In article , says...

Eric Swanson wrote:
In article , says...
Eric Swanson wrote:

It's worth noting that the results from Mears et al. at RSS shows stronger
warming in the tropics than does the latest UAH computations.

http://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006...per_104116.htm

In http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/104116.pdf

Mears et. al. write:

"In the Northern extratropics, there is excellent
agreement between the Christy et al. results and a
sub sample of the radiosonde sites chosen to
have consistent instrumentation type and thus
thought to be relatively free of error (Christy,
Spencer et al. 2000). Presumably the agreement
between these radiosondes and our data would be
somewhat worse, though this has not been tested
here."

Pretty much what I've been saying, and waiting for,
for quite some time.

That's "extratropics" not the tropics, which is the latitudes where the
differences between the MSU and sonde data resulted in controversy. As
Prabhakara pointed out back in 2000, the monthly data is dominated by short
term variation and thus the trend is a small part (about 5%) of the
variance. There could easily be "good agreement" between the sonde data and
BOTH the UAH and RSS products for the Northern extratropics, while they
differ in their respective global trends.

We'll never know until RSS performs the same comparison.

We take the winner of that comparison.

But, Christy et al. have claimed that the previous versions of their product
met the test you demand. Now they have made a major revision in their
analysis, but we don't yet know how well the latest UAH version stacks up
against the sonde data, as far as I am aware. What if the latest version does
worse than the earlier version? Will you only accept the previous version
(5.1) over the latest (5.2)?

--
Eric Swanson --- E-mail address: e_swanson(at)skybest.com :-)
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