Prospects for 2017.

Early last year I wrote a post called prospects for 2016. It was mainly tracking the progress of the El Nino, and I introduced the series of bar plots comparing corresponding months of 1997/8. I've kept updating those plots to end 2016.

Anyway, commenter Uli and others made good use of the thread to make and monitor predictions for 2016. Uli's prediction of 0.99°C at the time turned out to be exact, although the strength of the El Nino caused him to sometimes think a little higher. So I hope this will continue. Uli's main review comment is here.

For my own part, I don't claim any special insight, but I think substantial cooling from here is not very likely (but of course possible). For those who have been following NCEP/NCAR, it has been a wild ride in January:



Pretty warm at the moment. Sea ice, both N and S, has been fascinating too. After a long excursion way below historic levels, the Arctic has dropped back to the field for the moment. The Antarctic excursion was even more extreme, and is still well below other years. Here it is more interesting, because it is not far from the minimum. Again the earlier very high melting rate has not been maintained, but because of the coastline geometry, that is inevitable. A lot of shore doesn't have much ice left to melt (here is the movie.

So I'll leave the thread there open for comments through the year. Thanks, Uli and all.

GISS fell 0.12°C in December; NOAA rose 0.04°C.

The contrasting directions are a result of the fading influence of polar warming. Basically, NOAA was down in November because it included the Siberian cold, but not the complementary Arctic warmth, while GISS was high then. The split in TempLS variants was similar, and BEST also dropped by about 0.06, similar to TempLS mesh. The drop in GISS was a little larger than I expected. HADCRUT 4 rose by about 0.07°C, under the same influence as NOAA and TempLS grid.

As noted in my earlier post today, GISS, NOAA and HADCRUT 4 did set records in 2016, GISS by a larger margin.


I'll show the regular GISS plot and TempLS comparison below the fold

GISS and NOAA both find that 2016 was hottest year recorded.

GISS and NOAA have jointly released their 2016 results. GISS's press release is here. NOAA's is here. I'll analyse the December results in a separate post, but for the moment, I'll just post the cumulative record plots:
GISS:


NOAA:



A fuller set of records for various indices is here, along with a discussion of UAH. The discussion of TempLS is here. Every index so far has reported a record year, and I expect the rest to do so. BEST also reported a record; BEST's report is here, and here is their cumulative record plot:





Update: Hot Whopper has more details.

Update. I see that HADCRUT 4 is out too, and they also had a record year, by a small margin. Here is their plot:



The complete set of these plots shown here is now fairly filled with complete data.

First surface temperature 2016 record - TempLS.

TempLS mesh was down a little in December, from 0.699°C in Nov to 0.653°C. That actually makes it the third warmest in the record, behind 2014 (just) and 2015. TempLS grid actually went up by about 0.04°C. As usual, this reflects differences at poles, which were not so warm in December. This affects TempLS mesh more, as it will GISS relative to NOAA/HADCRUT

The main map features are cold in N central Russia and NW America (but not Alaska), and big warmth around Central Asia.



But the main news is that it completes the year average, which was a record high at 0.807°C. All TempLS anomalies are relative to 1961-90 base years. 2016 beat the 2015 record of 0.728°C, so there shouldn't be much chatter about a "statistical tie". I have posted the series of cumulative records plots here. The plot for TempLS mesh is below. It shows a new color and level in each year a record was set.



TempLS grid was also a record at 0.776°C, vs 0.745°C for 2015. That's closer, reflecting again the fact that warmth at the poles was a feature of 2016, and is picked up more strongly by TempLS mesh. I expect that this will be reflected in the major indices, with GISS setting a record by a good margin, but NOAA and HADCRUT closer, In fact, HADCRUT is no sure thing, although I think the rise in TempLS grid this month increases the likelihood.

Data for RSS and UAH5.6 are also in. RSS V3.3 TLT dropped as did UAH V6, but still narrowly set a record for warmth in 2016. UAH5.6 had 2016 warmer by a more substantial margin. You can see the predicted record plots updated as data comes in here.

UAH - first index with record warm 2016

if you don't count NCEP/NCAR. But UAH just scraped in, due to a drop of 0.21°C in December. I see Roy Spencer has now adopted the line "not statistically warmer". I guess we'll hear a lot of this. There will be indices that will never be "statistically warmer" while the temperatures go up and up.

Anyway, in previous years I have shown progressive record plots to show how the record has crept (or, sometimes recently, leapt) upward over the years. This year I wanted to take an advance peek. So I did a range of indices, infilling missing months with the minimum month for 2016. That is pretty conservative, although it would have overestimated UAH. I show the plots below. There is more explanation of the style here. This time I have headed the plots with an "Incomplete" and superimposed a pink cross if there was infilling. I'll maintain it, so when the results are all in, this will go away. Use the arrow buttons to flick through the datasets. I'll try to keep the most recent finalised showing first. With conservative infilling, all indices currently show a record, though some are close. Often, the margin is high if that for 2015 was low, and vice versa.

For the meaning of the headings, see the glossary here.

NCEP/NCAR December Down 0.09°C - coolest since June.

The Moyhu NCEP/NCAR index fell from 0.48°C in November to 0.391°C (June was 0.369°C). It was an up and down month, cool in the mid, but warm at the end.

I don't normally talk about long term records with reanalysis, because I don't think it is homogeneous enough. But I will note that successive annual averages for the last three years were 0.19, 0.33, and 0.531°C (anomaly base 1994-2013). So up by 0.2°C in 2016. This is an indicator of large margins in other indices. It also means that all months in 2016 were warmer than the 2015 average, including December. El Nino has gone, but it stayed warm.

A feature was again a band of cold from Cairo to Vladivistok through Russia, though most of Asia was warm. Also cold in Canada and north US, though not in the South. Warm in the Arctic - a pattern for the December quarter.

Sea ice in the Arctic became more normal, and the very fast melting in the Antarctic slowed, although still a lot less ice than in other years.

Merry Christmas to all

And a viable New Year (as our CFO used to wish)

As a Christmas gift, I've been sparring at WUWT with folk who insist that raw temperature data is hidden/deleted/not available. I point them, of course, to GHCN Daily. But there was much talk of BoM, and I must admit that the data page isn't as obvious as it was. But it is there. And not only can you get an unadjusted daily file for just about any station they have, back to start, but you can download zipped csv files for max and min (but not together, unfortunately). And there is also extensive metadata.

On to interesting times. Here is Sou on Mike Mann's court victory. And Eli.