Wednesday 27 January 2016

2015: record hot or not? | Energy Matters

2015: record hot or not? | Energy Matters



With the 2015 lower troposphere temperatures in, NASA and NOAA have declared without any caveats or doubts, that 2015 was the warmest year since records began. This short post updates my charts that compare satellite with surface thermometers temperatures. The differences between the two methodologies are in fact tiny and subtle. According to satellites, 2015 was the third warmest year, lagging 1999 by a fair margin. The main material difference, therefore, is that the satellite record would deprive the scaremongers at NASA and NOAA of their eye popping headlines.
Figure 1 Surface thermometer (GISS LOTI and HadCrut4) and satellite (UAH and RSS) records compared. It is plain to see that surface thermometers set a new record in 2015 while the satellites did not.
In this post I am looking at two of the surface thermometer records (GISS LOTI and HadCrut4) and the only two versions of the satellite record (UAH and RSS). The surface thermometer models are based to a large extent on the same surface thermometer data base where air temperature is measured over land and sea surface temperature (SST) is measured over the oceans. The results are area weighted with the SSTs contributing about 70% of the total. The satellite models are based on the exact same satellite recordings. We will see that there is no material difference between GISS LOTI and HadCrut4 and no material difference between UAH and RSS.

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