Rice, Georgia Tech study in Science reveals Pacific temperatures over a millennium Rice University Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb samples an ancient coral for radiometric dating. She is part of a team of Rice University and Georgia Tech scientists using data from coral fossils to build a record of temperatures in the tropical Pacific…
By Paul Dorian NOAA’s CFS v2 computer forecast model is predicting relatively strong La Nina conditions by later this summer (August/September/October); SST anomalies plot courtesy NOAA *La Nina may form in the equatorial Pacific Ocean later this year and, if so, it could have wide-ranging ramifications* Overview It appears somewhat likely that the current weak…
Reposted from the Cliff Mass Weather Blog Friday, February 14, 2020 A Weak El Nino Transitioning to La Nada During the past few months we have moved from near neutral conditions (La Nada) to a weak El Nino (warmer than normal temperatures in the central and eastern tropic Pacific)–providing some insights into the weather later…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Sometimes a chance comment sets off a whole chain of investigation. Somewhere recently, in passing I noted the idea of the slope of the temperature gradient across the Pacific along the Equator. So I decided to take a look at it. Here is the area that I examined. Figure 1.…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my last post, which was about the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) in Hawaii, Dr. Richard Keen and others noted that for a good comparison, there was a need to remove the variations due to El Nino. Dr. Keen said that he uses the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) for such…
In my last post, which was about the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) in Hawaii, Dr. Richard Keen and others noted that for a good comparison, there was a need to remove the variations due to El Nino. Dr. Keen said that he uses the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) for such removal. And what is the…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my peripatetic meandering through the CERES satellite data, I’ve been looking at the correlation between the temperatures in the NINO3.4 region and the temperatures of the rest of the planet. The NINO3.4 region is an area in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean. It covers five degrees north and south…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In a recent post here on WattsUpWithThat, the claim was made that the El Nino influences rainfall. They showed a correlation between various historical proxies and El Nino/La Nina. So I thought I’d take a look at the modern correlation between rainfall and the El Nino. As a measurement of…
AND Is that the Reason Why This El Niño is Not Suppressing the California Drought as Expected? Guest Post by Bob Tisdale El Niño events come in different flavors, and those different flavors can have differing impacts on regional weather around the globe. There are East Pacific El Niño events like the 1997/98 El Niño,…
Guest post by David Middleton Cyclical changes in the Pacific Ocean have thrown earth’s surface into what may be an unprecedented warming spurt, following a global warming slowdown that lasted about 15 years. While El Niño is being blamed for an outbreak of floods, storms and unseasonable temperatures across the planet, a much slower-moving cycle…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale We recently discussed and illustrated how the differences between sea surface temperature datasets prevented us from knowing which of the recent strong El Niño events (the 1982/83, 1997/98 or 2015/16 El Niños) was actually strongest. See the post here. That post, of course, was intended to counter all of the…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach A while back, folks noticed that a couple of months after the El Nino kicked in across the Pacific, the earth would warm up a bit. Since then, people have engaged in what they describe as “removing the El Nino signal” from the global temperature record. A while back I…
The climate zealots were out in force this week trying to link the rains in Texas to ‘climate change’. The press release from NASA makes no such connections, but instead blames a mundane weather pattern induced by El Niño. Video and explanatory graphic follows. From NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center: Severe flooding hits central Texas, Oklahoma …
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale The graphics at the NOAA GODAS website were running a few pentads (5-day periods) behind when I published the May 2015 ENSO Update. They’re caught up now, and the Hovmoller diagram of the surface zonal wind stress along the equator, Figure 1, is showing another westerly wind burst during early…
Wow! ECMWF Long-Term Weather Model Is Predicting a Super El Niño and I Mean Super Guest Post by Bob Tisdale I was notified today of the rather remarkable plume of ENSO forecasts for 2015 from ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). See their System 4 ENSO region sea surface temperature anomaly forecast webpage here.…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale WRAP-UP This is the final post in The 2014/15 El Niño series. It began back in April 2014 when many people were expecting a strong El Niño due to the magnitude of the downwelling (warm) Kelvin wave. But the development of the El Niño floundered because it was missing something…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale Of course they did. Those who have followed the 2014/15 El Niño series from its start back in April will recall all the hoopla about the strong downwelling Kelvin wave that was traveling from west to east along the Cromwell Current (aka the Pacific Equatorial Undercurrent). Based on the size…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale This post provides an update on the progress of the evolution of the 2014/15 El Niño conditions. The post is similar in layout to the earlier updates. (See the entire 2014/15 El Niño series of posts here.) The post includes 3 gif animations and more than a dozen illustrations so…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale And maybe it will. Weekly sea surface temperature anomalies last week for the NINO3.4 region were at their highest level for the year. Then again, NINO1+2 region temperature anomalies have dropped to the 0.5 deg C threshold of an El Niño, making them the lowest since the last week of…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale In this post we can learn from someone’s mistakes. The author of the post at Slate clearly misunderstands many aspects of El Niño and their relationship with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation…so many that I’ve had to focus on just a few. To confuse matters more, mixed in with those misunderstandings…
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale This year started off with a subsurface weather event below the surface of the tropical Pacific that made researchers and global warming alarmists hope for a super-duper El Niño in 2014. Sadly, things didn’t work out for them. The trade winds refused to cooperate. Now, there are replays taking place…
Guest post by Bob Tisdale I’ll provide the September update in a week or so, but I found the following interesting. According to the animation of subsurface temperature anomalies along the equatorial Pacific, which is available from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center Equatorial Pacific Temperature Depth Anomaly Animation webpage, another downwelling (warm) Kelvin wave may…
Yes, I’m using the term Mulligan as in a replayed golf shot. Ocean-atmosphere processes have consumed most of the warm water in the eastern equatorial Pacific from the downwelling (warm) Kelvin wave that had crossed the Pacific earlier this year. But we recently discussed and illustrated how a pool of subsurface warm water had broken…
There may still be a chance for an El Niño during the 2014/15 ENSO season. A new “pocket” of warm subsurface water has formed in the western equatorial Pacific. See the note in the page from the most-recent NOAA Weekly ENSO Update to the right. (Please click on illustration for full-sized image.) In their update,…
A few interesting things have happened since the July Update last week. On the ocean side, weekly sea surface temperatures in the NINO3.4 region have dropped (just) below the threshold of El Niño conditions (using the standard NOAA base years of 1971-2000 for their Reynolds OI.v2 data). On the atmospheric side, the 30-day running average…
This post provides an update on the progress of the early evolution of the 2014/15 El Niño with data through the beginning of July 2014. The post is similar in layout to the May and June updates. The post includes 3 gif animations and 13 illustrations so the post might take a few moments to…
Yesterday, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) published a post about a number of mistaken beliefs about El Niño and La Niña events. Misconceptions discussed:
There’s still a possibility the 2014/15 El Niño could die even though it had so much promise just a few months ago. In this post, we’ll compare a few indicators now to where they were 2 months ago at the start of the El Niño enthusiasm. Some of them show an off-season event quickly drawing…
This post provides an update on the progress of the early evolution of the 2014/15 El Niño with data through the end of May 2014. The post is similar in layout to the May update. The post includes 5 gif animations and 16 illustrations so the post might take a few moments to load on…
The SkepticalScience animation The Escalator has been around for a couple of years, and it has appeared in dozens of their posts and in blog posts by other carbon dioxide-obsessed alarmists. Their intent with The Escalator animation was to show that the instrument temperature record includes many short-term absences of global warming, while, in their…
In a recent interview, Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist, from NCAR said the upcoming 2014/15 El Niño might shift global surface temperatures upwards by 0.2 to 0.3 deg C to further the series of upward steps. Curiously, Trenberth is continuing to suggest that the warming we’ve experienced since the mid-1970s resulted from naturally occurring, sunlight-fueled…
Late last week, Judith Curry published a post written by Donald Rapp titled El Ninos and La Ninas and Global Warming. Donald referred to my work a number of times in that post. That, of course, created the expected responses from warmists who can’t grasp or refuse to understand the subtleties of ENSO. I made…
The Southern Oscillation Index has been mentioned often in comments at WattsUpWithThat, in this series of blog posts about the upcoming El Niño. Curiously, Australia’s BOM Southern Oscillation Index for April 2014 is at a positive value that’s near to La Niña conditions, while the sea surfaces of the equatorial Pacific are now warming toward…
This post provides an update on the progress of the evolution of the 2014/15 El Niño. Included are updates of the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies for the four most-often-used NINO regions. Also included are updates of the GODAS map-based animations of sea surface height anomalies, T300 anomalies (depth-averaged temperature anomalies to 300 meters), sea…
I’m truly sorry about the title, but nothing else really describes the ridiculousness of the pronouncement by the White House aide John Podesta over these two satellite images in a maddeningly idiotic story from the Washington Post. In a Feb. 24 Oval Office meeting, two of President Obama’s top climate advisers presented these sharply-contrasting images…
…or Introductions to the Impacts of El Niños on Global Weather Patterns and to the Long-Term Effects of Strong El Niño Events on Global Surface Temperatures Since the first of the year, there have been hundreds, possibly thousands, of news stories about the growing possibility of a strong El Niño evolving this year. Your local…
UPDATE: I’ve added NOAA’s description of the PDO index toward the end of the post, before the closing. # # # During the earlier discussions of the upcoming El Niño event, the topic of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO was raised a number of times. Apparently, it’s time again to discuss what the PDO…
In the preceding post, we looked at the evolution of the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies in two regions of the equatorial Pacific (NINO3.4 and NINO1+2), comparing the data so far in 2014 to those of the strong 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Niño events. (See 2014/15 El Niño – Part 3 – Early Evolution –…
Comparisons are still being made of the 1997/98 El Niño with the El Niño forming this year. So I thought we should compare the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies for this year, in two NINO regions, with those during 1997 for the 1997/98 El Niño and 1982 for the 1982/83 El Niño. The 1982/83 and…
I knew it wouldn’t take long. The 2014/15 El Niño has yet to form and there’s already a well-commented blog post about it that spreads more speculative nonsense than one would think possible. Even the title Monster El Nino Emerging From the Depths: Nose of Massive Kelvin Wave Breaks Surface in Eastern Pacific is remarkable.…
The title of the post, of course, assumes that an El Niño event will form this year and carry over into the next. This post is intended for persons new to the topic of El Niño events—and for those who are familiar with them. It should help provide a number of different perspectives on the…