isn't the issue that Tropospheric heating should be about 3X surface heating to be consistent with the GCM projections of the effect of CO2 thogh?

Recently, some convergence seems to be occurring between the satellite and ground-based data for the period of overlap

Complete nonsense, the satellite and ground based data is diverging at a spectacular rate.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1998/plot/uah/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998

This article is a classic example of back-fitting data to achieve a desired result. The state of climate science has become so pathological, it is difficult to even discuss it in a serious fashion any more.

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts"
- Albert Einstein

When the raw data doesn't fit, construct a proxy.

Apparently, direct temperature readings from satellites aren't reliable. This is real news since the scientific community has, until now, claimed that satellite temp data was the most reliable. If this study is correct then it casts doubt on the accuracy of previous studies which used satellite temp data. Looks like it's back to the drawing boards.

Whenever I see the terms "proxy" and "infer" in scientific studies I become suspicious. If we cannot accurately measure temperature in the troposphere then how can we realistically reach any conclusions about what the data is telling us?

Brett, do you know who funded this study?
Reply: No, I do not Rick.

So, if I understand this correctly, we should infer temperature from balloon wind information because we can't measure temperature correctly, nor can we process data correctly. If NOAA/NASA can't make the most basic measurements correctly, why should we trust them to report or predict climate change? A proxy using wind to infer temperature is more accurate than direct temperature measurements due to "unknown changes in instrumentation and data processing"? Can these guys keep a straight face while saying this? If a wind proxy to represent temperature is more accurate than NASA satellite measurements, or balloon temperature measurements, why are we spending the money? De-orbit all the satellites, the wind and the computer models will tell us all we need to know. To paraphrase, "data are like people; torture them long enough and they will tell you anything you want".

Interesting concept. However when I want to know what the temperature is outdoors I check a thermometer not an anemometer.

Are they saying that the radiosonde balloon temperature measurements are in error, so they're deriving it from the wind speed measurements of the radiosondes? I thought radiosondes were very accurate on temperature especially when compared to the surface temperature network.

I presume they will hypothesize why the radiosonde temperature measurements are wrong but the wind speed and direction are right. This should be major headline news and the radiosonde designers to be fixing right away!

In summary, this is another attempt to prompt radiosonde data to reflect the output of climate models, but it still doesn't account for the continued lack of a correlation between satellite readings of high altitude temperature and what climate models predict it should be.

It brings to mind the IPCC's use of simple climate models to simulate the response of higher order climate models, not the real world, in order to make their projections of future climate change.

Coincidentally, Brett, Steve McIntyre took another look at radiosonde data today.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3082#more-3082

Reply: Thanks Bob, I will check it out.

I think I had radiosonde mixed up with satellites in regards to the accuracy issue, but radiosondes do seem to have a number of errors that may be affecting all the data they measure, so data that i trusted should be explained.

The direct temperature measurements didn't give the results they were after, so they took an indirect measurement, made a bunch of assumptions to infer the results back to temperature and surprise, surprise, ended up with the results they were after. Forgive me for being a little skeptical.

Uhh let me get this right, new data supports the "change" models predicted.
Hmm how can that be when the old data wasn't as good as this, in other words how do you base your data on something not as good as present date?
baseline?
Garbage in, garbage out?
Oh I forgot, they already KNOW the answer.

Coldest stinking May ever, doesn't prove global cooling (or warming)
volcano eruption in Chile, must be man made, made Mother Earth mad did it?
So will that cool us even more?

Another case of changing the test or data to fit the predetermined conclusion. Freshman level Chem. teaches that just because you don't get the results you want you don't just change the test to fit.

I'm always unhappy to see an article that says real world observations match some climate model output. It's the other way around -- the models are to be measured against the real world.

The models are either consistent or inconsistent with the real world. The comparison should always be model to real world, never real world to model.

Now that that rant is out of my system, why is it that all changes being made to measurement boost warming? Has nobody ever discovered a problem with the data that overestimates warming?

Not to change the subject or nothing, but I wonder what the wind is doing to the ice on Mars? And what of poor Jupiter? All the SUVs there seem to be aggravating the Red Spot something awful.

I love it, if at first you don't get the result to verify your theories, change the procedure for getting the result your theory predicts.

Isn't that called cheating?

Uh oh. You know what the Denial Machine is going to say: Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood are really KGB agents from Russia, who are here to undermine the holy grail of capitalism, restrict our freedoms, control our lives, and...*drum roll please*....raise our taxes!!

Cuz, you know, it's all a conspiracy. Can't we just forget about this and let's invade Iran already?!? Ha!

Utter nonsense once again. It seems like anything associated with GW is justification for for any one to run with silly data. Time is ticking for them to keep it up though for the weather and climate continues not to fit their projected data. Imagine all the money already made off of something that is still only proven to be make believe. Seems like there are an awful lot of other things in the world a whole lot more important than this subject right now.

Did anyone hear about solar cycle 24? Did anyone hear about the cold Phase of the PDO? Did anyone hear about the AMO going into the cool phase? I guess this is all figured into these great models!!!!!!

You have to remember that the climate alarmists' minds are already made up (and closed).

When you already "know" that CO2 is pushing us toward climate catastrophe, you will naturally prefer data that supports the models' output and you will tend to ignore data that does not.

Have the alarmists come up with their alternative ocean temperature measurement method yet? Since the ARGOS data doesn't seem to reveal a recently warming ocean, there's got to be something wrong with it.

A little research into the typical errors of radiosonde temperature data may illuminate many of those that question the use of the wind data as a proxy for temperatures through thermal wind equation.

The following quotes come from the attached web link:
http://www.wmo.ch/pages/prog/www/IMOP/publications/CIMO-Guide/Draft%207th%20edition/Part1-Ch12Final_Cor.pdf

"Most modern radiosonde systems measure temperature in the troposphere with a standard error of between 0.1 and 0.5 K."

"Temperature errors in many radiosonde systems increase rapidly at low pressures, so that some of the available radiosonde systems are unsuitable for observing at the lowest pressures."

"In the upper troposphere, V � dT/dz is often around –0.05 K s-1 so that a time constant of response of 5 s will lead to lag errors of around 0.25 K."

I also want to point out an article published in 2001 by the Roger Pielke of the infamous "skeptic" ICECAP.US web site:

"In Pielke et al. 2001: Analysis of 200 mbar zonal wind for the period 1958-1997. J. Geophys. Res., 106, D21, 27287-27290, we demonstrated that temporal and spatial trends in upper tropospheric winds can be used to diagnosis the trends in the tropospheric temperatures below the level of the wind observations. This concept uses what is called the �thermal wind relation� and is a robust, well-established relationship between the change of wind with altitude and the horizontal temperature gradient."

"...in order to assess the accuracy of satellite and radiosonde assessments of tropospheric temperature trends, the monitoring of the trends in wind speed and direction provides an independent metric to assess the temperature trends."

I guess if this thermal wind methodology is OK for Roger it should be Ok for all of the other skeptics.

Remember, before you openly criticize something, just do a little research and you may be surprised what you learn.

A little research into the typical errors of radiosonde temperature data may illuminate many of those that question the use of the wind data as a proxy for temperatures through thermal wind equation.

The following quotes come from the attached web link:
http://www.wmo.ch/pages/prog/www/IMOP/publications/CIMO-Guide/Draft%207th%20edition/Part1-Ch12Final_Cor.pdf

"Most modern radiosonde systems measure temperature in the troposphere with a standard error of between 0.1 and 0.5 K."

"Temperature errors in many radiosonde systems increase rapidly at low pressures, so that some of the available radiosonde systems are unsuitable for observing at the lowest pressures."

"In the upper troposphere, V � dT/dz is often around –0.05 K s-1 so that a time constant of response of 5 s will lead to lag errors of around 0.25 K."

I also want to point out an article published in 2001 by the Roger Pielke of the infamous "skeptic" ICECAP.US web site:

"In Pielke et al. 2001: Analysis of 200 mbar zonal wind for the period 1958-1997. J. Geophys. Res., 106, D21, 27287-27290, we demonstrated that temporal and spatial trends in upper tropospheric winds can be used to diagnosis the trends in the tropospheric temperatures below the level of the wind observations. This concept uses what is called the �thermal wind relation� and is a robust, well-established relationship between the change of wind with altitude and the horizontal temperature gradient."

"...in order to assess the accuracy of satellite and radiosonde assessments of tropospheric temperature trends, the monitoring of the trends in wind speed and direction provides an independent metric to assess the temperature trends."

I guess if this thermal wind methodology is OK for Roger it should be Ok for all of the other skeptics.

Remember, before you openly criticize something, just do a little research and you may be surprised what you learn.

In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

- Andy Warhol, 1968

heh, heh...stop the presses, a "Breaking-Wind study"!!!...kinda falls right in line with similar AGW voodoo adjustment methodologies...not unexpected, considering some egghead is receiving free money to prop the farce of climate models...i wonder how many proud yale university alumni were watching the cubs vs dodges in the WINDY city today...35 degrees WIND chill at game time on may 27...now us deniers know one days weather isnt climate...however, the pontificators of imminent doom have got to be wondering how many they are convincing the sky is falling, when millions are watching all those diehard cub fans freezing their asparagus' off during America's (god bless it) national pastime...sad thing though, with all the cold weather, some of those cubs fans are probably delusional after a few COLD beverages that they finally made it to october....have a nice day dudes!!!!

Dennis,
Nice try. The simple fact remains, that raw upper tropespheric temp data does not support many of the AGW theories. In climate science, you question everything but the theories. If the raw data doesn't match, said data must be adjusted, or in this case replaced with proxy derived data.

Hi Mark,

Your conspiracy comments are getting extremely repetitive and lame. It is just a group of people protecting their livelihood and reputations.

Not a difficult concept to understand for most people.

As Steve McIntyre points out on his Climate Audit website, Sherwood claims on his website:

The procedure appears to have been successful in eliminating systematic temperature biases in most regions, although the deep tropics appear to retain cooling biases over time that we still cannot identify; these may be due to changes that are too numerous to detect, or not step-like. A penalty paid for the elimination of systematic biases is that random errors are not reduced as effectively as other methods, so that individual stations now have trends that are about as variable as in the raw data; however, the accuracy of zonal means appears to be significantly improved.

In other words, Sherwood knows what the data should be, and will adjust the measurements until they agree. An earlier but recent paper by Sherwood clearly shows his ad hoc approach to data adjustment.

Hi Dennis Hlinka,

Here is "a little research" for you.

GISS has almost no stations in Canada, Africa, Greenland or Antarctica, yet they report worldwide temperatures within one one-hundredth of a degree.

In engineering, that is known as having a "precision much greater than your accuracy" and causes many a freshman student to fail.

Radiosonde data is vastly more accurate than the nonsense being distributed by Hansen.

I cannot see how this is not simply adjusting data to make it appear that it falls in line with a bad theory!

They make sure they say that "long-term climate signals in the radiosonde network is the known presence of artificial discontinuities due to unknown changes in instrumentation and data processing."

And "A second problem is the sporadic operation of many stations." Going on about how they are using 10% of the known stations to still only get "suboptimal" results.

Unknown changes in instruments and data processing errors coupled with operational errors of the instruments produces numbers that are inconsistent with observation, so these PhD's determine that faking data with technical sounding words will make the data better?

If the purpose of this "study (i.e. BS way to get funding!)" was to measure Temperature changes over altitude instead of "to estimate the climate signals, missing data, and instrument change effects synergistically," then this BS might mean something.

Synergistically? Dilbert ought to get a job in Climate Change.

When you already have data and you try to "estimate climate signals, missing data, and instrument changes" you are MAKING STUFF UP.

WHY ARE WE PAYING FOR THIS CRAP!?

TAKE GOOD MEASUREMENTS IF YOU WANT GOOD DATA! Don't take bad measurements and then try to make them look good.

Kipp, this is exactly what I was talking about when you don't change the data, you change your theory