Satellites Confirm Antarctic Is Getting Colder

By Paul Homewood

 

We looked yesterday at evidence which suggested that surface temperatures had been dropping in the Antarctic in recent decades.

I thought I would also have a look at what the satellites were telling us about atmospheric temperatures. Below is a plot of the monthly UAH temperature anomalies for the lower troposphere. They label it as “South Pole”, but the actual coverage is 60S to 85S.

 

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt

 

The red line is the trend (not the mean). The decline is small, but just visible, working out at around 0.2C/century.

Of course, atmospheric temperatures are not the same as surface ones. Nevertheless, over long periods there is usually a pretty good correlation between the two. Furthermore, models predict that warming in the troposphere should be 1.2 times that on the surface.