A possible correlation between the Southern Oscillation Index and the Solar Ap Index

I’d agree that this does look too good to be true.
Any idea where these measurements came from?
According to the pdf, it came from INTERNET!, but that seems a bit broad.

Of course I was being sarcastic.

Took NOAA’s SOI index values here
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/GEOMAGNETIC_DATA/INDICES/KP_AP/
and BOM (Australia) SOI index values here
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/sco/soi/soiplaintext.html
and the Ap index here
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/GEOMAGNETIC_DATA/INDICES/KP_AP/
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/GEOMAGNETIC_DATA/INDICES/KP_AP/MONTHLY.DAT
(file description in MONTHLY.FMT)
Could not reproduce the results. Ap-SOI R2 < 0.01. SO no correlation whatsoever. R2 of both SOI indices for the period 1932-2009 was 0.934
The Ap temporal variations appear (by eye) similar to the ones shown here
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/ap-index-1932-2008.png
Please check, I could easily have made a mistake …

In the graph above, the 1939/40/41/42 El Nino appears as the dip from months ~100 to ~160 when it should be more toward ~81 to ~125. The 1981/82 El Nino appears centered near month 639, when it should run from ~595 to ~617, And the 1997/98 El Nino above occurs around month 813, when it should run from ~770 to ~800. So the SOI has been shifted (lagged) as far as I can tell.
And those specific El Nino dips do NOT appear on Leif’s AP Index graph.
Leif, if you’ve got the AP Index data in monthly format, I’ll plot it with the SOI.
Regards

The SOI does seemed determined to remain positive at the moment, almost inspite of the more neutral readings from other ENSO factors. The correlation had crossed my mind and am fascinated if somethng showed up. They’re sailing on Lake Eyre, which just indicates that we’ve had a reasonable “wet” season in ENSO effected regions of Australia.

Bob Tisdale: What would it mean, then, for the near future of SOI the low Ap index values we are having?

Correction – Climate Audit. Anyone know how to forward him this tidbit?

I don’t know much at all about Landscheidt, but I do know that the history of science contains many instances where someone notices correlations but cannot come up with a good explanation. The barycentric model seems a little far out to me as far as gravitational cause and effect, but who knows what is going on magnetohydrodynamically.
Alfred Wegner was not the first to notice how the continents matched up, but he pushed the correlation farther than anyone. He could not come up with a mechanism, but the mechanism that was finally found now comprises one of the best proven theories in science.
Immanuel Velikovsky was a crackpot, but he noticed a lot of exceptions that probed the rule of uniformitarianism and are now being treated with real scientific interest. No, no competent scientist hypothesizes that Venus was a comet, but there is evidence that comet Encke or its fragments may have affected the earth within the cultural memory of man if not in written Chinese history.
Hannes Alfven said words to the effect that physicist pronounce their theories, but the universe does not behave that way. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of the electromagnetic properties of the universe.
“Dark Matter” is hypothesized to comprise some 90% of the universe, but we have no idea what it is.
Correlation is not proof, but only a fool dismisses it, IMO.

I’ve wondered about these connections before, but if memory serves, there have been different series used to establish correlations. Thus it is important that those of us (not including me) who are most handy with data and most hard headed in their use dig deep.
Would it be useful to use sunspot series instead of the AP index as a second way of looking at the issue?
Assuming for the sake of argument that there might be a connection between solar activity and the SOI, can anyone knowledgeable on the subject make an informed guess as to what might have happened to the SOI when the sun was cooler than it would be during “normal” 11 and 22 year cycles, e.g., during the Dalton minimum in the early 19th C, or the less pronounced minimum in the early 20th C?

No no no. This is a hoax.
The obvious failing is two fold :
1) The allignment of the graphs is too perfect. Looking at the graphs, I could never believe that there would be such a perfect allignment.
2) If there is a correlation, then there must be a lag, of at least a few years. Water has tremendous heat capacity, and any solar influence would have a few years delay. That graph is just too perfectlt alligned to be real.
If it is genuine, then the AGW hoax has just technically ended.
(not necessarily policially ended !!)
But this is not real.

In Solar Activity Controls El Niño and La Niña, Theodor Landscheidt’s
Fig 3 under Distribution of El Niños within subcycles of the sunspot cycle since 1610
shows a strong similarity to Alexander’s Fig. 2 “Characteristics of the periodic sequences of river flow at representative dam sites. The double sunspot cycle is diagrammatically superimposed”
which correlates frequency of river flow intensity in southern Africa with the 22 year double solar cycle.
See: Linkages between solar activity, climate predictability and water resource development, Alexander et al. Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, Vol. 32 49 Number 2 June 2007 pp 32-44 PDF file
(Here is an objection to Alexander’s work: <a href=”http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=10&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wrc.org.za%2Fdownloads%2Fwaterwheel%2Fmar-apr07%2FLetter%2520p%252011-13.pdf&ei=csvxSZe-DpX2Mdmg5K0P&usg=AFQjCNENGAG4g_KQ-DJwV0u2Ic38r6UE5Q&sig2=pt0V7nEjyxsKkT939s_pRwIs Climate Prediction Flawed?)

The referenced figure was made using the Hadcet data set, and using Spectral analysis. The Input is the error from the liner estimation of the temperature from 1659-2008. A run was then made to look at temperature variations in the 10 year period range. This involved blocking out the freq. not only above the 0.12 freq., but also lower ones between 0.003 and 0.06 cycles/yr. This allowed a better look at the ~10 year period cycles, as shown in T_est_03.
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/t_est_03-0KLEO.gif
The top illustration shows both the unfiltered and filtered temperature, and sunspot activity plotted below. It would appear that the 10 year solar cycle is reflected in some way to the temp., and existence of a strong correlation. A more detail analysis of this would be interesting in the future, as well as the North Atlantic cycle.

I tried looking at some of this a while back, except I was looking at the Bz component of the IMF vs the SOI, and it had a tantalizing similarity, but I could never quite get it to match closely enough to want to go further with it. There seemed to be times when the correlation “switched signs” so to speak, perhaps due to the sun’s polarity reversing? I am not a statitstical kind of guy so I never went anywhere with analyzing cyclical behavior or possible lags. I believe there is a potential correlation there…but figuring out the causation to go with the correlation would be another big step to have to make.

In the paper cited above: “Solid earth geophysicists assume that ENSO may possibly be physically connected with seismic events in the Pacific bottom (Walker, 1988, 1995)”
Could it be a possible contributor to increase sea temperatures plate tectonics and underseas volcanic or magma activities, as under the pacific warm pool, caused by changes in Ap index?

Thanks Leif and Arnost for the data. So here are two comparison graphs with the AP Index and SOI datasets. I had to scale the SOI to provide any worthwhile comparison. The equation is on the graphs.
Here’s the AP Index and Scaled SOI without filtering:
http://i40.tinypic.com/1z1shhx.jpg
And here’s the same data with 12-month running-average filters:
http://i42.tinypic.com/23vx2mp.jpg
I don’t see any correlation. None at all.
Regards

OOps, our Jet Stream barrels in…

Beyond AnonyMoose: Is Climate Change linked to geomagnetic changes led to this 2001 paper Connection between ENSO phenomena and solar and geomagnetic activity by M. A. Nuzhdina, Astronomical Observatory of Kiev National T. Shevchenko University, Kiev, Ukraine
ABSTRACT
Connections between El Ni˜no – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena and indices of solar activity and geomagnetic disturbance were investigated. Spectral analysis of the ENSO-data was carried out. Oscillations with periods of about 11–12, 5–6, 2–3 years were found. Correlative and cross-spectral analysis was carried out to estimate connections between ENSO data, and solar and geomagnetic indices. Functions of coherency and phase were calculated.
Fascinating. It looks like there is something going on there.

The “magnet in his pocket” article mentions these as data sources (although does not state that the graph was created from those):

The Ap index is a measure of the general level of geomagnetic activity over the globe for a given (UT) day. It is derived from measurements made at a number of stations world-wide of the variation of the geomagnetic field due to currents flowing in the earth’s ionosphere and, to a lesser extent, in the earth’s magnetosphere. The official values for Ap (and other related indices of geomagnetic activity such as the three-hour Kp index) are calculated by the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam Adolf-Schmidt-Observatory for Geomagnetism, D-14823 Niemegk (Germany), and are available from
http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/pb2/pb23/GeoMag/niemegk/kp_index/
with near real-time “quicklook” values and definitive values updated twice a month (once during the days 16-20 with the first 15 days of the current month and once during the days 1-5 with the second half of the previous month).
The SOI is the atmospheric pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin. It is all explained by the weatherman at:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/glossary/soi.shtml
Since these two graphs fit like fashion model’s hand in her own glove, it seems likely that magnetic field shifts are driving El Nino and La Nina.

Well I too found the match of those two graphs to be quite striking.
But I am also quite ignorant of exactly what Southern Oscillation Index or Ap Index are, so the thesis is quite meaningless to me.
I’m generally suspicious of the word “index”, as the only such term known to me is the “refractive Index” of optical materials; which is simply the ratio of two velocities; that of light in a medium, and the value of (c) which is defined exactly.
The graphs as plotted show a striking match at certain time intervals, but one cannot see how the finer detail matches up.
So (a) I don’t even know what I am looking at, and (b) in view of Leif’s remarks, I become suspicious of the validity of the data.
Those are not a very stable platform on which to try and construct a cause and effect relationship. But I am reading all your comments and explanations; once again this one seems to have lit up the statisticians.
But I still don’t see the proof that frogs become stone deaf when you cut off all four of their legs
Unfortunately, the web has become too easy a vehicle for all the leg pullers out there; I think I will sit this one out.
George

Baker studied the correlation between SOI and solar cycles:
Exploratory Analysis of Similarities in Solar Cycle Magnetic Phases with Southern Oscillation Index Fluctuations in Eastern Australia
ROBERT G.V. BAKER, Division of Geography and Planning, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia. Email: rbaker1@une.edu.au
Geographical Research, Volume 46 Issue 4, Pages 380 – 398, DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI) 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2008.00537.x About DOI
ABSTRACT

There is growing interest in the role that the Sun’s magnetic field has on weather and climatic parameters, particularly the ~11 year sunspot (Schwab) cycle, the ~22 yr magnetic field (Hale) cycle and the ~88 yr (Gleissberg) cycle. These cycles and the derivative harmonics are part of the peculiar periodic behaviour of the solar magnetic field. Using data from 1876 to the present, the exploratory analysis suggests that when the Sun’s South Pole is positive in the Hale Cycle, the likelihood of strongly positive and negative Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) values increase after certain phases in the cyclic ~22 yr solar magnetic field. The SOI is also shown to track the pairing of sunspot cycles in ~88 yr periods. This coupling of odd cycles, 23–15, 21–13 and 19–11, produces an apparently close charting in positive and negative SOI fluctuations for each grouping. This Gleissberg effect is also apparent for the southern hemisphere rainfall anomaly. Over the last decade, the SOI and rainfall fluctuations have been tracking similar values to that recorded in Cycle 15 (1914–1924). This discovery has important implications for future drought predictions in Australia and in countries in the northern and southern hemispheres which have been shown to be influenced by the sunspot cycle. Further, it provides a benchmark for long-term SOI behaviour.

KEYWORDS
Southern Oscillation Index • sunspot cycle • Hale Cycle • Gleissberg charting • rainfall patterns • drought prediction • climate change
Nicola Scafetta & B. J. West show correlation between solar cycles and surface temperature:
Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, “Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” Physics Today, 3 50-51 (2008). PDF
Bob Tidsale’s 12 month running-average graph of the AP- index appears similar to Scafetta’s figure on p 51.

Basil (08:12:39) :
I am probably prejudiced and think that “theory” means a “mathematical theory” that can be based back on axioms, not a simple hypothesis or logical inductive reasoning.
Otherwise I do not disagree with your statements.

erlhapp (08:13:29) : “Ozone is carried into the upper troposphere in high pressure cells. . . ”
Did I miss something? Does air not descend in high pressure cells?

jorgekafkazar (11:40:04)
“[…] makes me wonder (1) what effect, if any, does the interaction of varying solar wind and CME’s with the Earth’s magnetic field have on the average temperature of the night sky? (2) Is the night sky temperature assumed constant with time in the models? […]”
I’ve been waiting for weeks to see someone mention something like this. A theme for dozens of WUWT threads….

A few people have made comments about fine-details & high-frequencies in the context of “wiggle-matching”.
Suggestion:
Pause to consider what the fields of chaos & fractal geometry are all about. Coupling is distinct from synchronicity. Spatiotemporal heterogeneity exists.
Whether or not it is easy we have got to wrap our heads around the variability of parameter estimates with scale. (This is a hard-learned lesson that has been hammered like thunder in some disciplines.)

Taking Leif’s data for AP and SOI data from
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/sco/soi/soiplaintext.html
And doing a FFT on both gives this output
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2844/apvssoifft.jpg
Note that an FFT will show frequencies/periods and will therefore show a correlation of effects of SOI to AP or Ap to SOI. If SOI lags AP by less than the repetition rate of AP then this will show up on SOI as a peak at the same rate (phase of data is lost in the FFT)
The AP has 11 year cycle (to the accuracy of a 1024 pt FFT)
The SOI index has nothing near.
The SOI FFT MAY show a repetition of between 2 and 9 years idicated by a raise in the “noise” level over that period.

“”” erlhapp (16:02:56) :
George E. Smith
Want to understand climate? you need to bone up on these two indices. The S.O.I. simply reflects the timing of warming events in the tropics. Its the SO in ENSO. That is El Nino Southern Oscillation. “””
Well actually, I’m not that interested in “climate” or “climate science”; Meteorology maybe; but the only “Climate” issue that is of much concern to me is what controls the temperature range of this planet.
And I already know the answer to that; it’s the water. Water is the most abundant “greenhouse gas” by far, and is responsible for the earth not being a frozen rock. But water; unlike ANY OTHER GHG exists in all three phases in the atmopshere, and in the liquid/solid phases in the form of clouds, water produces a cooling influence; so all by itself water keeps the earth in a stable temperature range by simply adjusting the amount of cloud cover as other system variables change.
So long as those oceans remain there; and the laws of physics don’t change; we can neither raise nor lower the temperature of this planet very much even if we wanted to.
And if we could; where would YOU set the thermostat knob ?
But I’m glad that there are people who worry about El Nino, and ENSO, besides my favorite meteorologists; but I wish some of them would learn some physics; it would be so much help to them; and it would be wonderful if the Universities that taught “climate science” or “climatology” included the general theory of sampled data systems in their freshman year. Maybe then the Japanese equivalent to our National Academy of Sciences, would not describe their work as akin to “ancient astrology”.
George

There are lots of little correlations in climate with all these different indices (solar, ocean, winds, pressures, global warming theory inputs).
The correlations appear very strong sometimes and then the correlations go away.
I think you should always start with “is there a real physical explanation for this correlation” – what is the physical explanation for the AP index to impact the SOI.
Well, the SOI is just the difference in atmospheric pressure between Darwin and Tahiti. There is no logical reason why the AP index should impact this measure. Maybe there is one but I can’t see it.
When we examine the SOI and ask why does it provide an indicator of the ENSO (in fact, the Southern Oscillation is part of the name for the ENSO), the difference in pressures provides an indication of how the winds over the ENSO regions will behave – pressure and temperature differentials determine winds which helps determine the ENSO so there is a physical explanation.
The next thing one needs to do is examine the actual numbers. I can’t tell you how many times I have read this paper or saw that chart and then downloaded the actual data and found the actual data takes you to a completely different conclusion.
The next thing one needs to do is check whether the correlation continues throughout time at a sufficient level. The correlations come and go so one needs to go back in time as far as possible to see if the correlation continues.
For the SOI versus the ENSO, oh yeah, the correlation seems to always be very strong throughout the entire record. They are slightly off-track for small periods of time but not much.
I always look first for the physical explanation and then see where the real actual numbers go and then see whether the correlation continues throughout the available record. If it doesn’t pass all of these tests, it should go in the recycle bin.

Anna V wrote: “Now, in my view, there is a better probability that the fluid dynamics of the sun induced plasma is governed by similar equations as the heat inputted in the oceans than that the yellow curve is driving the mauve curve.”
Wow. That is objective, hard, HARD truth.
Well said, as always, Anna.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Re: bill (16:03:03)
Keep in mind that these are non-stationary time series (so FFT isn’t going to reveal everything that might be of interest).
–
Re: Bill Illis (18:07:16)
I hope you pause to consider the possibility of lurking conditioning variables (some of which may act as simply as a mere switch).

When I see one of these MS Excel plots with the default horizontal gridlines in place, the default gray background, vertical text direction on the x-axis, a title caption that more or less repeats the y-axis label, and the dreaded “mauve” and yellow series colors, it often signals that the author is not experienced at analyzing data, and is liable to have made one or more errors. This common format results from using the “Line” rather than “XY” chart format in Excel and then having to delete an unexpected data series. Since the author is probably not proficient at graphing data in MS Excel, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they simply plotted the wrong data, perhaps one original data set and a transformed version, rather than the two independent data sets they intended.
Yes, it’s an indirect measure, but my experience in reviewing many papers for publication has been that when the authors haven’t put much thought or effort into how their graphics are created and presented, then it is often the case that they haven’t put much thought or effort into how their data was collected and analyzed either.

MartinGAtkins: You wrote, “I didn’t scale the SOI to match the AP but I did invert it…”
Keep in mind that the original graph in this post, the graph that started all discussion, did not invert the SOI.

I’m presently working on a website tying together many independent researchers’ theories. This ties in well with the barycenter theory and Oliver Manuel’s neutron core model of the Sun. The barycenter cycle appears to cause the magnetic neutron core of the Sun to flip every eleven years. We are presently in an extremely rare situation where the barycenter follows tightly to the surface of the Sun for an extended period of time, thus the solar neutron core is not being tugged by gravity to flip. The effect will likely last longer than a weaker event during the Maunder Minimum.
It will be another month or so before the web pages are published, but I’m giving a heads up if others are interested in starting a parallel inquiry.

Sorry folks, I blew it!
The graph is too good to be true, as several suspected, but it took me a while to track what I had done wrong. I picked an Excel grapher that does not allow the different graphs to cross. When you read the numbers, they are OK, but it squashes the lower trace down, so that it inevitably looks a far better than it is in reality.
Back to the drawing board. I tried to recant in all directions, but did not realise this one had run away. There is some sort of a fit, at least between the very big El Nino’s, the low SOI numbers (when there are several in a row), and the low Ap Index numbers, but it is not nearly as good as the incorrect graph that starts this thread suggests.
Andrew Guentner picked the problem exactly. Who needs peer review, this lot works fine. Blunder and you are shot from the sky in short order. Thanks Andrew.
Thanks anyway, Anthony, and again. apologies all.
Peter Ravenscroft
Peter Ravenscroft.

Bob Tisdale (04:40:03) :

Keep in mind that the original graph in this post, the graph that started all discussion, did not invert the SOI.

Fair enough. When I eyeballed the graph it look like that is what had been done. Of course that means that they casually correlate in the opposite direction.
I feel a new theory is about to be born.

How many long range ENSO forecasters are amongst this group? And if so how many long range forecasts have you made and from how far out. And what methodology do you consider if you do not heavily rely upon space weather ? Which I do.

MartinGAtkins: You wrote, “Fair enough. When I eyeballed the graph it look like that is what had been done. Of course that means that they casually correlate in the opposite direction.”
But the AP Index data used in the original graph is in question. Maybe it was the AP Index data was inverted originally, but using the data provided by Leif, there is no correlation–raw or inverted.
Regards

David Thomson (05:39:01)
Geoff Sharp (07:49:22)
len (08:03:42)
Didn’t notice David’s comment and Geoff beat me to the submit button.
I guess there’s a general consensus we are in a ‘Grand Minimum’?

Peter Ravenscroft (06:06:35) :

There is some sort of a fit, at least between the very big El Nino’s, the low SOI numbers (when there are several in a row),

Bob Tisdale is the one to brief you better on this but I’ll throw my two penny worth in. El Nino and SOI are measuring much the same thing. SOI is a measure of Sea Level Pressure (SLP) between Tahiti and Darwin. El Nino’s measures Sea Surface Temperature (SST) at the Pacific Equator.
If you invert the SOI and match it up with Nino 3.4 you should get a tight fit.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/NINO-SOI.jpg

David L. Hagen
I didn’t bring up swine flu for discussion, just intended to alert our peripetaeic blogger. An article or two of his seems each week to attend these alerts from commenters.
Today the story has exploded and could be a useful topic.

erlhapp (08:52:25) :
…But, there is a relationship between tropical temperature and the solar wind that is well documented. …
If you can point me at monthly tropical temperature records of about 100years length and minimal missing data then I will FFT those and see if there is an 11 year cycle.
Thanks

bill (10:27:17) :
“From all this I would suggest that there is no effect of solar cycle SSN or TSI on temperature.”
It seems that you are basing this conclusion on just FFT.
–
Re: bill (05:32:44) & (06:52:36)
I appreciate your understanding of FFT – & your contribution to this discussion. I’m also conveying that I wouldn’t stop at FFT because I am (generally) curious about details and willing to use tools that cast light from a great variety of other directions.
– – –
Bob Tisdale (07:28:30)
“We can lag and invert and filter all you want, but we’re not going to get those two signals to correlate, as far as I can see.”
I have an algorithm that checks all of the (standard) possibilities. Based on its output, your assessment is (basically) correct.
Whatever relationship may exist involves lurking conditioning variables &/or complexity (i.e. nonlinearity). Most investigators’ patience runs out when the going gets that thick – (managerial instincts kick in strongly, shutting down the investigation…. for many scientists with a lot of really interesting things on-the-go, this is just time-management …and no one should take it personally or be dissuaded…..)
– – –
I want to thank Anthony for running this thread. It caused me to track down & compare a lot of variants of the various indices. The exercise has been an eye-opener and I now have new ideas for overcoming old roadblocks. The exercise was time-consuming, but well-worthwhile.

Leif Svalgaard (11:22:03)
Things go the other way: from the surface and up.
Wave motions are a principal mode of energy transfer in the atmosphere from the surface and upwards.
Interesting, Temperature Sprites. This sounds familiar somehow but I can’t remember most of what I hear on this topic, leaking hydrogen in direct cooled stator occupies my mind for the most part.

Paul Vaughan (15:38:50) :
I appreciate your understanding of FFT – & your contribution to this discussion. I’m also conveying that I wouldn’t stop at FFT because I am (generally) curious about details and willing to use tools that cast light from a great variety of other directions.
We are looking at real world systems here. You have temperature, TSI, and time. Apart from plotting temp vs TSI Theres not a lot more I can think of (TEF may be different but no one has poinred out the data for this (or for that matter described its difference from TSI)).
You obviously can think of other treatments of this data – perhaps you would care to enlighten me. Thanks.
erlhapp (17:07:32) :
There is no 11 year signal. A tropical cooling event occurs at both minimum and maximum.
There is no real 22 year cycle evident in the averaged FFTs either.
There is a QBO signal in temperature and ozone concentration at the equator between 12°N and 12°S at all levels upwards of 200hPa. This has an average periodicy of 27.1 months for data after 1948. That periodicy is derived from changes in the polar vortex and it propagates towards the equator with a variable lag that increases towards the end of each solar cycle.
Surprisingly the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) could be showing up in the averaged FFTs (it does not show up in CET (too far north!) – there is a raising of noise level around 2.25 years. However the NAO (north atlantic oscillation) also shows peaks at 2.5 and 2.7 years! and surprisingly do not show up on the CET FFT

Re: bill (18:17:54)
2 places to start:
1) Wavelet analysis
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/wonderful-world-of-wavelets/
http://www.ecs.syr.edu/faculty/lewalle/tutor/tutor.html
http://paos.colorado.edu/research/wavelets/
http://www.ce.umn.edu/~foufoula/papers/efg_022.pdf
2) Recurrence methods
http://www.recurrence-plot.tk/
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lizb/rps.html
Leif gives a nice example of an application of the former in a univariate scenario:
http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric%20Rosenberg-Coleman%20Effect.pdf
There are also windowed versions of FFT, but of course results vary with window-parameters.
Time-integrated cross-correlation analysis is another useful tool. (One can produce informative timescale-lag correlation-color-contour plots that convey information about periodicity. The beauty of the method is its intuitive simplicity.)
All of these methods can avalanche mountains of information on an investigator, particularly since there are variations on methods (each with its own benefits & drawbacks).
If nature only threw stationary sine waves at us, wide-window FFT would be enough. The main point is that spatiotemporal heterogeneity exists and that regardless of the set of methods employed (there are others), there is often important information to be gained by exploring the sensitivity of parameter estimates to scale variations across space & time.
Going a step further:
Cross-recurrence & cross-wavelet methods are useful for investigating nonlinear relationships & synchronicity. The latter depend on the use of complex (& hypercomplex) numbers. (See the various websites for details.)
– – –
erlhapp (22:01:47)
“[…] when something depends upon a variable that is not accounted for […]”
The more quantitative you can be in nailing down the details of the conditioning variables, the lighter your (currently complex verbal) communication-burden will become. I wish you endurance, penetrating insight, lots of accurate data, & resilience in your investigations of these complex phenomena.

Paul Vaughan: You wrote, “I have an algorithm that checks all of the (standard) possibilities. Based on its output, your assessment is (basically) correct.”
Can your algorithm pluck out repeats in signals?
ENSO events create Rossby and Kelvin waves. Some have been reported to linger in the Pacific SST records for over a decade. I would assume they’d rattle around all the oceans also, effecting climate and global temperatures longer than one would expect. With that in mind, I went looking to see if ENSO signals repeat in the global temperature anomaly record. (Not a repeat in the NINO SST records, but in the global temperature anomaly records: GISTEMP, for example.) The timing of the El Nino events, large and small, should give them a “fingerprint” of sorts. I believe with my poor statistics and signal processing I was able to coax two ENSO “echoes” (for lack of a better word) out of the global temperature anomaly data: the first was 24 months later and the second was 44 months from the original events. All the events lined up. My abilities in those fields are so poor I won’t write up my methods. Give me a few hours and I’ll give you a link to a better explanation, though.

Re: Bob Tisdale (13:52:54) & (15:59:11)
These topics are of interest. There may be occasion to discuss this further moving forward.
Bob: “Can your algorithm pluck out repeats in signals?”
Loosely speaking, yes – and if some particular features of a dataset roused suspicions about some particular pattern, I could adjust the algorithm to look for that pattern (or for a class of patterns) without too much trouble.
– – –
Re: erlhapp (03:51:24)
Thanks for pointing me towards some interesting data. This is a complex area into which to venture, so I may wait until a time when I can get really serious about it before I have an intense go at it, but I can comment now that I’ve seen enough of the literature on this to mark it “audit-worthy”.

Sorry, the above comment was intended for
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/25/examining-sorce-data-shows-the-sun-continues-its-slide-toward-somnolence/

Leif Svalgaard (13:17:54) :
Terry Ward (12:26:31) :
At last, someone points out the obvious and it gets past moderation.
I was not trolling about TEF.
I was trolling about your seeming AGW apologism and your overt derision and covert censorship. The closer I approach retirement the more I rail against blinkered dismissal of opposing views based solely on an unwillingness to break the chains of habit and think outside of self constructed boxes.
Given the power to do so, you always get any reply that disturbs your world view snipped. For someone who is all over Internet, on forums and discussion groups, and unhesitatingly and frequently offers third party rebuttal of a point of view that you refuse to put any effort into other than to offer scorn and to poke fun at, your energy and omnipresence is nothing short of remarkable for someone presumably busy at work. Your focus on the sun is commendable purely because you are a good solar scientist but your quoting from, and using as a shield, 100 year old papers that “prove” cyclomaniacs are mad if they attempt to present a system based on what you deem to be Astrology is as bad as the CO2 crowd claiming that 100 year old science works for them and we should all just fade away.
I have been shown something that you have not considered, that, with readily available tools (which you, no doubt, can access superior versions of and have staff, or interns, to delegate to the task) can be seen by this layman and you, and anyone, could repeat. There are definite alignments of the planets that, somehow (I am not claiming to know how) have cyclical effects upon the sun and, subsequently, upon weather/climate here. The solar system is exactly that, a system. Taking one element apart from that whole is inelegant and smacks of agenda.
Your treatment of “cyclomaniacs” (on CA for instance) appears rude, dogmatic, recidivist and haughty. It does not become you to dismiss without further investigation, by yourself, with a software orrery (The Sky from Software Bisque for example), those planets that cannot have gravitic, tidal or barycentric (or any other “alchemical”) effect on sol yet do, most emphatically, have repeating, cyclical, strong and predictable force of some kind with regard to this planet’s variables.
Just because someone had not the wit, skill or equipment to discern those relationships over a century ago, yet had the ear of their peers and the establishment sufficient to publish findings and just because currently “eminent” scientists are too lazy, too frightened or too arrogant to re-investigate a phenomena does not mean that those relationships are not present.
You could have taken a fresh look when the opportunity arose. Many people were saying similar things yet you chose the paths of ridicule and of asking for remarks to be snipped. Yet it is as plain as day that, viewed from the sun, planetary configurations that repeat in a cycle and can be utilised for prediction, are anathema to you. This does not mean that those theories are wrong. In fact, several people make a very good living from long range weather forecasting based upon those very principles and the farmers, market speculators, supermarket managers and holiday firms (to name a few) who rely upon those private forecasts are no fools and observe high success rates or they would drop them like a hot potato. The astroclimatologists may hold proprietary knowledge close to their chests (the withholding of which from society I do not agree with for many more reasons than the rather obvious and delightful one that would put egg on many faces) because of the arduous extraction of signal from noise that they all had to perform, but let us not demean their investigations without commensurate application.
We all appreciate the time you spend educating us in the ways of the solar sleuth. Your reciprocation would be equally well received if you were to investigate, for example, extreme weather events and then plot the orbital bodies’ (all of them) positions and vectors at those times to see the similarities. I do, however, expect you to skirt this issue as you have previously. Probably with snide remarks such as “rev up your orrery” and “angel wings beating”. Prove me wrong.

” Your reciprocation would be equally well received if you were to investigate, for example, extreme weather events and then plot the orbital bodies’ (all of them) positions and vectors at those times to see the similarities. I do, however, expect you to skirt this issue as you have previously. Probably with snide remarks such as “rev up your orrery” and “angel wings beating”. Prove me wrong.”
What did your last slave die of, TW??
He does have a career and a salary to justify, who do you think Lief is? Jim Hansen?

Leif, Thank you for your response but I still did not get a direct feel for what you believe is possible , forecast wise. As in what is possible to forecast from way out. Example… I forecasted that a Cycle 24 group would show up in the SH on December 10th, or be present quite a while back.
And only one Cycle 24 SH group had been seen prior to this as you might know. And a Cycle 24 group did emerge in the SH on December 11th. I could also give you other similar examples like for late 2006 which was made well out in advance.
And I’ve also been talking about a June increase for the past several weeks with some people within the meteorological community because some of them believe in the space weather forcing connection to the ENSO. And I have said that this will be the largest level of activity since March 2008.
So I want to know is a forecast like this good enough to some extent or do you want to hear specifics like flare strength, sunspot location, and total etc….
And please keep the criteria for my own forecasts on the same playing field level as someone like yourself. When it comes to specific forecast details. But I am also unaware if you make these types. Thanks in advance.