<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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:</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.agu.org/contents/journals/ViewPapersInPress.do?journalCode=GL">http://www.agu.org/contents/journals/ViewPapersInPress.do?journalCode=GL</a></div>
<div> </div>
<div>Papers in Press<br><span id="sortedBy"><em>Sorted by acceptance date </em></span></div>
<div><br> </div>
<div class="article" id="id2009GL040736">
<div class="citation">
<p class="authors">Meehl, G. A., C. Tebaldi, G. Walton, D. Easterling, and L. McDaniel <span class="year">(2009),</span></p>
<p class="title">Relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.<span class="comma">,</span></p>
<p class="journalgroup"><span class="journal"><em>Geophys. Res. Lett.,</em></span> <span class="doi">doi:10.1029/2009GL040736, in press.</span> </p></div>
<p class="linksgroup"><span class="links"><span class="pip"><font size="2">[</font><a href="http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2009GL040736-pip.pdf"><font color="#0000aa" size="2">PDF</font></a><font size="2">] </font></span></span><span class="acceptedDate">(accepted 20 October 2009)</span> </p>
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<div>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 11/15/09, <b class="gmail_sendername">Paul Rumelhart</b> <<a href="mailto:godshatter@yahoo.com">godshatter@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">A quote from the article:<br><br>"If the climate weren't changing, you would expect the number of temperature <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.physorg.com/tags/temperature/" target="_blank">http://www.physorg.com/tags/temperature/</a>> 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."<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Another quote from the article:<br><br>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.<br>
<br><br>This would lead me to believe that the number of record highs and lows is diminishing over time, as you would expect.<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Paul<br><br>Ted Moffett wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><span class="q"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.physorg.com/news177254019.html" target="_blank">http://www.physorg.com/news177254019.html</a><br>
<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp" target="_blank">http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp</a><br></span> temps <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg" target="_blank">http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg</a>><br>
<br>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] <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg" target="_blank">http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg</a>> (©UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao.) News media terms of use* <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp#" target="_blank">http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/maxmin.jsp#</a>><span class="q"><br>
<br>-------------------------<br><br>More records ahead<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>------------------------------------------<br><br>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br><br></span></blockquote></blockquote></div>