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Andy Russell's weather and climate blog.

Andy Russell
12 posts

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  • May 16, 2011
  • 08:21 AM
  • 916 views

Did Watts’ surfacestations.org paper show that surface temperature trends are unreliable? No.

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

A while ago I wrote a post about an analysis of the US climate monitoring network led by Anthony Watts, who has a very popular climate skeptic blog. The reason for that post was that Menne et al. 2010 had used some of Watts’ analysis to find that US surface temperature trends aren’t affected much by [...]... Read more »

Souleymane Fall, Anthony Watts, John Nielsen-Gammon, Evan Jones, Dev Niyogi, John R. Christy, & Roger A. Pielke Sr. (2011) Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. Journal of Geophysical Research. info:/

  • February 10, 2010
  • 07:10 AM
  • 688 views

On “the real holes in climate science”

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

[This post is based a question I got in response to a previous post but thought it deserved a short post on its own as there's a few interesting points.]
There’s been a lot of bad press recently for climate science but a lot of has focused on very minor issues. For example, most of [...]... Read more »

Schiermeier, Q. (2010) The real holes in climate science. Nature, 463(7279), 284-287. DOI: 10.1038/463284a  

  • January 21, 2010
  • 06:15 AM
  • 669 views

Classic clouds #1 – Kelvin-Helmholtz billows

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

This post is the first in a series about my favourite clouds. First up, Kelvin-Helmholtz Billows.... Read more »

  • February 3, 2010
  • 09:22 AM
  • 601 views

Skepticism or denial?

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

Whilst I would describe myself as a scientific skeptic, in that I will try to investigate claims before coming to a judgement, I would not say I was a “climate change skeptic”. This term is often used to label those that are irrationally dismissive of the scientific evidence (or worse). Several commentators on [...]... Read more »

M. J. Menne, C. N. Williams, & M. A. Palecki. (2010) On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record. Journal of Geophysical Research. info:/doi:10.1029/2009JD013094

  • March 1, 2010
  • 07:43 AM
  • 591 views

Antarctic climate change – the exception that proves the rule?

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

Antarctica has been in the news recently because two large icebergs (one about 60 miles long and the other about 50) have broken off the continent. These “calving” events often occur naturally and these ones are probably not linked to climate change, although they might affect the global ocean circulation.

But I thought that this [...]... Read more »

  • March 25, 2010
  • 06:46 AM
  • 543 views

Storms and climate change

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

I’ve been pretty distracted recently with the Institute of Physics issue. I’ll hopefully draw that chapter to a close in the next couple of weeks (it looks like the IoP are going to stick their head in the sand and wait for it to blow over) but right now I’m bringing my current project [...]... Read more »

Russell, A., Vaughan, G., Norton, E., Morcrette, C., Browning, K., & Blyth, A. (2008) Convective inhibition beneath an upper-level PV anomaly. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 134(631), 371-383. DOI: 10.1002/qj.214  

RUSSELL, A., VAUGHAN, G., NORTON, E., RICKETTS, H., MORCRETTE, C., HEWISON, T., BROWNING, K., & BLYTH, A. (2009) Convection forced by a descending dry layer and low-level moist convergence. Tellus A, 61(2), 250-263. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0870.2008.00382.x  

  • January 6, 2011
  • 11:07 AM
  • 523 views

Why has this winter been so cold in Europe?

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

I’ve written a couple of posts recently looking at the cold UK weather in context and how snow forms. What I haven’t done, though, is looked at why it’s been so cold over Europe this winter (as well as last year’s winter). It just so happens that a paper came out in the Journal of [...]... Read more »

V. Petoukhov, & V. A. Semenov. (2010) A link between reduced Barents-Kara sea ice and cold winter extremes over northern continents. Journal of Geophysical Research. info:/10.1029/2009JD013568

  • June 15, 2010
  • 04:09 AM
  • 511 views

The “Hockey Stick” evolution

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

This is a post that aims to go through the evolution of the “Hockey Stick” from 1990 to the present day.  It naturally misses out parts of the story, which deserve far more analysis, simply to keep the post short.  Comments that expand on the bits I’ve omitted are welcome! What is the “Hockey Stick” [...]... Read more »

Mann ME, Zhang Z, Hughes MK, Bradley RS, Miller SK, Rutherford S, & Ni F. (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(36), 13252-7. PMID: 18765811  

  • May 27, 2010
  • 07:21 AM
  • 510 views

The volcano: an interesting scientific distraction.

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

I realise that the volcano that is currently erupting in Iceland has caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. However, if I can see one plus side it’s all the impromptu atmospheric science that is going on around it. For example, the first paper about the volcano, which is looking at the [...]... Read more »

R G Harrison, K A Nicoll, Z Ulanowski and T A Mather. (2010) Self-charging of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic ash plume. Environ. Res. Lett. info:/

  • March 6, 2010
  • 09:39 AM
  • 484 views

Institute of Physics S&TC evidence submission – what’s actually wrong with it?

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

There’s clearly some interest in the IoP evidence submission and my original letter to the IoP didn’t really go into my objections in great detail. I thought I should go through the evidence submission in one place instead of explaining my views in response to blog comments.
Overall, I’m not objecting to the statement because [...]... Read more »

Anonymous members of the Institute of Physics Science Board. (2010) The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Memorandum. info:/

  • May 20, 2010
  • 03:50 AM
  • 377 views

Climate isn’t just about the atmosphere.

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

Most of our analyses of climate change have focused on the atmosphere and mostly over land and, therefore, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere.  This is simply because that is where our best data comes from. This is starting to change though. A paper published in Nature this week uses relatively new ocean data to show [...]... Read more »

Lyman JM, Good SA, Gouretski VV, Ishii M, Johnson GC, Palmer MD, Smith DM, & Willis JK. (2010) Robust warming of the global upper ocean. Nature, 465(7296), 334-7. PMID: 20485432  

  • October 26, 2012
  • 01:02 PM
  • 227 views

How much does Antarctica contribute to sea level rise? (And how should that be communicated?)

by Andy Russell in Our Clouded Hills

There’s an interesting new paper in Nature (King et al.) this week that looks at how much the Antarctic continental ice contributes to sea level changes. It initially caught my eye as it uses data from the GRACE satellites, which are very cool! They are twin satellites that can detect tiny changes in the distance [...]... Read more »

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