“Teleconnection”??

Please, water is heavy. It doesnt get teleported from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The heat coming out of the surface of the Atlantic is the stored heat from below the surface of the Atlantic.

Josh Willis will be wondering if his Atlantic Argo floats have thrown another wobbly, and it’ll probably get ‘adjusted’ away in the processing of the raw ARGO data.

I had to create my own using the SST anomalies for the areas listed in Ashok et al and the simple formula they included.

Regards

Is the Modoki index values available somewhere?

I plotted the Nino 4 and Nino 3 region values against US landfalling hurricanes in various different ways and there is just no “different type of El Nino” relationship to landfalling hurricanes whatsoever. I haven’t tried this novel Modoki method however.

And here’s the same data smoothed with 25-month filters:
http://i32.tinypic.com/2eulhuh.png

The shapes of the curves of the NINO3.4 SST anomalies that followed those big three events are strikingly similar.

Thanks again for the reminder.

I also had some problems trying to duplicate the Hye-Mi Kim et al Figure S2. Standardizing the data helped. Keep in mind that they described how they determined EPW and CPW events as, “EPW, CPW, and Eastern Pacific cooling (EPC) events are defined as follows: Niño 3 (fig. S1) warming greater than 1 standard deviation (SD), for EPW; Niño 3 or Niño 3.4 cooler than 1 SD, for EPC; and for CPW, Niño 4 warming exceeding 1 SD, while Niño 3 stays below this range. The results are shown in fig. S2.” So there is another qualifier other than NINO4 having a higher SST anomaly than NINO3 for the CPW event.

The peak NINO3.4 SST anomalies for the 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Ninos were similar, but the El Chichon eruption impacted the heat transport of the 1982/83 El Nino, so it was a non-Nino. That is, the 1982/83 El Nino had little to no measurable impact on global temperature. The peak NINO3.4 SST anomalies of the 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Nino events were substantially higher than the 1986/87/88 El Nino, but the 1986/87/88 El Nino lasted through the entire year of 1987, plus the ramp up in 1986 and transition to La Nina in 1988. The 1986/87/88 El Nino was so strong it caused a noticeable upward step change in global temperature, like the 1997/98 El Nino. The heat transport of the 1986/87/88 and 1997/98 El Nino events can be seen in the RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots and Time-Series graphs I provided here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html

So to answer the first of your questions above, I was talking about global impacts and about relative strength and duration.

What size the “cubes” How are they set around the world by latitude, elevation, and longitude (?) and by ocean and ground? Are the “cubes” the same size in x, y, and z? _ if Not, how are changes vertically handled in temperature, pressure, winds, water and humidity and clouds? What are modeled for mountains, seas, and high “flat” elevations? What about slowly changing elevations – such as Rockies CO to Western Mississippi? How are peninsula’s like FL and Thailand (?) and islands like New Zealand and Greenland and New Guinea handled? How is Antarctica handled? The Arctic?

Are jet streams produced (internal to the model) by the math as a function of the math itself, or are they artificially simulated by the equations or are they ignored altogether?

We understand “clouds” are a single, fixed, simple factor: A single assumed value. If this is correct, does that value change with time, humidity, “rainfall” predictions output or “drought” or higher temperatures or do the “climate modelers” simply keep one cloud value forever across 100 years or 200 years of processing?

Are clouds changing with elevation? With the different time steps, do “clouds” get changed by the output of previous steps, and what exactly IS fed back from step n to step n+1, n+2 , n+3 etc?

What is the physics in each “cube” – there ARE hundreds (if not thousands) or engineers and doctors and even scientists capable of understanding each equation, and easily understanding the “physics and chemistry” of each interaction inside each cube. WHAT do the models assume iis going on in the “cube”? and who has checked or audited or peer-reviewed (by name!) these steps.

Who has checked the computer coding in each “cube” to verify that what the equations are supposed to be is what what the computer is calculating?

It looks like ‘65, ‘66, ‘67, ‘77,’ 86, ‘90, ‘91, ‘94, ‘02, and ‘04 were Modoki seasons.

For comparison, Kim lists ‘69, ‘91, ‘94, ‘02 and ‘04 as CPW seasons. Pretty big mismatch.

Related to Kim’s Figure S2, I easily replicated the Nino 3 values in the Figure but was way off on the Nino 4 values. I still haven’t identified the reasons for the differences.

Bob:

Are you saying the impacts from the ‘86-87 El Nino were greater than the ‘82-83 event? Looking at 3.4 anomalies, the latter was a huge event. The ‘72-’73 El Nino was also quite a show: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/quick_look/sst34.gif

“(IMO, the 1986/87/88 El Nino was the second of the Super El Ninos in the 20th century, not 1982/83, since El Chichon suppressed most of the heat transport of the earlier one.)”

Bob:

Are you talking impacts or relative strength? The ‘82-’83 El Nino was huge in terms of anomalies in the Equatorial Pacific. Even the ‘72-’73 event had quite a peak: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/quick_look/sst34.gif

Looks like there was a run around 1900, too, but the tropical Pacific SST data is questionable before 1914. Then there were another pair around 1920. What I enjoy is that the 1986/87 El Nino shows up, but the second part (1987/88) of it doesn’t. Apparently, the warm spot moved east, which they have a tendency to do as the El Nino progresses. (IMO, the 1986/87/88 El Nino was the second of the Super El Ninos in the 20th century, not 1982/83, since El Chichon suppressed most of the heat transport of the earlier one.)

You’ll soon discover there are a few differences between the Hye-Mi Kim et al Figure S-2 and this one.

I’ll also work up a couple of NINO3.4 and El Nino Modoki comparison graphs tomorrow morning.

Regards

My guess that El Nino Modoki is an “okidoki” (Ron de Han) to find something “new” on which to hang global warming for December’s meeting. With a negative PDO and cooler temperatures we are likely to have fewer El Ninos and larger La Ninas, but, there must be some other warming disaster that rising CO2 levels can cause in the oceans.

Bob Tisdale, you have shown that there is nothing NEW in the heating of the Central Pacific Ocean during the entire 20th Century up to the present. So now climate realists — e.g., Bob, WUWT — have to turn their attention and research efforts toward outing this NEW okidoki.

A second item appeared In the same issue June 3rd of Science Mag in “Perspectives” by Greg J. Holland that appeared to innocently be about “Predicting El Nino’s Impacts”. Holland is from NCAR in Boulder CO where he is director (since 2005) of “Mesocale and Microscale Meteorology Division” He asserts that it has been shown, citing Webster’s co-authored article, Kim, ea, that El Nino should be broken into two independent modes: eastern Pacific warming (EPW) and a central Pacific warming (CPW). The latter has a high level of predictability and functions like a La Nina in this respect — North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity rises during CPW.

The detective story is getting hot. Webster and Holland co-authored an article published online in 2007 by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. They proposed that “climate change” is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes”. They showed step changes over the century of periods of annual averages of 6, 10, and now 15 tropical storms correlated closely with a 1.3 degree F rise in SSTs in the last 100 years. “The new study indicates that natural cycles are probably not the entire cause because the increase has happened across the last century rather than oscillating in tandem with a natural cycle.” Finally, “the proportion of major hurricanes to lesser hurricanes…has increased significantly in recent years.”

Webster and Holland appear like Al Gore’s storm troopers in the battle to purify our environment of the pollution and immenent disaster of CO2.