Quickies

Lots going on in the blogosphere, little of which I'll really take up in favor of mentioning that I'll be visiting Charlotte, NC next week.  Any of you in the area are welcome to drop me a note and maybe show me the area some.  If there's a Science Cafe in the area with an opening, I'd be glad to stop in and chat.

In the mean time, I've continued at a slow pace my work on the ESMR sea ice.  See the comment by MMM about the progress that the NSIDC has made on integrating it to the record with other satellites.  That's no reason to stop my effort here, though, because we're always better off if there are more lines of evidence, or more mehtods of analyzing the data, that independently come to the same conclusion.  Or, perhaps, it turns out that they don't support the same conclusions.  Either way, we learn something, which is the key for science.

A major European effort to re-examine prospects on sea level rise has completed and announced figures higher than the IPCC 4th report, but lower than some of those considered possible previously.  See ice2sea for details.

A 'citizen science' effort from Skeptical Science has confirmed the unsurprising, to those of us reading the scientific literature, that the overwhelming majority of the scientific literature either doesn't mention whether climate change is occurring and is human-caused, or that it supports the conclusion.  See 97% consensus for the details on what they did.

Climate change, by way of sea level rise, is starting to get attention of towns in the US, as Newtok, Alaska is now facing exile from its traditional locale since it'll be under water in the next few years.  I'm actually involved in a proposal that'll help provide improved information for the west coast of Alaska.  Doesn't affect this situation, but some towns farther inland, or where sea level isn't as obvious a factor, might be helped in their decision process.

The one-sided political divide continues on climate science.  Barry Bickmore, scientist and former GOP party official in Utah, has replied to a former GOP senator about the science.

Some time in the last week or two, we've reached 400 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.  On the one hand, it's a milestone of sorts; the digits ticked over a round number.  On the other hand, there hasn't been a question of whether we would do so for over 30 years.  Purely a question of when.  As many have noted, levels have not been this high in human history.  Now, if you take history to mean the written record of 10,000 years, that's true, but no surprise.  We've been past the highest levels in history ever since the industrial revolution.  Call it the 280 ppm of 'pre-industrial'.  It's more surprising if you consider that it's longer than our species has existed -- the about 200,000 years 'anatomically modern' humans been around.  And, for that matter, we didn't see such levels even in our ancestors' times, for Homo erectus, back to around 1.8 million years.  Last time such levels existed is perhaps 2.5 million years ago, when the nearest thing to us was Homo habilis -- a species with less than half our brain size, and averaging perhaps 1.3 m tall (Wikipedia).

Assessing forecasts

This is actually part of pursuing whether ESMR was screwy, but I decided that to show that nothing was up my sleeve, it was time to talk some about assessing forecasts.  That, and it's something I've been meaning to talk about for a while.  The thing is, forecast assessment is not nearly as simple as we sometimes think.  Having judged many a science fair project that is comparing weather forecasts, I've seen many of the same issues come up there, too.

For precipitation forecasts, people (science fairs included) often think about either 'probability of detection' -- i.e., what fraction of the time that there's rain did the weather forecast call for rain, and 'false alarm rate' -- what fraction of the time did you get no rain even though the forecast called for rain.  Both are potentially meaningful, and both have serious problems if used alone.

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Was ESMR screwy?

A reader here also asked about the pre-1979 satellite data over at my question place. The thing is, we do have pre-1979 satellite sea ice data -- the ESMR (Electrically Scanning Microwave Radiometer) 1973-1976.  It was a much simpler instrument than the SMMR, SSMI, SSMI-S, and AMSR which started flying in 1978 and since.  The more recent ones have two very important improvements over the ESMR -- they use multiple channels (think of it as colors) and they use both horizontal and vertical polarizations rather than just total power.

Ok, translation to English.  Our eyes look in three channels -- red, green, and blue.  Different creatures use different numbers of channels.  Dogs use only one, black and white (as we do if the lighting is very low).  Mantis shrimp use 10 channels.  Bees use ultraviolet.  And so forth.  The key is that the eyes respond to some number of colors.  Numbers vary, and what color band also varies. 

The other thing about electromagnetic radiation is that it can be polarized -- vibrating in one way versus another.  The two linear polarizations are horizontal and vertical.  ESMR just lumped them together and measured total power.  SMMR and the rest measure horizontal and vertical polarization separately at most of the channels.  Basically, SMMR and all the more recent instruments have high quality color vision versus ESMR being a rather fuzzy black and white.


But ... black and white is still better than not being able to see at all.  The question then arises in retrospect whether we can use the black and white instrument, ESMR, like our more recent color vision instruments.  Now, in part, I know the answer already -- you can't.  More precisely, you can't do it well enough to satisfy my colleagues at NASA-Goddard.  Perhaps, though, it can be done accurately enough to answer some questions of interest, even if not accurately enough to be entirely comparable to the modern instruments.

I have some ideas, naturally, and have been been pursuing them a bit -- enough to know that there's a fair chance of getting useful answers.  Whether it's useful enough to answer questions of interest ... well, I'll also invite questions you all find of interest.

Forecast Contests

I'll invite your suggestions for forecast contests to hold.  In the mean time, some results from forecast contests at my work. 

The winter contest was to predict the date of the first 2 inch (5 cm) snowfall at our official weather station.  It never happened.  I came close to predicting the date, sort of.  Since we've had some memorable storms on or near President's day (February 18th this year), I went with that.  Nothing noteworthy that day this year.  But the next guesser was for May 1, so when we were getting forecasts of significant snow (4-8 inches, 10-20 cm) in mid-March, I was hopeful.  Only 1.7" at the official station, though, so no luck for me.  (If only we'd used any of the other area stations!  All beat 2".)  This is our second straight year of not having even one day with 2" of snow.  Should probably adjust the standards to 1" (2.5 cm).

The summer contest had a winner before entries had even closed.  One of the contests was to predict the first day that the official station would exceed 90 F (32 C).  Entries open to the 30th of April, it happened the 10th if I remember correctly.  The 7th earliest date ever.  Spring here, apparently was April 8th and 9th.  We're now on summer.  Note to future: have to close entries on the summer forecast contest on April 1st or earlier.  (Our earliest ever 90 F day was apparently late March -- 27th, iirc).

Both contests suggest that traditional weather forecast contests need some updating for changing climate.

For here, a couple of contests that came to mind, in addition to the 'traditional' guessing of the September average Arctic sea ice extent, are to guess when the atmospheric CO2 levels for Mauna Loa monthly average will pass 400 ppm, and when it will pass 150% of pre-industrial (420 ppm).  One that can be done annually, guess the first week when Arctic sea ice extent will fall below the climatological (1979-2000) minimum extent, and guess how many weeks the ice will remain below that minimum.

Other ideas?

Life isn't simple even for a coral

Heard an interesting talk yesterday about coral, and remote sensing of water temperatures and light levels as a means of tracking how they're doing.  The effort was prompted by the major coral bleaching events in the last decade.  I'm a physical, rather than biological, oceanographer, so my prior knowledge of corals is well-covered by a) coral bleaching events are bad for coral and b) coral are pretty.  A good entry point on the web for the coral monitoring efforts is NOAA Coral Reef Watch, where you can find out much more.

One of the things that is important for coral is water temperatures.  If water gets too hot, it's bad for the coral.  That's old news at this point.  The addition from this presentation was that coral also care about light levels.  If it's too bright, that's also bad for the coral.  They can adapt to some degree, over time, to high light levels. 

As I suggest in the title, the situation is not simply those two things.  High temperatures aren't good.  But if the lighting isn't too strong, it's survivable.  The presentation included observation of a time that had prolonged high temperatures, but the lighting wasn't very strong and the coral survived ok.  A situation that didn't have as high temperatures (though still high) but did have excessive lighting resulted in much more bleaching.

It's also the case for coral, as for people, that it is sustained extreme conditions which matter.  So, again, the concern is for heat waves, not hot individual days.

Consequences of the abnormal normal climate

In last Monday's note, I concluded that climate was only 'normal' from 1936-1977.  As with any science conclusion, this is not past discussion.  But, as we often do in science, let's take that part as true and see where it leads us.  If it leads us to something silly, then we have (more) reason to question our original conclusion.  On the other hand, if it leads us to things that make sense, it suggests that the original, tentative, conclusion is possibly better than we originally thought.

So, if climate were 'normal' only between that span, give or take, is there anything else that can be concluded?  Two things occurred to me pretty quickly; please do add more that you think of!  One is about psychology and the other is engineering.

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When was climate normal?

It's been a couple years since I took up the question of normal climate, so time for another go.  At that time, I used monthly data from Hadley, and arrived at the observation that if you're younger than 26, you've never seen a month where the global average as as cold as the 1850-2011 average, 317 consecutive months (at that point, now over 330) of warmer than 'normal' temperatures.  I'll cheat and give you some answers first, read on to see how they're established:

• Climate was 'normal' only between 1936-1977
• Every year 1987-present has been warmer than any year before that
• 1976 was warmer than any year before 1926
• 1978 (next coldest year of the recent run) was warmer than any year before 1940

Do read on to see what 'normal' winds up meaning; it's important!  One part of 'normal', as we intuitively think about it, is that you should some times above it, and sometimes below.  Having many consecutive years above 'normal' says that normal isn't really very good.  To help get quantitative about how to proceed, consider this plot of NCDC's data (warmer/colder than the 1880-2012 average -- the length of the entire record).

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Buy my son's book

My son (step son to be technical) is now published in book form. The first of, I expect, many. _The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right_, Lee Fang. It is available on Amazon. The publisher is www.thenewpress.com

In keeping with my blog, this is a research book. For Lee, that means research on money and messaging in politics. The text is good and readable. And there are plenty of citations to support the points in the text. As always, follow the citations.

Another point for the book is that in several cases, Lee is the one who did the original research. One of the more amusing parts is that some of that research, an interview with one of the Koch brothers, was played as part of an episode the Newsroom.

So yes, buy my sons book. But do so because it is well-researched and will shed much light on how US politics is now run.