Climate Models get a Boost from the Wind
I saw this article from the AFP yesterday. To summarize...........
Climate scientists Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood from Yale Universitry have used a new technique to show temperatures changes in the upper troposphere (7.5-10 miles up) since 1970 are clearly in sync with most of the climate change models in showing a general warming of 0.65 degrees celsius per decade. Over the past two decades, temperature data directly gathered by satellites and balloons had showed little or no increase in upper troposheric temperature during that period, but researchers suspected these discontinuities with the model projections were due to unknown changes in instrumentation and data processing.
By tracking radiosondes attached to weather balloons, the team used trends in vertical wind shear to infer those of temperature. (Here is the link to Steven Sherwood's site on the project) According to the scientists, there are approx. 10X fewer discontinuities in wind records than in temperature records since the new prodcedure was able to eliminate systematic temperature biases in most regions, making vertical wind shear measurements (assuming I understand it correctly) a more reliable indicator of long-term trends.
