With ENSO, chaos rules, models drool

Let’s hope they reference Bob Tisdale in this article.

Simon says:
March 26, 2014 at 5:07 pm
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CO2 has punched out it’s dance card…..so it would be perfectly normal warming if it did

‘Simon says:
March 26, 2014 at 5:07 pm
…. The no warming in 15,16,17 years meme might really break next time and then we can all agree that global warming is real and occurring.’
I think we all already would agree that global warming has been occurring since the end of the LIA. Nothing controversial there.
Except it’s neither catastrophic, nor unprecedented, nor caused by C02. You should read ‘The Pursuit Of The Millennium’ by Cohn. The end times have been around for a long time.

Right, so there is a complex, multivariate, non-linear system with definite but unknown feedback and some of the variables as yet also unknown. That abstract, clear and concise as it is (in stark contrast to almost every scientific paper I have ever read, and already leading one to suspect that the authors are actually intelligent) must be one of the most unsurprising in the history of science.
So, for all the geeks out there, what does the “B” stand for in Benoit B Mandelbrot?
Answer: Benoit B Mandelbrot.
I thank you.
Your humble servant,
The Master of Bad, Nerdy Jokes

OR, could it be because the data’s gone to sh**, because Obama’s let some 40% of the temp gatherng float buoys go out of service?

What’s the sun doing right now. It’s up to her. El Nino is really dependent on cloud cover.

Crispin in Waterloo but really in Johannesburg says:
I think Bob Tisdale has a good grip on how ENSO works but I don’t recall him making ‘predictions’. Did he?
“Just about all indicators are pointing to a moderately strong El Niño for the 2014/15 ENSO season…The subsurface temperature anomalies along the equatorial Pacific associated with the downwelling (warm) Kelvin wave are quite warm…Eventually, some (but not all) of that warm water will rise (be drawn) to the surface. ”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/24/enso-update-outlook-suggests-a-moderately-strong-el-nino-for-the-201415-enso-season/
That’s what Bob wrote. Me, I’ve voting for La Nada.

‘Shaken champagne bottle’… It is coming fast, it’s going to pop and over flow, everyone will say WOW and it will fade just as fast. Fade by November

“Here come de heap big warmy. Bigtime warmy warmy. Is big big hot. Plenty big warm burny hot. Hot! Hot hot! But now not hot. Not hot now. De hot come go, come go. Now Is Coldy Coldy. Is ice. Hot den cold. Frreeeezy ice til hot again. Den de rain. It faaaalllll. Make pasty

[…]

So who are we to believe? For a final word, I turned to the greatest climate change scientist of all, Dr David Viner, one-time senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, who predicted in 2000 that, within a few years, winter snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event”.
However, he was trapped under a glacier in Stockport, so was unable to comment at the time the Telegraph went to press.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100222487/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-we-have-to-trust-our-scientists-because-they-know-lots-of-big-scary-words/

Craig says:March 26, 2014 at 7:39 pm
“Entirely unpredictable?”
The correlation that you show, is it an input or output of the process?

“Will we see an El Niño this year? Only chaos knows for sure.”
=================================
Well, if anyone knows it would be Bob Tisdale.
He never clues us in though.
Makes you think he is still trying to just bury us with data, so we can individually make fools of ourselves.

“””””…..Climate simulations suggest that multi-decadal periods of high and low variability in the phenomenon known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean may be entirely unpredictable……”””””
The hell you say !
So just what is it then, that you ARE simulating ??

bushbunny says:
March 26, 2014 at 10:11 pm
” There is a 50-50 chance I might die in the next 20 years.”
=========================
I’ve built a model that indicates a 95% chance I’ll die within the next 20 years.
The model parameters are alcohol, cigarettes, gambling and free time.
(not necessarily in that order, at all times).
Other than tornadoes, I think I’m safe from the ravages of Global Warming (or whatever).
I’m lucky to have lived thru these first 51 years in a healthy state.
I’ve got no complaints.

This Nature item is about the following new (modelling!) paper in the Journal of Climate.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00577.1
Wittenberg et al., 2014: ENSO Modulation: Is It Decadally Predictable?. J. Climate, 27, 2667–2681. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00577.1
From the abstract:
” …no decadal-scale predictability of ENSO behavior is found. This indicates that multidecadal epochs of extreme ENSO behavior can arise not only intrinsically but also delicately and entirely at random. … … those slow variations appear not to lend significant decadal predictability to this model’s ENSO behavior … … the potential implications of these results are sobering for decadal predictability …”

Exactly, this model(and NOAA) have bombed for years now. The ongoing PDO is raining
Chaos…

Retired Engineer John says:
March 26, 2014 at 7:09 pm
When something is this unpredictable, it means that there are significant inputs to the process that have not been identified. We are probably seeing the inputs and are disregarding them.
Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case. Chaotic systems vary strongly based on very small changes in intial conditions. As summarized by Lorenz:
“Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. ”
We could probably list all the inputs for which way a pencil, balanced on its point, will topple. But because very small changes in those inputs could result in the pencil toppleing in a different direction, it is for all practical purposes unpredictable.

When something is this unpredictable, it means that there are significant inputs to the process that have not been identified. We are probably seeing the inputs and are disregarding them.
Well, no, often it means that the process involves solution to stiff systems of differential equations or chaotic dynamical systems, either one of which are highly sensitive to small tweaks of their initial conditions because a bundle of solutions started from nearby points tend to rapidly diverge to fill a phase space of possible outcomes, possible future histories.
Weather is not only such a system, it is the dynamical system where this (in retrospect) unsurprising fact was discovered, even though at this point it has long been reduced to simple classroom demonstrations. It’s like the feedback loop I often observe when boiling down my wort making beer — under the right conditions of heating and cooling, the entire system undergoes an irregular oscillation where it suddenly boils up, releasing a bunch of heat and cooling the bottom with new, infalling cooler wort from the top. The boil then slows or ceases for some time while the new wort makes it across the boiling threshold. It then surges up, displaced by the cooler wort on top and the sides, and a burst of bubbles and foam arrive on top. But this again quenches the boil, and the cycle repeats itself.
The time in between and the specific structure of the surges as the liquid “chuffs” in this way are “unpredictable”, except for the certain knowledge that they are going to occur and some very rough bounds on the times involved — the liquid is being heated and cooled at different places and this phenomena is going to occur until its temperature is uniformly close enough to boiling that a single boiling convective roll establishes itself that picks up heat at the bottom, boils up to the top, dumps its steam, and redescends (basically a Prigogene-style self-organized pattern that optimizes heat transport from the bottom to the top, a heat engine).
Note that this is in a stationary, unstirred liquid. If I stir it, I can completely alter or suppress the cycle. I can even alter it in specific ways (this is what physicists do when making beer, we can’t just down an ale or two and watch, we have to figure things out:-). If I stir the liquid into a spin in the round pan, the center fluid is nearly stationary and there is a tipping angle on the buoyant force that makes the center axis of the pan bottom the location of the densest fluid. This trapped fluid is the stuff that accumulates heat to go over the boiling point so that the surge comes up in the middle of the pot, pushing a burst of foam out across the rotating surface in a coriolis-driven spiral. This lasts only a second or two, however, and as the steam is released there is a general collapse back towards the pan axis as new cool fluid is pushed in on the bottom and trapped in the middle. The boil stops. A few seconds later it surges up again, stops, again, stops, each time making a spiral galaxy of foam first appear, then collapse back to the center. Eventually the spin slows, and as it slows I often get a boil that establishes on one side and the usual stable convective boil appears.
It is my guess that ENSO and the other decadal oscillations are in many respects quite similar conceptually to this simply stovetop “system”, with obviously greater complexity. The system is a differentially heated spherical system with an interface that is bottom heated for one fluid and top heated for another (much denser) fluid. The sphere is rotating, so that there is a much more complex pattern of differential coriolis forces on the surface in addition to a reasonably but not perfectly consistent gravitational field. The entire system is being differentially heated and cooled with two primary harmonic components — one with a (TOA) strength of 100% of peak and a period of 24 hours, and a secondary annual variation of the peak with an overall amplitude of around 3.5% (7% total range). However, even this insufficient to describe the sphere surface, as entire substantial regions of the tipped planet have a 100% annual cycle of TOA strength, and the entire planet has a latitude dependent roughly sinusoidal modulation with this period, meaning that the fourier transform of the effective TOA flux to the surface isn’t sharp at 1 year and 1 day, but is indeed rather broad with lots of contributing frequencies and artifacts.
Then, the fluids being heated and convected are a lot more complex as well. The lower fluid is almost all at or very near 4 C, its temperature at peak density, in a state of very, very slow non-thermally driven motion that arises because of surface phenomena involving evaporation and density variation due to a substantial load of solute salts. The top few hundred meters, however, deviates from this temperature due to a complex process of differential flow fluid dynamic turnover (the fluid is not in laminar flow and hence develops large scale eddies and rolls even when surface heated) that — like my pot — absorbs heat near the equator, reducing density, displacing the entire surface generically poleward, so that it cools as it moves, dumps its heat where it is much cooler than where it is absorbed, becomes denser than the surface waters, descends, and displaces an absolutely enormous volume of water that moves in a very, very slow convective roll around the entire planet. This roll is so long that it actually makes multiple trips to the top along the way to warm, move, cool, and sink, often in less than obvious and possibly long term unstable locations.
A second problem is that the pot isn’t nice and cylindrical and shiny — the fluid flow is constrained by continental borders that look like they were drawn by van Gogh during his electric I’m-losing-my-mind phase. There are whole patches of nearly or completely circumscribed water — the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean and its the linked saltwater seas — as well as whole pole to pole stretches with extremely variable width — the two primary oceans. The bottom depth is similarly fractally irregular, dotted with islands and intruding whole continents (like Australia). As fluid tries to flow poleward past these continental boundaries and over this bouncy bottom, eddies, traps, whorls are set up that cause e.g. a certain amount of “chuffing” of gulf stream water as it is heated in the summer time.
A third problem is that this isn’t the only fluid. On top of this fluid is a fluid that itself is heated at the BOTTOM, but not just by surface contact (that would be too easy!). It is heated at the bottom by surface contact, latent heat transport from the heavier liquid at the semi-sharp interface in between them, and (sigh) is heated in depth and in opposite directions by radiation both coming in from the TOA and going back up from the surface and the surrounding fluid itself in entirely different spectral band based on the specific chemistry of the fluid itself, which is not particularly constant as the concentration of key absorptive components is highly variable with temperature, density, location, and dynamically, with the very specific history the vary specific parcel of fluid in question. Its surface interaction is similarly constrained by an irregularly shaped continential profile where the surface is covered with things like mountain ranges that reach up to the top of the troposphere and arbitrary mixtures of smooth, vegetation free sand or rock, grasslands, forested lands, farm lands, lakes and rivers, plains and foothills and cities and… all of which interact differentially with the fluid as it passes over it in contact.
I wish we were done, but of course we are not. This upper fluid is cooled almost exclusively at the top (as is the lower fluid!) and by a single mode — radiation. The catch is that the fluid is differentially penetrable by radiation consistent with the general thermal range of the fluid and surface, in a way that is also highly chemistry dependent. Worse, we have completely ignored the extreme variability and stationary variation of the surface’s absorptivity to incident radiation in the various wavelengths of delivery — parts of the surface are comparatively highly reflective, parts are highly absorptive. Then there are phase change linked changes in reflectivity. Finally, the pesky lower fluid has an annoying habit of transporting latent surface heat upwards to where it can be radiated away and then enabling a phase change of the lower fluid that first makes it into fluffy, high albedo clouds that differentially reflect a very high fraction of any incoming radiation (in the day) and also differentially reflect a very high fraction of any outgoing surface radiation back (day or night) that otherwise might escape the system to keep it in thermal balance. The fluid, cooled, then falls back down to eventually rejoin the lower fluid, as a schizophrenic addition — it is lower in the dissolved salts and hence dilutes the baseline fluid density, but is also cooler and hence increases it as the fluid re-mixes. Instabilities galore are created, enabling and driving long-length scale transport process that get pushed this way and that and up and down as the lower fluid moves.
The upper fluid also moves. It picks up heat, rises, spreads out and moves polewards, being deflected to spinward as it moves, even as the cooled fluid on the return loop returns to the hottest (equatorial) patch and is deflected to antispinwards (relative to the surface) as it does so. These general motions are modulated by the annual differential polar heating and instabilities are easily created by interactions with the specific state of the underlying fluid surface, by the eddies created by surface and boundary structure, by small variations in the many not-really-constant drivers, and by one particular butterfly in Brazil that controls both hurricane season on the East Coast and ENSO by flapping its wings — in a chaotic system a perturbation that small will create an entirely different — substantially different — future history in a completely deterministic evaluation of the physics at very high spatiotemporal resolution (something we are utterly incapable of at this point).
At this particular moment, we cannot integrate equations of motion at a spatiotemporal resolution sufficient to predict a chaotic thermally drive chuffing caused by a complex process of heat absorption, transport, and release in this system — ENSO. That is not surprising! We cannot integrate the equations of motion of the vastly simpler fluid in my heated, smooth, cylindrical boiling pot that describe the timing of the chuffing of the boil up from the center under nearly ideal conditions, let alone conditions that might hold if I leave the spoon in to create rotational eddies or periodically turn the heat on or off, up or down, or just give the liquid a bit of a random stir.
We cannot even determine the initial conditions to use to solve the coupled equations of motion that describe ENSO more than crudely, from scattered, comparatively sparse measurements compared to the volume and surface of the heavier fluid involved, and have absolutely no hope of decribing the detailed pattern of fluid motion of the lighter fluid on the surface, which couples to the entire past thermal/climate history of the planet (which is even more unknown).
So it is not just a matter of not knowing some key aspect of the dynamics. Even if we had the exact equation of motion for the system, even if we had exact knowledge of the actual initial conditions on some comparatively fine spatiotemporal grid, specified to six significant digits, we would see a substantial spread of final solutions to the coupled equations due to variations in the seventh significant digit, and the actual evolution might or might not resemble any of the solutions generated in an ensemble of a few hundred independent runs with these initial conditions because of an unpredicted weather/climate event — a tropical storm, say — that rapidly kicks the system outside of the entire phase space range of the trajectories predicted.
That isn’t to say nothing can be done with models. The closer you get to what you are predicting, the less time the initial bundle of solutions has to diverge based on butterfly wing flaps. Hurricane models, for example, often such badly a week out, but one or two days out they are pretty good as the space of accessible futures collapses. For even larger scale, slower phenomena like ENSO, predicting a year out is probably impossible because a single large tropical storm in the pacific basin could alter temperatures enough to change everything. But a few months out? Sure, why not. It is interesting that there is a barrier to the range of prediction — it suggests a high degree of sensitivity to chaos elsewhere that is still indeterminate at that time — a question of just which of the vast number of potentially nucleating fluctuations grow and which ones damp out. After one has nucleated and grown past some critical point, however, the system probably slaves to it and becomes comparatively predictable.
rgb

rgbatduke says:
March 27, 2014 at 7:32 am
When something is this unpredictable, it means that there are significant inputs to the process that have not been identified. We are probably seeing the inputs and are disregarding them.
Well, no, often it means that the process involves solution to stiff systems of differential equations or chaotic dynamical systems, either one of which are highly sensitive to small tweaks of their initial conditions because a bundle of solutions started from nearby points tend to rapidly diverge to fill a phase space of possible outcomes, possible future histories.
Weather is not only such a system, it is the dynamical system where this (in retrospect) unsurprising fact was discovered, even though at this point it has long been reduced to simple classroom demonstrations. It’s like the feedback loop I often observe when boiling down my wort making beer — under the right conditions of heating and cooling, the entire system undergoes an irregular oscillation where it suddenly boils up, releasing a bunch of heat and cooling the bottom with new, infalling cooler wort from the top. The boil then slows or ceases for some time while the new wort makes it across the boiling threshold. It then surges up, displaced by the cooler wort on top and the sides, and a burst of bubbles and foam arrive on top. But this again quenches the boil, and the cycle repeats itself.
…
So your beer boiler is a version of the Belousov-Zhabotionsky reactor? How do these dynamics affect the beer’s taste?

Climate science: A high bar for decadal forecasts of El Niño
– Pedro DiNezio1
One more data point demonstrating that Climate Science has all the predictive powers of Botnay.

Thanks- Joel O’Bryan says:
March 26, 2014 at 10:22 pm
for the bit more detail. The paper is only looking at one models ability to predict increasing or decreasing strength ENSO events. The model obviously obviously can’t predict in its own simulated results, let alone reality. At least they were honest in saying that.
rgbatduke says:
March 27, 2014 at 7:32 am
“Well, no, often it means that the process involves solution to stiff systems of differential equations or chaotic dynamical systems, either one of which are highly sensitive to small tweaks of their initial conditions”
I can’t help but think that you and Retired Engineer John are talking about the same thing.
In the real world I see the Kelud eruption (Feb 2014 VEI5?) as likely more than just a small tweak of “initial conditions”. The satellite temperature data (and the long/shortwave data) for the next couple of years will be interesting.

phlogiston says: March 28, 2014 at 9:16 am
“The position you outline is known as determinism. If we know everything we can predict everything. It was well articulated by Simon Laplace in 1814:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
—Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
In summary – determinism is false. It doesn’t matter how much you know, quantum physics together with chaos together absolutely prevent any chance of determinism in a complex system. For certain systems, no amount of knowledge will allow you to predict them.”
I agree determinism is false. I feel sure if Simon Laplace were alive today, he would also say it was false. My position is not determinism. We cannot determine when a radioactive atom will breakdown and emit some form of radiation or when certain things in quantum physics will occur. We can make estimates based on bulk properties and measured performance. The problem with designating ENSO as a chaotic system without thoroughly exhausting the search for causes means we can be overlooking processes that can be used to predict at least short time behavior.
Random events do not necessarily fall in the category of chaos. A random event is not necessarily based on a series of events that multiply into a random event. The event can be caused by a stress that exceeded the design limits of the device. The event is considered random when the stress cannot be identified.
I am interested in quantum mechanics and I would be interested in a paper or book that gives the details of your statement: ” One of these is quantum physics – for example at the quantum scale, particles continually appear out of nothing then disappear”. I have seen where Hawkings is working with these particles; however, there are no technical details.

“mwhite says: March 29, 2014 at 5:08 am If Joe is right, not all El Ninos are equal.”
I don’t get an article on El Ninos, I get a temperature map. Please check your URL.

Retired Engineer John says:
March 28, 2014 at 5:36 pm
phlogiston says: March 28, 2014 at 9:16 am
“The position you outline is known as determinism. If we know everything we can predict everything. It was well articulated by Simon Laplace in 1814: …
I agree determinism is false. I feel sure if Simon Laplace were alive today, he would also say it was false. My position is not determinism. We cannot determine when a radioactive atom will breakdown and emit some form of radiation or when certain things in quantum physics will occur. We can make estimates based on bulk properties and measured performance. The problem with designating ENSO as a chaotic system without thoroughly exhausting the search for causes means we can be overlooking processes that can be used to predict at least short time behavior.
Random events do not necessarily fall in the category of chaos. A random event is not necessarily based on a series of events that multiply into a random event. The event can be caused by a stress that exceeded the design limits of the device. The event is considered random when the stress cannot be identified.
I am interested in quantum mechanics and I would be interested in a paper or book that gives the details of your statement: ” One of these is quantum physics – for example at the quantum scale, particles continually appear out of nothing then disappear”. I have seen where Hawkings is working with these particles; however, there are no technical details.
The wiki article on Hawking radiation cites as the original reference just a “conversation” with Charlie Rose. However there are other technical citations addressing particle-antiparticle spontaneous appearance and then one of the pair zipping into the black hole before it has the chance to disappear, the basis of Hawking black hole radiation, with the connected problem of trans-Plankian wavelength:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
Chaos by itself is not strictly speaking (philosophically) an argument against determinism, but, together with quantum mechanics, it becomes one. Quantum mechanics forbids the degree of precision of knowledge that would be needed to predict a chaotic system.