Dr. William Gray is a vocal opponent of the anthropogenic global warming theory and recently took issue with Dr. James Hansen of NASA's GISS.
Last week we wrote about an extremely strongly worded letter from William Gray to the American Meteorological Society (AMS) objecting to their awarding James Hansen their highest award. This letter pits two of the giants in meteorology and climatology against each other in the debate over manmade climate change and global warming.
The letter itself (available here on icecap.us) takes issue with some of the decision making processes within the AMS which is not particularly relevant to us. What is revealing however is Dr. Gray’s arguments against the global warming theory and Dr. Hansen’s research. Today we will take a look at the discussion in the letter about Dr. Hansen himself and his credentials.
For those that aren’t familiar with him, Dr. Gray is a Professor Emeritus of Colorado State University who is best known for his hurricane forecasts. He is a highly trained and respected meteorologist with decades of practical experience in monitoring the earth and its climate.
In the letter he points out that Dr. Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), is not a trained climatologist nor a meteorologist. His formal background is actually in astronomy which does make one wonder how he has become one of the primary mouthpieces for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or manmade climate change.
Extremely high clouds, known as deep convective clouds, are typically associated with severe storms and rainfall. In this AIRS image of Hurricane Katrina, taken August 28, 2005, the day before Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, the eye of the storm was surrounded by a "super cluster" of 528 deep convective clouds (depicted in dark blue). The temperatures of the tops of such clouds are colder than 210 degrees Kelvin (-82 degrees Fahrenheit). Image credit: NASA/JPL
Scientists are NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA recently released the results of a study that determined that global warming is causing an increase in high clouds and a corresponding increase in severe storms and rainfall. This is not unlike previous warnings issued by some scientists, in particular those warnings of an increase in hurricane intensity and frequency in the Atlantic. Thus far those previous warnings have not bore out. Will this one?
PASADENA, Calif. — The frequency of extremely high clouds in Earth’s tropics — the type associated with severe storms and rainfall — is increasing as a result of global warming, according to a study by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
In a presentation today to the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, JPL Senior Research Scientist Hartmut Aumann outlined the results of a study based on five years of data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft. The AIRS data were used to observe certain types of tropical clouds linked with severe storms, torrential rain and hail. The instrument typically detects about 6,000 of these clouds each day. Aumann and his team found a strong correlation between the frequency of these clouds and seasonal variations in the average sea surface temperature of the tropical oceans.
For every degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average ocean surface temperature, the team observed a 45-percent increase in the frequency of the very high clouds. At the present rate of global warming of 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, the team inferred the frequency of these storms can be expected to increase by six percent per decade.
Climate modelers have long speculated that the frequency and intensity of severe storms may or may not increase with global warming. Aumann said results of the study will help improve their models.
“Clouds and rain have been the weakest link in climate prediction,” said Aumann. “The interaction between the daytime warming of the sea surface under clear-sky conditions and increases in the formation of low clouds, high clouds and, ultimately, rain is very complicated. The high clouds in our observations—typically at altitudes of 20 kilometers (12 miles) and higher—present the greatest difficulties for current climate models, which aren’t able to resolve cloud structures smaller than about 250 kilometers (155 miles) in size.”
Aumann said the results of his study, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, are consistent with another NASA-funded study by Frank Wentz and colleagues in 2005. That study found an increase in the global rain rate of 1.5 percent per decade over 18 years, a value that is about five times higher than the value estimated by climate models that were used in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
JPL manages the AIRS project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information on AIRS, visit http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/ .
These extraordinary satellites will provide everything from lightning mapping and improved hurricane forecasting to monitoring of sea surface temperatures. The press release from NOAA provides some of the details on this exciting endeavor:
NOAA, NASA Select Contractor to Build GOES-R Series Spacecraft
New Geostationary Satellites Will Give Forecasters Better Information
December 2, 2008
NOAA and NASA officials announced today Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, of Denver, Colo., has been selected to build two spacecraft for NOAA’s next generation geostationary satellite series, GOES-R. There are two options, each providing for one additional satellite. Scheduled for launch in 2015, the new satellites will provide more data in greater detail which is essential to creating accurate weather forecasts.
The contract has a total value of $1.09 billion for the two satellites. A separate contract to build the GOES-R ground system, which receives, processes and distributes data transmitted from the spacecraft, will be announced later in 2009, officials said.
“GOES-R, with its highly advanced instruments and sensors, will provide about 50 times more weather and climate data than is available with NOAA’s current fleet of geostationary satellites,” said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for NOAA Satellite and Information Service. “The American public will see real life-saving benefits from this satellite system with more timely forecasts and warnings for severe weather.”
GOES-R will improve the monitoring of sea surface temperatures and also provide more data to hurricane forecasters by giving sharper images of storms every 30 seconds, instead of every 7.5 minutes as the current satellites provide.
Additionally, GOES-R will carry a first-of-its-kind instrument called the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, which will quickly locate all lightning flashes occurring anytime, anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The lightning mapper will aid in predicting tornadoes, which often spawn from lightning-packed thunderstorms.
Other key benefits expected from GOES-R include: greater monitoring of surface temperatures in metropolitan areas to improve warnings for heat stress, and better data to bolster the forecasts for unhealthy air quality days. GOES-R will feature advanced solar monitoring instruments for space weather forecasts and warnings of solar storms. These storms endanger billions of dollars worth of commercial and government assets in space and cause power surges for the satellite-based electronics and communications industry.
George Morrow, director of Flight Project for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. said, “NASA Goddard is excited to be NOAA’s partner in this next generation GOES development and we look forward to delivering an outstanding observatory for their operational use.”
NOAA funds, manages and will operate the GOES-R program. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center oversees the acquisition of the GOES-R spacecraft and instruments for NOAA.
Anyone who has followed the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan has heard about the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). These are essentially remote control airplanes capable of performing a number of tasks from surveillance to actually carrying weapons.
NASA and NOAA have over the last year been experimenting with a small UAV from Aerosonde, an Australian manufacturer. NOAA currently uses manned hurricane hunter aircraft (WP-3D Orion and Gulfstream IVs) to take measurements from inside and immediately surrounding hurricanes. This data is essential to not only predicting hurricane paths and guaging the storms’ strength but also to learning more about them.
These new UAVs offer many advantages over the traditional, manned hurricane hunter aircraft. For one, they can fly at much lower altitudes into the storms without endangering human lives. Further, they can be called into service on much shorter notice than a manned crew and remain on station around a storm for longer periods of time. In November of 2007 NOAA sent an Aerosonde UAV into Hurricane Noel and the unit was airborne for over 17 hours and collected more than seven hours worth of data.
The technology has many applications within NOAA’s mission of monitoring our globe. In addition to hurricane hunting, UAVs can be used to monitor ice flows, wildfires, severe weather, animal life and much more. The program is really just getting started and funding is minimal in comparison to the military equivalent but the applications are very promising. Maybe a tornado hunter is next!
Here’s a video from Aerosonde discussing the potential applications.
In this GISS image, incorrect data shows much of Russia under a heat wave in October.
Scientists at NOAA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced last week that October global temperatures were the hottest on record. Naturally this caused quite a bit of hubbub and had the global warming alarmists in quite an uproar. As we wrote about previously, the year has been cooler than normal in North America but this new data showed that Asia experienced record high temperatures last month. Word of the “hottest October on record” quickly spread of course.
In a bit of an embarrassment for NOAA and GISS, their claims were short lived when two blogger meteorologists went through the data and found a number of anomalies. They discovered at least 10 Russian stations that oddly enough reported the exact same temperatures as September. Well, since October is almost always cooler than September in the northern hemisphere they did some checking and found that GISS had used the incorrect data and it influenced the calculations significantly.
Al Gore's infamous "hockey stick" graph that was used in An Inconvenient Truth was quickly debunked as were a number of other "facts" used in the movie.
When GISS and NOAA recalculated October’s temperatures it dropped the month to the 2nd warmest on record and that is significant. However, these types of problems serve only to fuel doubt in the minds of climate change skeptics and highlight the need for more careful analysis and a level-headed approach to studying the subject – from both sides of the discussion.
