Feb 06 2008
January 2008 Coldest This Century
The Remote Sensing Systems group released its MSU data for January 2008 recently. January was one of the coldest months we’ve had in awhile, even in the Southern Hemisphere where it’s summer. Since I’m still under the weather a bit, pardon the pun, I’ve neglected posting so far this week. But I have some procedures already written that will take me only minimal effort to run, and they produce nice colorful pictures.
First, let’s look at the RSS MSU data. This is their globally averaged monthly product, as seen on the link above. The graphic is stolen borrowed directly from that page (as of 6 Feb 2008).
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The negative anomaly is associated with the current La Nina. RSS is also kind enough to provide us with a graphic of the spatial distribution of temperature anomalies.
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And below is the data from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis for January 2008.
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There are slight differences between the two. However, both show a general cool anomaly. Note that even though there is a La Nina, neither of the plots show a cold anomaly over the Eastern Pacific Ocean. A plausible explaination in the comments will receive extra credit.
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2 Responses to “January 2008 Coldest This Century”
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A plausible explaination for a Warm Eastern Pacific…ok
The Trade Winds which blow from East to West are stronger during a La Nina Event. During a La Nina cool waters from the deep ocean upwell into the tropics in the West, while the trade winds move these water across the tropics towards the east. These warmed waters, then kinda pool up in the West as the Trade Winds and current prevent them from drifting back east.
Warm waters are more bouyant that cool waters, so they float on top of the cool water. As water moves north it cools and loses volume causing sea levels to fall very slightly, since water always seeks the lowest level, the warm waters constantly seek the cold, creating convection as water from the equator drifts towards the poles, where it cools and sinks.
North and South of the Equator, the winds blow from the West to the East, because of of the difference of changing latitudes and the speed of the rotation of the Earth. So the warm waters, which have pooled in the West, drift North to find the colder sinking waters, but eventually find the westerly winds and are blown into the West coast of North America.
During an El Nino, the trade winds are not as strong, so less water is able to pool in the West, so the current is able to move the waters more effectively since there is less volume.
Do those satellite atmospheric temperatures show past El Nino/La Nina ocean temperature events? I thought they were particularly getting atmosphere temps up through the atmosphere, with very little contribution from the ground/ocean surface. The marine layer isn’t very thick.
This is getting a huge amount of attention from those who claim the cold January proves global warming either never happened or quit happening last month or last year.