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Comment by merpnderp | Hacker News Reader

Not according to the RSS and UAH satellite tropospheric data sets.

The MSU and AMSU sensors have issues, but still have wider coverage and superior accuracy to the ground station data the NOAA is using. Additionally, RSS and UAH are two different teams, with different methodologies, and using different sensors, with corroborating data.

http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/tltglhmam_...

[EDIT] I'm absolutely wrong. Both the RSS and UAH data confirm that November is the hottest November in the sattelite record also.

Thanks jacobolus for pointing this out (and making sure I stop assuming the NOAA is exaggerating on its hottest month claims.)

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Here are some of the relevant rows from your second link (hottest values in one of the “GLOBAL” columns). I’m not sure I completely understand what the columns all mean though. Can you elaborate a bit?

   YEAR  MON  GLOBAL     NH      SH    TRPC  NO.DAYS   GLOBAL     NH      SH    TRPC  DAYS
   1990   11   0.255   0.268   0.242   0.121    0      -0.005  -0.037   0.026  -0.092    0
   1998   11   0.121   0.126   0.116   0.111    0       0.484   0.502   0.465   0.733    0
   2001   11   0.168   0.203   0.133   0.153    0       0.101   0.108   0.095   0.013    0
   2002   11   0.196   0.164   0.227   0.242    0       0.215   0.172   0.257   0.192    0
   2005   11   0.198   0.234   0.161   0.209    0       0.197   0.240   0.154   0.293    0
   2009   11   0.277   0.203   0.350   0.428    0       0.093   0.091   0.094   0.122    0
   2010   11   0.170   0.260   0.080  -0.202    0       0.343   0.405   0.281   0.430    0
   2014   11   0.229   0.251   0.207   0.239    0       0.178   0.203   0.153   0.127    0
   2015   11   0.330   0.433   0.228   0.525    0       0.248   0.343   0.153   0.314    0

Maybe you can also extract and quote the relevant data from your first link? I’m not sure what I should be looking at.

Wow, I totally missed that. November was incredibly warm. This will bring up the long term trends significantly.

Looks like you excerpted the UAH data which is year, month, global average, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, Tropics, not sure what No.Days is for, and then the 12 month running mean for each of the previous.

I'm just so used to the NOAA saying "Warmest month ever" and it being contradicted by the MSU/AMSU data, it didn't even occur to me they were right.

Thank you so much for double checking me.

According to that then it looks like the 12 month running average is significantly lower, is that to be expected/in line with predictions/at all statistically relevant? I'm still not sure I actually understand what those numbers represent.

EDIT: After jacobolus updated with more columns and checking some other years from the link provided, that does not actually appear to be a trend. My apologies.

Here are the 27 hottest months on record, if anyone was curious about comparing to e.g. the hottest october or december:

   YEAR  MON  GLOBAL     NH      SH    TRPC 
   2010    4   0.330   0.449   0.210   0.687
   2015    6   0.330   0.410   0.251   0.456
   2015   11   0.330   0.433   0.228   0.525
   2004    3   0.334   0.490   0.179   0.271
   2010    6   0.336   0.432   0.240   0.449
   2010    7   0.354   0.520   0.188   0.315
   2003   12   0.357   0.462   0.252   0.272
   2010    8   0.370   0.518   0.222   0.272
   1987   12   0.382   0.573   0.191   0.656
   2010    9   0.393   0.356   0.429   0.144
   1998   10   0.400   0.484   0.315   0.368
   2007    1   0.406   0.484   0.327   0.550
   2010    5   0.426   0.611   0.241   0.804
   2015   10   0.426   0.638   0.213   0.530
   2013    1   0.429   0.345   0.512   0.420
   1998    9   0.437   0.506   0.367   0.356
   2010    2   0.441   0.392   0.491   0.856
   1998    3   0.482   0.509   0.455   1.128
   2010    1   0.483   0.553   0.412   0.599
   1998    1   0.491   0.402   0.580   1.132
   1998    7   0.496   0.617   0.375   0.467
   2010    3   0.503   0.560   0.446   0.776
   1998    8   0.513   0.482   0.544   0.459
   1998    6   0.561   0.572   0.551   0.629
   1998    5   0.636   0.566   0.706   0.975
   1998    2   0.665   0.688   0.642   1.275
   1998    4   0.742   0.852   0.633   1.177

1998 was just incredibly hot throughout (but not in November).

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