Atlantic and Pacific oscillations lost in the noise, say Mann & co.

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) [credit: NASA-JPL]

AMO & PDO – RIP. That’s the claim here anyway. Might be news to NASA and others.

Recently, meteorologists report that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) do not appear to exist, says Tech Explorist.

The discovery could have implications for both the validity of previous studies attributing past trends to these hypothetical natural oscillations and for the prospects of decade-scale climate predictability.

The discovery is based on observational data and climate model simulations, that shows there was no reliable proof for decadal or longer-term internal oscillatory signals that could be separated from climatic noise— arbitrary year to year variation.

The apparent main swaying is the well-known El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Extending El Niño event predictions to a year

The El Niño of 1997-8

Let’s see how this theory works out in practice.

A group of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Beijing Normal University and Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen has found a way to predict El Niño events up to a year before they occur, says Phys.org.

In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their complexity-based approach to better predicting the seemingly random weather events.

El Niño is a weather event in which the water surface temperatures in some western parts of the Pacific grow warmer than normal and then seep eastward.

Scientists are eager to learn more about such events because they can contribute to excess rainfall in some parts of the world and drought conditions in others.

El Niños stronger in the industrial age, say researchers

More than a hint of assuming what they would like to prove here, by implying El Niños are now influenced by ‘the industrial age’. But at the end of the report a researcher says: “Maybe El Niño can just enter a mode and get stuck in it for a millennium.” Who gets to define what is or isn’t ‘natural variation’?

El Niños have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Niño years, reports Phys.org.

A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Niños are part of a climate pattern that is new and strange.

It is the first known time that enough physical evidence spanning millennia has come together to allow researchers to say definitively that: El Niños, La Niñas, and the climate phenomenon that drives them have become more extreme in the times of human-induced climate change.

“What we’re seeing in the last 50 years is outside any natural variability. It leaps off the baseline. Actually, we even see this for the entire period of the industrial age,” said Kim Cobb, the study’s principal investigator and professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

“There were three extremely strong El Niño-La Niña events in the 50-year period, but it wasn’t just these events. The entire pattern stuck out.”

Climate Models vs Observations: 2019 Update – by Ross McKitrick

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Below are a few quotes from the GWPF article. More discussion with graphics via the link. Is the handbrake about to be re-applied to so-called human-caused warming of the planet, in contradiction of alarmist ‘projections’?

Back around 2014 many people, me included, were commenting on the discrepancy between climate models and observations [writes Ross McKitrick].
. . .
The IPCC itself in the 5th Assessment Report (2013) noted that out of 114 model runs, 111 had overstated observed warming since the late 1990s.

Is Global Warming All Due To Super El Niño’s?

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Interesting question, but we’re still left with another one: what causes the super El Niños?

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

In a recent CFACT article, climate expert Joe Bastardi says super El Niños have caused all the atmospheric warming since satellite measurements began in 1978. I suggested this two years ago in a CFACT article titled “No CO2 warming for the last 40 years?” Now Joe has confirmed it.

The focus of Joe’s long article is that these super El Niños are natural.

Most importantly, here is Joe’s picture of the 1998-2000 super El Niño step up in global temperatures, with nothing but 15 to 20 year pauses on either side:

My description of this big step up, posted two years ago, is here.

There is little to no CO2 warming in the entire satellite record! Just a step up warming due to the super El Niño 20 years ago. I told you so. We may now have…

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East-West shift in El Niños since mid 1970s

The original headline for this article was: ‘Climate warming promises more frequent extreme El Niño events’. But since nothing is ‘promised’ it seems to rely too much on assumptions. For example, we are yet to see the full effects, if any, of the current very low solar minimum and the ‘quiet’ solar cycle expected to follow it.

El Niño events cause serious shifts in weather patterns across the globe, and an important question that scientists have sought to answer is: how will climate change affect the generation of strong El Niño events?

A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team of international climate researchers led by Bin Wang of the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), has an answer to that question, reports Phys.org.

Deep learning application able to predict El Niño events up to 18 months in advance

In 24 out of 34 cases anyway, which is said to be better than existing methods.

A trio of researchers from Chonnam National University, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that a deep learning convolutional neural network was able to accurately predict El Niño events up to 18 months in advance, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Nature, Yoo-Geun Ham, Jeong-Hwan Kim and Jing-Jia Luo, describe their deep learning application, how it was trained and how well it worked in predicting El Niño events.

El Niño-Southern Oscillation events are periods during which water warms above normal temperatures in tropical parts of the Pacific. When that warm water moves east, it leads to more rainfall and other weather events, such as hurricanes, in the Americas, and less rain in Australia and Indonesia.

2019 ENSO forecast

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We like a forecast at the Talkshop. Let’s see how this one goes.

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry and Jim Johnstone

CFAN’s 2019 ENSO forecast is for a transition away from El Niño conditions as the summer progresses. The forecast for Sept-Oct-Nov 2019 calls for 60% probability of ENSO neutral conditions, with 40% probability of weak El Niño conditions. – Forecast issued 3/25/19

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El Niño latest: not much going on

Credit: NASA climatekids

The necessary ocean-atmosphere coupling needed for El Niño to develop has not been observed so far, despite earlier favourable predictions.

ENSO-neutral conditions are present, says NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center [pdf].

Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are above average across most of
the Pacific Ocean.

The patterns of convection and winds are mostly near average over the tropical Pacific.

Is El Niño to blame for the big Southern storm?

Credit: NASA climatekids

The official view of US experts on the current status of El Niño will be delivered on Thursday.

Heavy rain in California and piles of snow in the Southeast may be signs another El Niño weather phenomenon is upon us, says CBS News.
– – –
Heavy rain and mudslides in California, flooding in Texas, and up to 2 feet of snow in North Carolina — all these recent weather events are symptoms of the infamous climate phenomena called El Niño.

For months now we have been on the verge of an official El Niño, but so far the climate community has not pulled the El Niño trigger.

Global temperature drops by 0.4°C in three years

Misleading manipulation of climate-related stats is an ongoing issue, as explained here.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, says David Whitehouse @ The GWPF.

In science communication however, a simple graph can be worth far more than pictures particularly when the main point is that the last four years have been the hottest on record.

Strong chance of a new El Niño forming, says WMO

The last one finished in mid-2016 and was one of the strongest on record.

The World Meteorological Organization says there’s a 75-80% chance of the weather phenomenon forming by next February, BBC News reports.

The naturally occurring event causes changes in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean and has a major influence on weather patterns around the world.

It is linked to floods in South America and droughts in Africa and Asia.

Ian Wilson: Is the November 2018 Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) a possible trigger for an El Niño?

Conservation of angular momentum – ice skater

The title says it all. Another in the author’s series of intriguing brain-teasers for followers of climate theory to explore, this time with a particularly topical theme.

1. The Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO)

The Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the dominant form of intra-seasonal (30 to 90 days) atmospheric variability in the Earth’s equatorial regions (Zang 2005). It is characterized by the eastward progression of a large region of enhanced convection and rainfall that is centered upon the Equator.

This region of enhanced precipitation is followed by an equally large region of suppressed convection and rainfall. The precipitation pattern takes about 30 – 60 days to complete one cycle, when seen from a given point along the equator (Madden and Julian 1971, 1972).

Ian Wilson: A Severe Case of Cognitive Dissonance

[For details on the graph see below]

Update 12/11/2018: Ian Wilson’s 2019 El Nino forecast can be found here.

Cognitive Dissonance: When a person or a group of people have attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that are in conflict with each other. Generally, this produces a feeling of mental discomfort that leads to an alteration in their attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that moderates their mental discomfort and restores balance.

I believe that the level of cognitive dissonance that we have about the influence of lunar tides upon El Nino events has become so large that something has to give.

In a series of blog posts in November 2014:

http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2014/11/evidence-that-strong-el-nino-events-are_13.html

I showed that between 1870 and 2025, the precise alignments between the lunar synodic [phase] cycle and the 31/62 year Perigean New/Full moon cycle, naturally breaks up into six 31-year epochs each of which has a distinctly different tidal property. Note that the second of these 31-year intervals starts with the precise alignment on the 15th of April 1870, with the subsequent epoch boundaries occurring every 31 years after that:

Epoch 1 – Prior to 15th April  1870
Epoch 2 – 15th April 1870 to 18th April 1901
Epoch 3 – 8th April 1901 to 20th April 1932
Epoch 4 – 20th April 1932 to 23rd April 1963
Epoch 5 – 23rd April 1963 to 25th April 1994
Epoch 6 – 25th April 1994 to 27th April 2025

I claimed that if the 31/62-year seasonal tidal cycle plays a role in sequencing the triggering of El Niño events, it would be reasonable to expect that its effects for the following three epochs:

Visualization of Pacific ocean temperatures shows El Niño brewing

Ocean currents
[image credit: SPL/BBC]

The latest NOAA synopsis says: ‘Overall, the oceanic and atmospheric conditions reflected ENSO-neutral, but with recent trends indicative of a developing El Niño.’ Sounds like a ‘definite maybe’ there, with models now forecasting a relatively weak El Niño.

Warming waters in the equatorial Pacific give increasing confidence that El Niño will be here soon, says Discover magazine.

It’s still not here yet, but El Niño sure looks like it’s coming.

In its latest forecast, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there is a 70 to 75 percent chance that El Niño will form “in the next couple of months and continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2018-19.”

Volcano eruptions at different latitudes impact sea surface temperature differently

Volcanic eruption

Interesting results from this research into where and how volcanoes might fit into the oceans/climate picture.

Volcanic eruptions are among the most important natural causes of climate change, playing a leading role over the past millennium, says Phys.org.

Injections of sulfate aerosols into the lower stratosphere reduce the incoming solar radiation, in turn cooling the surface.

As a natural external forcing to the Earth’s climate system, the impact of volcanic aerosols on the climate has been of great concern to the scientific society and the public.

In recent years, scientists have found that there is a relationship between volcanic eruptions and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) based on reconstructions and model simulations, which is manifested in increased/decreased sea surface temperature (SST) gradient over the equatorial Pacific.

The blueprint for El Niño diversity

Credit: concernusa.org

How much this research can aid ENSO predictions remains to be seen, but any advance in understanding is welcome.

A new study isolates key mechanisms that cause El Niño events to differ, says ScienceDaily.

Researchers found that the complexity and irregular occurrence of El Niño and La Niña events can be traced back to the co-existence of two coupled atmosphere-ocean oscillations, with different spatial characteristics and different frequencies.

A new research study, published this week by an international team of climate scientists in the journal Nature, isolates key mechanisms that cause El Niño events to differ amongst each other.

Scientists reveal drivers of prolonged spring-summer drought over North China

Drought conditions in Northern China

But what is driving the drivers – that bright thing in the sky perhaps?

A recent study reveals the large-scale dynamic drivers of the prolonged spring-summer drought over North China, where prolonged drought tends to begin in spring and persists to summer with severe societal impacts, says EurekAlert!.

North China, where almost half China’s population lives and most wheat and corn are grown, is facing serious water crisis. Since the late 1990s severe and extreme droughts have frequently dropped by and drought affected area has been increasing by 3.72% decade-1 in the past five decades, posing great challenges for regional sustainable development.

Scientists have been concerned that if climate continues to warm in the future, there is a high confidence level that drought over North China will continue to increase. Thus, it is of great importance to identify the drivers and dynamic mechanisms of North China drought in order to improve drought prediction and better water management.

Are El Niños Fueled By Deep-Sea Geological Heat Flow?

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Is there evidence of a cause and effect connection between geological forces and El Niño generation? A look at one theory.

The Next Grand Minimum

El Niño and La Niña weather patterns have a significant impact on California climate. This illustration shows the drought impacts.

Long-term La Niña periods have been associated with long-term droughts in the southwest lasting 200, 90 and 55 years. More specifically severe droughts from AD1021 to 1051, AD1130 to 1180, AD1240 to 1265, AD1360 to 1365.

I often wondered what was the controlling mechanism that generated long-term La Niña conditions with few La Niño conditions. Plate Climatology Theory may be one possible answer, the generation of La Niña events by undersea volcanic activity.

I found this article on Plate Climatology most interesting.

Geologically induced “Eruptive” warm burst that helps generate 2014-2015 El Nino.

All El Ninos originate at the same fixed “Point Source” located east of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Fixed point sources are typical of geological features, and not typical of ever moving atmospheric or ocean…

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Human-engineered changes on Mississippi River increased extreme floods

Levee breach on the Mississippi river [image credit: Wikipedia]

This shows once again that glib claims about climate-related flooding due to ‘extreme weather’ should be treated with great caution, or even suspicion. The reality is that other factors are at work.

A new study has revealed for the first time the last 500-year flood history of the Mississippi River, as Eurakalert reports.

It shows a dramatic rise in the size and frequency of extreme floods in the past century — mostly due to projects to straighten, channelize, and bound the river with artificial levees.

The new research, led by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), also uncovered a clear pattern over the centuries linking flooding on the Mississippi with natural fluctuations of Pacific and Atlantic Ocean water temperatures.