Antarctic Land Surface Temperature (part 8)

In this article I derive anomalies for 17 long series bases using a common 14-year climate normal reference period for 1979 – 2018 and derive a continental anomaly

Well, we’ve had a jolly good thrash through the surface temperature data and discovered how easy it is to jump to the wrong conclusions owing to methodological issues of making reliable and consistently reliable measurements down in the harshest climate on Earth. NSST v6.0 satellite data came to the rescue in part 7 and this gave me the idea of trying to merge as many base records as possible to give a quasi-definitive GHCN land record.

I started out listing all bases with at least 30 year’s worth of annual means for the period 1979 – 2018 to see what years they all had in common. It turns out that 17 bases had 14 years worth of data collection in common over this time frame and so I obtained those 14-year sample means for each base in turn to enable the derivation of temperature anomalies - a task made all the more rather enjoyable by a tin of freshly baked flapjack and a cafetière of Waitrose No.1 Colombian Reserve Ground Coffee – a blend that I find particularly helps improve modelling results. Herewith a table of summary statistics for the long series stations 1979 – 2018 so you get a feel for the sample:

When the resulting 17 anomaly series are plotted out all at once, along with the NSST v6.0 Lower Troposphere South Pole Land Mean, we get this splendidly colourful slide:

I confess that this pleased me no end! Given the technological issues facing data collection from land or from satellite I was pretty gobsmacked at the degree of correspondence between all 18 anomaly series. We may note that the NSST v6.0 South Pole Lower Troposphere Land surface anomaly takes us through to 2022, and there’s something most peculiar with readings at Neumayer around 1994 that I presume is due to missing data records. If we ignore a few dubious outliers here and there our eyeballs tell the story of a pancake batter platter rather than a rising soufflé.

We can go one better than this and that is to combine the 17 long series GHCN land station anomalies to arrive at the grand Antarctic land surface mean anomaly. Herewith the results of a bit more crunching:

This is fabulous in many ways for we have both land station and satellite data agreeing beautifully providing care is taken over the handling of the GHCN data series. The satellite series looks to be a bit more sensitive to temperature fluctuations but that is what we should expect. The final spike upward for the GHCN series looks for all the world like it is going to take-off into unprecedented warming but the satellite data reveals this is not going to be the case (unless some serious cherry-picking sets in). This should be good news for everybody but I suspect we’ll see more soup on paintings and people glued to doors.

I guess I better run that linear regression thing! Right then, so we have an utterly insignificant warming trend of +0.41°C per century (p=0.431) for the GHCN combined land station mean annual anomaly and an equally insignificant warming trend of +0.82°C per century (p=0.213) for the UAH NSST v6.0 South Pole Lower Troposphere land anomaly.

Well there you go. Clearly not enough soup is being thrown; perhaps it’s the wrong sort of soup.

Long Winded Or What?!

It’s only taken me eight articles to inform you that Antarctica, when taken as a whole, is not showing any signs of warming. I am certain we can all go find a localised station warming story if somebody paid us enough cash to obediently follow the science. Any budding eco-journalists wanting fame/dosh/glory real bad would be best advised to stick to Antarctic stations on the peninsula well outside of the Antarctic circle, and ideally stick to the bases with probes in all the wrong places that are now gearing up for tourism. Bases with less than 50% daily data capture would also improve their chances of nabbing a warming story, and do remember to ignore record-breaking temperatures prior to 1990 whenever possible!

As for me, I’m interested in what’s actually happening to the weather-cum-climate down under rather than pushing a fashionable story that favours my career. At the outset I had a hunch that Antarctica, as a continent, isn’t warming but it’s always handy to verify the facts and ensure that I’m not overdosing on sugar-coated carbs. It seems I’m not: satellite says so, as do 17 of the best bases for data collection.

I think what I fancy now is to take my newly forged anomalies and set them against sea ice extent, sea surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 to see what we may see.

Kettle On!