date: Fri May 20 12:53:40 2005 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: Latest MSU results to: "Thomas C Peterson" Tom, Thanks for the update. Heard much the same from Ben and Chris who were at the HC from Wednesday. Jim Hurrell also said that Roy deserves a lot of credit. Will make the section in Ch 3 a lot easier. Your last sentence is highly amusing ! Cheers Phil At 19:07 18/05/2005, you wrote: Hi, Phil, I just thought I'd send my CCSP trip report on to you too as it discusses the latest developments in MSU VTT matters that I'm sure you will be addressing in IPCC. Unfortunately, some of the papers being submitted on these matters are to Science so they are embargoed until published. I didn't describe Ben's work (with Tom Wigley). It looked at the relationship between sfc, lower trop and upper tropospheric temperatures in over 40 models and found out that the UAH lower trop was out of the model range. -Tom Trip Report: Chicago, May 16-17, 2005 CCSP Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere Lead Authors Meeting In this meeting we decided how to address the numerous official NRC review comments. It led to many good plans and, fortunately, only a moderate amount of additional work for me to do. But the important part, the reason Im sending out a trip report more widely, was the reports on new research by Ben Santer, Carl Mears, Qiang Fu (presented by Dian Seidel) and Steve Sherwood (briefly described by John Lanzante). As an upshot, the report will be changed to: Use the Fu data for tropospheric temperatures as we agreed that his new work is more reliable than his initial derivation and better represents what is going on in the troposphere than MSU 2 alone does. Fu applies a mathematical weighting formula to remove the stratospheric component from the MSU 2s mostly tropospheric temperatures. As the stratosphere is cooling, Fus adjustment shows the troposphere warming more than MSU 2 alone would indicate. RSS has developed a new lower tropospheric temperature data set that shows considerable warming. In the process of comparing their work with UAHs effort, they found what appears to be an error in the UAH lower tropospheric temperatures. John Christy and Roy Spencer, after listening to Carl and digesting his comments, agreed that it is quite likely that an error is in their lower tropospheric temperature formula. John estimates that in the tropics this will change the trend from (if I recall correctly) 0.0 K/decade to 0.1 K/decade. This is a giant step forward in reconciling vertical temperature trends. And I must say that the way they reacted to this news and the plans they drew up to address it reflects very well on their character and scientific integrity. Also, John Lanzante talked about some recent work by Steve Sherwood that uncovers what may be an inherent cold bias in daytime radiosondes. The meeting ended with Roger Pielke, Sr. arguing with Tom Karl about the goal for VTT synthesis report. Regards, Tom Peterson -- Thomas C. Peterson, Ph.D. Climate Analysis Branch National Climatic Data Center 151 Patton Avenue Asheville, NC 28801 Voice: +1-828-271-4287 Fax: +1-828-271-4328 -- Thomas C. Peterson, Ph.D. Climate Analysis Branch National Climatic Data Center 151 Patton Avenue Asheville, NC 28801 Voice: +1-828-271-4287 Fax: +1-828-271-4328 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------