[Vision2020] National Center for Atmospheric Research: Record Daily High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows In US

[Ted Moffett]

Did anyone actually access and read the published (or accepted for
publishing) research article on this issue?  I did not, because it required
a log-in and I suspect a membership fee... But access to the article is at
the website below... Or at the blue "PDF" I pasted into this post.  Just
reading through all the titles in this "Papers in Press" list for
"Geophysical Research Letters" is mind boggling.  I don't know what many of
the article titles exactly mean, but they read like a kind of scientific
poetry anyway.  The article in discussion is way down that list of articles,
as of today.

I only quoted and referenced a couple of articles summarizing this research
on daily record high and low temperatures, I suspect simplified for a public
readership.  Reading the actual published article that is being discussed,
which has or will appear in "Geophysical Research Letters," should offer
more details:

http://www.agu.org/contents/journals/ViewPapersInPress.do?journalCode=GL

Papers in Press
*Sorted by acceptance date *



Meehl, G. A., C. Tebaldi, G. Walton, D. Easterling, and L. McDaniel (2009),

Relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low
minimum temperatures in the U.S.,

*Geophys. Res. Lett.,* doi:10.1029/2009GL040736, in press.

[PDF <http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2009GL040736-pip.pdf>] (accepted 20
October 2009)
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 11/15/09, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> A quote from the article:
>
> "If the climate weren't changing, you would expect the number of
> temperature <http://www.physorg.com/tags/temperature/> records to diminish
> significantly over time," says Claudia Tebaldi, a statistician with Climate
> Central who is one of the paper's co-authors. "As you measure the high and
> low daily temperatures each year, it normally becomes more difficult to
> break a record after a number of years. But as the average temperatures
> continue to rise this century, we will keep setting more record highs."
>
> They don't actually say that the number of temperatures is actually
> diminishing over time or not.  Since they bring up as an expected
> consequence of climate change, you would think they would declare whether or
> not it was diminishing.
>
> Another quote from the article:
>
> The study also found that the two-to-one ratio across the country as a
> whole could be attributed more to a comparatively small number of record
> lows than to a large number of record highs. This indicates that much of the
> nation's warming is occurring at night, when temperatures are dipping less
> often to record lows. This finding is consistent with years of climate model
> research showing that higher overnight lows should be expected with climate
> change.
>
>
> This would lead me to believe that the number of record highs and lows is
> diminishing over time, as you would expect.
>
> Would it have killed them to provide the simple numbers of record highs and
> lows next to the by-decade ratios?  I'd rather see more information in a
> graph than a cute picture of the US and large 3D bars.
>
> If I get more time to crunch data, I'll see if I can provide a similar
> global graph, albeit using data that is aggregated at the monthly level
> rather than the daily level, since that's all I have access to.  I doubt
> I'll have anything in the near future, since I'm really busy at work and I
> have to write more code to limit the stations to those that existed in 1950
> and to do the counts of record highs and lows.  Not to mention that I'm
> still working on getting monthly graphs and trying to extract data for
> Moscow to see what that looks like.
>
> Paul
>
> Ted Moffett wrote:
>
>> http://www.physorg.com/news177254019.html
>>  http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp
>>  temps <http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg>
>>
>> This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows
>> observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States
>> from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of
>> record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and
>> 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30
>> years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about
>> two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole. [ENLARGE] <
>> http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg> (ŠUCAR,
>> graphic by Mike Shibao.) News media terms of use* <
>> http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp#>
>>
>> -------------------------
>>
>> More records ahead
>>
>> In addition to surveying actual temperatures in recent decades, Meehl and
>> his co-authors turned to a sophisticated computer model of global climate to
>> determine how record high and low temperatures are likely to change during
>> the course of this century.
>>
>> The modeling results indicate that if nations continue to increase their
>> emissions of greenhouse gases in a "business as usual" scenario, the U.S.
>> ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to
>> about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100. The mid-century ratio
>> could be much higher if emissions rose at an even greater pace, or it could
>> be about 8-to-1 if emissions were reduced significantly, the model showed.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------
>>
>> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>>
>>
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