Adm. Titley on the Cruz Pause
John Hockenberry who has got four Emmys and three Peabody Awards called David Titley up and asked him about the Cruz Pause and the Cruz Conspiracy. Now if you listen to the first part of the interview, well Hockenberry is a little unhappy with his long ago and former employer, NPR and the Cruz interview they put on a couple of days ago, with "a radio host". Peter Gleick was unhappy enough with the interview that he fisked it. Dave Titley, anger is not his style, but accepting nonsense is also not his style. Eli has transcribed the part of the interview about the sainted satellite temperatures:
The science, the factual components of this are several. One that the satellite is in fact not measuring temperature it measures basically microwave returns. It turns out as I mentioned in the testimony, it is actually not rocket science but it is a lot harder to convert that into temperatures. The people who have done that before have in fact had numerous errors, which had to be corrected by independent analysis. And as those errors are being corrected that satellite data in fact shows more and more warming.
But even if you say, accepted the data that Sen. Cruz presents at face value, he is actually averaging parts of the atmosphere that we know are cooling. The top of the atmosphere, the stratosphere is cooling, while the bottom is warming. So if you average, just anybody if you take +1 and you take -1 and add them up together, what do you get, you get zero.
Then he takes this very, very specific 18 years. He is very much on message with his 18 years. Why. Because he is starting from a point that we had a huge El Nino in 1998 and he is connecting it to today. So a question that you could ask Sen. Cruz is if there are these natural variations and you started from a very high El Nino its amazing sir that your data in fact does not show a decrease. If we were just having natural ups and downs this where a down would be. So why didn’t we get a down. Why have we had we have so many years, what is it 10 of the last 12 years of being some of the warmest on record. It doesn’t sound like no global warming, it sounds like we had a very high plateau and now 2014 and 2015 we are going back up the staircase again. That is how climate changes. It doesn’t change in a nice straight line you have ups and downs but the downs are now flat and the ups are really up.
Oh yes, Tamino has the radio sondes between his teeth and is chewing Roy and John's SST calibration up. Eli thinks, more and more, that something is happening with the AMSUs, maybe an aging effect to the receivers or the hot target. That is just a bunny's wild hare guess.
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IMHO, the asteroid has hit the earth. The dinosaurs don't know they are dead.
Tamino suggests that RSS calibrates their TLT with sonde data. I don't think so. For example, see: Mears, C. A. and F. J. Wentz, (2009) Construction of the RSS V3.2 Lower Tropospheric Dataset From the MSU and AMSU Microwave Sounders. They give several graphs of the weighting functions for the retrieved swath data, which are plotted vs. altitude. But, the equations which produced those weighting functions were originally computed in pressure height terms. The graphs from RSS use the U.S. Standard Atmosphere as their temperature vs. altitude model. I didn't notice any mention of the impacts of other seasonal models of lapse rate. Also, there's a difference in the TLT between land and ocean, the result of the higher microwave emissivity over land (~.95) vs. ocean (~.50), so the ocean retrievals are colder.
Then too, as I've previously suggested, the emissivity over sea-ice is much closer to that of land, so a decline in average sea-ice extent would tend to introduce a cooling bias in the TLT for the NH. The AMSU channel 5 has peak weighting about 500m lower than the MSU channel 2, both of which go into the TLT time series. The switch from the MSU satellites to the AMSU about the time that Arctic sea-ice begin it's recent decline may be one possible explanation for the downward trend in the RSS TLT after around 2000.
Tamino appears to have been straightened out on the RSS issue if you look over there.
If the problem were sea ice, then FWIW the difference btw summer/winter in the AMSU record would have widened from 2000. You are right that as you have shown the (A)MSUs have ice issues tho.
I'm hoping this will be resolved soon. I do so want to see S & C have to put out a *another* adjustment and *another* round of explanations :)
In case you missed it, Dana Nuccitelli hinted there is a paper in the works in response to a comment by Victor Venema over at ATTP's.
Dana's comment immediately follows Victor's.
Can it be a Po-Chedley global TLT dataset in the pipeline?
Watch table 3 and 4 in this paper to assess the potential..
It's always been within the UWashington group's reach. The only question is whether they wanted the agro of going there.
Olof said...
Can it be a Po-Chedley global TLT dataset in the pipeline?
Po-Chedley et al. includes co-author QIANG FU, as in:
Fu, Q., and C. M. Johanson, 2005: Satellite-derived vertical dependence
of tropospheric temperature trends. Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L10703,
doi:10.1029/2004GL022266
One should be aware that S&C's TLT was an attempt to remove the stratospheric contamination from the MSU channel 2 data, aka, TMT. The fact that the theoretical peak weighting of resulting TLT is at a lower pressure height became an added sales point for S&C, IMHO. But, the lower altitude of peak emissions also results in increased sensitivity to input from the surface, which may be a source of further confusion. If the work of Po-Chedley et al. results in an improvement in the removal of the cooling from stratospheric contamination, it would appear there's little need for a TLT. Perhaps that's why S&C use their TMT v6.0 in their recent presentations. The RSS web site shows a series called TTT, which may be that of the earlier Quaing Fu analysis based on the MSU. Po-Chedley et al. present the results of their latest adjusted series, which they call "T24":
...In Table 4, we provide tropical T24 trends, surface temperature trends from HadCRUT4, and the amplification ratio of the T24 trend to the surface trend. Our amplification factor over the tropics is consistent with tropical tropospheric amplification implied by models, which is approximately 1.4–1.6 (Santer et al. 2005; Fu et al. 2011). Our amplification factor over land is reduced because of enhanced land surface warming relative to sea surface warming (e.g., Sutton et al. 2007). All of the MSU/AMSU datasets demonstrate tropical tropospheric amplification, except UAH.
Of course, those cherry pickers in the Republican denialist camp love S&C's data...
I do think this Cruz show may be a watershed moment, of a sort. Surely someone can do some messaging with this failure? And some staffers have all they need to work with for the next six months, starting with learning why Cruz had his way with the Sierra Club president, then learning how ten minutes of prep had the NPR interviewer able to overcome Cruz' Gish gallop.
Team B has little gas left in the tank, and you can tell their bus is slowing down.
Best,
D
http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2015/12/11/when-i-was-young-we-used-to-go-there/
A recent photo:
http://weatherblog.wboc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/earth-moon-hayabusa-2.jpg
"... Earth and Moon in one frame. Take some time and look at that picture, and consider that the highest we go now is about a millimeter above the Earth in that image. We used to all the way to that dot on the left though, but in those days the folks funding NASA accepted basic science...."
P.S.: best quality image from the archive:
http://jda-strm.tksc.jaxa.jp/archive/photo/P100010331/0e1343044915597825945ef85c1bf9da.jpg
Invitation and opportunity to say thank-you:
http://global.jaxa.jp/messages/hayabusa2.html
The problem, Hank, is that they are not funding liquid hydrogen propulsion, and when they do it's in the entirely wrong way. Both sides of the aisle are gleefully funding the expendable monstrosities known as the SLS and Orion, and NASA is GOING ALONG with it. The conclusion here that in America, stupidity is both bipartisan (across the aisle) and institutional (NASA). Witness the NASA astronaut hero cult run by NASA officials who seem not to have any technical education at all.
The next rresident will have to clean up the NASA mess. It won't be cleaned up by DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN children in NASA and congress.
SLS and Orion are the darlings of congress and NASA. It's their shit pile to clean up. Don't hold your breath in the vacuum of space for that to happen.
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