Re: [Phys-l] Is Global Warming really a one-sided point of, view ora scientif...

[David Appell <appell@nasw.org>]

LaMontagne, Bob wrote:
> David - I am unfamiliar with the reporting method in the GISS data.
> Obviously the numbers are not temperature per se. If they are
> temperature changes or possibly deviations from a baseline - perhaps you
> could illuminate so I don't have to dig through references. The data
> seem at odds with what I have been finding, but I'm sure it's simply
> because I don't have a key to the GISS formatting.

Bob, the NASA GISS numbers in 
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
are the deviations of the average surface global temperature, in deg C 
multiplied by 100, from the baseline, arbitrarily chosen to be 1951-1980.

Thus Feb 2009's value of "41" means that that month's globally average 
surface temperature was 0.41 C above the 1951-1980 average. (The latter 
average is roughly 14 C, but not exactly.)

The other prominent surface temperature time series is put out by the 
Hadley Centre in the UK, and can be found at 
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt .

These two pretty much track one another (i.e. their trends are about the 
same), though for reasons I don't understand GISS is usually the higher 
of the two, and calculated to only 2 significant digits instead of 3.

Then there are the two monthly satellite measurements of the 
mid-troposphere temperatures:

UAH (Univ of Alabama at Huntsville): 
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

RSS (Remote Sensing Systems): 
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_2.txt

David

--
David Appell, freelance science journalist
e: appell@nasw.org
w: http://www.nasw.org/users/appell
m: St. Helens, OR