NASA: La Niña has remained strong

A strong La Nina would explain flooding in Sri Lanka and Australia and Brazil, due to coupling with the PDO/ADO which are both in a negative phase lowering temperatures in other parts of the globe.

….and global temperatures still keep climbing, global ice area is reaching the lowest level recorded…..and yet AGW is still being , 2010 was the equal warmest, and wettest year recorded, we are only two weeks into 2011 and extreme weather events have affected Brazil, Sri Lanka and Queensland….hmmmmmm

“Earth’s ocean is the greatest influence on global climate”. And how does the ocean get its heat? From the CO2 driven atmospheric warming? But water has ~3,000 times the heat capacity (per unit mass) of air. I think the pseudo-scientists have their independent and dependent variables reversed.

According to the monitoring graph on WUWTs ENSO page, this La Nina isn’t even as strong as the 2008 one (at least, yet. . .it could take another leg down).
Are they hyperventilating over there, or is there something about “strength” not reflected in the monitoring graph?

rushmike
Severe weather and La Nina? Who’d a thunk?
http://www.mapsofworld.com/referrals/weather/severe-weather-conditions/la-nina.html

All levity aside, is there a claimed relationship between man-made CO2 and a La Niña event that can be gleaned from climate models?
How do the models, which by my (limited) understanding predict warming due to the excess of CO2 put into the atmosphere by man account, for cycles like the current La Niña?

What new do we learn from these data? All this is known from terrestric data and from other satellite data which measure SST. Now NASA measures sea surface temperatures by sea surface heights. And by a very complicated, time consuming analysis which gives nothing new, but that is achieved with much bigger error bars.
The other day we had the solar constant minimum baseline newly adjusted, it differs considerably from the previous satellite result. And the new value approaches the sixty year old terrestric value of Abbot.
How many satellites are in space measuring climate data? 20 or 50 or 100?
Each 100 megabucks or how much more?
And terrestric data taking is shut down (or not even started) because of lack of funds.
It may be allowed to ask: who benefits most from all the climate change excitement?

Don’t listen to “Just The Facts”, he is forgetting about the Panama Canal , where [undocumented] climate workers furiously shuttle the cooler water through to cool the planet.

As Sam Glasser says:
January 15, 2011 at 7:00 am
“Earth’s ocean is the greatest influence on global climate”. And how does the ocean get its heat? From the CO2 driven atmospheric warming? But water has ~3,000 times the heat capacity (per unit mass) of air. I think the pseudo-scientists have their independent and dependent variables reversed
I think that the AGW theory fails at almost every level but the heating of the oceans is one of the most fundamental stumbling blocks. Given that 70% of the surface area of the earth is ocean and given the heat capacity of the oceans (bear in mind the heated volume in comparison to the depth to which the ground/soil can be heated) means that you cannot get global warming unless the oceans are being heated. However, a slightly warmer atmosphere (whatever be its cause) cannot heat the oceans. You cannot heat a cup of water by blowing a hair dryer over and parallel with the surface of the water.
We know that CO2 does not in itself heat, and at best can only slow down heat loss but in practice in the real world, it is not very effective at slowing down heat loss, witness how cold a desert is at night. The CO2 in the atmosphere does not act an effective blanket keeping in the heat which has been generated during the day and the sand in the desert does not possess sufficient latent heat to continuously at night heat the air above it. Contrast this with the air over an ocean which remains warm at night due to the heat capacity of the ocean which continuously heats the air above it and due to the moisture of ocean air.
Oceans, if they are getting warmer (which they do not appear to be doing) can only be heated by energy from the sun or thermal energy from the mantle/crust. CO2 cannot drive the energy budget of the oceans and that is a death knell to the AGW theory.
NB. I am ignoring currents which are merely distributing or redistributing heat that is already in the system and which may change where the heat is to be observed but which do not in themselves actually heat the ocean.

Werner Weber says: “Now NASA measures sea surface temperatures by sea surface heights.”
Hi Werner. I didn’t understand that from this post. NASA has been monitoring ocean topography with satellites since the early 1990s.
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/elninopdo/latestdata/
I have never seen NASA attempt to convert SSH data into SST data.

Obviously the isthmus of Panama is a barrier for the free flow of water, yet it does at seem at first glance that there is (nearly) one long streak of blue stretching the width of the Pacific and on up to Great Britain.
Does a seemingly matching blue tongue often appear in the Gulf/Atlantic during a La Nina? I am guessing not, after looking at a La Nina page on NOAA’s site (http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/la-nina-story.html). They show images of 3 recent La Nina’s near the top of the page; none of them display blue to the west of Panama.

Besides the the Austrailian floodings, 1974 brought on one of the worst severe thunderstorm outbreaks in North America. The infamous Day of the Killer Tornado occured during a modertate to strong La Nina episode. Tornados broke out from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico in one event. Xenia Ohio was totally flattened.

To Bob Tisdale: Bob, you are right. I was not aware of that series.
I was fooled by this sentence: “A new Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite image of the Pacific Ocean that averaged 10 days of data was just released from NASA. The image, centered on Dec. 26, 2010, was created at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.”
and thought, this a a new satellite (Jason-2), delivering first data. And I was also fooled by the solemn language of the announcement.
So what is presented is a spin-off of the Jason project and they show that there is a signature of La Nina in the data. Fine. Congratulations, USA. So U.S. knows much better the heights of global oceans than it knows the heights of their ground water levels, which are pumped through irrigation into the oceans and contribute how much with all other arid countries to global sea level rise?

@- richard verney says: –
“Oceans, if they are getting warmer (which they do not appear to be doing) can only be heated by energy from the sun or thermal energy from the mantle/crust. CO2 cannot drive the energy budget of the oceans and that is a death knell to the AGW theory.”
The last man on Earth is incorrect on two counts.
1) Oceans certainly appear to be getting warmer, direct and satellite measurements of surface temperature indicate this as does the rise in sea level which is at least in part from thermal expansion.
2) Oceans are heated by absorption of visible light from the sun, thermal energy from the mantle AND down-welling long-wave radiation from the atmosphere. The back-radiation from the atmosphere is measured to increase with rising CO2. The photons in this radiation are predominately absorbed and thermalized min the top few nanometers of the ocean surface.
How far that heating mixes with the bulk ocean, or how it affects evaporation rates is a matter for discussion, but that it heats the ocean is not in dispute.

Does anybody believe as I do that the 2010 super El Nino may be the result of the twenty year lag in solar forcing that began with the decline in SSN that started in 1990 and continues today? If so we may have a moderate El Nino in ten years but then see progressively weaker ones after that.

richard verney says:
January 15, 2011 at 9:09 am
As regards La Nina, it will be interesting to see how tempwratures in 2011 compare with those of 1999. Specifically, will the 2011 global temperature drop below 1999 levels? If they do, what will the warmists say?
The temps will continue to drop this year, and the warmists will churn out another version of AGW causes global cooling.
Why are temps dropping (and people chattering thier teeth)?
1. ) because there is nothing going on that propels the temps any higher, and they have to return from whence they came.
2. ) The ride up bears little to no resemblance to the climate patterns now being observed on the drop side. That is why the current La Nina does not fit the pattern as depicted on the ENSO/SST WUWT page. It is more like a La Nino or El Nina, or better yet, a climate marriage made in hell.
3.) TSI is in defecit mode as the last century was in surplus mode. However slight and seemingly inconsequential, a defecit is a defecit is a deficit. A function of time as to how long before equilibrium is reached.
4.) Jet Streams have moved equatorwards and fattened thier traveled ranges. Storm fronts now operate on 1.5 to 2 times thier latitudinal breadth. Should result in much wider band of cloud activity.

I think warming of the ocean’s surface via longwave radiation may be both ever-so-slightly warming and mostly cooling, depending on oceanic conditions. It is known that choppy seas throw salt water spray into the air, leaving not much chance of LW warming. Quiet seas are another matter. What are the temperatures of quiet seas? Depends on their address. I think that LW radiative addition to sea surface warming would be extremely hard to determine and very hard to model holistically. The best you could do would be to input oceanic surface condition, oceanic temperatures, air temperatures, cloud parameters, and ozone parameters. Not to mention just how much CO2 is above.

Dr Lurtz said: ‘I would suggest Climate is over 100 years and Weather is over 5 years.’
Very amusing, but it won’t work. How would climate scientists make any money? At the same time the whole idea that a 30 year trend is essential for the recognition of climate change is utterly flawed.

izen says:
January 15, 2011 at 10:12 am
I got a feeling that you are wrong on all counts. Go to NASA, Agos. The data from these bouys suggests that the oceans are cooling. Sea level has begun to level off from the century long 3mm rise. The Maldives are not sinking and the UK is tilting so the sea level is falling in the north and rising in the south.
Back radiation is a negligable effect because CO² absorps a little IR radiation and reradiates in all directions which means under half goes ground ward and that is probably absorbed by N and O kinectically.

GregO says:
January 15, 2011 at 7:47 am
All levity aside, is there a claimed relationship between man-made CO2 and a La Niña event that can be gleaned from climate models?
How do the models, which by my (limited) understanding predict warming due to the excess of CO2 put into the atmosphere by man account, for cycles like the current La Niña?
_____
In general, the acceleration (which would necessarily mean intensification) of the hydrological cycle is predicted by GCM’s when looking at increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. From a geological perspective, as part of the basic carbon-rock cycle, when CO2 in the atmosphere increases, so does the hydrological cycle, as a natural negative feeback mechanism to remove the CO2, through rock weathering. In this way, the level of CO2 is kept in a range. It is entirely possible that increased CO2 amounts could change the nature/character/severity etc. of the natural ENSO and PDO ocean cycles, and this would be one way the acceleration of the hydrological cycle would be manifested.

rushmike says:
January 15, 2011 at 6:54 am
….and global temperatures still keep climbing, global ice area is reaching the lowest level recorded…..and yet AGW is still being , 2010 was the equal warmest, and wettest year recorded, we are only two weeks into 2011 and extreme weather events have affected Brazil, Sri Lanka and Queensland….hmmmmmm
Rushmike, if global temperatures still keep climbing, why did even Phil Jones of Climategate fame conclude no significant warming for over a decade? 2010 wasn’t warmer than 1998 in Spencer’s UAH record. Yes, 1998 was an El Nino, so was much of 2010. Now we’re getting La Nina and cooling, plus plenty rain here in Australia, though not record amounts – we had worse in 1974 and there were earlier ones that were worse still. And where are the PDO and the Medieval Warm Period in your analysis?
Re Arctic icecap check out the effect of the Arctic Oscillation:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041220010410.htm
Re Antarctic ice see:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/01/30/antarctica-again/
I don’t trust anything NASA and co. put out while Hansen has any power there. Continual high outlier data, mysterious adjustments, and his recent revelation that democracy doesn’t work and we should adopt China’s way of doing things:
http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/hansen-us-democracy-not-competent-to-deal-with-global-warming-calls-on-communist-china-to-save-humanity/
Hmmm indeed. Conspiracy I doubt, but craziness fits the bill.

MattN says:
January 15, 2011 at 12:59 pm
The SOI is higher right now than it has been in a long, long time. I perused the monthly historical readings the other day, and I think you have to go back to 1917 to find higher values.
Here’s to a long, strong La Nina…
_____
Matt,
It is interesting that you’d hope for a long and strong La Nina as it is causing untold misery to the people of Australia. You might also be interested to know that during La Nina events, there is a general accumulation of heat in the Pacific to be released during the inevitable El Nino cycle…so a “long and strong” La Nina, with the misery it brings to Australia and other areas, might also mean a lot more heat released during the next El Nino cycle to inevitably come.

Thank you for the response Matt G, the alternative explanation you propose for recent warming in the effect of solar changes decades ago on albedo and ocean cycles is probably the most credible alternative hypothesis I have encountered on the skeptic side. I am not sure would survive the level of review applied to AGW over the last few decades! -grin-
@- Matt G says: -(re warming a pool by body heat).
“Yes it is possible in the swimming pool only in a enclosed system ….., but this is not the case including the oceans. … This was my point regarding the oceans, where this tiny amount would take many centuries to warm the oceans a little if everything remained the same and was in a enclosed system.”
I agree that there are other factors, but on a rough calculation the extra DLR from the extra CO2 is a bit over 2 W/m2. that is enough energy to raise the temperature of an olympic pool by 1degC in about a month and a half.
Obviously the ocean is not an enclosed pool system…
“BUT, the energy ratio between warming the water by SWR and LWR is absolutely huge, so the percentage change in LWR must have to be many (orders) times bigger then any change in SWR to cause this rise in such a short period. (eg 30 years)”
The problem I have with this argument is that the 1LOT means that extra energy is doing something… somewhere…
In physics (and biology and chemistry) the rule is follow the energy – rather like follow the money in politics.
Where the energy goes always points to the underlying causation.
Unlike possible effects from solar variation on cloud albedo the DLR from the extra CO2 has both a well established physical mechanism and direct measurement of the anthropogenic change.
That seems to require any alternative to AGW the explanation to also provide a mechanism that negates the CO2-energy effect while amplifying the cloud/albedo energy effect.

The MEI is found here – http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/klaus.wolter/MEI/
It is by no means obvious that this La Nina is bigger than anything since the 1950’s.
The results show a Pacific decadal pattern – more intense and frequent La Nina to the mid 1970’s and frequent and intense El Nino to 1998 – with a shift back since. Check the article at posted at the link above.

izen says: January 15, 2011 at 10:12 am
quote
“1) Oceans certainly appear to be getting warmer, direct and satellite measurements of surface temperature indicate this as does the rise in sea level which is at least in part from thermal expansion.
unquote”
The Argo data suggests that ocean heat content is on a downward trend. Is there a credible data source that suggests otherwise?
Also there doesn’t appear to be any change in the ongoing sea level rise that started long before AGW could have been a contributing factor. We can continue to live with 1 – 2 mm per year.

If the La Nina develops into a long term cold PDO then there will be global cooling. I am not sure we are there yet, but soon it will happen. Once it does it will be fun to watch the AGW crowd start crying about the unfairness of the PDO and how we need to ignore it because the Earth would be warming without it.
John Kehr
The Inconvenient Skeptic

“Earth’s ocean is the greatest influence on global climate.”
Enough said.

If the argo buoys suggest a decreasing heat content and sea level measurements indicate an increasing level, one may well question the argo buoy data. OTOH one may also question the sea level measurements.

It doesn’t look to me like there has been any sea level rise since late 2005:
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global.jpg

“Earth’s ocean is the greatest influence on global climate.”
But only to mask any CO2 driven warming, it never causes warming of it’s own accord (that would be completely unnatural). But yet, Global Warming causes Global Cooling…which came first…the Global Warming or the Cooling?

The problem with this debate is the quality of data. Generally, the required data is either not available or there are reasons to suspect that the quality of data is poor so that it is difficult to make trustworthy extrapolations.
In my post of 15th Jan 09:00 hrs when I made the comment is parenthesis that the oceans do not apear to be warming, I had in mind the ARGO data. I accpet that that data is open to question in that it is over a very short span and that temperatures to the entire depths of the ocean are not recorded.
The sea level data is also questionable (on a number of grounds) but even if correct, it is not clear precisely what is being measured given plate techtonics. For example Southern England is rising whereas Scotland is falling. As the earth has come out of the ice age, some of the land which was covered by glaciers that have since receded is still moving upwards as a result of the reduction in weight. I have never seen a proper calculation of displacement caused by land mass/plate movements. Sea water levels are also displaced in other ways such as rock/soil erosion (I haven’t checked but believe that the delta area in Bangladesh has grown significantly in area), new atols (admittedly miniscule) and water is being added by ice melts.
If anyone considers that sea level rise is due to CO2, I would like to see their calculation as to the amount of energy required given the volume of the ocean to raise sea levels by say 2mm and compare that to the energy that they claim CO2 imparts to the ocean by back radiation.
Materially, during the last 150 years, the rate of sea level rise has remained fairly constant and there is eveidence to suggest that the rate of rise has been slowing for the past 30 or so years. If the rate of rise since 1940 has either not altered or more significantly has even slowed, it demonstrates that CO2 in the atmosphere is not actually warming the oceans (to any measurable extent). It has not added one measurable iota to the rate of change that was occuring between 1850 to 1940 due to natural variation.
When in my post, I suggested that only solar (or geothermal) energy could (effectively) heat the oceans, I had in mind not simply the total energy being emitted by the sun (in whatever forms that energy may take) but also how much of that energy is received by the earth (ie., I include changes in albedo due to cloud changes and also changes in the transparency of the atmoshere due to reduction in aerosols and any effect that changes in the magnetic field may have).
PS. I am not sure that the hand in a swimming pool is a good analogy. A better an analogy would be if you were to place your hand fractions of a mm above the water would this effectively heat the swimming pool?

@- crosspatch says:
January 15, 2011 at 7:01 pm
If the argo buoys suggest a decreasing heat content and sea level measurements indicate an increasing level, one may well question the argo buoy data. OTOH one may also question the sea level measurements.
It doesn’t look to me like there has been any sea level rise since late 2005: -LINK-
———
The ARGO system is new, has known error problems and covers a very short time. It is also uncorroborated by any independent source of measurement of the OHC.
Sea level rise is derived from two independent sources – at least since satellite measurement began.
The link you provided was to the satellite record that included a large amount of short-term variation from seasonal temperature changes and air pressure changes. It is possible to exclude these effects and the CU does that here :-
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg

rushmike says:
January 15, 2011 at 6:54 am
….and global temperatures still keep climbing, global ice area is reaching the lowest level recorded…..and yet AGW is still being , 2010 was the equal warmest, and wettest year recorded, we are only two weeks into 2011 and extreme weather events have affected Brazil, Sri Lanka and Queensland….hmmmmmm
——–
The primary driver for these weather events is la Nina, but exactly how much worse they are due to AGW is hard to fathom at this stage.
I am waiting for some decent state-wide rainfall figures to pop up so some proper historical comparisons can be done. Also the rain may not be finished yet.

Walter Dnes says: “I’ve downloaded ENSO weekly data from http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/data/indices/wksst.for and plotted the Nino3.4 anomaly, from 1990 onwards. I got the same graph as Bob Tisdale at http://i51.tinypic.com/2ivn3n8.jpg I’ve noticed a 12-year cycle.”
What appears to be agreement between ENSO and the Solar Cycles looks better when one uses NINO3.4 SST (not anomalies). But the apparent relationship falls apart when one goes back further in time.

LazyTeenager says:
January 15, 2011 at 8:59 pm
Sam Glasser says:
January 15, 2011 at 7:00 am
“Earth’s ocean is the greatest influence on global climate”. And how does the ocean get its heat? From the CO2 driven atmospheric warming? But water has ~3,000 times the heat capacity (per unit mass) of air. I think the pseudo-scientists have their independent and dependent variables reversed.
———
But since the oceans are being heated both by the sun directly and by IR radiation from the atmosphere and not by conduction from the air it appears your understanding of the process is poor.
Hi Lazy, What is the ocean residence time of any LWIR energy which manages to enter the oceans instead of being converted to latent heat, verses the residence time of SWR entering the oceans, and how much does this residence time differnce in energy spectrum affect the ability of a flux change in energy to accumalate over time?

edbhoy says:
Sea level is a proxy for heat content and we know how unreliable proxy measurements can be!
Mercury in thermometers is a proxy measurement, seems quite reliable to me…..and virtually everyone else…..unless you disagree?

Caleb says:
January 16, 2011 at 4:46 am
WUWT regular M.Vukcevic has found the cause behind the effects we see in La Niña/El Niño:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC19.htm

gary gulrud says:
January 16, 2011 at 5:55 am
“Mercury in thermometers is a proxy measurement”
No, its relation, via thermal expansion, is direct.
Take a few, slow breaths.
Your rather unfortunate attitude aside, with a mercury thermometer you are not measuring temperature directly but observing the expansion of the metal and comparing the expansion to previous results….a proxy. The same is true of sea level rise and ocean temperatures….levels go up would suggest that ocean temperatures have increased. This is of course the original point which in your attempted snideness probably missed.

“levels of flooding usually only seen once in a century”
Why do people persist with this incredibly poor way of describing probabilities? It’s rubbish on almost all accounts.
1) We don’t have anywhere near enough data to do odds on “one in a century” events. We’d need millenia before we could do that accurately. Certainly our less than 200 years of data won’t start to be enough to even give a rough guide. They’re probably doing some extrapolations based on a normal variation (in the technical use of “normal”), when climate is notoriously not normal at the extremes.
2) The events aren’t independent. So a “one in a century” event is likely to be followed by another as the underlying causal conditions are still similar. You can’t do individual probabilities with dependent events – it’s the first thing you are taught in high school statistics.
3) “One in a century” where? Queensland? Australia? Brisbane? There is never a boundary condition given. If it is “once in a century” in any given town, say, then you would expect that it would occur every year if there are 100 towns. (Except, of course, because these things are dependent, it will occur everywhere or nowhere.) You need to specify boundaries to your events.
4) Even if the events were independent, and their frequency well known, and the boundaries well set, it doesn’t help people one jot. People are incredibly poor at judging what truly random behaviour is. They expect that “once in a century” events will basically occur on average one time in any century, which they almost never will.
5) The margin between extreme and merely high is statistically important, but usually practically worthless. If the flood was a bit lower, so that it was now only “once in a 75 year period” it would still be a disaster. Often from a practical point of view, two slightly smaller floods are worse than one really large one. What you need is flood prevention schemes for all floods, not fretting that “this was a big one”. (The recent Christchurch earthquake, similar in level to the Haiti one, shows how preparedness is the key, not the size of the event.)
So I would really like meteorologists to stop using the bollocks “once in a century” type descriptors. Get them to a statistics class if need be. Even if it is right, it is unhelpful.

Caleb says:
January 16, 2011 at 4:46 am
Audacious Idea #2
I think your idea of a triggering role for THC and upwelling is quite reasonable. Indeed, to propose that the deep ocean and THC had no role in ENSO would be even more audacious.

Edbhoy, I agree with you that thermometers are better proxies than tree rings. Fewer variables for a start. Tree ring growth is determined by more than the temperature; pollution, light levels, moisture levels etc. Measuring temperatures using thermal expansion of course has its variables, pressure being the most obvious. Once you correct for the pressure then sea level rise has been fairly consistant, even in recent years. http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg

As far as I am concerned El Nino and La Nina mean the same thing in Montana. Livingston, MT high on Sunday, January 16th was 51 degrees. All the snow is gone. North Entrance to Yellowstone…haven’t been below freezing for about a week now. It rained all day today. Butte, MT 42 degrees today. Forecast for Billings, MT is for mid to upper 30s for the remainder of the week. Rain in Butte, Bozeman, Livingston, Great Falls, Helena and Billings. It is March in mid-January with no end in sight.
Joe Bastardi over at Accu Weather is predicting the coldest January since 1985. Good luck with that forecast Joe. Not much of a winter in the Northwest or the Northern Rockies for quite a while. Global cooling?….I don’t think so.