The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

• The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
• SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
• A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated.  HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3.  The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4.  More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for the current version HadSST4.1.1.0 is here.   The charts and analysis below is produced from the current data.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through June 2025. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024 and cooling in 2025.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes.  That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period.  A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.

Then in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak.  Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 12 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 8 months from its 1.3C peak in August, down to 0.8C in March and April.  Remarkably, April 2025 SST anomalies in all regions and globally are the coolest since March 2023.  May showed little change in the Global anomaly, while in June declines in SH along with the Tropics mostly offset an upward bump in NH.

Comment:

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures.  It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.  Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:

El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years.  Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on.  Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds.  As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century  It iswell understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.

Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world.   We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example.  So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.

It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well.  One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.

A longer view of SSTs

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations.  Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015.  This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since.  The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies.  Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.

The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.

SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8,  a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12.  Again SSTs are average 2013-14.

Now a different pattern appears.  The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off.  But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average.  In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16.  NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.)  Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021.  In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.

Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year.  Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, following months cooled in all regions, and the Tropics continued cooling in April, May and June along with SH dropping.  After July and August NH warming again pulled the global anomaly higher, September through January 2025 resumed cooling in all regions, continuing February through April 2025, with little change in May and June despite upward bumps in NH.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH.  The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before.  After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

Contemporary AMO Observations

Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future.  So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has current data.  It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic.  “ERSST5 AMO  follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.”  So the values represent SST anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.

The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed.  As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its variability, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin.  Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Then in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before declining.  An annual chart below is informative:

Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years.  2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September.  1998 and 2007 were mildly warm.  2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average.  2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an  extraordinary peak in July.  August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C.

Then in 2024 the AMO anomaly started higher than any previous year, then leveled off for two months declining slightly into April.  Remarkably, May showed an upward leap putting this on a higher track than 2023, and rising slightly higher in June.  In July, August and September 2024 the anomaly declined, and despite a small rise in October, ended close to where it began.  Note 2025 started much lower than the previous year and is headed sharply downward, well below the previous two years, now in May and June aligning with 2010.

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.

The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.17.  The orange line the average 1980-2024, value 0.4, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-2024, value 0.67. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.

Curiosity:  Solar Coincidence?

The news about our current solar cycle 25 is that the solar activity is hitting peak numbers now and higher  than expected 1-2 years in the future.  As livescience put it:  Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun’s chaotic peak be?  Some charts from spaceweatherlive look familar to these sea surface temperature charts.

Summary

The oceans are driving the warming this century.  SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.”  The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect.  The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

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July 17, 2025 at 10:35AM

0 out of 10 based on 0 rating

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July 17, 2025 at 09:54AM

50.21853 -5.17480 Met Office CIMO Assessed CLASS 5 repeat CLASS 5 Installed 30/9/2020

I quote

“Observations from amateur stations and those not part of the Met Office’s official network cannot be considered for entry into the official records as they’re not subject to the same internationally agreed standards that are required for the official records.”

Trevince is one of the Met Office’s official network, it is an amateur site and one so poor it meets no internationally agreed standards because there are no regulatory conditions to be met for a Class 5 site. It is in fact “Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)” for which the requirements are “Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.” in other words no conditions at all – JUNK………..and this was installed less than 5 years ago.

The Met Office openly gives the entire reason for running this site as:

“Personal” located in a “Field sloping gently down to SE”. They seem to be so concerned about the site’s local attributes that they cannot even be bothered to evaluate them by giving their own standard ratings to each category. Everything is blank.

It really does not seem worth me going further with any site evaluation, the Met Office itself rates it as Junk – more a waste of computer memory storage. There are, however, important questions raised by this site. Why is the Met Office being so untruthful? They falsely claim their standards are very high and “professional” when clearly this and and so many more of their sites demonstrate they are nothing more than poor quality back garden amateur sites. There may be the excuse of older legacy sites originally intended for other specific purposes being pressed into use for climate reporting but there is none of that here. This is an almost brand new, unregulated standard offering that is far worse than most genuine amateur sites.

Why the charade that this is somehow “official”. Just like Astwood Bank this is an amateur site run for “personal” reasons i.e. a hobby! The Met Office portrays itself as some high tech organisation – an elite -when the reality is a “barrow boy” outfit cobbling together data that is not worthy of the name. Bear in mind that if this site were to record a highest ever reading it would almost certainly be regarded as a representative site. Trevince is a tourist attraction – what a way to get yourself “on the map!”

Suffice it to say Trevince nor any others of this almost comedic standard will be anywhere near a serious national historic climate reconstruction.

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July 17, 2025 at 09:42AM

By Paul Homewood

The UK Met Office has just published its annual State of the UK Climate report for last year. It reads more like a political pamphlet than a scientific one.

The Press Release sets the tone at the very start:

“Record breaking and extreme weather has become increasingly commonplace in the UK as our climate has changed over the last few decades.

The latest assessment of the UK’s climate shows how baselines are shifting, records are becoming more frequent, and that temperature and rainfall extremes are becoming the norm.”

Most people think of extreme weather as events like the winter of 1963, the Great North Sea Flood, the 1987 Storm or the heavy snowfalls and floods in 1948, not a mild February or sunny day in April.

They say the most noticeable change has been the rise in temperatures, which amounts to about a degree in the last 100 years. There are many possible reasons for this:

a) Natural recovery from Little Ice Age lows

b) Urbanisation

c) Poor siting

d) Cleaner air, resulting from Clean Air Acts

e) Greenhouse gases

But taking the Met Office data at face value, a rise of one degree is much less than the official Met Office projection of a five degree rise by 2100.

It is the latter that is the basis for the whole Net Zero agenda. Who would be prepared to spend a trillion and wreck the economy just to avoid a half a degree temperature rise in the next 50 years?

To put it into perspective, Oxford is about one degree warmer than Birmingham on average. Does that make Oxford’s climate more extreme? Of course not, the whole idea is as absurd as it is unscientific.

The Met Office claims that there has been an increasing frequency and intensity of daily temperature extremes. This is nonsense – while extremely hot days may be more common, these are offset by fewer extremely cold ones. Overall, the frequency of temperature extremes has not changed.

Rainfall

The Met Office also claim that “the UK’s climate has become steadily wetter since the 1980”. However, the 1970s and 80s were unusually dry decades.

Although the UK is currently in a run of wet years, there have been similarly wet periods in the past – the 1870s, 1910s and 1920s, for example.

Similarly, the Met Office claim that rainfall has become more extreme since the 1960s. But the full datasets show no such long-term trends.

Sea Levels

According to the Met Office report, sea level rise around the UK is accelerating, though no actual data is provided to support this claim.

The UK has three long running tidal gauge records – Aberdeen, North Shields and Newlyn. All three show the same pattern – sea levels have been rising no faster in recent years than in the first half of the 20^th century.

A period followed where sea level rise slowed, before returning back to earlier rates. For instance, North Shields:

Storms

Despite the hyping of winter storms by giving them all names, the Met Office report admits:

For the UK overall there are no storms in recent years which compare in severity with exceptional storms in the observations such as the ‘Burns’ Day Storm’ of 25 January 1990, the ‘Boxing Day Storm’ of 26 December 1998 and the ‘Great Storm’ of 16th October 1987.

Weather v Climate

Throughout the report, the Met Office confuse WEATHER and CLIMATE. Individual weather events are presented as evidence of a changing climate.

A good example is winter rainfall, which is said to have been increasing in the last decade or two.

The report includes a section on the North Atlantic Oscillation index (NAO), which is explained as follows:

This index is a measure of the large-scale surface pressure gradient in the North Atlantic between Gibraltar and Iceland, which determines the strength of westerly winds across the Atlantic, and is the principal mode of spatial variability of atmospheric patterns in this region. When the pressure difference is large, the WNAO is positive and westerly winds dominate with stronger and more frequent storms. When the pressure difference is small, the WNAO is negative with an increased tendency for blocked weather patterns, reducing the influence of Atlantic weather systems. The WNAO index is therefore associated with winters which are either mild and wet or cold and dry.

In recent years, the NAO has been strongly positive, just as it was in those equally wet years in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The NAO is a natural meteorological phenomenon, and clearly its switching to positive mode in the last decade must explain much of the recent increase in winter rainfall. Yet the Met Office ignore this fact and instead put the blame on climate change.

The whole report is 68 pages long, which I doubt anybody will bother to read.

The real intention was to publish a Press Release with scary, apocalyptic soundbites for the media to propagate.

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July 17, 2025 at 08:14AM