress.com

I’ll still be posting here, though possibly less frequently.

RSS Anomoly Guess

September’s numbers are out from University of Huntsville, and global temperatures rose slightly.

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

RSS hasn’t released their data yet, but I’m going to guess that their anomoly will be around 0.25 degrees C (+/- 0.04 C).  This could turn out to be innacurate, but we’ll have to wait to see.  This isn’t a wild guess; I’ll describe how I got there when RSS releases September’s numbers.  When they do, it’ll be here:

ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt

Success! RSS’s September numbers are within my .08 range (0.21-.029), with a 0.211 anomoly.  To predict this I looked at UAH’s and RSS’ relationship (i.e. RSS minus UAH) over the course of several years.  Since 2003, the values of RSS – UAH have been cyclical as I have discussed in other posts, and these cycles have been nearly identical, which would make predicting the monthly value of RSS with the value of UAH relatively easy.  However, this year, the cycle has acted rather differently.  By this September, the difference between RSS and UAH had not yet begun to decrease, so it was apparent that to behave like the other years, it would have to decrease this month.  To decide the magnitude of the change, I looked at the range of magnitudes of decrease in the past few years during the fall.  Apparently, I was a little to conservative in determining the magnitude.

Below is a graph of RSS minus UAH with my guess and with the actual RSS anomoly.

And here is a graph of the the temperature anomoly for UAH and RSS since 2007, with my prediction.

Update on UAH/RSS Difference

A while ago, I posted on the annual cycle in the difference between UAH and RSS.

https://climatechangeskeptic.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/rss-minus-uah-a-revealing-analysis/

Looks like Lucia, Atmoz, and McIntyre beat me to it by a few months.  Here’s a post on Lucia’s Blackboard with a little more statistical sophistication than mine; note the discussion in the comments.

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/uha-vs-rss-temperature-differences-why-energy-at-1-year/

Alaskan Climate Change

“Well, as the nation’s only Arctic state and being the governor of that state, Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real.” -Palin during the VP debate.

Here’s a graph of sea surface temperatures around Alaska:

It is apparent that the great climate shift of 1978 caused a step change in ocean temperatures, though there has been no trend in temperatures since.

Here’s data from several temperature stations in Alaska.

Aside from a few surface stations, climate change in Alaska seems to have been on hold for the past thirty years.