We may never know the real history of global temperature, 100 year back or 100 million years back.

There certainly has been no cherry-picking; Agassiz has been a core focus in my research for a year-&-a-half.

The 1930s drought was catastrophic & of continental scale. This is not in dispute. I am eager to (secure funding &) broaden the study spatially. [You may be interested to know that I think this will be a key to taking the last woodfortrees graph a step further. (I already have preliminary results.)]

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tallbloke (03:42:41) “[...] I lost the context on the first.”

Maybe a look at the base harmonics will help:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Cos(Phase(abs(Pr.),2r..,3LNC)).png

The number of possible blends & contrasts varies geometrically [2^(n-1)] with the number of harmonics considered [2^(1-1) = 1; 2^(2-1) = 2; 2^(3-1) = 4; 2^(4-1) = 8; etc.].
I’m not going to post all combos, but I will note that another of the combos relates to LOD. The combo I posted should help focus the attention of anyone investigating mechanisms.

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I agree with you that this thread is wrapping up.

Cheers,
Paul.

Agreed, the more transient anomalies appear to be SST responses to atmospheric processes, though I don’t know that I’d confine the atmospheric processes to clouds alone.

You wrote, “2) Apart from the main equatorial alternation of el nino, la nina, the other multiyear features (with an annual oscillation due to axial tilt) are the areas east of Austalasia and Japan. These drift north and south over periods of months. Do you think this drift is connected with shifts in the jet streams at the boundaries of the Hadley cells?”

I can’t answer your questions regarding jet streams and Hadley cells.

You wrote, “3) The residual warmth sometimes clinging to the sides of south and north America following el nino. Are they affected by the changes in LOD and AAM Paul has been working on, causing water to pile up against continental masses?”

I don’t know enough about Paul’s research to comment, but I would think that the “piling up” along the tropical west coasts of North and South America are at first a “mushrooming” caused by the volume of warm water being carried from west to east by the Equatorial Countercurrent. Eventually, the North and South Equatorial Currents catch up and drag the warm water back to the west. The clinging? Convection follows the warm water, causing a change in the sea surface winds. Would the winds then tend to “hold” the warm water against the coastline? Dunno.

You wrote, “I could set up a discussion forum, or you could host it? What do you think is best?”

Feel free to start commenting on the thread where I threw all of the SST anomaly videos.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/animations-of-weekly-sst-anomaly-maps.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/
“The larger long term trend in ocean warming reported here makes it much easier to reconcile the sea level estimates from thermal expansion with the actual rises. Those estimates do now match. But remember that the second big issue with ocean heat content trends is that they largely reflect the planetary radiative imbalance.”

Gavin is correct on the second count, but wrong on the first as my calcs show. The new ocean heat content estimate is around 2.5 too low to account for the observed sea level rise due to expansion.

Once again reality has been ‘adjusted’ to fit the theory.

Max – (also ~winter solstice / ~perihelion).

Also the closest Perigee of the year was Jan 15th just 2 hours after full moon, and the furthest Apogee was Jan 28th 1 day after new moon. Very unusual configuration.

Data here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html

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Did you see these 2 tallbloke?
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG

Yes but I lost the context on the first. Lunar?
The precip/wobble plot is impressive, but you’ll get accused of cherrypicking if you don’t compare it to other locales.

Zero phase – but that’s not the story — it’s the context that’s interesting – the wave-train tightens, loosens, tightens, loosens, etc. There’s clearly a link with the LOD peak ~1912/1913 – more in the days ahead…

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tallbloke (00:23:25) “What stage of the 18.6 year cycle was the moon in, near maximum declination perchance?”

Max – (also ~winter solstice / ~perihelion).

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tallbloke (00:23:25) “Do you think the Earth Moon system might be more susceptible to funny wobbles when the solar wind pressure is low?”

No comments on solar.

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Did you see these 2 tallbloke?
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG

They are the “take home” part of the chapter 1 story.

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Thermodynamics was not among my few dozen engineering courses, but it is great to watch the exchange you & Bob are having.

This is what I would describe as a rupture in the continuity of normalized wavelet harmonic cross-spectrum power between the absolute magnitude of the vector rate of change of terrestrial polar motion |Pr’| and the rate of change of the rate of change (i.e. 2nd derivative) of the distance of the sun from the solar system centre of mass r”:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930HarmonicPowerRupture.PNG

Hi Paul,

I note your graph has a wavelet period around the length of the chandler wobble.
So if I understand correctly, you are thinking there may be a link between the acceleration of the sun relative to the COM and the phase shift in the Chandler wobble, possibly due to differential gravitational effects on the earth moon system.
Good to see someone playing with Ray Tomes ideas in a new application by the way.

Was the sun accelerating inwards towards the COM or away at the time?

What stage of the 18.6 year cycle was the moon in, near maximum declination perchance?

The sun was dropping to minimum at the time. Do you think the Earth Moon system might be more susceptible to funny wobbles when the solar wind pressure is low?

1) The way warm anomalies ‘flow’ across cental america from the Carribean Gulf to the CalMex coasts indicates that clouds are the cause of a lot of the comings and goings of the more ephemeral sea surface anomalies.

2) Apart from the main equatorial alternation of el nino, la nina, the other multiyear features (with an annual oscillation due to axial tilt) are the areas east of Austalasia and Japan. These drift north and south over periods of months. Do you think this drift is connected with shifts in the jet streams at the boundaries of the Hadley cells?

3) The residual warmth sometimes clinging to the sides of south and north America following el nino. Are they affected by the changes in LOD and AAM Paul has been working on, causing water to pile up against continental masses?

I have lots more questions popping into my head, but I’ll leave it there for now.

Just to comment that this thread will fall off the bottom of the thread list soon. I’m getting a lot out of it and I’d hate to see it become a complete ghost town. How about we bookmark it or move the discussion to another site? I could set up a discussion forum, or you could host it? What do you think is best?

I’ll delete that earlier version in a few days.

Loose resonance can be seen in a plot of the harmonic phase difference:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930sHarmonicPhaseDifference.PNG

Note that there is only one 180 degree (black) vertically-oriented trace, in the 1930s (…& note that during ~1910-1920 there was almost an instance of antiphase).

Introducing lunar nodal cycle (LNC) harmonics makes it clear that 1:2:3 resonance was broken in a unique interference pattern that has occurred only once in the entire polar motion record (1846+):
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png

It is very difficult to get any of my contacts to understand this stuff, but eventually someone of stature & influence will have the necessary patience & lack of prejudice.

Note for anyone pondering physical mechanisms that may have been overlooked in the past: The index r” is confounded with other indices of solar system dynamics.

Speculation: Earth’s shells (atmosphere, ocean, solid, molten parts) respond differentially to gravitational acceleration/shear. Although this may not always be important, it may sometimes be very important when peculiar harmonic phase alignments arise. Perhaps some terms in some equations have been assumed to be near-zero when they are not always near-zero. Or perhaps Earth is being treated as a point mass or as a homogeneous, symmetrical, uniformly-rotating body in (draft) calculations when it should be treated as heterogeneous (& additionally as a member of the Earth-Moon system).

I am only introducing a rough sketch here. I have other clean results. For example, this stuff is clearly related to LOD and local extreme monthly temperatures.

The balance of this investigation is going to take weeks-to-years – (perhaps a decade due to circumstances). The rate of progress could be severely limited by my access to funding beginning as early as this week. Research/Education money is being diverted to pay for the 2010 Olympics in my neck of the woods – and whatever climate research money there is here only goes to projects promising to prove global warming & its implications (supporting the existing carbon tax).

Funding research on the 1930s severe drought, which had severe economic, ecological, & social consequences, is not even on the radar of the funding bodies so far as I can tell (to date). I am left with the impression that our society has gone off the rails with its blinderred sense of priorities, but I choose to remain optimistic.

My strong background in ecology positions me to fully appreciate the importance of the hydrologic cycle, including the ecological impact of severe drought. Appreciable knowledge of statistics positions me to handle the harmonic cross-wavelet calculations. Engineering taught me to focus on extreme & unusual events rather than averages. Physical geography taught me to be relentlessly & acutely conscious of scale & heterogeneity. The results of this research are too clean to be dismissed. It is just a matter of time before the right combination of experts (from different fields since this is trans-disciplinary) polish this work. One patient & open-minded astrophysicist &/or geophysicist in a position of influence might be all I need as a collaborator to successfully see this work through to its fruition, for the benefit of all of society.

Earlier plots, for reference:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG

“During the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains.”

“[...] severity, extent, and duration of the 1930s drought was unusual for the 20th century [...]”

“While progress has been made in understanding some of the important processes contributing to drought conditions (3–7), the mechanisms by which a drought can be maintained over many years are not well established.”

“Understanding the causes of the 1930s drought is particularly challenging in view of the scarcity of upper-air meteorological observations prior to about 1950.”

Siegfried D. Schubert, Max J. Suarez, Philip J. Pegion, Randal D. Koster, & Julio T. Bacmeister (2004). On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Science 303(5665), 1855-1859.
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/schubert_2004.pdf

“[...] the development and maintenance of atmospheric ridges is the prime ingredient for drought conditions [...]”

“[...] the longer the anomalous weather conditions persist, the more likely it is to have some stationary forcing acting as a flywheel (i.e., as a source for inertia) to maintain the anomalies [...]”

“[...] the forcing required to sustain a drought over seasons or years would be expected to lie outside of the atmospheric domain [...]”

“Because a large proportion of the variance of drought conditions over North America is unrelated to sea surface temperature perturbations, it is conceivable that when a severe drought occurs it is because numerous mechanisms are acting in tandem.”

http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-ch3.pdf

Fascinating. The ‘jerky’ version is as you say, detracts a little from the ‘flow of the narrative’, but it still contains a vast amount of information to the trained eye. To an untrained eye like mine, several things come to mind, but I’ll wait for you to upload the others and especiallythe global animation and view them all.

Thanks for your hard work on this, it must be time consuming.

NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png

tallbloke: You wrote, “It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ‘98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission.”

Please explain that.

NINO3.4 Region TLT anomalies follow the SST anomalies:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2a7bj2s.png

NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:

Hi Bob, how many interesting graphs do you have in your cupboard? :-)

I hope the foregoing post covers some of your question, because my fingers are starting to bleed, but what I draw from the second graph is that while temps were rising, the sun was strong, oceans were accumulating extra heat and el ninos were driven by increasing temps exciting trade winds, clouds and the PWP, there were big restrictions on OLR at Nino time.

But at the back end of the graph, since solar cycle 23 started winding down, the minor el ninos this decade haven’t had such a restriction on OLR. I anticipate this one will be the same, because the heat is coming out of the oceans into drier cooler air, and it’s rising to form cumulus which vanish overnight as Willis Eschenbach explained. Less humidity, less restiction on OLR.

The momentum of that heavy warm water heading upwards will keep going as air temps rise for a few months before the newly warmed atmosphere slows the emission rate down again, thus giving us a pale shadow of a full blown el nino like the ones we got in the ’80’s and nineties.

The key thing is, we’ll see SST’s rise almost simultaneously worldwide (southern hemi first?), rather than with a lag like the spreading PWP el nino’s you’ve described so brilliantly. This is because the heat is coming out of the oceans everywhere at once, due to cooler tropospheric temps. There is no ‘teleconnection’ involved, there will be no heat teleported from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The warmth coming out of the Atlantic will be the warmth that has been below the surface of the Atlantic these last 20 years or more, raising the anomaly and the sea level.

But without cloud amount data that runs to present times, it would be difficult to determine what’s cause and effect.

The non-seasonally adjusted sea level graph shows a lot of spikes occur in the second half of the year
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_ORIG.jpg
Until I chart the data for the various oceans I can’t be sure whether this is caused by high insolation in the southern hemisphere springtime before summer mugginess clouds the tropics more, but warm humid conditions will tend to prevent heat escaping from the ocean easily too. Lots to work on and think about, but the overall picture is becoming clearer to me. The sun heats the oceans, the oceans heat the atmosphere. Downwelling radiation doesn’t penetrate the oceans to heat it but creates more evaporation at the surface and that slows down heat emission. Co2 is along for the ride, chipping in it’s tiny contribution to that slowing of heat emission.

I have calculated the rate at which the ocean accumulated heat between 1993 and 2003 in terms of the number of watts per square metre required to warm that much water. According to the 2009 Levitus ocean heat content assessment which is 250% lower than it was in 2000, the figure comes out at; guess what?

1.7W/m2

Now where have we seen that figure before? As I said, the downwelling back-radiation from the atmosphere doesn’t heat the ocean, but limits it’s ability to emit at the rate it would in vacuuo. If the ocean is restricted from emitting by an amount equal to 1.7Wm2 it will accumulate ~6×10^22J per decade, all other things being equal.This figure roughly matches the Levitus et al and other studies.

If what I believe is the correct figure for ocean heat content increase of around 14×10^22J is on the mark, and it not only agrees with the altimetry and the gradient of temperature from the surface to the thermocline for the observed rise in SST, but also James Annan’s calculation of the Levitus et al 2000 data which Levitus got wrong, then the ‘forcing’ is not 1.7W/m^2 but 4W/m2.

This is more than co2 could accomplish in the wildest dreams of overblown climate sensitivity theoreticians, so the there must have been extra energy going into the oceans 1993-2003 as well as any additional restriction on it getting out again.

As soon as it is recognized that the source of extra heat going in has to be solar in origin, the game is up, because the claimed sensitivity rests on the assumption that solar input is near enough constant.

But it isn’t. Using sunspot numbers as a proxy for TSI, and counting them on a running cumulative total of the difference above and below the average sunspot number we can see that the run of high amplitude-short minimum cycle in the late C20th must have been putting a lot of extra TSI into the oceans.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view&current=sst-nino-ssa.jpg

And now the sun has quietened down, we get the modoki el nino, which is the manifestation of that accumulated energy coming back out of the oceans now the troposphere has started to cool down.

Clouds are very important in the major weather and climate shaping events you study, but these overarching processes of ocean heat accumulation and dissipation during runs of high and low solar cycles are the bigger drivers which have been hidden from view by the assumption that the sun’s effect on the energy budget of Earth is constant, and the inability to isolate the signal in the SST data. The modoki el nino is the signal. It’s previously stored energy coming out of the ocean not because temperatures are increasing, but because they are falling due to a quieter sun, creating a bigger heat differential between ocean and atmosphere, sucking the heat out of the ocean.

Having said that, the 11 year solar effect is amplified by the amount calculated by Nir Shaviv, and he believes the major cause is the clouds, and cloud changes on longer timescales too, so we’re both right really.

I just want to get the key points out in the open, so they are on the table if I get hit by a bus later today. I would like it if people let me write it up and present it in more carefully considered words though.

Thanks for listening.

Please explain that.

NINO3.4 Region TLT anomalies follow the SST anomalies:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2a7bj2s.png

NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png

Also, you might find the following link helpful. I just finished SST anomaly animations of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans from January 1996 to July 1, 2009, with the contour levels at 0.2 deg C to bring out the lower-intensity temperature anomalies. I’ll finish the “global” today and then upload and post them, probably tomorrow. Here’s a YouTube link to the Pacific:

But without cloud amount data that runs to present times, it would be difficult to determine what’s cause and effect.

These types of calculations aren’t up my alley, but I commend you guys for working on this.

Heh, and likewise Paul, the types of calculations you do make my head swim. I’m just a mechanical engineer with a bit of extra knowledge in fluid dynamics learned at my father’s knee.

Let’s stick to what we’re good at and compliment each other by taking the trouble to think about each others work, and keep lobbing fresh ideas over the fence to each other to help inform the directions of our researches.