el Niño and Satellite Data

Having compensated surface temperature data for el Niño, volcanic aerosols, and solar fluctuations, it’s appropriate I should do the same for satellite temperature data. After all, upper atmosphere temperature (what the satellites estimate) responds to these factors much more strongly than the surface temperature, so it can be argued that it’s more important to compensate satellite data than surface data. Not doing so can cause some very misleading conclusions about temperature trends.

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Correcting for more than just el Niño

I recently showed a version of “el Niño-Corrected” temperature from Gavin Schmidt at NASA. My own calculation suggested that el Niño caused about the same contribution to 2015’s heat as Gavin’s estimate. However, there are some pronounced differences between our calculations.