Other than the following maps, this post presents the weekly and monthly satellite-era sea surface temperature anomalies for the hurricane development regions—plus the extratropical waters off the east coast of the U.S. We’re including the extratropical waters off the east coast of the U.S. because it was part of Sandy’s storm track last year and people are interested in it. For additional discussions of the sea surface temperatures and anomalies of Sandy’s storm track, refer to the blog posts here and here.
For illustrations and discussions of the longer-term data, including the lack of a warming trend in the sea surface temperatures of the Main Development Region from 1930 to 1995, refer to this year’s first post on this subject here.
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The first illustration is an animation of sea surface temperature (not anomaly) maps. One map presents the sea surface temperatures for the week centered on July 10, 2013. The other presents the climatology for the same week, which is based on the average sea surface temperatures for that week during the period of 1971-2000. To determine the anomalies for July 10, 2013, the 30-year average (the climatology) is subtracted from the observed values for the past week.
North Atlantic SST Animation
I presented the sea surface temperature maps for two reasons: First, to show that the sea surface temperatures for much of the Main Development Region (10N-20N, 80W-20), for much of the extratropical U.S. east coast waters (24N-40N, 80W-70W), for the Caribbean (10N-20N, 84W-60W) and for the Gulf of Mexico (21N-31N, 98W-81W) are above 26 deg C, which is considered the threshold for tropical storm development. Refer to the discussion here. The second reason: to show that the sea surface temperatures in those regions are not unusually warm. And we’ll confirm that with the following graphs.
WEEKLY DATA
The following four graphs of weekly sea surface temperature anomalies since January 1990 also include horizontal lines in red depicting the July 10, 2013 values. Of the four regions presented in Figures 1 to 4, the Main Development Region had the highest sea surface temperature anomaly of +0.24 deg C last week, but that is not unusual there. At the other end of the spectrum, the sea surface temperature anomalies for the Gulf of Mexico were below the 1971-2000 average—and that also isn’t unusually cool.
Figure 1
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Figure 2
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Figure 3
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Figure 4
MONTHLY DATA
While we should be interested in the most recent values (the weekly data), there are likely some readers interested in the monthly data for those four regions, so I’ve presented them in Figures 5 through 8.
Figure 5
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Figure 6
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Figure 7
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Figure 8
CLOSING
The sea surface temperatures for most of the hurricane development regions are above the temperatures required for tropical storm development, but they are not unusually warm.
Also, there is nothing in the ocean heat content records or satellite-era sea surface temperature data to indicate greenhouse gases were responsible for their warming. That is, the data indicate the oceans warmed naturally. If that topic is new to you, refer to the illustrated essay “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge” [42MB].
SOURCES
The Sea Surface Temperature anomaly data used in this post is available through the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh
or: