Po-Chedley, Stephen, Qiang Fu, 2012: A Bias in the Midtropospheric Channel Warm Target Factor on the NOAA-9 Microwave Sounding Unit, J. Atmos. Oceanic Technol., 29, 646–652.
whose abstract says:
"The analysis reveals that the UAH TMT product has a positive bias of 0.051 ± 0.031 in the warm target factor that artificially reduces the global TMT trend by 0.042 K decade−1 for 1979–2009. Accounting for this bias increases the global UAH TMT trend from 0.038 to 0.080 K decade−1, effectively eliminating the trend difference between UAH and RSS and decreasing the trend difference between UAH and NOAA by 47%."That would essentially eliminate the RSS-UAH discrepency I pointed out. (Actually I noted this paper last year, but forgot about it until I read this HotWhopper post.)
(Why is it UAH's biases always seem to be on the cool side??)
This claim prompted a response by Christy and Spencer, which brought its own response from the original authors last month, saying
The main finding by Po-Chedley and Fu was that the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) microwave sounding unit (MSU) product has a bias in its NOAA-9 midtropospheric channel (TMT) warm target factor, which leads to a cold bias in the TMT trend. This reply demonstrates that the central arguments by Christy and Spencer to challenge Po-Chedley and Fu do not stand.Obviously this correction, if indeed true, would bring UAH into agreement with RSS but not with the model results as claimed by Spencer. I am still puzzled how it is that the average model trend doubled from 2007 to 2013.
David,
ReplyDeleteThe numbers given by Roy are for the Tropics, whereas the chart you reference from the 2006 report refers to global averages. That may explain a large part of the difference.