Update for “Blizzard Called Nemo” Post About Sea Surface Temperature Off Coast of New England

As the blizzard called Nemo was approaching New England on Friday February 8^th, I published a post, the title of which explained the content: Dear Chicken Little: The Sky is Falling (It’s Snowing) But Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies Off New England Coast Are NOT Unusual. It was also cross posted at WattsUpWithThat. I had prepared a map and graph of weekly sea surface temperature anomalies off the coast of New England, using the NOAA NOMADS website as the source. At that time, the latest data was for the week centered January 30, 2013, well before Nemo formed.  I hadn’t expected there to be a drastic change in sea surface temperature anomalies from one week to the next.   But the updated data for the week of February 6^th was made available from NOAA on Monday February 11^th and it proved me wrong.

The sea surface temperature anomalies for the week of Nemo were significantly cooler than they were during the prior week. 

Animation 1 is a gif animation that compares the sea surface temperature anomalies of the week I had used in the post (the map annotated in red) and the week of the blizzard named Nemo.  As illustrated, the sea surface temperature anomalies south of New England (east of New Jersey) were much cooler during the week that Nemo made its way north over the Atlantic, and they were slightly cooler in the Gulf of Maine. (You may need to click-start the animation.)

   

Animation 1

An updated time-series graph of sea surface temperature anomalies for the New England Coast, Figure 1, includes the value for the week centered on February 6^th. The sea surface temperature anomalies the week of Nemo were only 0.21 Deg C.  That’s not “a couple degrees above average off the East Coast” as Andrew Freedman had claimed over at ClimateCentral.   And it was not “higher by about 1 deg C [almost 2°F] than a normal (pre-1980) due to global warming” as claimed by Kevin Trenberth in Joe Romm’s post at ClimateProgress.

Figure 1

Will Freedman and Romm correct their misleading posts? 

The updated data and map were also presented in my recent YouTube video The Impact of Manmade Global Warming on a Blizzard Called Nemo and on Hurricane Sandy.

SOURCE

The weekly Reynolds OI.v2 sea surface temperature anomaly data and maps are available through the NOAA NOMADS website.