Climate Council (Australia) says Autumn 2014 is abnormal

Remember the Climate Council was birthed by ex staffers from the Climate Commission which was disbanded by the Australian LNP Government elected Sept 2013. Climate Council Seasonal Update: Abnormal Autumn – Looks to me as if their cherry picked warm period 8 to 26 May is borrowed from the BoM – Special Climate Statement 49 – an exceptionally prolonged autumn warm spell over much of Australia
Here is a time series chart of Australian Autumn mean temperature anomalies. Not sure what is abnormal. Remember these time series charts are built from ACORN SAT data.

Click to play animation of nine previous warm autumns.

Sydney is the only prominent site I can see that had an all time record warm Autumn. Birdsville qualifies too. Any other candidates?

12 thoughts on “Climate Council (Australia) says Autumn 2014 is abnormal”

  1. Looks like lack of change is not “normal”. So what caused those two troublesome similar consecutive years in the 20s?

  2. Most of the hype has been about the maximum temps for autumn but when the maximum mean comes in at 6th, behind past years of 1938 and 1958, not so abnormal.
    www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=tmax&area=aus&season=0305&ave_yr=0
    Observation.
    Sydneys Obs’ max mean for May was the highest on record but very few nearby stations matched Sydney at 23.2C – even the western Sydney w/s that have higher long-term May means than Sydney. Only 3 w/s stations broke their records, mainly set in 2007 and 1958.
    Does that mean that Sydney Obs temp was an ‘outlier’ and will be adjusted down in the ACORN record – like the BoM did with Sydney Obs’ May, 1958 data?

    On another point, the Sydney May report states that Sydney Obs’ May record beat the 1958 record. But the adjusted ACORN record shows that 1923 was the highest at 22.7C. So is the ‘Rolls Royce’ data not worthy when comparing past records? Where will it end?

    www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/nsw/sydney.shtml

  3. eyeballing that graph , l would suggest the 3rd warmest Autumn in 102 yrs of records

    Gee. Will Steffen really goes hard to find every bit of warm stuff doesn’t he.
    www.climatecouncil.org.au/abnormalautumn

    Unfortunately not much cold for us sceptics to brag about yet..

    Some warm very anomalies in the Antarctic curently but no warm anomalies in the Arctic ??on this map for May 2014
    picasaweb.google.com/110600540172511797362/TEMPERATURE2014#6020621137364024690

    Maybe the Bi-polar see saw about to change?

  4. “Maybe the Bi-polar see saw about to change?”
    The regular normal magnetic pole reversal of the sun? It could affect where water falls here. Even if all it can do is alter how those solar wind charges hit us.
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrgXDM3jAg
    If proof of this is an abnormal autumn, we need to keep waiting.

  5. Yes Australia is about 1.5% of global area (land and ocean).
    On page 9 of the BoM Special Climate Statement 49 it says –
    “Australian annually averaged temperature has warmed by 0.9 °C since 1910, and the month of May has warmed by a similar amount. The annual warming trend is consistent with that observed for the globe.” Readers should be warned that this 0.9° figure is enhanced by multi-thousands of BoM adjustments tweaking the trend higher.

  6. Can someone help me here?
    I ran the raw data set (from the Time Series graphs) for Australian mean temps 1900-2013.
    From 1900-1940 (31 years) the temp averaged -0.33C pa.
    From 1983 -2013 (31 years) the temp averaged 0.33C pa.
    Isn’t this only an increase of 0.66C since 1910 – or is there another way of determining the rate of increase (i.e. their claim of 0.9C)?

    www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=tmean&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=15

  7. Sorry, wazsah, I put 1900 instead of 1910 in my post above.
    The 1961-1990 mean temp averages 21.8C pa. This is the standard mean which all mean annual temps for Australia are compared against.
    The 1910-1961 mean temp averages 21.5Cpa.
    The 1991-2013 mean temp averages 22.2C pa.
    I still can’t see how they get 0.96C. What am I missing?

  8. Thanks Waszah. On your animation, I notice the national night-time hotspot near the southern end of the NT/WA borderis still uncorrected for 2002, 2005, 2007 and 2014. Dear oh dear when are the BoM going to clean this up – didn’t you even write to them about it and get a reply saying they would do something?

    Re trends, I wonder what the trend is from 1980 to present, when we are supposed to be seeing practically the entire man-made global warming signal? Looks pretty close to zero for that ~35 year period – the warming seems to have almost entirely 1950-80. Have noticed this for other ACORN data too.

  9. Excel says 0.36°C over the 35 years 1979-2013.
    There was a “Review of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Capacity” – announced by Senator Farrell – 18 July 2011.
    I wrote to the Auditor –
    2 Non-climatic anomalies in BoM temperature anomaly maps
    – June 5th, 2011
    www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=1029
    These repeated examples of a “National Night-time Hotspot” on the border of the NT & WA is evidence of laughable errors in BoM gridded data which BoM staff seem incapable of seeing for years. Please do something about improving the homogeneity of the BoM error ridden gridded data.

    Recent years seem to show the NNTHS less
    Apologies if some comments are lost in spam which is running @ 6 or 700 p d right now, too many to check.
    More than 3 links in a comment and even mine get in the spam list.

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