Equatorial Pacific wind data is here:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/data/indices/

Relax. Give me a couple of weeks. These are just preliminary videos. Those OI.v2-based SST anomaly maps run back to 1982. As soon as I’ve downloaded a group, I’ll crank out videos that compare the animations to comparison graphs of NINO3.4 SST anomalies and the SST anomalies for the given area: North Atlantic, etc. I’ll start with the Atlantic and show that all the red in the North Atlantic is caused by step changes resulting from the 1986/87/88 and the 1997/98 El Ninos. Then you can upset the fiendish minds of the AGWers.

In the mean time, there here a couple of posts that use graphs to illustrate what I’m talking about:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/02/there-are-also-el-nino-induced-step.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/12/lingering-effects-of-199798-el-nino.html

Hopefully, with the videos, those graphs will be more effective.

Regards

anna v (12:44:04) :

“What I am saying is that unless the anomalies are turned into Joules per m**3, or even watts/m**2 since we are talking of surface, the eye is fooled about magnitudes in these plots. A red color in the tropics is not in heat content the same as a red color in the arctic/antarctic since the relation of temperature to heat is not linear.”

Since I am not a scientist, I have trouble articulating many of these issues. However, the colors of the anomaly maps are jarring. They play right into the fiendish minds of AGWers. We see red all over the place when the temp anomaly is a little above 0C. Not right. Not helpful. Can’t a group of researchers get together and develop a different color convention for anomalies. They are not the same thing as SSTs. Please.

I could really do with one of those right now. :o)

Does anyone know of a climate model which will run on a standalone PC?

Agreed that the various ocean oscillations are going to teach us a lot whilst the sun is quiet but for the net effect on the current global temperature trend the net latitudinal position of the air circulation systems is a useful guide if anyone could work it out.

Anyway between you, me, Bob and Willis we are close to a workable new theory of climate here.

If the oceans can amplify by,say, 5 times they can also suppress by 5 times giving a total range of 10 times. That deals quite adequately with the apparent disjunction between the scale of solar variability and the scale of observed climate responses.

The energy differentials between the shifting locations of the boundaries of the Hadley cells must be vast, and I agree with your analysis that they could act as a strong governing mechanism on climate. I also think they may be cyclically affected by the lunar declination cycle, which is linked to the drought cycle. To further complicate the issue, Anthony did a study which found an ~18 year cycle in solar data.

I feel I’m still very undereducated and though I think I have some valid calculations which change the landscape, I don’t know how much that might help with a new theory of climate. I am hopeful though, and with the solid work done by Bob, and the excellent inductive hypotheses formed by you and Willis, we’ll get there. Meantime I’ll keep lobbing wild speculations into the mix to see what it jogs. :o)

I believe Nir Shaviv found an order of magnitude forcing in the solar cycle length responses of the ocean. He thinks clouds are the best candidate. If we are going to get clouds to help with our multidecadal problem, we will need to get down and dirty with the ISCCP data. Bob has showed us the way with his excellent analyses of climate critical areas such as Nino 3.4. We need to look at cloud there and in other critical locales and the concomitant XBT and ARGO data to try to work out how much long term cloud cover change affects insolation to important oceanic areas., because global cloud cover indices and even tropical indices don’t vary enough to do the job. Your latitudinal shifts are going to plug into that too.

I think Bob’s animations should help identify those critical areas.

How about a current map instead?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Ocean_currents_1943_(borderless)3.png

It’s large, but detailed.

“As shown in the animations, those SST anomalies travel. Surface water that’s warmer or cooler than “normal” is carried from one location to another, and those anomalies move from high latitudes to the tropics and from the tropics to high latitudes. If not “heat transport”, how else would you choose to describe it?”

Congratulation’s on the good work put into this,I know that it is an ongoing project.

To clarify the above quote ,would it be helpful to overlay SS current flow?

I’d be tickled pink if it came out at 42.

However I’m not sure that the sunspot count is necessarily an adequate proxy for the combined effect of all solar influences on the highly variable rate of energy transfer through the Earth systems of ocean and air (land being pretty much irrelevant because it’s energy storage capability is fixed and negligible).

Agreed that the various ocean oscillations are going to teach us a lot whilst the sun is quiet but for the net effect on the current global temperature trend the net latitudinal position of the air circulation systems is a useful guide if anyone could work it out.

Anyway between you, me, Bob and Willis we are close to a workable new theory of climate here.

The external driver is certainly solar but the Earthly effect from the oceans can be either positive or negative at different times. That explains the size of variation from what would otherwise be expected from solar alone.

If the oceans can amplify by,say, 5 times they can also suppress by 5 times giving a total range of 10 times. That deals quite adequately with the apparent disjunction between the scale of solar variability and the scale of observed climate responses.

I see that as the overarching scenario which accommodates all the new ideas expressed here and elsewhere by knowledgeable sceptics.

Stephen, thanks for the clear post and I agree with the closing segment quoted. Your theory implies any longer term change in global temperature must be due to external forcing. I add that this must imply a terrestrial amplification or ‘positive feedback within limits’. I have been pondering what the balance point is where the oceans emit as much as they absorb, and I think this may be somewhere around an average monthly sunspot count of 42. Perhaps Douglas Adams was right all along.

I am now trying to work out how fast the ocean will dissipate heat at 1and 10 sunspots a month and they rate of oscillation at which it will do it. The currently forming modoki el nino is a kind of proving ground for my ideas. I anticipate a 0.25 – 0.3C uplift in air temp over the next 4 months followed by a slide to an anomaly of -0.3 or a bit lower by next May. This is on the assumption the sun doesn’t burst into high activity, but slowly gains a few more spots/month over the next year. Also assuming a large volcanic eruption doesn’t occur.

I do not want to confuse the issue. Yes, there is heat transport, and yes, this will show in the temperature anomalies.

What I am saying is that unless the anomalies are turned into Joules per m**3, or even watts/m**2 since we are talking of surface, the eye is fooled about magnitudes in these plots. A red color in the tropics is not in heat content the same as a red color in the arctic/antarctic since the relation of temperature to heat is not linear.

Let’s look at how I used heat transport in this post. My first use of the word transport was in the discussion of the Pacific and the effects of El Ninos. I wrote, “Yet RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots (refer to RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots…) clearly show that the majority of the heat from the 1997/98 El Nino was transported to the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.” In case that link doesn’t make it through with the cut and paste, here it is again:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html
So my first use of the term had nothing to do with SST or SST anomalies, which were the bulk of your first comment.

Now let’s look at the common usage of “heat transport” with respect to El Nino events. David Enfield of NOAA in his El Nino FAQ webpage…
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/enso_faq/
…writes, “What happens during an El Niño ‘avalanche’ is that a lot of excess heat gets transported poleward, most frequently through winter storms.”

And that heat would be reflected in an increase in TLT anomalies in mid-to-high latitudes. Again, my use of the term is not outside common practice.

My second use of the word was in the following sentence, “Does this mean that El Nino events transport heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere?”

I fail to see where your discussions of the Southern Ocean and Greenland come into play with that sentence. But maybe transfer would have been more appropriate there.

Thanks. Hopefully they will. One high school science teacher had my video “The Lingering Effects of the 1997/98 El Nino” in his schedule last school year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uv4Xc4D0Dk

Also note how the lingering effects in the East Indian and West Pacific Oceans that were discussed in that video show up quite clearly in their respective videos above. The heat that’s redistributed by an El Nino can hang around for a number of years in the atmosphere and in the oceans.

:D

With the “sensitivity” of the contour levels I used, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re seeing a number of coupled ocean-atmosphere processes taking place in addition to ocean currents, etc. That was my hope with those settings. Unfortunately, this eliminated the upper end anomalies, like those in the North Atlantic and the peaks of the ENSO event anomalies in the equatorial Pacific. In fact, in the post when I mentioned heat transport or warm anomalies being carried by currents, I was very specific in the locations: the Humboldt and Benguela Currents. I did mention the North Atlantic, but very briefly. Apparently I led people to watch the North Atlantic when the preliminary action, what I was trying to note, took place in the South Atlantic (and in the South Pacific in the other example).

And yes, one’s want to see a process may lead one to believe that’s what they’re seeing.

If not “heat transport”, how else would you choose to describe it?

A function of heat transport? A spatial convolution of heat transport? Like seeing through a distorting lens by T**4 ( hand waving, it sure is not black body).

It is not even a simple projection.

It is logically disorienting to see red in Greenland when the real water temperature is -2C. There is a bit of extra heat but it does not tell us how much, with respet to the tropics, because the correspondence is not linear.

Possibly one could calculate a heat anomaly out of this, if one could approximate the temperature to heat function. That would have straight forward meaning because it would reflect the energy transports involved.

I’m not sure this description is precisely right. Because you’re dealing with anomalies and the fact that heat is not trapped in a water mass but can radiate into space, there’s an appearance of heat transport that may be greater than it actually is. Notice in the North Atlantic sequence the Gulf Stream doesn’t flow with waves of heat transport from SW to NE, but instead the whole basin seems to throb like a heartbeat. Obviously, there is transport, but I think our brains may be supplying an explanation to the patterns we see in these sequences that’s not completely the case.

Nice work, though. I wonder if a weekly time interval might be more revealing.