ICECAP UPDATE: NOAA agrees with the satellite assessment. The average United States temperature in January 2008 was 30.5 F. This was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 49th coolest January in 114 years. This despite a very warm week 2 that brought hundreds of records to the central and east.

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

University of Alabama, Huntsville (John Christy) just published their UAH lower troposphere data for January 2008. Like the RSS data set, it shows a negative anomaly, and a steep decline in the past 12 months though the magnitude of the anomaly is slightly lower at ∆T -.588 than the RSS ∆T -.629 degrees Centigrade.

I’ve plotted the UAH data below, as I did for the RSS data in the previous post:

See full size image here

And a zoomed version with the Delta T highlighted:

See full size image here

Read more of Anthony’s blog here. And the prior RSS blog here.