Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1168288278
1168288278
edu>
To: Susan Solomon <Susan.Solomon@noaa.gov>
Subject: Re: Science presentation for Paris
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:31:18 -0700
Cc: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>, mmanning@al.noaa.gov
Phil,
A suggested merge of Phil's text below with the SPM language we have implies
replacing the
sentence on page SPM-5, 6-7 with the following proposal:
Sites affected by the urban heat island effect are identified and excluded from
these
averages, so that remaining uncertainties due to this effect are negligible
(less than
0.0005�C per decade).
This would address several comments asking us to explain what is done with UHI.
OK?
Susan
Kevin, Susan,
On the UHI (slide 9) we should probably change the middle bullet. The first
and third are not in dispute. May be better to spell out SSTs though, or say
marine air temperatures. SSTs are used as anomalies though to approximate
MATs.
Middle bullet currently says
o Major influences are identified and excluded from the records used to create
the
continental and global values
Perhaps we should refer directly to David Parker's paper on UHIs, where he
couldn't detect any difference in trends (averaged for 200+ cities) in
temperatures
on calm nights (when you'd expect the biggest effect) compared to
windy nights (when you'd expect the least).
There are two aspects to the major influences.
1. Some sites are removed. This isn't many as a % of the total (about 1%).
2. We include in Brohan et al (2006) an estimate of urbanization in
the calculation of the errors. This is 0.0055 deg C/decade since 1900.
It is a one-sided 'error'. If you look very closely the error range in
this paper and in some of the Ch 3 figures is slightly one-sided.
This figure comes from Jones et al. (2001) , which came from
Jones et al. (1990).
Difficulty with all UHI work is that there are countless papers looking
at individual sites - which generally use a site in the city centre. This
site is rarely one used in the dataset - generally an airport is instead.
It is made worse by then looking at individual days and not monthly
averages. Only Jones et al. (1990), Parker (2005,2006) and Peterson
have looked at large scales.
So
Affected site are identified and excluded from the records used to create the
continental and global values (as not all sites are tested, part of the error
range
assumes an urban component of 0.0055 deg C/decade)
Cheers
Phil
At 22:47 07/01/2007, Kevin E Trenberth wrote:
Susan
Many thanks for the feedback. My comments and explanations follow. I'll
expressly ask Phil to respond to us on the UHI issues and what we should
say succinctly. I am keen to get further feedback on what to exclude. I
had decided to exclude the full slide on all the regional precip trends
becuase it is too detailed and would take too long to go through and so
the zonal mean latitude-time series captures a lot of the changes.
Personally I would like to have both but the issue will be time and
simplicity of message, and hence my decision to drop the series:
implicitly those are included of course because they are in the chapter.
> Kevin,
> Many thanks for the preview. I agree that the
> presentation has improved, thanks for that. I
> would like to offer the following suggestions:
>
> 1) Ramaswamy will cover radiative forcings, and
> will do so comprehensively including aerosols,
> ozone, etc. Calling out CO2 and N2O on your
> title slide will likely raise queries about why
> you cite those and not others. I suggest that
> you drop that bullet from your first slide.
Yes slide 1 at present is more comprehensive and perhaps more appropriate
for you to use. In general with these slides that context will be
desirable but perhaps not for Paris.
>
> 2) The chapter relates changes in DTR to clouds,
> and possibly aerosols and land use. The chapter
> doesn't explicitly say DTR changes are linked to
> dimming. While I personally would agree this is
--
****************
Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: [5]trenbert@ucar.edu
Climate Analysis Section, [6]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
NCAR
P. O. Box 3000, (303) 497 1318
Boulder, CO 80307 (303) 497 1333 (fax)
Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305
References
1. mailto:trenbert@ucar.edu
2. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
3. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
4. mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk
5. mailto:trenbert@ucar.edu
6. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html