Breaking: 2009 hottest year on record in Southern Hemisphere and tied for second globally [View All]

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Breaking: 2009 hottest year on record in Southern Hemisphere and tied for second globally
2010 still poised to be hottest year on record despite cool start in parts of Northern Hemisphere
January 14, 2010


Note: The NASA results are not yet official, but should be Friday. The figure above does not have the December data, but the final figure will look almost identical.


Eli Kintisch at Science Magazine just published, “2009 Hottest Year on Record in Southern Hemisphere.” He quoted NASA mathematician Reto Ruedy of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies on the as-yet-not-released December and yearly data. We’ve all been waiting for NASA’s final report on the year — to see whether 2009 will be the second hottest year on record (see Must-see NASA figures compare 2009 to the two hottest years on record: 2005 and 2007) and whether NASA would make an official prediction that 2010 is likely to be the hottest on record, as the UK’s Met Office has and as Hansen himself did (here).

So I called up Dr. Ruedy, and he said that the data have been processed but won’t be released officially until Friday, as they are awaiting completion of the accompanying report. Here’s the story.

As Science reports:

The United States may be experiencing one of the coldest winters in decades, but things continue to heat up in the Southern Hemisphere. Science has obtained … data from NASA that indicates that 2009 was the hottest year on record south of the Equator. The find adds to multiple lines of evidence showing that the 2000s were the warmest decade in the modern instrumental record.Southern Hemisphere temperatures can serve as a trailing indicator of global warming, says NASA mathematician Reto Ruedy of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, given that that part of the globe is mostly water, which warms more slowly and with less variability than land. Ruedy says 2009 temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were 0.49°C warmer than the period between 1951 and 1980, with an error of +/- 0.05°C.

I asked Ruedy if indeed 2009 was the second hottest year on record and he said yes, and then quickly clarified that, given the error bars on the temperature record (see figure), it’s really best to call it a 3-way tie with 1998 and 2007. In fact, he said, 2005 is “only marginally warmer than” the second hottest years.

More at: http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/14/2009-hottest-year-on-record-in-southern-hemisphere-nasa-giss/