DMI arctic temperature data animation doesn’t support claims of recent Arctic warming
Filed Under: Environmental News on September 7, 2009
Note: this is fairly complex and scientific. I’m posting only a portion of the entire piece here. Make sure to visit the original site, Watts Up With That?, to get the full picture. Here’s what it boils down to: the claims that hit the press around the main stream last week regarding rising Arctic temperatures, based on a partially NOAA-funded study, appear to be largely inaccurate. Since the scientists making those claims have thus far refused to release their raw data and since the data available from other sources does not match what they’ve claimed, a lot of doubt is cast on the issue. Of course, this refutation will not likely make the headlines, since it doesn’t sum up into a 10-word-or-less headline that grabs the reader.
There’s a lot of buzz about regarding the Kaufman et al paper published today in Science which claims a recent reversal on a long term Arctic cooling trend and “found that the cooling trend reversed in the mid-1990s.” In theNOAA internal newsletter I cited yesterday, NOAA claims that the “According to the most recent Arctic Report Card, the Arctic Ocean continues to warm”.OK fair enough, we’ll have a look.
NOAA based this on Hadley’s CRU dataset, which of course Hadley refuses to show any raw data for or methodology despite repeated FOI requests, making verification impossible. (read more here)
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| Figure A1. Arctic-wide annual averaged surface air temperature anomalies (60°–90°N) based on land stations north of 60°N relative to the 1961–90 mean. From the CRUTEM 3v dataset, (available online at www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/. Note this curve does not include ship observations. |
Note the trend from 1980 to present. Note also that there are few weather stations above 60N and even fewer on the Arctic Ice itself. The data is relatively sparse and interpolation/gridding/averaging is employed to come up with the coverage all the way to 90N. We’ll get back to this.
Let’s first get an understanding of the Kaufman paper.
Read the rest at Watts Up With That?
