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It looks like there may have been a mesoscale boundary south of the storm that was forcing junk convection. It looks like the cell is starting outrun that now. Once it finishes ingesting this last bit of convection it looks like the inflow notch might clear out. We'll see what happens.

The spatial and temporal size of the 90 tornado ingredients contour from the 9Z SREF has doubled since last night. I'm pretty sure we've seen larger in the past, but this is high risk worthy for sure.

21Z SREF tornado ingredients product is somewhat aggressive. We've certainly seen larger spatial and temporal sizes of the 90 contour, but this one is respectable nonetheless.

In addition we had this publication come out last year with a comprehensive analysis of the Earth Energy Imbalance. It is now up to +0.87 W/m^2. https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/2013/2020/essd-12-2013-2020.pdf

We've seen 3 local peaks. One on Feb 15th, one on Mar 6, and the most recent on Mar 12 with a 5D average of 14.75 per NSIDC extent. We cannot eliminate the possibility of a higher max (the 2012 max occurred on Mar 20), but with each passing day the probability decreases. It looks to me like the melt season is going to start lower than it did last year.

Copernicus reports that February 2021 was coolest since 2014. https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-february-2021

JAXA data showed a pretty significant surge the last few days which puts Mar 2nd above the mid Feb peak. The winter max will almost certainly occur in Mar per NSIDC as well.

Here is the NSIDC's update regarding the sea ice data problems. https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2021/03/nsidc-continues-to-investigate-sea-ice-processing-errors/

Oh...you're right. Between both Chrome and Edge cutting off support for ftp and having to switch to WinSCP to download the data I didn't even notice that it hadn't updated.

I usually just go to NSIDC directly. https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/ I did see that glitch on that site earlier today. I was assuming the glitch was isolated to that site. The data on the NSIDC site looks good.

We've seen a pretty substantial decline in the NSIDC sea ice extent the last few days. The last time the winter max occurred in February was 2015. So there is recent precedent.

We cannot eliminate the possibility that we've seen the winter max for 2021.

I don't know. That 0.03C response was for a single year. I think it is at least consistent with the hypothesis that aerosols have a big impact and that at current levels they are likely masking a lot of the GHG warming potential. Imagine if that 0.03C rate of change persisted for 10 years. That'd be a cumulative 0.3C change. I'm not really endorsing aerosols as a means of geoengineering here though. The safest thing to do would be to minimize human influence altogether. That way we aren't trying to fight one influencing factor with yet another influencing factor.

We are starting to see studies regarding just how much the pandemic influenced the global mean temperature in 2020. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL091805 About +0.03C per the study above and is attributable to reduced aerosol optical depths.

I believe it will be in March. https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/gfsv16/

Oh yeah. I totally remember. I did remove UAH and RSS from my model...just didn't add any skill no matter what weighting I gave it. In fact once I started adding other inputs UAH and RSS became more of a liability than an asset. Yes. I was running the GISTEMP code on the GHCN files. The land only index from GISTEMP actually added some skill to my model with 20% weighting. Getting the ERSST data plugged in proved very difficult at least for me. I just didn't have the time to spend on doing it. The input that mattered the most for me was Nick Stoke's TempLS dataset. I gave this input 50% weighting. When it was all said and done my model could predict the GISS update within 0.05 with 95% confidence. The guys posting as takeyourmoney and James Davis were clearly very smart. They had the modeling thing figured out long before I made my attempt. I wish those two would make an appearance on here. They were always respectful and their posts were packed full of relevant to the point information. They would be fun to engage with here.

That was me!

James Hansen says in his December update (just out today) that he thinks the warming may be accelerating as well. http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2021/20210114_Temperature2020.pdf

Yes I did. It was pretty nuanced though. The rules said 2020 had to exceed 2016 by 0.01 after rounding to 2 decimal places. The quirk was that 2016 had been getting reported as 1.01. But I (along with several other people) had figured out that the recent addition of observations into the GHCN repository was going to likely flip 2016 back to 1.02. And my model had predicted that GISS would revise Nov down to 1.11 and report 0.83 for Dec. GISS officially reported 1.11 and 0.81 respectively so I had already seen the 2020 round down to 1.02 coming as well. I exploited that situation as well. In the end I learned a lot from this exercise. First...I learned that prediction markets aren't that good. Second...I learned a lot of details about GHCN, ERSST, how the GISTEMP code works, and how to create a model for predicting GISS updates with publicly available information with up to 4 weeks lead time. It was really fun. BTW...your comment above about 2010 being a good analog to 2020 kept me on my guard

Berkeley Earth released their 2020 annual report. 2020 was the second warmest year behind 2016. http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2020/

2020 has eclipsed 2016 as the warmest year in the GISS record strictly speaking. But it was of the thinnest of margins and qualifies as a statistical tie.

Dr. Spencer posted documents containing the official seal of the Office of Science and Technology Policy on his blog under the direction of David Legates. These documents represent the views of a whos who list of contrarian scientists. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/01/white-house-brochures-on-climate-there-is-no-climate-crisis/ These documents are disinformation at best. They certainly don't represent "the current state-of-the-science on various topics of climate change" as Legates claim. In addition the OSTP did not grant approval to disseminate these documents. It is not even clear they were aware of their existence until now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/11/controversial-climate-skeptics-release-papers/ Edit: Apparently the documents are also hosted by the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences. https://www.ceres-science.com/content/climate_change_flyers.html Edit: David Legates and Ryan Maue have both been relieved of their duties in regards to the OSTP over this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/11/controversial-climate-skeptics-release-papers/ Edit: NOAA has issued a statement regarding the matter. https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/statement-on-climate-change-flyers-falsely-attributed-to-white-house-office-of-science https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/attempt-to-red-team-climate-research-comes-to-a-pathetic-and-confused-end/

Copernicus released their final monthly report for 2020. https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-december-2020 2020 is the second warmest year in their record after 2016.

Per NSIDC the annual mean extent in 2020 was 10.160e6. This breaks the previous record of 10.163e6 set in 2016.

That was a good read. Full text here. There is some interesting commentary about how we've probably underestimated aerosol forcing. That's probably not a good thing since it means the warming may continue to accelerate as we clean up our aerosol emissions.