The NCEP/NCAR anomaly for March was 0.566°C, almost the same as Feb 0.576°C. And that is very warm. It makes the average for the first quarter 0.543°C, compared with the 2016 annual average of 0.531°C. In most indices, 2016 was the warmest ever, so with a prospect of El Nino activity later in the year, 2017 could well be the fourth record year in a row.
You can bring up the map for the month here. It was warm in Europe, mixed in N America, warm in Siberia but cool further South, and varied at the poles. So GISS may come down a bit, since it has been buoyed by the Arctic warmth.
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Such exciting news, and rats, GISS has not updated on Wood for Trees since November 2016. I could be driving them nuts with my crayon drawings.
ReplyDeleteWe're up to date here :)
DeleteYes, I know.
DeleteI don't know how to graph using software, but I learned to use WfT by copying a commenter named Bart at Climate Etc., who was an artist:
an example of Bart's WfTs's chops
So It's my crutch. Lately I've been forced to use that icky HadCET4. I need to buy some graphing software and hire a kid from TCU to teach me how to use it.
Currently my outlook for this year, near 2015, is looking too cool. If there is an el nino and a 4'th record in 2017, then a fifth in 2018 would also be likely due to lingering nino effects.
ReplyDeleteChubbs
We can't really say that with confidence until we pass the May threshold for ENSO forecast accuracy, but yeah, it's like 97-98 all over again. An El Nino starting mid-NH summer, usually lasts well into the subsequent year, and that year is often the warmer of the two, so that could be the case again. The recent Knutson GFDL paper on prolonging the pause also modeled what they call spring-back warming episodes, and it smells like we're in one... a great big blob of warming over a decade or two. So what are the ever so brilliant skeptics going to do with that? My prediction, ram their heads even further up their... The problem is they think the cycle is completely natural... in reality, the 1983-2013 warming masking cycle was probably driven by the explosion of economic activity in Asia, and it's subsiding, and their junk just does not stay up in the air for very long. We've likely seen the last major cooling cycle we're going to get for the rest of this century. Climate sensitivity is on the high side.
DeleteYes enso for this year is still uncertain. The latest UK met decadal forecast, issued in January, is calling for warm conditions generally above the CMIP5 mean over the next 5 years. The forecast, from a model initialized last Fall, is looking good so far. Another indication that ocean conditions favor warming.
Deletehttp://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/decadal-fc
Chubbs
From memory, the original Smith study predicted half of the years after 2009 would be record warmest years... 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016 (wow year,) maybe 2017, and maybe 2018. Oh those crappy computer models: that would be way more than half!
DeleteAll three of the GFS/CFSR global temperature anomaly sources that I have found were up slightly from February to March by the following amounts: UM CCI +0.032°C, WxBELL +0.035°C, and Karsten Haustein's GFS/GISS-adjusted +0.033°C.
ReplyDeleteThe GFS is currently forecasting a large drop in estimated global temperature over the next week of about -0.3°C, although the GFS 168-hour forecast has been running too low by about 0.1°C to 0.2°C most of this year so far, and if this performance continues over the next week, the drop might only be about -0.1°C to -0.2°C. Hard to tell what impact that will have on the April average because it could easily rebound as it did after a big dip of about -0.5°C that occurred over a span of about a week in early January.
You might think that skeptics would be eating crow by now. Quite the opposite! UAH is the only global temperature source they trust, and March just came in at +0.19 C. That's down from +0.35 in February.
DeleteWhat a mess!
RSS TLT also dropped February to March, from 0.342C to 0.251C, referenced to 1981-2010. The adjusted ERAI stayed nearly the same, like the NCAR R1, at 0.688C for February and 0.685C for March, referenced to 1981-2010. There has been a large divergence between the TLT and surface estimates since June 2016, with the TLT estimates substantially lower. They were all bunched fairly close at the peak of the El Nino around February-March 2016. In the past, the TLT estimates were typically much higher than surface estimates during El Nino peaks, but much closer than recent years for periods away from the El Nino peaks. I've seen a variety of opinions as to why this change occurred (typically politically aligned), but I'm not sure which one to believe. It's a bit of an apples and orange comparison, but you'd think there should be better consistency in the general relationship over long time periods.
DeleteEra-interim March 2017 (Copernicus) stands out by being only 0.10 C colder than March 2016. The other surface reanalyses are down about 0.20 C, and the satellite troposphere datasets about 0.55 C, from March 2016.
Delete0.19C drop from February in RSS TTTv4 also. Looking at regional breakdowns it's a fairly even drop across the board. Difficult to understand really but perhaps just still dropping as a delayed response to declines in SSTs up to the end of last year.
DeleteBryan,
I think the key to understanding much of the variability difference between TLT/TTT and surface is a combination of regional variability in tropospheric/surface amplification and a tropospheric response delay factor. How that ultimately manifests can be very complex of course.
For example, TTT/TLT is disproportionately influenced by tropical SSTs and disproportionately uninfluenced (if you catch my drift) by high latitude and Arctic temperatures. Over the past several months we've seen declining tropical SSTs and large high latitude, particularly Arctic, anomalies. This kind of pattern is always likely to cause discrepancy.
This may also explain perceived differences between this whole El Nino event and previous ones. In the 2015-present period there has been a large uptick in mid-latitude, high-latitude and Arctic temperatures, which seems to be a result of emerging from a decadal scale variability pattern as much as the El Nino event. Because of low amplification factors in these regions warmth here has much less effect on TLT/TTT temperatures.