Wednesday 2 March 2016

Updates on Satellite Data

A couple of brief updates that are relevant to my previous post on Monckton's Pause.

UAH Latest Data

Whilst we wait for the RSS February 2016 temperatures, Roy Spencer has posted the UAH figure here. It's an astonishing 0.83 °C above the 1981 - 2010 average. That beats the previous monthly record by 0.09 °C.

Here's a graph showing monthly values. I've highlighted February 2016 along with the previous record month (April 1999).

This does seem something of an outlier, and I'm a bit suspicious of it. It will be interesting to compare it with the RSS figure.

RSS is being Updated

Gavin Schmidt reports there is to be a new version of RSS.

The abstract to the linked paper says:

The new methods result in improved agreement between measurements made by different satellites at the same time. We choose a method based on an optimized second harmonic adjustment to produce a new version of the RSS dataset, Version 4.0. The new dataset shows substantially increased global-scale warming relative to the previous version of the dataset, particularly after 1998. The new dataset shows more warming than most other middle tropospheric data records constructed from the same set of satellites. We also show that the new dataset is consistent with long-term changes in total column water vapor over the tropical oceans, lending support to its long-term accuracy.

This will very likely set the cat amongst the skeptical pigeons. Some commentators have been very certain that satellite data is nearly perfect, yet have a very selective attitude to what satellite data to use.

A couple of years back, RSS was showing little or no warming since the turn of the century, whilst UAH and all ground based measurements were showing continuing warming. At this point lots of skeptics were pointing out that satellites were more accurate than ground records, but only referring to RSS when they said that.

Last year UAH announced an update that brought UAH trends a lot closer to RSS, and suddenly UAH became acceptable with the same people who insist that any adjustment to ground based observations are evidence of fraud.

Now if RSS have a new version that shows more warming, will it be ignored or called fraudulent, by the same people who insist satellite data is the gold standard.

Update

This shows the overall change in the mid troposphere to increase the warming from 0.78 °C / Century, to 1.25 ° / Century. What I'm still not sure about, is how this will be reflected in the lower troposphere records, which are the ones usually used in comparison with surface data.

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