Reflections from surface and clouds - is there an albedo expert in the house?

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is a mite upset (archived here, latest here) because scientists aren't telling him he's right. In fact, they aren't telling him anything at all. And few of the readers at WUWT are helping him out, though a number are encouraging him with "scientists don't know nuffin'" comments.

Warnings - This article is long and meanders a bit - I have to call a halt at some point. This is just a blog article after all :) If you are looking for definitive answers about albedo, you won't find them. What you will get are some of the interesting bits and pieces I discovered as I went looking. There's no guarantee I've got it all right, either. This is something I've not explored in depth before now. So feel free to quibble in the comments.

Back to Willis Eschenbach. He thinks he's found a problem with a chart in a paper by Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (and elsewhere), and colleagues. The paper is about planetary albedo, which is the the fraction of the incoming solar energy scattered by Earth back to space. It's not a bad introduction to the subject, with some caveats as you'll see. The authors make two main points, as described in the abstract:

1. the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (NH, SH) reflect the same amount of sunlight within ~ 0.2Wm 2. This symmetry is achieved by increased reflection from SH clouds offsetting precisely the greater reflection from the NH land masses. 
2. The albedo of Earth appears to be highly buffered on hemispheric and global scales as highlighted by both the hemispheric symmetry and a remarkably small interannual variability of reflected solar flux (~0.2% of the annual mean flux).

Something Really Obvious: Wondering Willis Eschenbach doesn't check facts...

Wondering Willis Eschenbach wanders further from reality in a follow up article at WUWT on CERES (archived here, latest update here).

The title comes from Willis himself, who wrote in a response to another comment:

Scientists may be wrong, and often are. But when you think you’ve uncovered a “major error”, something really obvious, well, you should check your facts very carefully before uncapping your electronic pen …

Now I don't know if Willis considers himself a scientist or not.  If he does, then he's not being very scientific. He has concluded that

...the system works as follows. When the GHGs increase, the TOA upwelling longwave radiation decreases because more is absorbed. In response, the albedo increases proportionately, increases the SR. This counteracts the decrease in upwelling LW, and leaves the surface temperature unchanged.

The evidence he provides is that he says he has found "the longwave and the reflected shortwave is strongly negatively correlated, and averages -0.65 globally".  By which I think he means that as outgoing longwave radiation decreases, reflected shortwave radiation increases.

It looks as if Willis is proposing a version of Lindzen's Iris Hypothesis, which was long ago found wanting.  But despite being asked at least twice (once today and once on a previous occasion), Willis hasn't acknowledged that.  He wants to claim the idea for himself.

In his own words, what Willis is arguing is that:

the earth has a strong active thermoregulation system which functions in part by adjusting the albedo (through the regulation of daily tropical cloud onset time) to maintain the earth within a narrow (± 0.3°C over the 20th century) temperature range.

Except he's wrong.  As well as all the papers I've already linked to, Earth's surface temperature hasn't been maintained "within a narrow +/- 0.3°C over the 20th century.  It's risen by 0.8°C since the early 20th century - and by about one degree since 1910.  In addition the oceans have heated, a lot.  About 90% of the extra energy from the increased greenhouse gases has gone into the oceans, which is demonstrated by the rise in sea levels. (As the water heats it expands.)

Willis' "Crackpot" Pseudo-Science vs Observations

Why doesn't Willis show a temperature chart? Because it would show up his ideas as dumb.  For example, compare Willis' ± 0.3°C over the 20th century with observations:

Funny thing, apart from Willis chastising someone else for "not checking facts very carefully" (when you think you’ve uncovered a “major error”, something really obvious), is that no-one has asked him where the energy is coming from that's heating the surface and the oceans and melting ice.  Everyone seems to want him to be correct, so they aren't seeing the big fat flaw in his argument.

And no-one has asked for evidence supporting his cloud hypothesis either.

But a couple of people have questioned him.  For example, one person asked him why he sees clouds as only reflecting incoming shortwave radiation and not longwave radiation from the surface.

Willis is quickly adding runs to his "crackpot" score using the points system idunno linked to.

The global mean energy budget

By the way, in addition to the paper I quoted from yesterday, regarding Willis' previous wonderings, there are sections in the IPCC AR5 WG1 report that deal with top of atmosphere energy fluxes.  For example, in Chapter 2 on page 2-24 there is this paragraph:

The estimate for the reflected solar radiation at the TOA in Figure 2.11, 100 W/m2, is a rounded value based on the CERES Energy Balanced and Filled (EBAF) satellite data product (Loeb et al., 2009; Loeb et al., 2012b) for the period 2001–2010. This dataset adjusts the solar and thermal TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to be consistent with independent estimates of the global heating rate based upon in situ ocean observations (Loeb et al., 2012b). This leaves 240 W/m2 of solar radiation absorbed by Earth, which is nearly balanced by thermal emission to space of about 239 W/m2 (based on CERES EBAF), considering a global heat storage of 0.6 W/m2 (imbalance term in Figure 2.11) based on Argo data from 2005 to 2010 (Hansen et al., 2011; Loeb et al., 2012b; Box 3.1).

It's not a simple matter to work this out.  Willis thinks he can overturn all the detailed workings of lots of scientists by crunching some numbers that I suspect he doesn't understand.  Compare Willis' conceptualisation of the energy budget with the diagram from the IPCC report.  Willis' first. His notion is on the far right.  His notion of the science is on the left and in the middle. (Click to enlarge.)

Source: WUWT

Now for how scientists portray the global mean energy budget - Figure 2.11 from page 2-127 of the final draft of WG1. Click to enlarge.

Figure 2.11: Global mean energy budget under present day climate conditions. Numbers state magnitudes of the individual energy fluxes in W/m2, adjusted within their uncertainty ranges to close the energy budgets. Numbers in parentheses attached to the energy fluxes cover the range of values in line with observational constraints. Figure adapted from Wild et al. (2013). Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page 2-127

Willis Eschenbach wonders about CERES

Ceres circa 235 - 250 CE
Louvre: Borghese Collection; 
purchase, 1807

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is wondering about CERES (archived here, latest update here).  He's written quite a few articles about CERES data at WUWT lately.  I'm wondering if he's bothered to read anything about the data before wondering.  (I'm guessing he hasn't read too many scientific papers on the subject either, because it's not his way.)

For example, the CERES website has data quality summaries, such as this one for top of atmosphere data.  The paper states it "represents the minimum information needed by scientists for appropriate and successful use of the data product".



Today Willis wonders about outgoing longwave and reflected shortwave irradiance:

Now, there are several very curious aspects to this figure. The first and most surprising issue is that the hemispheric values for shortwave, and also the hemispheric values for longwave, are nearly identical from hemisphere to hemisphere. Why should that be so? There is much more ocean in the southern hemisphere, for example. There is solid land at the South Pole rather than ocean. In addition, the underlying surface albedos of the two hemispheres are quite different, by about 4 watts per square metre. Also, the southern hemisphere gets more sunlight than the northern hemisphere, because the earth’s orbit is elliptical.

So given all these differences … why should the longwave and shortwave in the two hemispheres be the same?

Willis answers his own question by writing this:

Given the myriad differences between the northern and southern hemispheres, my explanation of this amazing stability is that a) the temperature of the planet is regulated by a variety of threshold-based processes, and b) the set-point of that regulation is controlled by globally consistent values for the physics of wind, water, and cloud formation.

Now, there certainly may be some other explanation for this amazing stability and symmetry of the climate despite the large differences in the geometry and composition of the two hemispheres. That’s my explanation. If you have a better one … bring it on.

One can only guess what Willis means in his first paragraph above.  He's probably talking about his thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis, but it's pretty well gobbledegook. Especially his bit about "the set-point of that regulation is controlled by globally consistent values for the physics of wind, water, and cloud formation".  Never mind his silly "set point" notion - which is contradicted by paleo records (glacials and interglacials). What about his "Globally consistent values for the physics"? Does he mean that the behaviour of wind, water and cloud formation is consistent with known physics? That's a bit trite, surely.  Or is he trying to say something else. Who knows.

Anyway, I'm not so daft as to try to analyse or even interpret the TOA data from CERES.  One look at the data quality summary and I know I'm quite out of my depth.  It would take me longer than the time I have to start to come to grips with it all.  However, I did take a peek at the charts on the CERES website.  Below, for example, is an animation of the change in TOA net flux (all sky) over a climate year by latitude.

I've got to say there look to be differences between the net flux at different latitudes over the year.  However that's not broken down into longwave and shortwave fluxes.  Even so, if there is a difference then at least one of shortwave or longwave (or incoming solar) must also be different.  You can see the shortwave and longwave variations by latitude here. Click on one of the charts to view month by month as a slide show.

Before I get to Willis' specific question, here are a couple more diagrams, showing the TOA net flux (all sky) on a regional basis. First for February (click to enlarge):

Next for July:

There's another NASA web page that has an animation of the net radiation over the globe from July 2006 to October 2013. It's mesmerising.  As stated on the website, "averaged over the year, there is a net energy surplus at the equator and a net energy deficit at the poles. This equator-versus-pole energy imbalance is the fundamental driver of atmospheric and oceanic circulation."

Here is a chart showing the annual solar insolation over the year by latitude.

The total energy received each day at the top of the atmosphere depends on latitude. The highest daily amounts of incoming energy (pale pink) occur at high latitudes in summer, when days are long, rather than at the equator. In winter, some polar latitudes receive no light at all (black). The Southern Hemisphere receives more energy during December (southern summer) than the Northern Hemisphere does in June (northern summer) because Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle and Earth is slightly closer to the Sun during that part of its orbit. Total energy received ranges from 0 (during polar winter) to about 50 (during polar summer) megajoules per square meter per day.
Source: NASA

The page from which the above diagram came discusses the radiation budget in terms of incoming, reflected and net radiation.  It also uses one of Willis' favourite analogies (which I think he thinks he invented), the heat engine.  It's part of a series of articles at NASA's Earth Observatory website, on the topic of Climate and Earth’s Energy Budget.  It would pay for anyone taken in by Wondering Willis to read it.  Willis might learn something himself, if he chose to.

How Wondering Willis mucked up somewhere

Now back to Willis' question.  He asked why longwave and shortwave are the same for each hemisphere.

I came across a paper by Voigt et al (2013), which says that both hemispheres reflect nearly the same amount of short wave irradiance but that the long wave irradiance is quite different between the two hemispheres.  So it looks as if Willis has done something wrong in his analysis.  He got the shortwave bit right (at least insofar as the two hemispheres are almost identical), but didn't pick up the difference in longwave irradiance.  Here is the abstract from Voigt13, which probably raises more questions than it answers (my paras):

While the concentration of landmasses and atmospheric aerosols on the Northern Hemisphere suggests that the Northern Hemisphere is brighter than the Southern Hemisphere, satellite measurements of top-of-atmosphere irradiances found that both hemispheres reflect nearly the same amount of shortwave irradiance.

Here, the authors document that the most precise and accurate observation, the energy balanced and filled dataset of the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System covering the period 2000–10, measures an absolute hemispheric difference in reflected shortwave irradiance of 0.1 W m−2.

In contrast, the longwave irradiance of the two hemispheres differs by more than 1 W m−2, indicating that the observed climate system exhibits hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance but not in longwave irradiance.

The authors devise a variety of methods to estimate the spatial degrees of freedom of the time-mean reflected shortwave irradiance. These are used to show that the hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance is a nontrivial property of the Earth system in the sense that most partitionings of Earth into two random halves do not exhibit hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance.

Climate models generally do not reproduce the observed hemispheric symmetry, which the authors interpret as further evidence that the symmetry is nontrivial. While the authors cannot rule out that the observed hemispheric symmetry in reflected shortwave irradiance is accidental, their results motivate a search for mechanisms that minimize hemispheric differences in reflected shortwave irradiance and planetary albedo.

Below is Figure 1 from Voigt13 showing the hemispheric difference for the 12 month running mean of reflected short wave and outgoing long wave radiation.  Notice the different y axis on each. (Click to enlarge.)

Voigt, Aiko, Bjorn Stevens, Jürgen Bader, Thorsten Mauritsen, 2013: The Observed Hemispheric Symmetry in Reflected Shortwave Irradiance. J. Climate, 26, 468–477.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00132.1

From the WUWT comments

There are quite a lot of comments. I haven't read them all but so far all but one seem to assume that Willis is correct and there is something "wrong" with the data or there is an explanation for Willis' contention that there is no difference in outgoing longwave or reflected shortwave irradiance between the two hemispheres. (Archived here, latest update here.)

AlecM talks about CO2 as a "working fluid" and says:

January 7, 2014 at 12:04 am
A remarkable study. The explanation s that there is a very stable set of control systems in the atmosphere which use CO2 as the working fluid thus reducing CO2-AGW to near zero.

The other issue is that the ‘forcing’, black body real surface energy flux and ‘back radiation’ ideas in Climate Alchemy are bad physics and must to be junked before the theory can advance.

AndyG55 refers to Willis' notion of a "regulator" of his thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis says:

January 7, 2014 at 1:46 am
Willis, could it be something to do with atmospheric pressure being the regulator?

AndyG55 says earth needs more incoming than outgoing energy for it to function (my bold italics):

January 7, 2014 at 2:04 am
I have to say I would be amazed if there was a balance of zero.

Plant life consumes energy, and the biosphere is growing.

Every movement of any tree or structure by wind causes changes within that tree or structure that are locked there for its life. The whole of Earth is constantly being eroded by energy changes, rocks crack, metals corrode. How much energy is dissipated in a large wave? Where does it go to?

No, here MUST be more energy coming in than going out for the Earth to function.

tty says the opposite to AndyG55, that there's more energy leaving than entering:

January 7, 2014 at 3:09 am
Actually slightly more energy must be going out than coming in, since geothermal heat is continuously being created by radioactivity. There may also be some residual heat from the early stage of planet formation, plus a little bit being liberated by tidal braking of the Earth’s rotation. In all about 0.1 wm-2.

There was someone posting stuff that no-one could follow (me included), which probably prompted this comment by jaffa, who says:

January 7, 2014 at 5:31 am
It’s like I’m stuck inside David Icke’s head.

Ross McKitrick says:

January 7, 2014 at 5:49 am
Willis says: “Now, there certainly may be some other explanation for this amazing stability and symmetry of the climate despite the large differences in the geometry and composition of the two hemispheres. That’s my explanation. If you have a better one … bring it on.”

Shouldn’t be too hard. All anybody has to do is solve the equations of motion of two nonlinear fluid systems coupled on a rotating sphere and subject to differential heating, turbulent mixing, random phase changes, low frequency inputs on unknown time scales and radiative transfer processes across the spectrum. I keep hearing that this is “simple physics”.

Andres Valencia is the only person I've come across in the discussion, who questions Willis' conclusions and says:

January 7, 2014 at 7:18 am
Thanks Willis. Good questions.
Why should the longwave and shortwave in the two hemispheres be the same?
Are they the same?
I’ll keep tuned to your inquire.

Willis Eschenbach himself gets more and more irate with a particular commenter over the course of the discussion, at one point writing (excerpt)

January 7, 2014 at 9:01 am
...EITHER PROVIDE PROOF OF YOUR FALSE CLAIMS, OR STAND CONVICTED OF BEING A HILARIOUSLY CHILDISH LYING SACK OF PORCINE EXCREMENT!
Is that clear enough for you, you libelous scumbag?

w.

That's not very nice, Willis, is it.