This is a bit early in the month to post, but I see Lucia has noticed an early result from GISS suggesting a very big drop, so I was curious as to TempLS's take.
I think in fact it is too early. The most recent release of GHCN was Jan 5, and in all, land and sea, there were only 3213 stations reporting - see map below. That gives sparse land coverage.
I've recently put a big store of monthly data mapped on a globe. Dec 2012 is included, and the areas responsible can be seen. I'll discuss below.
That said, the TempLS analysis, based on GHCNV3 land temperatures and the ERSST sea temps, also showed a big drop in monthly average of 0.22°C for December, down from 0.51 °C in November.
Below is the graph (lat/lon) of temperature distribution for November. I've also included a count and map of the stations that have reported to this date.
This spherical harmonics plot is done with the GISS colors and temperature intervals, and as usual I'll post a comparison when GISS comes out. It shows very cold in Russia, NW N America and N Europe. In part of Russia, is went beyond the color scheme limit (6°C).
Here is the map of 3213 "stations" which contributed to this report. That's even lower than last month.
But the big news here this month is the new WebGL facility for looking at station temperatures. The December data is there. Here's a snapshot of the freeze across Eurasia:
I see you've posted January now too on your "Latest data" page (but no blog post?) - but there must be something wrong there because GISS has reported for December but you have N/A, and Roy Spencer has posted UAH January 2013 number as well (way high!)
ReplyDeleteArthur,
ReplyDeleteFirst sorry about the moderation delay - I have moderation on for posts more than 4 weeks old to reduce spam problems, and I don't check as often as I should.
The GISS problem is that it won't currently let my script download the file. I presume this is because of their server issues. I could do it manually, but I've been hoping the problem will right itself.
It's a somewhat similar problem with UAH. Roy posts, but it's days before the data appears online, and again I don't like to intervene manually in case of inconsistency. But I'll do TempLS today.