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Why do NASA and NOAA disagree?

post #1 of 4
5/23/09 at 1:15pm
Thread Starter 

The NOAA says that 1998 was still the warmest year on record.

 

NASA says 1998 was the third warmest, after 2005 and 2007.

 

Why do they vary by quite a bit? Are they using different baselines? Different data stations? And how do these stations compare to other temp data sources?

 

...looking back, maybe it's just that my NOAA graph only seems to go up to 2001. I couldn't find a more up to date one though, anyone know?

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post #2 of 4
5/23/09 at 3:23pm

Here's their up-to-date data:

 

 

Looks like they've got 2005 at the top too.

 

Though Hadley calls 1998 the warmest.  The difference is in how each group deals with the Arctic, where the warming is greatest but where there are essentially no temperature monitoring stations.  Hadley excludes areas where they don't have temperature stations, while NASA uses their northernmost stations to extrapolate for Arctic warming.

 

Quote:

Our ranking of 2005 as warmer than 1998 is a result mainly of the large positive Arctic anomaly. Excluding the region north of 75N, 1998 is warmer than 2005. If the entire Arctic Ocean were excluded, the ranking of 2005 may be even lower.

 

Our analysis differs from others by including estimated temperatures up to 1200 km from the nearest measurement station (7). The resulting spatial extrapolations and interpolations are accurate for temperature anomalies at seasonal and longer time scales at middle and high latitudes, where the spatial scale of anomalies is set by Rossby waves (7). Thus we believe that the remarkable Arctic warmth of 2005 is real, and the inclusion of estimated arctic temperatures is the primary reason for our rank of 2005 as the warmest year.

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post #3 of 4
5/23/09 at 4:06pm
Thread Starter 

 

Quote:
Originally Posted by dana1981 View Post

Hadley excludes areas where they don't have temperature stations, while NASA uses their northernmost stations to extrapolate for Arctic warming.


Ahhh, okay thanks. So do you know if NOAA and NASA use the same meteorological stations? Just curious.

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post #4 of 4
5/23/09 at 8:54pm

I don't think so, but I'm not sure.

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