Tuesday Links

• Nick Barnes and colleagues and contributors are off to what looks like a great start with a new open source version of GISTEMP.

• Jeffrey Park from Yale examines the relationship between temperature and CO2 at interannual time scales in Geophysical Research Letters.

Since 1979, at Mauna Loa and other observation sites, interannual coherence exhibits a 90° phase lag that suggests a direct correlation between temperatures and the time-derivative of CO₂. The coherence transition can be explained if the response time of CO₂ to a global temperature fluctuation has lengthened from 6 months to at least 15 months. A longer response time may reflect saturation of the oceanic carbon sink, but a transient shift in ocean circulation may play a role.

• Naomi Levin and colleagues find a possible source for the high stable isotope values of rainfall in Ethiopia in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The combination of wind direction data from Ethiopia and _e distribution in Africa indicates that transpired moisture from the Sudd and the Congo Basin is likely responsible for the high isotopic values of rainfall in Ethiopia.

• Andrew Dessler and Sun Wong on ‘Estimates of the Water Vapor Climate Feedback during El Niño–Southern Oscillation‘ in Journal of Climate.