Thursday, January 07, 2016

This El Nino's Lower Troposphere Temperature, Compared to the Past

Here is a nice, relevant plot from Sou at Hotwhopper: it shows UAH's calculation of the lower troposphere temperature anomaly, for this El Nino, 2009-2010's, and 1997-98's.

This year is significantly ahead:


And here's an update to an (admittedly confusing) graph I've given before: a comparison of surface temperatures during this El Nino, compared to 1997-98.


Even though the strength (dashed lines, left-hand axis) of the respective El Ninos is comparable, with this year just a little ahead of 1997-98's, surface temperatures (solid lines, right-hand axis) are consistently higher by 0.2-0.4°C. There's your global warming.

2 comments:

DocRichard46 said...

Fascinating. It would be interesting to use 1997 and 2015 (and maybe other El Niño years) and input all forcings and feedbacks that we know of. It might be a good test of the accuracy of our knowledge and the skill of our computers, and maybe put better constraints on the pulse of warmth the El Niño gives.

David in Cal said...

Nice charts. They give some indication of the speed of warming. By my eye, the comparison of 2015 GISS anomaly to 1997 is a difference of around .75 deg, which would correspond to 4.2 deg per century. The same comparison for UAH would be a difference of about .2 deg C, which corresponds to 1.1 deg c per century.