Tag: temperature

The Wizard turns on…

Catching up with some of the stuff that got lost in the Copenhagen hubbub, this morning I stumbled on a major new effort to provide interactive climate data and visualisations — the Climate Wizard. This amazing tool is the web front end to a collection of temperature and precipitation data and model projections, and allows the user to create custom maps of climate change over the last fifty years, and projections for the 2050s and 2080s for three IPCC scenarios across 16 models. It provides state-level detail for the USA, but coarser regional and global maps for the rest of the world. It can also create ensembles of model projections on the fly:

[Lead author] Girvetz recommends using one of the newest features added to the program, the ability to create an ensemble of some or all of the 16 models. Want to average the temperatures of, say, the 12 climate models that forecast the largest temperature increases? Climate Wizard can do so almost instantaneously. [Source]

The background to the Wizard (a joint effort of the University of Washington, University of Southern Mississippi and The Nature Conservancy) is described in this PLoS One paper.

Apart from being a very interesting way of looking into temperature data and projections, it is also a tool set that can be extended by the addition of extra data: the authors suggest they could include “simulations of global vegetation, fire, water runoff, species range shifts, agriculture, sea level rise, heat stroke, disease, and food security.” They also suggest that the Climate Wizard could provide a basis for web “mash-ups” with services like Google Earth/Maps to help with public education on climate change. Highly recommended.

[Flaming Lips]

2000s warmest decade ever, 2009 to be 5th warmest year

2009tempsUKMet.gif

The World Meteorological Organisation has announced that 2009 is likely to be the fifth warmest year in the global temperature record, and the first decade of the 21st century will be the hottest since instrumental records began in the 1850s. The UK Met Office graphic above shows how the decadal average for the “naughties” easily tops the 1990s, confirming that strong warming continues despite sceptic claims of cooling. Commenting on the release for the Science Media Centre, NIWA principal climate scientist Jim Renwick said:

It is a very good overview of the state of the global climate in 2009, something that has only become possible to do in close to real-time since the advent of comprehensive satellite (and other) observing systems. The climate in 2009 show a mix of events, underlining the effects of climate extremes upon humanity, from the Victorian bush fires, to drought in China, and heat waves in Europe and India. The climate change signal is clear, with the current decade coming in warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s.

See also: BBC, Independent (UK), NZ Herald, NOAA, UK Met Office.

CRU emails show fraud? Yeah, right.

Want to know just how much you have to read into the stolen CRU emails to uncover fraud? This excellent Youtube video explains the background to two of the more widely quoted passages — and in passing presents a few of the absurd accusations from the likes of Limbaugh and Beck in the USA. For members of the reality-based community, those sections may be painful. The whole thing’s well worth a watch — if only for the most creative use of the phrase “febrile nitwits” I’ve come across this year. Presenter “potholer54” has a Youtube channel devoted to climate and science issues, which is also well worth exploring.

NZ temps: more stations, no adjustments, still warming

NIWA has released details of a newly calculated long term temperature series for New Zealand, based on 11 stations that have had no major site moves or significant adjustments made to their raw data. Running from 1930 to present, the series shows that significant warming has taken place, confirming that the national temperature series recently attacked in a shonky analysis published by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Climate Conversation Group is not only pointing in the right direction, but actually warming a little more slowly than the new series.

Here’s a graph of the new compilation:

The stations used in the analysis are Raoul Island, Tauranga Airport, Ruakura (Hamilton), Gisborne Airport, Chateau Tongariro, Palmerston North DSIR/AgResearch, Westport Airport, Molesworth, Queenstown, Invercargill Airport and Campbell Island. All were identified by Jim Salinger as offering consistent long term records requiring little or no adjustment for site moves or other influences. Salinger’s calculations were confirmed separately by NIWA’s chief climate scientist Jim Renwick, and the results were identical. Over the period, warming of 1ºC is seen.

Bottom line? Unless there’s a significant “urban heat island” at places like Molesworth Station, warming over New Zealand and in the wider NZ region is undeniable.

Continue reading “NZ temps: more stations, no adjustments, still warming”

NZ temps: warming real, record robust, sceptics wrong

The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), accused last week of fiddling the long term New Zealand temperature record to create spurious warming, has released information showing that the attack mounted by the NZ Climate “Science” Coalition and Climate Conversation Group has no merit.

The NIWA announcement shows that the warming trend in the long term record is also found when weather stations with long term records that require no corrections are used. From the release:

Dr Jim Salinger has identified from the NIWA climate archive a set of 11 stations with long records where there have been no significant site changes. When the annual temperatures from all of these sites are averaged to form a temperature series for New Zealand, the best-fit linear trend is a warming of 1°C from 1931 to 2008. We will be placing more information about this on the web later this week.

I’ll have more detail on that series when it’s made available. So the warming in the record is robust, found in sites all round New Zealand, and doesn’t depend on mysterious adjustments. But the Treadgold/CSC report also made claims about data being hidden:

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.

That’s an outright lie, as the NIWA release shows.

For more than two years, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition members have known of the need to adjust the “seven station” data. They have had access to:

  • the raw data
  • the adjusted data (anomalies)
  • information needed to identify the adjustments made by Dr Salinger
  • information needed to develop their own adjustments.

The NIWA release cites emails to CSC members Vincent Grey and Warwick Hughes in July 2006, which provided all the references required to calculate the necessary adjustments themselves. In particular, all the information about the station site changes has been publicly available since 1992 and details of the methodology since 1993!

So where does this leave Treadgold and the CSC? They have published a report, issued press releases and made blog posts that misrepresent the facts, and have shown themselves incapable of conducting good science. They have proven themselves morally and ethically bankrupt, and should — if they had any decency — withdraw and apologise. But I won’t be holding my breath.