Did you hear about that time when the press reported Atlantic Ocean temperatures over one-hundred degrees? It was this week. The South Florida,hot tub analogy is accurate (sort of), but not the way the media sold it. The ocean bouy was in salt water, but inland, inside the barrier reef, in shallow water, at low tide.
Anthony Watts reports that MNBF1 is actually near the shore in something called Manatee Bay, which is part of Everglades National Park.
One of the most important things that the media missed is the fact that due to the shallow water and placement near land, this buoy is sensitive to tides and wide temperature fluctuations due to the shallow nature of the water. With very shallow water, it is very easy for the sun to heat the sand/mud beneath the buoy, which is dark (which will absorb more sunlight), which will then increase the temperature reading recorded in the water.
Indeed, the high temperature reading correlates closely to low tide. Temperature peaked at 2200 HR GMT – which was after low tide at 1:35PM – water had a chance to warm because sunlight was hitting the bottom.
Wait, it gets better.
The media completely missed the fact that this sort of temperature at that buoy has happened before and this was not the highest temperature ever seen there. The record for the Manatee Bay site is 102 degrees. It was set on Aug. 15, 2017. The data from that buoy only goes back to 2004. With such a short period of data, it cannot possibly be representative of any climate trend, which requires at least 30 years or more of data.
In other words, if we disregard the absence of sufficient data to determine a trend, the reported 101 degrees represents a cooling trend form 102 back in 2017.
Ha!
