The Great American Eclipse of Monday, August 21, 2017 will be one of only a couple of chances for many Americans to experience a total solar eclipse. This is the first coast-to-coast total eclipse since 1918. The last total eclipse visible from any point in the contiguous U.S. was 38 years ago, in 1979. Your next chance will be April 8, 2024.

A total solar eclipse at mid-day will be amazing. If you are in the path of totality, some of the brighter stars and planets will appear. The temperature can fall rapidly.

The following map, provided by greatamericaneclipse.com, has a wealth of information regarding how much of the sun will be covered, at what time, and how long totality will last:

While a partial eclipse will be experienced everywhere in the U.S., where you will want to be is in the narrow (~70 mile wide) path of “totality”, there the moon completely covers the sun. If the skies are partly clear, some of the brighter stars will appear as well as a couple of planets. Totality will last for as long as 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

As long as you are within about 25 miles of the center of the path, you will experience the better part of that maximum time of totality. So (for example), even though Nashville, TN will be 25 miles from the centerline, it will still experience 2 minutes of total solar eclipse.

Safety First!

Since the August 21 eclipse will occur when the sun is high in the sky, it WILL NOT BE SAFE to view it with the naked eyes at any time until totality occurs (the moon completely covers the sun). Until that time, you will need a pair of solar viewing glasses, which are MUCH darker than sunglasses. Do NOT attempt to view the sun with sunglasses, you will permanently damage your eyes. Just before totality, there will be a tiny sliver of bright sunlight…do NOT be tempted to look at it. Solar viewing glasses (and even solar viewing binoculars) might well sell out early, so get them soon.

Will It Be Cloudy?

Climatologically, certain parts of the country will have a greater chance of seeing the eclipse than others. Eclipse2017.org has those probabilities.

But, as a meteorologist I can tell you that weather — not climate — will determine whether you have mostly clear skies or are under a thick thunderstorm anvil.

The following MODIS satellite imagery for mid-day on 21 August 2015 shows that your success will depend heavily upon just what kind of weather systems are occurring and where.

It could be that one of the climatologically best locations (say, north-central Oregon) will be completely cloud covered (as it was on 21 August 2015), while one of the worst places (the Smokey Mountains) will have mostly clear skies if a cool front recently passed by. There is no way to know more than a few days in advance. Thunderstorm anvils blowing off large thunderstorm complexes will likely ruin the experience for many people. This is why I won’t decide where I will go until 1-2 days before the eclipse. I’d love to be in Teton Village for the event, but not if it’s cloudy.

Here in the southeast U.S. in August, even a mostly sunny day will have “popcorn” cumulus clouds that develop by mid-day. One option I’m considering (if that’s the weather forecast) is to go to one of the large reservoirs which tend to stay clear under such condtions, for example Kentucky Lake east of Paducah, or Watts Bar Lake in eastern Tennessee.

But even if you are stuck under the clouds, it is still worth experiencing being in the path of totality. It’s going to get really, really dark in the middle of the day.

To Travel or Not to Travel?

If you live farther than about 6 hours away from the path of totality, and can’t drive there the morning of the eclipse, your other option is to get within 100-200 miles of the path of totality and stay in a hotel the night before, then drive the rest of the way in the morning. Hotels in the path of totality have all been sold out for about a year or so.

I was originally considering going to downtown Nashville, but I’ve heard that hundreds of thousands of people might converge on some of the metro areas, and there could be gridlock. So, I’m still conflicted about whether to go metro or rural.

How to Record the Event?

For most people, just experiencing the event will be magical. Being with a large group of people will raise the excitement level (although if you are easily annoyed by a few overly-excited voices, you might want to avoid crowds).

Now that most people have smartphones, taking some video of the event will be the easiest way to capture the moment. There will be lots of great photos of the sun itself after the event, and they will all look about the same. So, capture the scenery and the reactions of people in cell phone video, instead.

For those of us with heavy-duty photo equipment, we have a number of choices, none of which are easy. Video or stills? If video, real-time or time lapse? Wide-angle landscape shots or zoom in on the sun (with solar filters if not during totality)? I haven’t decided yet. I will probably have one camera on a tripod doing wide-angle video with the sun near the top of the frame, and another camera with a 200-300mm focal length lens taking bracketed exposures of the solar corona over the ~2 minutes of totality, which is what went into the spectacular composite photo at the start of this article.

No matter where we choose to go, happy eclipse hunting, everyone…lets hope for blue skies for as many people as possible!

2017 Eclipse Websites

GreatAmericanEclipse.com

Eclipse2017.org

Space.com

Eclipse2017.nasa.gov

SkyandTelescope.com

It was inevitable that the new RSS mid-tropospheric (MT) temperature dataset, which showed more warming than the previous version, would be followed with a new lower-tropospheric (LT) dataset. (Carl Mears has posted a useful FAQ on the new dataset, how it differs from the old, and why they made adjustments).

Before I go into the details, let’s keep all of this in perspective. Our globally-averaged trend is now about +0.12 C/decade, while the new RSS trend has increased to about +0.17 C/decade.

Note these trends are still well below the average climate model trend for LT, which is +0.27 C/decade.

These are the important numbers; the original Carbon Brief article headline (“Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998”) is seriously misleading, because the warming in the RSS LT data post-1998 was near-zero anyway (140% more than a very small number is still a very small number).

Since RSS’s new MT dataset showed more warming that the old, it made sense that the new LT dataset would show more warming, too. Both depend on the same instrument channel (MSU channel 2 and AMSU channel 5), and to the extent that the new diurnal drift corrections RSS came up with caused more warming in MT, the adjustments should be even larger in LT, since the diurnal cycle becomes stronger as you approach the surface (at least over land).

Background on Diurnal Drift Adjustments

All of the satellites carrying the MSU and AMSU instruments (except Aqua, Metop-A and Metop-B) do not have onboard propulsion, and so their orbits decay over the years due to very weak atmospheric drag. The satellites slowly fall, and their orbits are then no longer sun-synchronous (same local observation time every day) as intended. Some of the NOAA satellites were purposely injected into orbits that would drift one way in local observation time before orbit decay took over and made them drift in the other direction; this provided several years with essentially no net drift in the local observation time.

Since there is a day-night temperature cycle (even in the deep-troposphere the satellite measures) the drift of the satellite local observation time causes a spurious drift in observed temperature over the years (the diurnal cycle becomes “aliased” into the long-term temperature trends). The spurious temperature drift varies seasonally, latitudinally, and regionally (depending upon terrain altitude, available surface moisture, and vegetation).

Because climate models are known to not represent the diurnal cycle to the accuracy needed for satellite adjustments, we decided long ago to measure the drift empirically, by comparing drifting satellites with concurrently operating non-drifting (or nearly non-drifting) satellites. Our Version 6 paper discusses the details.

RSS instead decided to use climate model estimates of the diurnal cycle, and in RSS Version 4 are now making empirical corrections to those model-based diurnal cycles. (Generally speaking, we think it is useful for different groups to use different methods.)

Diurnal Drift Effects in the RSS Dataset

We have long known that there were differences in the resulting diurnal drift adjustments in the RSS versus our UAH dataset. We believed that the corrections in the older RSS Version 3.3 datasets were “overdone”, generating more warming than UAH prior to 2002 but less than UAH after 2002 (some satellites drift one way in the diurnal cycle, other satellites drift in the opposite direction). This is why the skeptical community liked to follow the RSS dataset more than ours, since UAH showed at least some warming post-1997, while RSS showed essentially no warming (the “pause”).

The new RSS V4 adjustment alters the V3.3 adjustment, and now warms the post-2002 period, but does not diminish the extra warming in the pre-2002 period. Hence the entire V4 time series shows more warming than before.

Examination of a geographic distribution of their trends shows some elevation effects, e.g. around the Andes in S. America (You have to click on the image to see V4 compared to V3.3…the static view below might be V3.3 if you don’t click it).

We also discovered this and, as discussed in our V6 paper, attributed it to errors in the oxygen absorption theory used to match the MSU channel 2 weighting function with the AMSU channel 5 weighting function, which are at somewhat different altitudes when viewing at the same Earth incidence angle (AMSU5 has more surface influence than MSU2). Using existing radiative transfer theory alone to adjust AMSU5 to match MSU2 (as RSS does) leads to AMSU5 still being too close to the surface. This affects the diurnal drift adjustment, and especially the transition between MSU and AMSU in the 1999-2004 period. The mis-match also can cause dry areas to have too much warming in the AMSU era, and in general will cause land areas to warm spuriously faster than ocean areas.

Here are our UAH LT gridpoint trends (sorry for the different map projection):

In general, it is difficult for us to follow the chain of diurnal corrections in the new RSS paper. Using a climate model to make the diurnal drift adjustments, but then adjusting those adjustments with empirical satellite data feels somewhat convoluted to us.

Final Comments

Besides the differences in diurnal drift adjustments, the other major difference affecting trends is the treatment off the NOAA-14 MSU, last in the MSU series. There is clear drift in the difference between the new NOAA-15 AMSU and the old NOAA-14 MSU, with NOAA-14 warming relative to NOAA-15. We assume that NOAA-14 is to blame, and remove its trend difference with NOAA-15 (we only use it through 2001) and also adjust NOAA-14 to match NOAA-12 (early in the NOAA-14 record). RSS does not assume one satellite is better than the other, and uses NOAA-14 all the way through 2004, by which point it shows a large trend difference with NOAA-15 AMSU. We believe this is a large component of the overall trend difference between UAH and RSS, but we aren’t sure just how much compared to the diurnal drift adjustment differences.

It should be kept in mind that the new UAH V6 dataset for LT uses three channels, while RSS still uses multiple view angles from one channel (a technique we originally developed, and RSS followed). As a result, our new LT weighting function is a little higher in the atmosphere, with considerably more weight in the upper troposphere and slightly more weight in the lower stratosphere. Based upon radiosonde temperature trend profiles, we found the net effect on the difference between the two LT weighting functions on temperature trends to be very small, probably 0.01 C/decade or less.

We have a paper in peer review with extensive satellite dataset comparisons to many balloon datasets and reanalyses. These show that RSS diverges from these and from UAH, showing more warming than the other datasets between 1990 and 2002 – a key period with two older MSU sensors both of which showed signs of spurious warming not yet addressed by RSS. I suspect the next chapter in this saga is that the remaining radiosonde datasets that still do not show substantial warming will be the next to be “adjusted” upward.

The bottom line is that we still trust our methodology. But no satellite dataset is perfect, there are uncertainties in all of the adjustments, as well as legitimate differences of opinion regarding how they should be handled.

Also, as mentioned at the outset, both RSS and UAH lower tropospheric trends are considerably below the average trends from the climate models.

And that is the most important point to be made.

There is much internet buzzing about “snow” in Kenya yesterday, and its connection to climate change.

Here’s what the event looked like on a road near Nyahururu, Kenya, which is on a plateau around 7,800 ft. elevation, and is positioned right on the equator:

If you click to get the full-size photo, you will notice that the ditch is running with water, and there is fog just above the ice. This means there was heavy rain with the event, and that the air is relatively warm and humid, and the ice on the ground is cooling the air to below the dewpoint, causing the fog.

This was a hailstorm, not “snow”.

Here’s what the area looked like from the MODIS instrument on a NASA satellite:

Those are thunderstorm clouds, not snow-producing clouds. Mountain hikers are familiar with summer storms producing small hail.

The GFS weather forecast model fields for yesterday showed that there was no cold air mass intrusion from high latitudes. The air mass temperature was near normal. At this latitude, you would have to go up to around 18,000 ft altitude to experience actual “snow”, which sometimes falls on the summit of Mt. Kenya (~17,000 ft.), and frequently on Kilimanjaro (~19,000 ft.)

I can understand when pop-scientists like Bill Nye spout scientific silliness.

But complete nonsense coming from Stephen Hawking? Really?

In this video, Stephen Hawking claims that Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Accord could lead to the Earth being pushed past a tipping point, with Venus-like 250 deg. C temperatures and sulfuric acid rain.

The trouble with this statement is that no reputable climate scientist would claim such a thing. The reason is that Venus has about 220,000 times as much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as does Earth.

Meanwhile, human civilization will have trouble simply doubling (2x) our atmospheric CO2 concentration (it’s taken about 100 years to increase it by 50%, which is half way to doubling).

Since we don’t know what our future energy mix will be in 50-100 years, it’s not obvious we will even reach “2XCO2”.

So, how could we possibly get from 2x to 220,000x?

We can’t.

Impossible.

Not even if we wanted to.

Venus is a very different planet. Venus has 93x as much atmosphere as Earth, and it is almost 100% CO2. The CO2 concentration in our comparatively thin atmosphere is only 0.04%.

I have no idea where Hawking ever got such a wild idea. Apparently, he had his audience in tears with his dire predictions.

This is partly why the public makes fun of scientists. Sad.

Lowest global temperature anomaly in last 2 years (since July, 2015)

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for June, 2017 was +0.21 deg. C, down from the May, 2017 value of +0.44 deg. C (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 18 months are:

YEAR MO GLOBE NHEM. SHEM. TROPICS
2016 01 +0.55 +0.73 +0.38 +0.84
2016 02 +0.86 +1.19 +0.52 +0.99
2016 03 +0.76 +0.99 +0.54 +1.10
2016 04 +0.72 +0.86 +0.58 +0.93
2016 05 +0.53 +0.61 +0.45 +0.71
2016 06 +0.32 +0.47 +0.17 +0.38
2016 07 +0.37 +0.43 +0.30 +0.48
2016 08 +0.43 +0.53 +0.32 +0.50
2016 09 +0.45 +0.50 +0.39 +0.38
2016 10 +0.42 +0.42 +0.41 +0.46
2016 11 +0.46 +0.43 +0.49 +0.36
2016 12 +0.26 +0.26 +0.27 +0.23
2017 01 +0.33 +0.32 +0.33 +0.09
2017 02 +0.39 +0.58 +0.19 +0.07
2017 03 +0.23 +0.37 +0.09 +0.06
2017 04 +0.27 +0.29 +0.26 +0.22
2017 05 +0.44 +0.39 +0.49 +0.41
2017 06 +0.21 +0.32 +0.09 +0.39

NOTE: We have added the Metop-B satellite to the processing stream, with data since mid-2013. The Metop-B satellite has its orbit actively maintained, so the AMSU data from it does not require corrections from orbit decay or diurnal drift. As a result of adding this satellite, most of the monthly anomalies since mid-2013 have changed, by typically a few hundredths of a degree C. The 1979-2017 linear trend remains at +0.12 C/decade.

The UAH LT global anomaly image for June, 2017 should be available in the next few days here.

The new Version 6 files should also be updated in the coming days, and are located here:

Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txt

Yesterday, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) sent a letter to DOE Secretary Rick Perry, scolding him for the following opinion he uttered in a CNBC interview on June 19.

Quoting from a Washington Post article:

Asked in an interview on CNBCs “Squawk Box” whether he believed that carbon dioxide was “the primary control knob for the temperature of the Earth and for climate”, Perry said that “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.” Perry added that “the fact is this shouldn’t be a debate about, ‘Is the climate changing, is man having an effect on it?’ Yeah, we are. The question should be just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that?”

(Most of the headlines I’ve seen on the CNBC interview, including the WaPo piece, refer to Perry with the usual “denier” terms.)

Basically, Perry is saying he believes that nature has a larger role than humans in recent warming. I, too, believe that the oceans might well be a primary driver of climate change, but whether the human/nature ratio is 50/50, or less, or more than that is up for debate. We simply don’t know.

So, while Sec. Perry goes against the supposed consensus of scientists, it was not outlandish, it wasn’t a denial of a known fact.

It was a valid opinion on an uncertain area of science.

AMS, me thinks thou doth protest too much

In response to Sec. Perry’s comments, the Executive Director of the AMS, Keith Seitter, said this in his letter to Perry (emphasis added):

While you acknowledged that the climate is changing and that humans are having an impact on it, it is critically important that you understand that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the primary cause. This is a conclusion based on the comprehensive assessment of scientific evidence. It is based on multiple independent lines of evidence that have been affirmed by thousands of independent scientists and numerous scientific institutions around the world. We are not familiar with any scientific institution with relevant subject matter expertise that has reached a different conclusion. These indisputable findings have shaped our current AMS Statement on Climate Change, which states: “It is clear from extensive scientific evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and nitrous oxide.”

Indisputable findings? Really? In my opinion, the AMS view (which draws upon the U.N. IPCC view) is much more definitively stated than the evidence warrants.

Sure, all of the scientific institutions are going to jump on the bandwagon, with politically savvy committees agreeing with each other; they are in effect being paid by the government to agree with the consensus through billions of dollars in grants and contracts.

If there is no global warming crisis, there would be little congressional funding to study it, and thousands of climate-dependent careers (including mine) simply wouldn’t exist.

That money also trickles down to the AMS, which is paid to hold scientific conferences, workshops, and publish the resulting research studies in scientific journals. They have a vested interest in the gravy train continuing.

So, maybe I can ask the AMS: Just what percentage of recent warming was natural in origin? None? 10%? 40%? How do you know? Why was the pre-1940 warming rate — caused by Mother Nature — almost as strong as recent warming?

The truth is, no one knows just how much of recent warming was human-caused, including those thousands of “independent” scientists. They pin the blame on CO2 partly because that’s all they can think of, and we still don’t understand natural sources of climate change.

Besides, in the climate business, there are no thousands of independent scientists, anyway. They live and work in an echo chamber, and very few of them have the breadth and depth of knowledge to make an informed judgement on the issue. The vast majority are specialists in some narrow field of research. They go along to get along… and to continue to get funding.

Young climate researchers today cannot voice any doubts about anthropogenic global warming, or they might not have a career. They can’t go to Big Energy for research funding because, as far as I know, such funding does not exist. Big Energy knows they don’t have to pay people to prop up petroleum, natural gas, and coal, because the world runs on the stuff, and for the foreseeable future there are no large-scale, cost-effective, reliable, and readily dispatchable alternatives.

What we DO know with considerable confidence is that increasing CO2 should cause some warming. I’ll admit that my opinion here is mostly based upon a theoretical extrapolation from laboratory measurements of how CO2 absorbs and emits infrared energy. But we really don’t know how much warming. We certainly do not have enough confidence to claim it is indisputable that our greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause, as the AMS letter claims.

I am ashamed that the climate research community allows such pronouncements to be made. The AMS became a global warming advocacy group many years ago, and as a result it lost a lot of established members, including myself.

Now that the idea of a global warming Red Team approach to help determine what our energy policy should be is gaining traction, it is important that we understand what that means to some of us who have been advocating it for over 10 years — and also what it doesn’t mean.

The Red Team approach has been used for many years in private industry, DoD, and the intelligence community to examine very costly decisions and programs in a purposely adversarial way…to ask, what if we are wrong about a certain program or policy change? What might the unintended consequences be?

In such a discussion we must make sure that we do not conflate the consensus on a scientific theory with the need to change energy policy, as is often done. (Just because we know that car wrecks in the U.S. cause 40,000 deaths a year doesn’t mean we should outlaw cars; and I doubt human-caused climate change has ever killed anyone).

While science can help guide policy, it certainly does not dictate it.

In the case of global warming and the role of our carbon dioxide emissions, the debate has too long been dominated by a myopic view that asserts the following 5 general points as indisputable. I have ordered them generally from scientific to economic.

1) global warming is occurring, will continue to occur, and will have dangerous consequences

2) the warming is mostly, if not totally, caused by our CO2 emissions

3) there are no benefits to our CO2 emissions, either direct (biological) or indirect (economic)

4) we can reduce our CO2 emissions to a level that we avoid a substantial amount of the expected damage

5) the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is low enough to make it worthwhile (e.g. mandating much more wind, solar, etc.)

ALL of these 5 points must be essentially true for things like the Paris Agreement (which President Trump has now withdrawn us from…for the time being) to make much sense.

But I would argue that each of the five points can be challenged, and not just with “fake science”. There is peer-reviewed and published analysis in science and economics that would allow one to contest each one of the five claims.

The Red Team Approach: It’s NOT a Redo of the Blue Team

John Christy and I are concerned that the Red Team approach, if applied to global warming, will simply be a review of the U.N. IPCC science on global warming. We are worried that it will only address the first two points (warming will continue, and it is mostly caused by CO2). Heck, even *I* believe we will continue to see modest warming, and that it might well be at least 50% due to CO2.

But a Red Team reaffirming those points does NOT mean we should “do something” about global warming.

To fully address whether we should, say, have regulations to reduce CO2 emissions, the Red Team must address all 5 of the “consensus” claims listed above, because that is the only way to determine if we should change energy policy in a direction different from that which the free market would carry it naturally.

The Red Team MUST address the benefits of more CO2 to global agriculture, “global greening” etc.

The Red Team MUST address whether forced reductions in CO2 emissions will cause even a measurable effect on global temperatures.

The Red Team MUST address whether the reduction in prosperity and increase in energy poverty are permissible consequences of forced emissions reductions to achieve (potentially unmeasurable) results.

The membership of the Red Team will basically determine the Team’s conclusions. It must be made up of adversaries to the Blue Team “consensus”, which has basically been the U.N. IPCC. If it is not adversarial in membership and in mission, it will not be a real Red Team.

As a result, the Red Team must not be allowed to be controlled by the usual IPCC-affiliated participants.

Only then can its report can be considered to be an independent, adversarial analysis to be considered along with the IPCC report (and other non-IPCC reports) to help guide U.S. energy policy.

The May 1 Space-X launch of a classified satellite mission was considered very unusual after amateur satellite watchers realized it was being put into the same orbit as the International Space Station (ISS).

(ISS resupply missions aren’t classified.)

We now know that not only was “USA 276” put into the same orbit, but it actually buzzed the ISS as it gradually “orbited” around the space station.

Here’s a simulation from the SatTrackCam blog, showing the new spy satellite just outside the box representing the safe distance for objects to pass near the ISS without an orbital avoidance maneuver:

Over time, the spy satellite then circled the ISS, just several kilometers away.

This does not happen by accident. To accomplish this you have to launch the satellite into a precise orbit with the same altitude and inclination angle with the equator. Then, you have to use on-board propulsion to fine tune the orbit and “catch up” to the ISS. To then “orbit” the ISS at a safe distance is even trickier.

So, what could this classified mission of USA 276 be?

The most logical explanation is that DoD is testing a capability to rendezvous with and spy on spy satellites, up close and personal. Such a capability would no doubt include high resolution imagers, electronic surveillance, and whatever else they can think of to investigate other countrys’ spy satellites and better figure out what they are doing up there.

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for May, 2017 was +0.45 deg. C, up from the April, 2017 value of +0.27 deg. C (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 17 months are:

YEAR MO GLOBE NHEM. SHEM. TROPICS
2016 01 +0.54 +0.69 +0.39 +0.84
2016 02 +0.83 +1.16 +0.50 +0.98
2016 03 +0.73 +0.94 +0.52 +1.08
2016 04 +0.71 +0.85 +0.58 +0.93
2016 05 +0.54 +0.64 +0.44 +0.71
2016 06 +0.33 +0.50 +0.17 +0.37
2016 07 +0.39 +0.48 +0.29 +0.47
2016 08 +0.43 +0.55 +0.31 +0.49
2016 09 +0.44 +0.49 +0.38 +0.37
2016 10 +0.40 +0.42 +0.39 +0.46
2016 11 +0.45 +0.40 +0.50 +0.37
2016 12 +0.24 +0.18 +0.30 +0.21
2017 01 +0.30 +0.26 +0.33 +0.07
2017 02 +0.35 +0.54 +0.15 +0.05
2017 03 +0.19 +0.30 +0.07 +0.03
2017 04 +0.27 +0.27 +0.26 +0.21
2017 05 +0.45 +0.42 +0.48 +0.41

The UAH LT global anomaly image for May, 2017 should be available in the next few days here.

The new Version 6 files should also be updated in the coming days, and are located here:

Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tmt/uahncdc_mt_6.0.txt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/ttp/uahncdc_tp_6.0.txt
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tls/uahncdc_ls_6.0.txt