From the Jet Propulsion Lab:
NASA/NOAA Study Finds El Niños are Growing Stronger
A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Niños and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting.
Lead author Tong Lee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Michael McPhaden of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, measured changes in El Niño intensity since 1982. They analyzed NOAA satellite observations of sea surface temperature, checked against and blended with directly-measured ocean temperature data. The strength of each El Niño was gauged by how much its sea surface temperatures deviated from the average. They found the intensity of El Niños in the central Pacific has nearly doubled, with the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.
The scientists say the stronger El Niños help explain a steady rise in central Pacific sea surface temperatures observed over the past few decades in previous studies-a trend attributed by some to the effects of global warming. While Lee and McPhaden observed a rise in sea surface temperatures during El Niño years, no significant temperature increases were seen in years when ocean conditions were neutral, or when El Niño’s cool water counterpart, La Niña, was present.
“Our study concludes the long-term warming trend seen in the central Pacific is primarily due to more intense El Niños, rather than a general rise of background temperatures,” said Lee.
“These results suggest climate change may already be affecting El Niño by shifting the center of action from the eastern to the central Pacific,” said McPhaden. “El Niño’s impact on global weather patterns is different if ocean warming occurs primarily in the central Pacific, instead of the eastern Pacific.
“If the trend we observe continues,” McPhaden added, “it could throw a monkey wrench into long-range weather forecasting, which is largely based on our understanding of El Niños from the latter half of the 20th century.”
El Niño, Spanish for “the little boy,” is the oceanic component of a climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which appears in the tropical Pacific Ocean on average every three to five years. The most dominant year-to-year fluctuating pattern in Earth’s climate system, El Niños have a powerful impact on the ocean and atmosphere, as well as important socioeconomic consequences. They can influence global weather patterns and the occurrence and frequency of hurricanes, droughts and floods; and can even raise or lower global temperatures by as much as 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.4 degrees Fahrenheit).
During a “classic” El Niño episode, the normally strong easterly trade winds in the tropical eastern Pacific weaken. That weakening suppresses the normal upward movement of cold subsurface waters and allows warm surface water from the central Pacific to shift toward the Americas. In these situations, unusually warm surface water occupies much of the tropical Pacific, with the maximum ocean warming remaining in the eastern-equatorial Pacific.
Since the early 1990s, however, scientists have noted a new type of El Niño that has been occurring with greater frequency. Known variously as “central-Pacific El Niño,” “warm-pool El Niño,” “dateline El Niño” or “El Niño Modoki” (Japanese for “similar but different”), the maximum ocean warming from such El Niños is found in the central-equatorial, rather than eastern, Pacific. Such central Pacific El Niño events were observed in 1991-92, 1994-95, 2002-03, 2004-05 and 2009-10. A recent study found many climate models predict such events will become much more frequent under projected global warming scenarios.
Lee said further research is needed to evaluate the impacts of these increasingly intense El Niños and determine why these changes are occurring. “It is important to know if the increasing intensity and frequency of these central Pacific El Niños are due to natural variations in climate or to climate change caused by human-produced greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
Results of the study were published recently in Geophysical Research Letters.
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“These results suggest climate change may already be affecting El Niño by shifting the center of action from the eastern to the central Pacific”
Eh… yeah. He’s got it backwards..
“However, a new NOAA-funded study shows that the 1918/1919 El Niño was one of the strongest of the 20th century”
http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/pandemic_1918_1919.html
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009BAMS2903.1
Never has so little explained so much.
dT
If the Modoki type has been happening more often, SST anomalies in the Modoki area should be rising compared to classical ENSO area more to the east. It is not happening.
Modoki area SST
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ihadsst2_200-230E_-5-5N_n_mean1.png
Normal El Nino area SST
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ihadsst2_230-270E_-5-5N_n_mean1.png
The claim that Modoki-type ENSO events are happening more often, is not supported by data, unless cherry picking 1960-2000 period.
Recently Bob Tisdale posted here on WUWT showing from recent decades that the el Nino Modoki type was less likely than the “standard” el Nino to be followed hot on its heels by a La Nina event. This analysis, based on several closelyt spaced el Ninos recently (e.g. 1991-2, 1994-5, 2002-3, 2004-5), coming from one of the leading authorities on oceanic cycles, surprisingly has proved wrong this year. “As we speak” we are descending into a strong La Nina event immediately after the most intense recent el Nino Modoki.
This unusual turn of events which seems to be breaking the recent pattern may signify that something has changed. What could change influencing the pattern and succession of ENSO events? The answer is obvious – the PDO/AMO longer term multidecadal cycles. In fact we now know this very clearly following Roy Spencer’s recent WUWT post showing that the 20th century temperature curve could be tracked precisely as a function of the ENSO cycle.
The paper here, while useful and informative, shows the myopic cherry picking to give an alarmist AGW conclusion without which nothing can be published in scientific journals concerning climate. “Here is a trend over the last 3-4 decades which obviously is going to continue for ever and ever, Amen”.
A more raional take on this is that the ENSO is the mechanism by which global temperatures rise during the PDO/AMO upswings, e.g. 1970-2005. But now we are starting a downswing, so the rules change subtly. A second strong La Nina tightly sandwiching an el Nino Modoki is not supposed to happen. The regime has changed. We could call his year’s ocean temperature downswing as a “La Nina Modoki”.
( Sorry no WUWT links supplied, I’m writing from a mobile phone.)
Anthony, I admit my ignorance about sea surface temperature records, so I ask for your help here. A.R.G.O’s are very recent but do they indicate any warming outside what would normally be observed in the central Pacific as this study would indicate?
How can you believe this.
According to those maps sea surface heights were around 9 cms [4.5 ins] above normal at the peak of that ’09-’10 El Nino on the east coast of Australia.
Well the highest astronomical [king] tide of the year at my 47 year old benchmark on Jan 31st 2010 [in the middle of that El Nino] was 200 cms [8 ins] below the normal king tide level.
And local marine scientists claimed that tide was higher than predicted.
If background temperatures are the same, and if the 2010 El Niño was the most intense, this year should be the warmest on record. But according to IPCC background temperature is now 0.2°C higher than in 1998. And still 2010 does not seem to become the warmest.
So the planet must be cooling.
So they “measured changes in El Niño intensity since 1982.”
And “they found the intensity of El Niños in the central Pacific has nearly doubled, with the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.”
And “Our study concludes the long-term warming trend seen in the central Pacific is primarily due to more intense El Niños”
And “These results suggest climate change may already be affecting El Niño”
So they are sure that a bigger (or I guess a smaller) El Nino compared to a 28 year average is a big deal. If the cycle is 3 – 5 years, that would make it the biggest out of somewhere between 6 & 9 “El Ninos”.
Wow.
And there’s no doubt, I presume, that it is Climate Change (=all you guys driving SUVs) that is puffing up these El Ninos and not El Ninos that are changing the Climate.
Yeah. Just when we thought the Science Was Settled. Worse than we thunk.
Not only that, but “it could throw a monkey wrench into long-range weather forecasting”.
Well that’ll be a blow, seeing how long-range forecasts are so accurate that we need urgently to change to a “low-carbon” economy (that doesn’t work) on the strength of them.
This is probably a great study.
But let us look, for example, at NINO 3.4
Go to http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs2.cgi?someone@somewhere
look for, e.g., the ERSST v3b (Bob Tisdale would prefer the Reynolds OI v2 SST but that does not matter much) take +- 5 degrees latitude and 170 to 120 W longitude and look at the last 30 years.
The trend line is slightly negative. You may see it by eyesight, if you want to do better, you have to evaluate the raw data, also provided by KNMI.
In contrast, the average 30 y trendline of all tropic oceans is +0.1 C/decade (to which the Nino areas significantly contribute).
Is it discussed in the paper, why the Nino 3.4 trendline deviates so strongly from the rest of the tropics?
Oh, it’s obviously AGW – who could doubt it?
Does the data actually exist to conclude that these events didn’t ever happen on such a scale prior to 1990 – or is this just hyperbole based on just 20 years worth of data?
A recent study found many climate models predict such events will become much more frequent under projected global warming scenarios.
Lee said further research is needed to evaluate the impacts of these increasingly intense El Niños and determine why these changes are occurring.
Keywords: projected global warming scenarios, more frequent, further research is needed, increasingly intense El Niños.
Panic now? Or simply another case of “We haven’t a clue but blame it on Global Warming anyway, where are the grants?”
“changes in El Niño intensity since 1982″
Well we all know that there was a run of strong El Ninos over that period so this is hardly news.
The whole period was a spell of positive (warming) ocean cycles and so would be bound to show an increase in El Nino strengths as compared to the previous 30 years and before that we had no means of measuring El Nino intensities.
The trouble is that the whole process went into reverse around the turn of the century as part of the normal 30/60 year ocean cycle so we are now in the early stages of a negative cooling cycle once again.
” the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.”
Really ? I had read that it was merely a ‘moderate’ El Nino.
I’m sure Bob Tisdale has a lot to say on this thread.
How unscientific. A statistical result (‘climate change’) cannot affect a real world phenomenon (‘El Niño’) as the causality link is reversed. Here is a more logical wording:
(I drop the word ‘change’ as it is a redundancy in this context.)
A couple thoughts in passing — —
/sarc on// OMG, that’s like … forever!! /sarc off// Okay, seriously for a moment. Now that we’ve seen changes during the latter stages of the warm phase of the PDO; let’s see how it develops over the long haul during the cool phase of the PDO.
Let’s try a little thought experiment and put the horse before the cart. What if it’s the changing nature & strength of the ENSO that’s been driving the bulk of climate changes? It might take more than a single (human) generation of studies to arrive at a working hypothesis.
Andy Revkin has asked these researchers a couple of intelligent questions. (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/pacific-hot-spells-shifting-as-predicted-in-human-heated-world/) Quoting from the replies:
“If all we had was data the interpretation would be ambiguous as to what causes what. However, we also have climate change computer models which are valuable guides to how the climate system will respond to greenhouse gas forcing.”
“We can’t be 100% certain that this interpretation is correct because the data are limited and the models are imperfect. But it provides us a plausible working hypothesis for further investigation into the nature and impacts of a changing face to El Niño.”
If it’s just a plausible working hypothesis, it’s hardly worth arguing about. But I have a plausible working hypothesis that it will be reported in the media as something more.
OMG! It’s worse than we thought! A new kind of global warming! Aaargh!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/07/el-nino-same-but-different/
With all due respect, what a load of crap.
There is no possible way to even theorize about a “new el nino type” given the microscopic amount of time we’ve been monitoring the Pacific with any kind of accuracy.
This is sounding like the med-school syndrome, where as someone learns about various diseases they often become convinced they have them.
We get the ability to see ozone concentrations, find a “hole”, and immediately panic. We get the ability to see temperature anomalies and immediately panic. Others have joked about it, but some of these people would not surprise me if they started thinking the Sun’s lethargy was our fault.
REPLY: Bingo. – Anthony
EL NINO events arise in an area of the equatorial Pacific where crossings
of the magnetic (Z-component) and the geographic equators are found.
The equatorial crossing has moved towards the central Pacific during the last four centuries.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
@Anthony
I told you that you were too quick to say that the intensity of El Nino is not related to CO2 warming. You don’t know that. The climate system is too complex for off-the-cuff dismissals like that. You wrote that the El Nino heat disappears too quickly and isn’t reflected in distributed global temps the next year. Further you wrote if it was CO2 induced the heat should stick around somewhere. Then I pointed out that the massive amount of energy in the 1998 El Nino was probably absorbed as latent heat of fusion in Arctic ice melt which ice appears to have made a 1 million square kilometer step change to a lesser extent shortly after the 1998 El Nino and so the heat actually did stick around. Then you stopped responding to me.
http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0423-kozloff_cochabamba.html
Nothing new under the sun, El Nino varies all the time
How do they do a press release like this without mention of the PDO, which has a 50 to 60 year cycle, and they’ve studied for 28 years?
Yes, I paid for the study. $9.00 for a very simple statistical examination of NINO3 and NINO4 peak SST anomalies during El Nino and La Nina events. Oy!
The following is their Figure 3.
http://i38.tinypic.com/3004ktz.jpg
The first thing to note is the impact of the 2009/10 El Nino, which is one of the reasons for the study. But any short-term evaluation of the linear trends of ENSO events is skewed by the years included in the study. Second, the multiyear El Nino and La Nina events are not represented. They appear to have picked peak SST anomalies for ENSO events. Would this make a difference? I’m working on it. Then the question would be is the intensity of an ENSO event dictated by the peak, or the time spent above 0 deg C, or the actual change in SST anomalies from trough to peak and from peak to trough.