BornFromTheVoid

Although much more exposed, Malin Head has a December high of 16.8C. That can't be much more than 25 miles from you? I'd guess your record high would be closer to 15C.

They're the upper level height anomalies, which can be useful for picking out the general pattern, such as the location of troughs and ridges with the jet stream. In that December chart, the suggestion would be for the jet stream to ridge towards Greenland, then turn south just to our west, leaving a large trough over western Europe. This would encourage more northerly winds across the British Isles, with a tendency for high pressure to form to our west and low pressure to the east. With the trough/low pressure nearby, we'd likely get a good amount of precip, despite the increase in northerly winds. Overall, December is looking average/cool and wet. Whether or not it gets cold enough for that extra precip to turn to snow is something we won't know until it's just before it happens. But I think there is good potential. I'll be posting a full winter forecast next month, and things should be a little more certain then.

Is the the record high for your personal station, or an official station nearby?

The teleconnection based composites I've been using this year for forecasting have worked well, they suggest a return to more settled condition for November Here's what things what's being suggested for December at this stage

With a minimum of 8.4C and maximum of around 15.5C, we should remain on 12.9C on tomorrows update. After that, the 06z GFS op run has the CET around 13.0C to the 19th (15.1) 13.1C to the 20th (14.6) 13.2C to the 21st (14.7) 13.3C to the 22nd (15.5) 13.3C to the 23rd (14.2) 13.3C to the 24th (13.7) 13.4C to the 25th (15.6) I'd say a 50/50 chance of ending up with a top 10 warmest CET before corrections

I thought I'd give an update on the Autumn forecast now that the data is available again. I think September turned out quite well, and October is very much going to plan. I'm going to change November though as the teleconnection trends suggest more of a high pressure influence, with a strong north Atlantic ridge and the low heights to our north (forecast back in August) weakening and retreating. So the general pattern will change from: this to this With the trough across south west Europe and the ridge leaning over the British Isles, this set up may increase the chances of an easterly flow across southern England, and with that, average or slightly below average temperatures there. Further west and north suggests generally average, perhaps slightly above. Precip is likely to be slightly below average to the west and average or slightly above in the east. I've begun looking ahead to Winter also, and there seems to be a good signal for a mid Atlantic ridge and low heights to our east. Something of a reversal of the general pattern since June which has featured strong heights over Scandinavia. I'll give a full Winter forecast next month though.

With the US Government shutdown finishing up, more data is becoming available. It looks like the +ve upper ocean heat anomalies in the tropical Pacific have switched rapidly to -ve anomalies as a cold upwelling kelvin wave begins to exert an influence . This should help in keep things neutral through the winter, rather than the borderline El Nino being forecast by the CFS.

A sea ice extent increase of 170,836km2 on IJIS for the 17th, which is a record large extent increase for that date based on the 2002 to 2012 data. Daily extent change

A sea ice extent increase of 170,836km2 on IJIS for the 17th, which is a record large extent increase for that date based on the 2002 to 2012 data. More of that and we might be justified in calling this a great refreeze! Daily sea ice extent change for October

Going by the 12z GFS op run, the CET will be around 13.0C to the 17th (12.5) 12.9C to the 18th (12.2) 13.0C to the 19th (14.8] 13.1C to the 20th (14.3) 13.1C to the 21st (13.2) 13.2C to the 22nd (15.9) 13.2C to the 23rd (11.9) 13.1C to the 24th (12.2) I'd put the likely range after corrections a touch higher than SomeLikeItHot, about 11.5 to 13.3C

Not quite yet, only just reaching Borg territory!

Enjoy SI. No booze for me tonight. I've Captain Janeway and the Voyager crew to keep me entertained though

It's from realclimate, not my own. Sorry you found it patronising. So despite that thousands scientists think the argo floats are fine, that the oceans are accumulating heat and that the data is good, you believe the argo floats are useless, the missing heat simply cannot be found, and all the scientific evidence that goes against your idea is just a bloggers theory? That doesn't seem right, surely? Hi MIA, The argo floats only measure down to 2,000m, the deeper ocean data comes from other sources and the trends aren't quite as robust. There are over 3,000 argo floats out there, so the small error (argo website says +/-0.005C here) for an individual float gets largely cancelled out when you average the millions of readings. Over time, you can also build up the trends too, because to even cause a fraction of a degree of warming in the water down to 2,000m requires huge amounts of energy. World ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level change (0–2000 m), 1955–2010 Another way of looking at ocean heat accumulation is by examining the sea level record. Most of the sea level rise is due to thermal expansion as the oceans accumulate heat. Sea level rise has been accelerating over the over the last century, which implies and growing accumulation of heat also.

Depends on what average we're comparing to. If October finishes at 12.5C (joint 10th warmest on record), we'd still need November and December to average 3.3C above the 81-10 average just to get above the 81-10 annual average of 10.0C. So we'll definitely be below that! For the 61-90 annual average (9.5C), 0.3C above for November and December will take us to 9.6C for the year, while 0.3C below will take us to 9.4C for the year. With that in mind, an annual value within 0.1C of the 61-90 average seems most likely at this stage, so still a cool one by recent standards.

The 5 day average increase has just dropped below the 2002-2012 average also. A good increase so far, but nothing exceptional.

So you don't think it's capable of doing the job it was intended to do? Yet the many studies and thousands of scientists think it works just fine. The 0.1C uncertainty (have you a link for that) doesn't apply when averaged out over 3,000 floats, it just doesn't work like that. How to deny data Ideologically motivated “climate skeptics†know that these data contradict their claims, and respond … by rejecting the measurements. Millions of stations are dismissed as “negligible†– the work of generations of oceanographers vanish with a journalist’s stroke of a pen because what should not exist, cannot be. “Climate skeptics’†web sites even claim that the measurement uncertainty in the average of 3000 Argo probes is the same as that from each individual one. Thus not only are the results of climate research called into question, but even the elementary rules of uncertainty calculus that every science student learns in their first semester. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/ The graph comes from the realclimate page which we both linked to in the past. It's also similar to how ENSO operates. The ocean is known to be thermally stratified, with a warm layer, some hundreds of meters thick, lying on top of a cold deep ocean (a). In the real world the transition is more gradual, not a sharp boundary as in the simplified diagram. Panel b shows what happens if the wind is turned on. The surface layer (above the dashed depth level) becomes on average colder (less red), the deep layer warmer. The average temperature changes are not the same (because of the different thickness of the layers), but the changes in heat content are – what the upper layer loses in heat, the lower gains. The First Law of Thermodynamics sends greetings. Incidentally, that is the well-known mechanism of El Niño: (a) corresponds roughly to El Niño (with a warm eastern tropical Pacific) while b is like La Niña (cold eastern tropical Pacific). The winds are the trade winds. The figure greatly exaggerates the slope of the layer interface, because in reality the ocean is paper thin. Even a difference of 1000 m across the width of the Pacific (let’s say 10,000 km) leads to a slope of only 1:10,000 – which no one could distinguish from a perfectly horizontal line without massive vertical exaggeration. Now if during the transition from (a) to b the upper layer is heated by the greenhouse effect, its temperature could remain constant while that of the lower one warmed. Info on ENSO, to show how it's similar http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/history/ln-2010-12/three-phases-of-ENSO.shtml

But they have? Do you think the data is false then?

Could you explain a bit further? How are they not any good for that?

We have instruments on the argo floats to help find that particular unfindable. Is it that you think they aren't of any use?

With a min today of 6.2C, and maxima likely to reach the high 13s, a drop to 13.0C is likely tomorrow. After that, the 06z GFS op run has the CET at 13.0C to the 17th (13.1) 13.0C to the 18th (13.1) 13.1C to the 19th (15.5) 13.2C to the 20th (14.9) 13.3C to the 21st (14.2) 13.4C to the 22nd (16.0) 13.4C to the 23rd (14.2) The ensembles show a slight cool down after that, so a finish in the mid 12s before corrections seems likely at this stage imo. Daily mean CET values so far. Still just the 1 day below average.

24.5mm of rain overnight, a little minor flooding about but nothing too bad.

Sea ice extent has dropped below 2008 now on IJIS, but we're still 1.7 million km2 above 2012. Over the next 7 days, 2012 grew by over 200k/day, so it will be tough to stay far ahead.

As for the IPCC's take on the elusive missing heat, and the supposed uncertainty about the oceans... It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (above 700 m) has warmed from 1971 to 2010, and likely that it has warmed from the 1870s to 1971 (Figure TS.1). There is less certainty in changes prior to 1971 because of relatively sparse sampling in earlier time periods. Instrumental biases in historical upper ocean temperature measurements have been identified and mitigated since AR4, reducing artificial decadal variation in temperature and upper ocean heat content, most prominent during the 1970s and 1980s. {3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3, 3.5.3} It is likely that the ocean warmed between 700 and 2000 m from 1957 to 2010, based on five-year averages. It is likely that the ocean warmed from 3000 m to the bottom from 1992 to 2005, when sufficient observations became available for a global assessment. No significant trends in global average temperature were observed between 2000 and 3000 m depth for either overlapping time period. The largest changes in deep ocean temperature have been observed close to the sources of deep and bottom water in the northern North Atlantic and especially in the Southern Ocean with anomaly amplitudes lessening along the routes through which these waters spread.... ...The rate of ocean warming in some of the 0–700 m estimates was lower from 2003 to 2010 than in the previous decade (Figure TS.1); however, warming in the subsurface layer between 700 and 2000 m likely continued unabated during this period. Then from the climate scientists over at realclimate with the latest data http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/ People think the slow down in warming over the last 15 years is important, yet they said nothing when the warming was faster than expected in the 15 years to 2006.

Most opinions here are going off the summary report for policy makers (or were formed well before its release...). I'm still gradually getting through the full report myself!

Perhaps a clue lies in your use of the word "apparently"!