There's a  new paper out that shows that, contrary to what you'll read on denier blogs, NOAA's latest version of global sea surface temperature is probably the best and most accurate around. It's the closest to observations, when you compare it to measurements from moored and floating buoys, Argo floats and radiometer-based satellite records of sea surface temperature.

You might remember how climate hoax conspiracy theorists, professional disinformers and other deniers protested loud and long when NOAA scientists published a paper about the revised NOAA temperature data. The US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, led by arch denier Lamar Smith, harassed NOAA endlessly with subpoena after subpoena. A lot of the changes to the NOAA temperature record were a result of a new version of the global sea surface temperature data set, known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature, or ERSST v4. The papers on that were published in February 2015 (see below). The protests only came, though, in June 2015 when there was a paper by Karl et al. That paper pushed denier buttons because it challenged the so-called "hiatus". You can read about Karl15 here, and the paper itself is here.

And a chart, showing how ERSST v4 is closest to the measurements from buoys and satellites:

You can read the full article here - with lots of references. (It's got terrific publicity already, and the paper's only just out.) The paper is in Science Advances and is open access. It's well worth a read.

• The average global surface temperature anomaly for November was 0.95 °C (NASA), which is the second hottest November on record, and only 0.07 °C lower than the hottest November during the El Niño in 2015.
• The 12 months to November 2016 averaged 1.02 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was 0.14 °C hotter than the 12 months to November 2015.
• For 2016 to be colder than 2015, the December average would need to be below minus 0.75 °C. The only month the average was less than minus 0.75 °C was in December 1916! 

http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2016/12/its-still-hot-second-hottest-november.html

A reminder to everyone who isn't in San Francisco at AGU16, that it's best to be prepared in advance. (Fine words coming from me, when I can barely find time at the moment to write a simple blog article.)

I think that last year's registration details probably work this year too. If so, you've probably already received an email from AGU with all the links. If not, you can register and logon to AGU On-Demand here. (Let me know if that link doesn't work for you.)

You can browse and search the scientific program ahead of time. The search button is on the top right, easy to miss.

More in the blog article.  Happy viewing

PS It would be great if you would add tips about what to watch out for at AGU16, here or on the blog.

* These images show the most recent image of the United States, from NOAA geostationary (GOES) satellites. They are generated every 30 minutes using either the Visible, Infrared, Shortwave Infrared (4um), or the Water Vapor images into one larger composite image using GOES East and West Imagers.
Other Areas: Alaska | Hawaii | Guam | Puerto Rico | American Samoa

The National Mosaic Enhanced Radar Image http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/full_loop.php with its interference patterns around cities seems confusing to me.

My bandwidth is fairly narrow and I was wondering what other non-technical user friendly weather satellite imagery resources are available out there in the great wide world? 

The Brown Ocean Effect

Climate State
Published on Aug 31, 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ4N9G2GDIk

Tropical storms and hurricanes are driven by energy and momentum derived from warm ocean waters of at least 26.5°C. The warmer the ocean, the more energy is available to the storm, and the more intense it is likely to become. Ordinarily, these storms lose energy after making landfall, as they move beyond the ocean as their source of heat energy. However, in 2007 this conventional wisdom was brought into question when meteorologists were stumped by Tropical Storm Erin.

As tropical storm Erin tracked over Texas, something unusual occurred: it grew stronger over land than it ever had while over the Gulf of Mexico, even forming a hurricane-like eye over the state of Oklahoma. The phenomenon came to called “The Brown Ocean Effect” — and describes storms which derrive their energy over land, after moving ashore. Storms fed by the Brown Ocean Effect get their energy from the evaporation of abundant soil moisture. The land essentially mimics the moisture-rich environment of the ocean, where the storm originated.

According to NASA-funded research by Theresa Andersen and J. Marshall Shepherd of the University of Georgia in Athens, tropical storm Erin is an example of the newly-described Brown Ocean Effect, and has given rise to a new sub-category of tropical storm type called “Tropical Cyclone Maintenance and Intensification Event,” or TCMI.

The finding has possible implications for the response of storms to climate change. As average surface temperatures rise, and as precipitation events increase in frequency and severity, more moisture is retained and then released from extremely wet soils. This, together with warmer air in vulnerable regions, supports the environmental conditions for the persistence of tropical storms well beyond their ocean birthplace.

Recently in June 2015, Tropical Storm Bill brought isolated rainfall totals of more than a foot to the Texas/Oklahoma border area, and was likely impacted by the Brown Ocean Effect. Conditions sustained a Tropical Depression much longer than expected, in total for 78 hours after landfall. Average post-landfall lifespan of 131 inland tropical cyclones since 1970 was just 36 hours, only 12 of those systems lasted 78 hours.

Kevin Trenberth from the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded in 2012, “Empirical evidence confirms that warmer climates, owing to increased water vapor, lead to more intense precipitation events, even when the total annual precipitation is reduced slightly. A warmer climate therefore increases the risks of floods.”

Tropical storms therefore could be sustained by more favorable conditions with moisture-rich soils over land. Thus, may track further and further inland, and communities previously out of reach of tropical storms and hurricanes may become more vulnerable to damaging winds and heavy precipitation they generate.

Deep in the Himalayas sits a remote research station that is tracking an alarming trend in climate change, with implications that could disrupt the lives of more than 1 billion people and pitch the most populated region of the world into chaos.

The station lies in the heart of a region called the Third Pole, an area that contains the largest area of frozen water outside of the North Pole and South Pole.

Despite its relative anonymity, the Third Pole is vitally important; it is the source of Asia's 10 largest rivers including the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy and the Ganges — and their fertile deltas.

Flows from the glaciers that give the pole its name support roughly 1.3 billion people in China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — and the glaciers are melting fast.

Chinese authorities have opened up a remote research station on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau and revealed alarming research on the pace of global warming.

Half a century of research shows the temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees in the area, more than double the global average. More than 500 glaciers have completely disappeared, and the biggest ones are retreating rapidly.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for August was 0.98 °C, which is 0.16 °C higher than the previous hottest August in 2014.

Because July is the hottest month of the year, I've seen this July reported as the hottest month ever in recorded history! I asked the question whether August beat July and was told it's too close to call.

The average for the eight months to the end of August is 1.05 °C, which is 0.25 °C higher than any previous January to August period. The previous highest was last year, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.8 °C.

There are now eleven in a row of "hottest months" from October 2015 to August 2016 (that is, hottest October, hottest November etc). If we could look back over the entire Holocene, it's probably more than 7,000 years since there was a similar run of hottest months on record, that is, not since the Holocene climatic optimum (it's probably hotter now than it was back then).

And a couple of charts. The first is a progressive average - Each year shows the average from January that year to the month on the horizontal axis.

This next one compares 2015/16 with past strong-ish El Ninos that were immediately followed by a La Nina. You can see the difference this year where August temperatures kicked up instead of dropping. (NOAA has just taken off the La Nina watch. BoM will issue it's fortnightly ENSO update later today.)

I had a pal share this at CFI, I can't watch it now, but thought I'd pass it along.  Looked pretty interesting.

Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change 

by Steven Easterbrook
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIiW6ugLHL4 

Published on Sep 7, 2016
Climate scientists build large, complex simulations with little or no software engineering training, and do not readily adopt the latest software engineering tools and techniques. In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study of the culture and practices of climate scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre. 

The study examined how the scientists think about software correctness, how they prioritize requirements, and how they develop a shared understanding of their models. The findings show that climate scientists have developed customized techniques for verification and validation that are tightly integrated into their approach to scientific research. 

Their software practices share many features of both agile and open source projects, in that they rely on self-organisation of the teams, extensive use of informal communication channels, and developers who are also users and domain experts. These comparisons offer insights into why such practices work.

Hurricane Hot Towers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU0Y7qjoacA
Published on Nov 25, 2012

This visualization won Honorable Mention in the National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge in September 2007. It was also shown during the SIGGRAPH 2008 Computer Animation Festival in Los Angeles, CA. 'Towers in the Tempest' is a 4.5 minute narrated animation that explains recent scientific insights into how hurricanes intensify. This intensification can be caused by a phenomenon called a 'hot tower'.

Tropical cyclones on track to grow more intense as temperatures rise
Aerosols have compensated for greenhouse gases, but won't in future
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160714151858.htm
July 14, 2016
Source: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

Summary: Powerful tropical cyclones like the super typhoon that lashed Taiwan with 150-mile-per-hour winds last week and then flooded parts of China are expected to become even stronger as the planet warms. That trend hasn't become evident yet, but it will, scientists say.

Over the past century, tiny airborne particles called aerosols, which cool the climate by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, largely cancelled out the effects of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions when it came to tropical storm intensity, according to a new scientific review paper published this week in the journal Science. That might sound like a good thing, but many of those particles came from the burning of fossil fuels and wood, and contributed to acid rain, smog and lung damage. As vehicles and power plants added filters and scrubbers to reduce their impact on human health, levels of human-made aerosols in the atmosphere began to decline. At the same time, greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise.

The plot shows the time the Timer attached to a rope attached to a tripod attached to the ice in the middle of the river moves sufficiently that the timer is stopped.

Not an accurate measure of ice breakup perhaps but one which is difficult for climate contrarians to claim "adjustment".

This plot is in days from vernal equinox. This being a more fixed time to the annual cycle than a date.

The linear plots have been made assuming that there is a slope change around 1964 The smoothed curve is one smoothed by a Hodrick Prescott filter

In the tropical Pacific Ocean, the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) remains neutral, but a late and weak La Niña remains possible. In the Indian Ocean, a negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) continues, but has weakened from record July index values.

International climate models surveyed by the Bureau suggest the negative IOD will weaken during the southern hemisphere spring, and is likely to end in November. This means its influence on Australia’s spring rainfall may not be as strong as it has been during this winter, when wetter conditions prevailed in the east.

In the tropical Pacific Ocean, sea surface temperatures are cooler than average, though remain well short of La Niña levels. In the atmosphere, there has been little change in trade winds or cloudiness, indicating little or no coupling between the atmosphere and ocean. As a result, cool sub-surface temperatures have eased slowly towards normal. International climate models suggest neutral to weak La Niña levels for the remainder of the year. A La Niña WATCH remains in place.

Below is the POAMA outlook.

"Record-high temperatures melted Arctic permafrost and released deadly anthrax spores from a thawing carcass of a caribou that had been infected 75 years ago and had stayed frozen in limbo until now. This all suggests that it may not be easy to predict which populations will be most vulnerable to the health impacts of climate change."

The results of the damage we're doing to our climate are varied and both more subtle and more pervasive than we imagined. The article mentions a number of other effects such as altering animal migrations and release of methane from melting permafrost. 

We tend to concentrate on big issues in relation to climate change--rising sea levels, melting glaciers, vanishing Arctic ice, and so on. Some of these smaller matters (a thawing caribou carcass) can still have devastating consequences.

Poisonous Algae Blooms Threaten People, Ecosystems Across U.S.
August 29, 2016
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/29/491831451/poisonous-algae-blooms-threaten-people-ecosystems-across-u-s

Serious algae outbreaks have hit more than 20 states this summer. Organisms are shutting down beaches in Florida, sickening swimmers in Utah and threatening ecosystems in California.

The blooms are a normal part of summer, but the frequency, size and toxicity this year are worse than ever.
The algae is showing up in lakes and big reservoirs like Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville. In some places, it looks like someone poured a giant can of green paint into the water. And the smell can be rank.

Anderson says California has posted danger signs at at least 30 lakes and reservoirs.

But what's most alarming are the toxin levels, which Anderson says are "crazy."
20 micrograms per liter would be worrisome.
Current readings are as high as 150,000 micrograms per liter.

http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article95209412.html

AUGUST 12, 2016 6:00 AM

California’s summer of slime: Algae blooms muck up waterways across state

Over looking those reservoirs we have bark beetle ravaged forests.  I don't see how the system can heal itself.  Particularly since temperatures are only going to keep going up.

It's going to be a rough ride.  And the question none of us dare raise, where do we go from here?

"In the North this summer, a devastating offensive is underway. Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”

In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef—dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space—were reduced to white bone-yards."

"War" certainly captures the sense of urgency of the climate crisis and the huge economic refocus that will be required if we are to meet the 2degree target, never mind 1.5degrees. But David Roberts at Vox has some problems with using that framing (as well as some praise).

Roberts mentions two problems, although they seem like one to me: getting buy-in from everyone across the political spectrum and talk of revolutionary mobilization, which may make that buy-in tougher than it needs to be. I share Roberts' problem with the metaphor:

"Who is the enemy in this war? If it’s physics, well, people don’t get very fired up over physics (though, to be clear, they should!). If it’s the people who emit carbon, that’s all of us. If it’s fossil fuel executives, that puts McKibben in the position of comparing them to Hitler, which is generally a bad idea (almost as bad as comparing the Paris climate agreement to Munich, which … come on).

And the metaphor of climate change as a war sits somewhat uneasily next to the other popular narrative about climate action, which is that reducing emissions will bring all sorts of benefits: new jobs, economic competitiveness, less pollution, and so on. It’s good for us.

Consider the odd tenor of McKibben’s assurance that "gearing up to stop global warming would provide a host of social and economic benefits, just as World War II did." I know what he means, but "a war that’s good for us" is a weird pitch."

Anyway, that's enough for now, this is turning into a blogpost rather than a start to a discussion.