Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I have put forth the idea for some time now that one of the main climate thermoregulatory mechanisms is a temperature-controlled sharp increase in albedo in the tropical regions. I have explained that this occurs in a stepwise fashion when cumulus clouds first emerge, and that the albedo is further increased when some of the cumulus clouds evolve into thunderstorms.

I’ve demonstrated this with actual observations in a couple of ways. I first showed it by means of average photographs of the “view from the sun” here. I’ve also shown this occurring on a daily basis in the TAO data. So I thought, I should look in the CERES data for evidence of this putative phenomenon that I claim occurs, whereby the albedo is actively controlling the thermal input to the climate system.

Mostly, this thermoregulation appears to be happening over the ocean. And I generally dislike averages, I avoid them when I can. So … I had the idea of making a scatterplot of the total amount of reflected solar energy, versus the sea surface temperature, on a gridcell-by-gridcell basis. No averaging required. I thought well, if I’m correct, I should see the increased reflection of solar energy required by my hypothesis in the scatterplots. Figure 1 shows those results for four individual months in one meteorological year. (The year-to-year variations are surprisingly small, so these months are quite representative.)

Figure 1. Scatterplots showing the relationship between sea surface temperature (horizontal axis, in °C) and total energy reflected by each gridcell (in terawatts). I have used this measurement in preference to watts/square metre because each point on the scatterplot represents a different area. This approach effectively area-averages the data. Colors indicate latitude of the gridcell. Light gray is south pole, shading to black at the equator. Blue is north pole, shading to red at the equator. Click to enlarge

So … what are we looking at here, and what does it mean?

This analysis uses a one-degree by one-degree gridcell size. So each month of data contains 180 rows (latitude) by 360 rows (longitude) of data. Each point in each graph above is one gridcell.That’s 64,800 data points in each of the graphs. Each point is located on the horizontal axis by its temperature, and on the vertical axis by the total energy reflected from that gridcell.

The main feature I want to highlight is what happens when the ocean gets warm. From about 20°C to maybe 26°C, the amount of solar energy reflected by the system is generally dropping. You can see it most clearly in Figure 1’s March and September panels. But from about 26° up to the general oceanic maximum of just above 30°C, the amount of solar energy that is reflected goes through the roof. Reflected energy more than doubles in that short interval.

Note that as the ocean warms, the total energy being reflected first drops, and then reverses direction and increases. This will tend to keep ocean temperatures constant—decreasing reflections allow more energy in. But only up to a certain temperature. Above that temperature, the system rapidly increases the amount reflected to cut down any further warming.

Overall, I’d say that this is some of the strongest evidence that my proposed thermoregulatory system exists. Not only does it exist, but it appears to be a main mechanism governing the total amount of energy that enters the climate system.

It’s very late … my best regards to everyone, hasta luego …

w.

[UPDATE] A commenter asked that I show the northern and southern hemispheres separately. Here is the Southern Hemisphere

And the Northern. The vertical lines are at 30.75°C, nothing magical about that number, I wanted to see the temperature shift over the year and that worked.

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