John Neilson-Gamon has an interesting post at Climate Abyss titled
Using surface temperature data, John concludes that
All else being equal, an El Niño year will average about 0.2 C warmer globally than a La Niña year. Each new La Niña year will be about as warm as an El Niño year 13 years prior.
In response to his post, I wrote the following
Hi John – I recommend you also perform this analysis on the UAH MSU and RSS MSU lower tropospheric temperatures and on the upper ocean heat content paper. As we have shown in
Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2009: An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/r-345.pdf
and
Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2010: Correction to: “An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841″, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D1, doi:10.1029/2009JD013655http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/r-345a.pdf
there is a growing divergence between the surface analyses and the lower tropospheric temperature anomaly data. We attribute a signficant part of the warm surface temperature bias to the land minimum temperatures.
[Roger- I'll run the numbers in a couple of days when I'm back in town. - John N-G]
One of the commenters responded with
Roger Pielke Sr. “there is a growing divergence between the surface analyses and the lower tropospheric temperature anomaly data. We attribute a signficant part of the warm surface temperature bias to the land minimum temperatures”
I will reserve my judgement until the NOAA analysis of lower troposphere is released (they’re working on it). They’ve identified some biases in the UAH and RSS analysis which have been shown to influence the trends at other altitudes in the atmosphere meaning that it is probably going to influence the synthetic lower tropospheric altitude.
I sent the above comment to John Christy, who replied with the information below [I also sent to Climate Abyss to post].
