Show HN: 41 years sea surface temperature anomalies
ssta.willhelps.org95 points by willmeyers 3 hours ago
95 points by willmeyers 3 hours ago
I jumped to my birth date and found it's much colder than today.
Along these lines: I really like the 'Climate Reanalyzer' project by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine [1]. There's so much good stuff there if you click around a bit; you can create custom plots for the surface temperature of different regions for example[2], which quickly shows you that Western Europe has actually warmed a lot more than the global average, and we're closer to +2°C already in that region.
[1]: https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2 [2]: https://climatereanalyzer.org/research_tools/monthly_tseries...
In general I think the sea warms slower than land, so you'd expect land everywhere to warm faster than the global average.
> https://climatereanalyzer.org/research_tools/monthly_tseries...
It can also be clearly seen that the 2020 limit on the sulphur content in the fuel oil used on board ships [1] had quite the negative effects when it comes to surface sea temperatures, but I haven't that many climate (and not only) scientists taking responsibility of that act (even though related warnings had been made, I remember reading one just before the measure went in effect).
[1] https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/hottopics/pages/sulphur-2...
https://climatereanalyzer.org/research_tools/monthly_tseries...
What changed in 1979?
I don't know but it cooencideds with the start of satellite monitoring.
Half a century of satellite remote sensing of sea-surface temperature (2019) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003442571...
I haven't looked but there will probably be references somewhere explaining the dat sources.
Very nice. I had a quick look at the data source and I wonder if the more recent data is more sensitive/better quality since 2020? There's a clear trend of the oceans getting warmer but recently it seems like there's more and more heat retained.
"CRW's first-generation global monitoring products were operational at NOAA until April 30, 2020, when they were officially retired, and succeeded by CRW's next-generation operational daily monitoring products."
This looks cool but it's missing a clear legend on the default view to help the viewer understand what they're looking at.
It's not immediately clear if it's just absolute temperatures or relative temperatures or what. You have to look at the color scale to notice that it's from -5 to +5. But relative to what? Over what timescale? Is it a moving average?
I guess I could dig into the data link to figure it out but most people aren't going to do that.
Very emotionally powerful to watch something play out, even if I'm already consciously aware of it. Would love a speed where I can watch the whole dataset play out in about 1 minute.
What are we seeing play out? It just looks like some areas are warm and some are cold?
I can't believe there are still so-called intellegent people coming out with this crap.
1985 sure. Maybe 2000
But now?
I'll give you 2 reasons.
a) published data tends to see corrections from sensors and methodology which take several years to work out the fine details. (This isn't an attack this is science) Which means always take yesterday's numbers with more scepticism than 2yr ago. (This is making no statement of any data you're looking at or any trend you claim to see)
b) a field dominated by modelling needs data to back it up, otherwise the conversation would be, "Why is the LHC failing to find strong theory which is absolutely there" vs "I wonder if the modelling is correct based on..." This is a certain level of maturity that certain sciences are only starting to reach after playing in the ballpark of "let's go model my idea and make a press release which will just so happen to help my funding".
Yes sea level temps are rising, absolute numbers are still difficult to come by though and last UN summary doc I read still put things at 5C global average over a century. (Yes still horrifically catastrophic for the wrong people, but I'm also not in charge)
I doubt it has anything to do with data-quality, I'd be surprised if even 10% of climate denialists have studied the numbers. Remember >20% of US citizens are still creationists, a lot of people aren't emotionally ready to believe scary things, and maybe they never will be.
And believing the world ending as in "the day after tomorrow" was the "still mask wearing" of the 2010s. Fear.
No, most of these people consciously or otherwise, just want/need to be contrarians. Look at flat Earthers. There is no way any sane person would say the earth is flat.
This is all terrifying data.
Made worse that there's a significant number of people who refuse to believe it, and for all the wrong reasons at that.
Global warming doesn't exist.
If it does, it's not that bad.
If it gets bad, it's not a big deal in reality.
If it becomes a big deal, it was not humanity's fault.
And if it was humanity's fault, at least the planet was saved from a global dictatorship run by scientists.
I made something like this (in the VERY broadest sense) 10 years ago - inspired me to revisit and update both visuals and data (a lot has changed in that time).
https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/global_temperature_cha...
and
https://callumprentice.github.io/apps/climate_temperature_ch...
For those interested in this type of climate data visualization apps, I have worked on this one in the past, which is actively maintained with a lot of love, and very nice:
Awesome! Maybe there could be even larger speeds and timesteps.
This was my first thought. I'd like to see it running at like 10x or more to better grasp the change over time
Serious question. Why are there static (in absolute positional terms) anomalies in the data that seem to be recording at the other end of the spectrum to their immediate surrounding waters?
Also nice to see several shipping lanes crop up when watching it.
We're frogs, slowly boiling ourselves...
More of this!