Monday, February 25, 2013

南極の氷から推定された気温と塵の量の関係

The other day, there was a small news in Japan. The news was saying the number of days Mt. Fuji was visible(observable) from a university was increasing.
http://www.seikei.ac.jp/obs/pwork/fuji_j.htm
http://www.seikei.ac.jp/obs/pwork/image/visible.gif
This was surprising to me since seeing Mt.Fuji was a kind of a luckey event when I was a child.

At the same time, it reminded that the temperature in Japan had been getting higher and higher, year by year. "Could dust have any relation to the higher temperature, here ?" I know TV and news papers were reporting about the global warming, which is one of our concerns, though I'm not sure what really is causing it. Today, I just googled temperature and dust and I visited a site http://www.climatedata.info . I found 2 impressive pictures.

The first one is a picture that shows the relationship between estimated temperature and CO2 concentration.
http://www.climatedata.info/Proxy/Proxy/icecores_files/BIGw03-epica-temperature-and-co2.gif.gif

The other is a picture that shows the relationship between estimated temperature and airborne dust.
http://www.climatedata.info/Impacts/Impacts/dust_files/BIGdust_-_epica.gif.gif

Yap, it shed a light in my mind. This type of graph is ...

I downloaded the data for airborne dust from the site and made a new graph. Next picture shows a relationship between estimated temperature and the inverse of airborne dust, actually 50/(amount of dust), for 800 thousands years. Pink line is the calculated inversed airborne dust and dark blue is the estimated raw temperature.

Temperature (Blue) v.s. Inverse of Dust (Pink)
( 気温 v.s. 塵の量の逆数 )

It's interesting, isn't it ?
Yes, but still could be improved. I tried manual fitting using the Excel's log function. Here is the result.

Temperature v.s. Log inverse of Dust
気温 v.s. 塵の量の逆数の対数

The relationship between temperature and airborne dust can be written as
\[ Temperature \sim \log\left( \frac{14}{Dust} \right)^5 \]

It's really unbelievable to me.
How can the inverse of airborne dust fit to the temperature ? What can cause the dust behave like this ?
CO2 ?
That would be much more unbelievable to me.



*Notes after the writes
I noticed this site's analysis is earlier and better.http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/21/a-biologists-perspective-on-ice-ages-and-climate-sensitivity-part-i/

Furthermore, Nature letter had been published on 3 April 2008 (Vol 452) with other fitting formulas,
"Dust-climate couplings over the past 800,000 years from the EPICA Dome C ice core"
doi:10.1038/nature06763



I found another interesting chart.
Red: temperature
dark blue: CO2
light blue: methane