Roy W. Spencer

Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D., is Principal Research Scientist in Climatology in the University of Alabama’s National Space Science & Technology Center. When he worked at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, he and Dr. John Christy, who heads the NSSTC, jointly received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. He is a Senior Fellow of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

The Urban Heat Island Effect in GHCN Station Temperatures: Urban Locations Show Large Spurious Warming Effects

It has been a while since I have posted progress on our DOE-funded research into the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in the GHCN station temperatures used to monitor land-based global warming. It should be remembered that everything I post on this subject is (as is usually the case) a work in progress. What I […]

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Climate Fearmongering Reaches Stratospheric Heights

A new paper by Santer et al., provocatively entitled “Exceptional stratospheric contribution to human fingerprints on atmospheric temperature,” goes where no serious climate scientist should go: it has conflated stratospheric cooling with global warming. The paper starts out summarizing the supposed importance of their work, which is worth quoting in its entirety (bold emphasis added):

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Epic Fail in America’s Heartland: Climate Models Greatly Overestimate Corn Belt Warming

For the last decade, I’ve been providing long-range U.S. Corn Belt forecasts to a company that monitors and forecasts global grain production and market forces. My continuing theme has been, “don’t believe gloom and doom forecasts for the future of the U.S. Corn Belt.” The climate models relied upon by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel

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UAH Global Temperature Update for November, 2022: +0.17 deg. C

Sorry for the late posting of the global temperature update, I’ve been busy responding to reviewers of one of our papers for publication. The Version 6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for November 2022 was +0.17 deg. C departure from the 1991-2020 mean. This is down from the October anomaly of +0.32 deg.

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Canadian Summer Urban Heat Island Effects: Some Results in Alberta

Summary Comparison of rural with urban temperature monitoring sites across Canada during the summers of 1978-2022 shows the expected average nighttime warm bias in urban areas, with a weaker daytime effect. When applied to the Landsat imagery-based diagnoses of increased urbanization over time, 20% of the temperature trends in a small region encompassing Calgary and

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50-Year U.S. Summer Temperature Trends: ALL 36 Climate Models Are Too Warm

I’ll get right to the results, which are pretty straightforward. As seen in the accompanying plot, 50-year (1973-2022) summer (June/July/August) temperature trends for the contiguous 48 U.S. states from 36 CMIP-6 climate model experiments average nearly twice the warming rate as observed by the NOAA climate division dataset. The 36 models are those cataloged at

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De-Urbanization of Surface Temperatures with the Landsat-Based “Built-Up” Dataset

A relatively new global dataset of urbanization changes over the 40-year period 1975-2014 based upon Landsat data is used to determine the average effect urbanization has had on surface temperatures. A method is presented to compute the magnitude of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect on temperatures using the example of summertime 09 UTC (early morning) Integrated

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