Bart said
‘The oceans are vast and have room to contain many truths.’
Yes, surely that is so. Having spent quite a few hours in my rowing boat over several months on the ocean 200 yards from my house taking SST samples in connection with my article on SST’s here, and the resulting conversation with Dr John Kennedy of the Met office,
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/27/unknown-and-uncertain-sea-surface-temperatures/
it is apparent that at these latitudes (south coast of Britain)
1 The sea is warmer than the air during the winter for some of the time. A couple of weeks ago the air was 10C warmer than the ocean, two weeks prior to that the air was 10C cooler.The ocean temperature itself of course during the winter changed very little but the air did.
2 The sea will warm from around 8C in a normal winter to around 16/17C in a normal summer. Both will vary by a couple of degrees in more extreme seasons.
3 The top few metres of water is very poorly mixed with distinct bands of warm/cold water adjacent to each other on the surface and at vertical bands
4 Sea surface temperatures will warm very rapidly in warm sunshine and drop several degrees overnight at the shoulder months, but less so at night in the summer when nights are warmer
5 The number of times when the air and surface water temperatures are the same is limited.
6 Putting water in a bucket to measure it -as practised for 100 years- is daft unless there are substantial safeguards.Water in a bucket will rise in temperature very rapidly in left in the sun and cool if left in the shade (if the water ambient was higher than the shade ambient. As a result bucket temperatures for much of the year shoud be taken within a few seconds of the sample being taken.
7 One patch of water can be at a substantially different temp to another immediately adjacent. Depth makes a huge difference to water temperature. Mixing is best in stormy weather
My observations were practical and not scientific but did have some general validity.It is difficult to see the value of an ‘average’ global temperature especially historic ones.
tonyb