Further Confirmation Of Klotzbach Et al 2009

In

Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2009: An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841.

Klotzbach, P.J., R.A. Pielke Sr., R.A. Pielke Jr., J.R. Christy, and R.T. McNider, 2010: Correction to: “An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere. J. Geophys. Res., 114, D21102, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841″, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D1, doi:10.1029/2009JD013655

we concluded

“This paper investigates surface and satellite temperature trends over the period from 1979 to 2008. Surface temperature data sets from the National Climate Data Center and the Hadley Center show larger trends over the 30-year period than the lower-tropospheric data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems data sets. The differences between trends observed in the surface and lower-tropospheric satellite data sets are statistically significant in most comparisons, with much greater differences over land areas than over ocean areas. These findings strongly suggest that there remain important inconsistencies between surface and satellite records.”

In our paper,

Christy, J.R., Herman, B., Pielke, R., Sr., Klotzbach, P., McNider, R.T., Hnilo, J.J., Spencer, R.W., Chase, T., and Douglass, D. What Do Observational Datasets Say about Modeled Tropospheric Temperature Trends since 1979?. Remote Sens. 2010, 2, 2148-2169.

in which this issue was explored further we reported that

“However, at this time, the evidence implies that in the satellite era, the relationship between the surface and tropospheric trends in the tropics is significantly different between observations and models. This result is consistent with that of [7,8] who compared global surface and tropospheric trends between observations and models and found significant differences over composites of both land and ocean.”  [references 7 and 8 are Klotzbach et al 2009 and 2010].

An ideal candidate for explaining this divergence between the lower tropospheric and surface temperature records is a systematic warm bias in the surface temperature trend data. As presented yesterday (see), even the research groups who are using this data to admit to a lack of information on the siting history of these surface (GHCN) observing locations.