personal player football: The Recent Drop In The Sea Surface Temperatures Of U.S. Coastal Waters

Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Recent Drop In The Sea Surface Temperatures Of U.S. Coastal Waters

I’ve moved to WordPress. This post can now be found at The Recent Drop In The Sea Surface Temperatures Of U.S. Coastal Waters

################
This post illustrates the recent drop in the SST anomalies of the U.S. coastal waters. We’ll represent this subset with the coordinates of 20N-50N, 130W-65W. I’ve used those coordinates in at least one earlier post about the SST Anomalies of U.S. “Coastal” Waters. Figure 1 is the December 2010 Reynolds OI.v2 SST anomaly map with those coordinates highlighted. The cooling appears to be an exaggerated response to the 2010/11 La Niña.

http://i51.tinypic.com/ny902e.jpg
Figure 1

Figure 2 is the Reynolds OI.v2-based time-series graph for this subset. After the two-month flattening in September and October 2010, at approximately -0.24 deg C, the SST anomalies dropped more than 0.65 deg C by January 2011. The January 2011 reading for the U.S. Coast Waters is the lowest on record for the satellite-based Reynolds Oi.v2 SST dataset.

http://i55.tinypic.com/2hqe9hu.jpg
Figure 2

Note: This is not a post about global sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, nor is it a post about the SST anomalies of the individual ocean basins. For those refer to the January 2011 SST Anomaly Update.

Figures 3, 4, and 5 show the long-term SST anomalies for the U.S. Coastal Waters using the HADISST, ERSST.v3b, and HADSST2 datasets. They provide a different perspective on the magnitude of the recent drop. For the HADISST and ERSST.v3b datasets, one has to go back to the April 1971 to find similar SST anomalies, and back to July 1933 with HADSST2 data.

http://i53.tinypic.com/339o96f.jpg
Figure 3
###################

http://i54.tinypic.com/30w5e6v.jpg
Figure 4
###################

http://i56.tinypic.com/29e54s6.jpg
Figure 5

The weekly data for this subset, Figure 6, show that the SST anomalies are rebounding. I’ll add this dataset to the monthly update for a few months to assure it rebounds fully.