date: Thu May 26 15:35:35 2005 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: revising section on tropospheric temps for IPCC Chapter 9 to: Kevin Trenberth Kevin, See if Bill can split the differences between day and night launches. If he has data that splits the 00 from 12Z, it's not too difficult to separate the two as the tropics mostly have near 12 hr days and nights. There are probably only a few sites that do both. Might be that only Singapore, Darwin, Tahiti and a Caribbean one have both. Maybe more in Australian region. Cheers Phil At 15:16 26/05/2005, you wrote: Hi all I am happy with 3.4.1 and it accommodates the latest developments, almost. I am attaching the text. However, yesterday we got a new paper from Susan Solomon and David Thmopson (Thompson and Soilomon 2005) J Clim "Recent stratospheric climate trends: global structure and tropospheric linkages" I read it last night and I think a lot of it is wrong. It is based on radiosondes and NCEP reanalyses. Yesterday I played golf with Bill Randel who tells me he had done what I have been advocating for some time now: taking the MSU record and differencing it with sonde records at those locations. He says it is very revealing and shows spurious unphysical features in ALL tropical sondings. He has completed the work and is writing it up. But I have not seen any of the results. Please don't pass this on. Fu is also working on the sonde MSU comparison. Kevin Phil Jones wrote: Neville, Attached for your perusal only is the Carl/Wentz pdf of the latest RSS work. Roy Spencer admitted to a mistake in the UAH 2LT work at the Chicago CCSP meeting May 16-17. Relates to a sign on the correction for diurnal cycle changes. John Christy has told me that he will send me their revised version. His email of May 20 didn't make much sense - he's clearly wriggling, saying the mistake isn't that important. We will likely know more in a few weeks, so this issue isn't likely to be resolved in time for the FOD. With this problem and the earlier changes, UAH are losing credibility. I've not yet looked at our section in 3.4.1 but for the moment we will be going with the attachment and also with recent Fu papers. Upshot of all this is that the likely outlier now is the sondes. John Lanzante and the HC (probably) are working on looking at tropical sondes and separating them into day and night launches if at all possible. Ben Santer is going to keep me informed of how CCSP progresses. David should hear as well at some stage during June. They are on a tight timeframe now. There is an 8 week open review period for CCSP, but not till after Aug 12. This open review requires open access to all pdfs in press (no passwords or any control), so there may be issues wrt Science submissions (the attached and a paper by Ben et al.). David and/or Kevin may elaborate, but it seems watch this space is the only advice I can give. I could send our latest draft, but I'm not sure if I have all the figures for the relevant section. Cheers Phil At 08:03 26/05/2005, Neville Nicholls wrote: Hi David. I am just starting the process of revising what Chapter 9 will be saying about free atmosphere temperature. My intention is to start with what Chapter 3 will be saying in the FOD. I wouldnt want to stray too far from what you are going to say. Could you let me know if you think there will be substantial changes from your ZOD, and if so, let me know the broad direction of such changes? It would be great to have access to your early re-drafts even before I start revising Chapter 9, so we can ensure compatability. I am also interested in some recent work by RSS (I think) apparently finding more problems with the UAH data. I dont have details of this, so I may be completely wrong - are you aware of such work? Cheers, Neville Neville Nicholls Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre 9th Floor, 700 Collins Street Docklands,Melbourne, AUSTRALIA PO Box 1289K, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA 3001 Phone: +61 (0)3 9669 4407 Fax: +61 (0)3 9669 4660 Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- **************** Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: trenbert@ucar.edu Climate Analysis Section, NCAR [1]www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/ P. O. Box 3000, (303) 497 1318 Boulder, CO 80307 (303) 497 1333 (fax) Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80303 Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------