Cowtan and Way Make it to Climate Explorer

Since Lewis and Curry 2014 was published the fans of Cowtan and Way's satellite kriging revision to the Hadley Centers HADCRUT4.something is constantly mentioned as a L&C spoiler.  C&W does run warmer than the older HADCRUT4.somethingless.  I haven't used much of the C&W new and improved version since I like to check regions using the Climate Explorer mask capability.  Well, now C&W are on Climate Explorer.

This is one of my first looks at any data set, tropics, extended slightly to 30S-30N and the extratropics, 30 to 90.  As expected, the majority of the world is consistently warming as would be expected recovering from a period former known as the Little Ice Age and the Northern Extratropical region is warming more because that would be where ice during the period formerly known as the Little Ice Age would have been stored.  Ice/snow is a major feedback and is influences by temperature and dirtiness, albedo.  Industry, wild fires, wind blown erosion, volcanic ash, earthquakes and just about anything that disturbs the pristine whiteness of glaciers and snow fields would impact the stability of the glaciers and snow fields.  So in my opinion, the Rest of the World is a better baseline for "global" warming than the Northern Extratropical region if you want to try and attribute things to CO2, Volcanic sulfates or clouds.  Not that the Northern Extratropical aren't important, but you can see they are noisy as all hell.

Climate Explorer also allows you to use nation masks like the one above for New Zealand.  New Zealand skeptics are quite a bit miffed by the amount of adjustments used by national weather services to create the scary warming trend.  New Zealand is a large island and as such would have a maritime climate.  Since Cowtan and Way krige using satellite data which is heavily influenced by ocean temperatures, the C&W version of New Zealand looks a lot more like the skeptical Kiwis would expect.  I use three tiered 27 month smoothing and left the first two stages in so you can see how smoothing impacts the Warmest Year Evah.  The default baseline for Climate Explorer is 1980 to 2010, the satellite era which would also have an impact on Warmest Year Evah, but not the general trend.  This is a reminder that "Global" temperature reconstructions really should not be used for "local" temperature references since the interpolation, standard or krige, smears area temperatures, good for "Global" stuff but not so good for local forecasting.

 So there is a brief intro to HADCRUT4.something with new and improved smearing.  Not meaning to be a cut down of C&W, it serves a purpose, but increase smearing reduces the relationship between temperature and the energy it is supposed to represent.  Now if C&W had the "skepticism" required they would compile a "Global" energy anomaly reconstruction which would illustrate just how much error using temperature anomaly for temperature ranges from -80C to 50C can produce.  Then they would focus on the "other" forces that effect climate rather than just the CO2 done it all meme.  Since Way is Inuit, I am sure he knows about yellow snow and the variety of other than pristine white varieties.  It would be nice to see him focusing on the whole picture instead of trying to be a good CO2 band member.

Dirty Greenland Glacier courtesy NOAA