23 January 2014
2013 4th Warmest Year On Global Record
Posted by Dan Satterfield
This is why the global temperature is not taken in your backyard in January. When you average the entire globe for an entire year, a much different picture emerges. NASA Aqua satellite image of a cold and snowy Mid-Atlantic Wednesday morning.
NOAA calculated that 2013 was the 4th warmest year on record globally, and NASA using a slightly different method ranked it 7th. In both cases, the ten warmest years on record have all been since 1998.
Graphic ctsy. Climate Central
With the bitter cold in the Eastern U.S. today, this is a perfect time to illustrate the difference between climate and weather. Climate change doesn’t mean it never gets cold and snowy. It does mean that it happens less often, and is not as severe. When you look at longer periods (that average out the natural cycles of weather and climate) the rise in temperature from the increasing greenhouse gases is very apparent.
NASA has some graphics showing where the warming was most noticeable.
The high latitudes continue to show the greatest temperature anomalies. From NASA.
NASA Image.
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.
I’m interested to know how the instrumentation has changed since the records began. I can’t imagine that we have used consisted methods/technologies to observe weather/climate patterns since the first recordings. Though I think there is little argument against the warming of the planet (for thousands of years), especially when you look at how far the glaciers have receded.
It has indeed and adjusting the data for those changes is the hard work in compiling a global temperature record. This is why the fact that at least 4 independent reconstructions have been done and all agree closely shows that it can be done. The Devil really is in the details. You can the compare the reconstructions to proxy data and when you get close agreement, your confidence that your data is robust increases even more.
Very Good information to post..We do need to understand the difference between climate and weather.. Thank You.