date: Fri May 20 12:51:12 2005 from: Phil Jones subject: News travels fast as you might have guessed to: John Christy John, Heard back from several sources about the Chicago meeting. Similar sentiments from Jim Hurrell. Email from Tom Peterson below and Jim's bit pasted in below. It seems that not all was solved - re his last sentence about Pielke ! It seems that you can both come out with credit if these expressions of praise can get reported to the community. I'll make the same sorts of comments as and when I get the chance, but won't be shouting from the rooftops or going out of my way to say anything. Not sure exactly what else to say, but for the chapter in AR4 can you keep me informed about what you plan to do wrt publication etc. For my part, I'll try and keep Kevin under control ! Cheers Phil From JH Sitting in the CCSP meeting, but I wanted to let you know of what I believe is really remarkable progress. And I give much credit to Roy Spencer. He has admitted UAH Tlt has a negative bias, accepting the RSS argument the diurnal cycle correction is of the wrong sign. He also has stated the Fu technique is "acceptable" especially given the notion of 1000-200 T as opposed to 850-300. The revised CCSP report will have much more on Fu, and also a new UAH Tlt product. The latter also means IPCC FAR draft will need to be revised to include the new product. Roy thinks it can be done in about 2 weeks. Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 14:07:44 -0400 From: "Thomas C Peterson" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en To: Phil Jones Subject: Latest MSU results X-Spam-Score: 0.5 X-Spam-Level: / 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------