The 1998 Super El Niño: possibly a "rogue wave"?

Isn’t that what synchronized chaos was all about?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=synchronized+chaos
Climate has a lot more differential equations driving it than waves in the sea.
Look at the figures in:
http://www.uwm.edu/~kravtsov/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf
to see how el Ninos can arise.

Lighthouse keeper O’Driscoll reported a wave splashing into the 177 ft (54 metres) high light at the top of the lighthouse.

“Mr O’Driscoll remembers a storm in 1985 when a wave reached as high as the light and came crashing through the glass, overturning the vat of mercury and sending the poisonous liquid pouring down the stairs. He doubts the tower would have withstood another wallop as great as that, but it never came.”

The Fastnet Lighthouse, Light on a lonely rock The Economist, Dec 18th, 2008

To explain the 1998 temperature spike, you need more than the 1997-98 El Nino.
Although it was big one, it wasn’t especially out of the ordinary as there was other big El Ninos such as in 1982-83 and other years which didn’t produce nearly the impact.
http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/2453/nino1974.png
If you add in the super spike that the AMO had as well in 1998, you can get closer to the impact.
http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/2434/amo1974.png
There are other super temperature spikes in the record – 1878, 1915, 1941, 1973 among others. These seem to occur (more often anyway) when both the ENSO and the AMO spike at the same time.
In terms of the rogue wave idea, there is something called atmospheric angular momentum which could be the driver. During El Ninos, the earth’s rotation literally speeds up (a few tenths of a millisecond) which happens when the winds slow down and potentially causes warmer Pacific ocean waters to backup into the El Nino region. There is a strong correlation actually but there are times when it seems to be off quite a bit.
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/8463/aamnino34.png

Bill Illis: A clarification, please. Atmospheric angular momentum lags ENSO by a month or two, doesn’t it?

Those waveforms remind me very much of the Decca Navigator System. “Standing waves” would be generated by distant phase locked transmitters operating in the very low frequency band of around 14.2kilohertz. The system fell out of use with the arrival of GPS.

From: http://www.uah.edu/News/sciencenow/
Most powerful cosmic explosion brightens student’s 1st day on job
Adam Goldstein’s first day on the job tending the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) instrument on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was a doozy.
A graduate physics student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Goldstein was still learning the ropes the evening of Sept. 16, 2008, nearing the end of his 12-hour on-call shift when the GBM called his cell phone to signal that a burst had been detected.
That in itself wasn’t remarkable: GBM detects about one burst a day and it keeps Goldstein’s cell phone number handy, along with those of the other GBM team members.
This burst, however, lasted 23 minutes � almost 700 times as long as the two-second average for high-energy gamma-ray bursts. And that was just for starters.
“I was in class the next morning when Alexander (van der Horst, a NASA post-doctoral fellow) called me up and told me the LAT (Fermi’s Large Area Telescope) had found photons from that same burst,” Goldstein recalls. “At the time, when you get a burst you oooh and aaah but it’s not until you can sit down and do the spectral analysis that you know what you’ve found. And if another instrument looked at it, then you’ve got the chance to do some real science.”
The first significant gamma-ray burst detected by the LAT (Fermi was lifted into orbit in June), this burst bursts with superlatives. When the analysis of spectral data collected by a telescope on the ground was finished in November, the burst’s “red shift” put its point of origin about 12 billion light years from Earth. (Seen from Earth it came from just below the star Chi Carina in the southern sky.)
When that distance is factored with the burst’s brightness at the Fermi sensors, it becomes the most powerful gamma-ray event ever detected � four times as powerful at the source as the second strongest burst ever detected, said Dr. Valerie Connaughton, a scientist in UAHuntsville’s Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) and a member of the GBM team.
“This is the most spectacular burst ever seen at high energy,” she said. “If the event that caused this blew out in every direction instead of being a focused beam, it would be equivalent to 4.9 times the mass of the sun being converted to gamma rays in a matter of minutes.”
This theory-bruising burst is the subject of research published today in “Science Express,” the on-line scientific journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A collaborative effort by more than 250 scientists around the world, it is the first gamma-ray burst findings to be reported from the Fermi telescope.
The day after the burst, when Goldstein learned that his first burst was noteworthy, he called his parents in Pineville, Missouri, to share the news that his dreams were coming to fruition.
“The next day I talked to them when I found out what a big deal it was,” said Goldstein, who is completing a catalogue of gamma-ray burst data from an earlier orbiting detector as part of his thesis research. “I have always wanted to work with NASA, so for me this is an ideal place to be.”
Goldstein’s enthusiasm has spread to his family. One of the “honors” accorded a scientist when a burst is seen on his or her shift is the responsibility of writing a circular describing the burst’s coordinates and characteristics for the Gamma-ray burst Coordinates Network (GCN). Since posting his description of the Sept. 16 burst, Goldstein said, his father Scott has taken to routinely checking the GCN to see if his son has posted anything new.
The Sept. 16 burst is a theory bender because theories developed to explain gamma-ray bursts � believed to be the most powerful explosions since the Big Bang � don’t “allow” some of the behaviors seen by the Fermi instruments.
This includes the 23-minute duration. Roaring through space for 12 billion years tends to s-t-r-e-t-c-h waves of electromagnetic energy. Accounting for that stretching means the burst was a solid four minutes in duration when it was created.
“It is difficult to imagine keeping a central gamma-ray �engine’ active for that period of time,” said Dr. Michael Briggs, a CSPAR scientist and GBM team member.
Another problem is in the energy itself. Most gamma-ray bursts start hot with high-energy gamma rays, then fade to progressively weaker rays. The Sept. 16 burst started “cool,” with the high-energy gamma rays showing up almost five seconds later. That wasn’t expected.
And the burst had both high and low energy photons at the same time for about 200 seconds (also not expected), said Briggs. “It means everything that created both sets of rays happened in the same space at the same time, which is very difficult to explain.”
After not quite three and a half minutes the cooler gamma rays became too weak to detect, but the high-energy rays continued for at least 20 more minutes. (It was still going when the burst moved out of the LAT’s field of view.) If the cataclysmic cosmic event that caused the burst was fading away, why would the weaker gamma rays disappear while the strong ones stick around?
Gamma rays are at the highest end of the energy spectrum, with as much as one million times as much energy per photon as X-rays. Gamma-ray bursts are believed to come from dying stars that explode or collapse, potentially releasing as much energy in a few seconds (or minutes) as our sun will generate in billions of years.
Goldstein was the first (and is still the only) UAHuntsville graduate student to join the GBM team but several post-doctoral students have joined since the success of his first night, swelling the team to about ten. While the GBM instrument notifies team members and other scientists around the world when it detects a burst, someone has to be on-duty tending the instrument at all times. This responsibility is rotated in 12-hour shifts between the team in UAHuntsville’s Cramer Hall and scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
And: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/98/c/1019-clips.htm
Astronomy
Copyright 1998 Kalmbach Publishing Company
November, 1998
HEADLINE: Souped-up supernova: hypernovae may spark gamma-ray bursts.
Gamma-ray bursts have left astronomers scratching their heads ever since they were discovered by U.S. military satellites in the late 1960s. Part of the mystery was solved last year when astronomers found that these bursts emanate from galaxies billions of light-years away. But what exactly triggers these explosions, which can release 1,000 times more radiation than supernovae? A gamma-ray burst and a supernova recently flared from the same patch of sky, strongly suggesting that at least some gamma-ray bursts are triggered by stellar explosions. “This could be the missing link between supernovae and gamma-ray bursts” says astrophysicist Stan Woosley of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
On April 25, two satellites, BeppoSAX and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, detected the gamma-ray burst in the southern constellation Telescopium. On May 2, Dutch astronomers spotted Supernova 1998bw flaring in a spiral arm of a galaxy 120 million light-years away, in the same area as the April 25 burst. “The probability of a chance coincidence between the gamma-ray burst and Supernova 1998bw is well below one in ten thousand,” says Princeton University astronomer Bohdan Paczynski.
Supernova 1998bw is perhaps the most peculiar supernova ever seen. Astronomers were startled by radio observations showing material racing outward at nearly the speed of light, suggesting an explosion much more powerful than most supernovae.
Perhaps this event was a “hypernova”– a term Paczynski coined in 1997 to describe stellar explosions 100 times more powerful than supernovae. While nobody knows exactly how a hypernova would work, Woosley has published a theoretical model in which a massive, rapidly rotating star collapses at the end of its life to form a black hole. The black hole voraciously accretes matter from a surrounding disk, powering twin, high-speed jets that slam into surrounding interstellar gas and generate a gamma-ray burst. …

OT
Scientific American. Ice bridge in Antarctica collapses. Yep. Global Warming.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ice-bridge-holding-antarc

The 1983 El Nino was masked by the El Chichon eruption. Looking at the NINO34 index it was on par with the 1997 El Nino.
http://home.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/ninoforecast.gif
The similarity of 1972-1983 with 1997-2008 is striking, only that the 2008 El Nino did not aterialize, in fact it was a big negative spike. I don’t see this super el nino developing soon. The final verdict however can only be made after 2023.
Hansen needs his super el nino to occur very soon now…

From my oceanography courses, wave oscillations that are convergent would create larger ones. I don’t see why something similar wouldn’t be applicable when talking about all the systems at play that affect our climate.
I had one of those “V8” moments when I read that comment as it struck as one of those “truisms”.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/march1/ainansr-030106.html
“Flares hit Earth in 1998 and 2004”
In a 1999 issue of the journal Geophysical Review Letters, Inan and his STAR Lab colleagues reported the ionospheric effects of a giant gamma-ray flare from another star. It occurred on Aug. 27, 1998, in the middle of the night (as recorded at Stanford in the Pacific Daylight Time zone), but it ionized the atmosphere to levels usually found only during daytime.
Like a lighthouse whose spinning beam hits a specific point on shore at regular intervals, this neutron star had a periodicity. It spewed gamma rays every 5.16 seconds. “We observed the ionosphere respond to that,” Inan said. “The ionosphere was in fact pulsating at night.”

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-6654279.html
Newspaper article from our research archive:
See more articles from The+Milwaukee+Journal+Sentinel
Star surge: Massive blast from space hit Earth Gamma ray burst deflected by atmosphere is largest recorded beyond the sun
Article from:
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI)
Article date:
September 30, 1998
Author:
| Copyright informationCopyright 1998 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
A burst of radiation from a distant star smashed into the Earth’s upper atmosphere last month with enough energy to power civilization for a billion billion years, astronomers say.
The immense wave of energy, the most powerful ever recorded from beyond the sun, caused at least two satellites to shut down briefly, but it reached the Earth’s surface at a strength equal only to a typical single dental X-ray.
“We’ve been monitoring things like this for 30 years and we’ve never seen anything like this before,” Kevin Hurley, a research physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said Tuesday. The burst of gamma and X-ray radiation struck the Earth over the Pacific Ocean at night on … “

So finally we realise that the spike in temperatures was due to an extreme El Nino. Of course this extreme also then cools the subsequent years (so you have to take out the peak and the tough). Guess that means global warming peaked very recently.
BTW there is something wrong with your trendline as almost all recent values sit well above the line. It looks like an extrapolation to me???

Hmm the rogue wave event of Jan 1, 2005 seems conspicuously close to to earthquake / Tsunami event of Dec 26, 2004 to me. (I have seen speculation that that earthquake might have been triggered by a gravity wave from another major gamma ray burst which came through a day later, although going by the Oulu data the next major burst was a few weeks later on Jan 20,2005 (Ironically also had that drop spike drop pattern))
Speaking of the Oulu data, any thoughts on possible intractions leading to 1998 by the severe dropoff from mid-1991. Obviously if this has any relation it would need to be a very long lived one since the driver and driven response would be seperated by 6 to 7 years.

MarcH: “Hansen is still predicting the onset of an El Niño event that will drive global temperatures to a new record high in 2009 or 2010″….+-10 years

for the record here is a site describing the graity wave theory
http://www.etheric.com/GalacticCenter/GRB.html

Well I would be cautious about assigning the 1998 El Nino to a Draupner wave type of function.
The Draupner wave is essentially a standing wave pattern, which is the resultant of multiple travelling waves.
A Draupner wave phenomenon is well known to San Francisco Bay area boaters.
Just outside the Golden Gate Bridge there is a larger bay area bounded on the North by the Marin coastline. This area is commonly referred to as “The Potato Patch”. Wne you get ocean rollers and wind waves along with the GG currents, all of those travelling waves are going in several directions, and the Marin coastline drops relatively quickly into the water forming a reflective barrier, so there are waves all travelling in a lot of directions at once.
And when you try running a small boat (20 ft) through that area; what you find is that you cannot determine the dominent wave direction except for perhaps the long ocean rollers. Other than that you find that the water is “dancing”, and it simply pops up and down without moving in any direction; so ther id no boat speed or direction that is comfortable to run at. And that is the characteristic of standing waves. The waves in an organ pipe or on a violin string are standing waves formed by the interferrence (summation) of travelling waves going in opposite directions. The pipe or string is a transmission medium that propagates a certain wave velocity along it, and it also has a certain characteristic impedance.
On an electric transmission line such as a coax or parallel wirte line; the propagation velocity = 1/sqrt (LC) where L and C are the inductance and capacitance per unit length, and the characteristic impedance is sqrt(L/C) which works out to be Ohms if Henry’s and Farads are used for L and C (per unit length.
If the transmission line is terminated with an impedance equal to the characteristic impedance, the energy is absorbed in the termination, but if the lines is left open circuited, or short circuited, then a reflection occurs.
In the case where the line is open circuited, the reflected wave starts in phase with the incident wave so the amplitude steps up at the open end. In the short circuited case, the reflected wave is out of phase with the incident wave and the amplitude drops to dero at the termination. In either case a stadnign wave is formed between the incident and reflected waves.
So I don’t think there are any travelling waves in the climate sytem depicted by the temperature anomaly plots; so the 1998 El Nino is not likely to be a result of travelling wave superposition; but I do agree that it is likely to be a superposition of multiple climate effects that all hit it off together.
I must confess to having no understanding of just what physical phenomena result in either an El Nino, or a La Nina; but if I’m not mistaken, they typically manifest themselves in a localised climate pattern over a somewhat limited area of the Pacific to the West and south of Hawaii. So I am sure that the geographical structure of the pacific Basin is a primary factor in the phenomenon. The PDO on the other hand seems to be driven by somewhat more extended regional parameters. I don’t know beans about any of that, which is why I am not a climatologist.
George

MattB (13:08:29) :“any thoughts on possible intractions leading to 1998 by the severe dropoff from mid-1991. Obviously if this has any relation it would need to be a very long lived one since the driver and driven response would be seperated by 6 to 7 years”
Henrik Svensmark & Nigel Calder, “The Chilling Stars”, p.77 graphs.
Driver and driven response: Sea water´s lag, after two drops in GCR, one in 1982 and the other in 1991.5
“Large patches of the Pacific and Indian oceans, and a region of the North Atlantic between Greenland and Scandinavia, show the strongest links between low cloud cover and cosmic rays”(Op.Cit.)

Funny thing is that I saw a show on rogue waves a year or so ago. They have models for waves. Simple working linear models for simple phenomena.
There are examples of numerous large ships that have been crushed by huge rogue waves. The captains reported these events and weren’t believed. Well it turns out even these computer models were wrong. By handling the waves non-linearly they were able to predict the existence of rogue waves of a size reported by the captains of the numerous destroyed ships.
I don’t have any links unfortunately but its a case where computer models which were well known were unable to predict real natural phenomena.
—–
I was able to reconstruct the steig sat recon. It’s a lot of math but I got similar results.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/steig-avhrr-reconstruction-from-satellite-data/

The way to look for the frequency components of a signal is to use a FFT. It seem odd to me that people just eyeball signals in the analog domain when the FFT is available. It is in excel.

DJ (13:06:22) :
If you’re referring to the purple trend line the trend is an OLS based on only the data prior to the 97/98 El Niño. The red is using all of the data. The dashed purple portion is an extrapolation of what the temps would look like without the super El Niño effects, and that part of the data is well above the purple trend line, but seems to be decaying back to that line.
In case someone is curious, I picked the start and stop points for the El Niño as close to the zero anomaly line as I could so they had some rationale since I didn’t have the data at that time. The official points probably differ.

Adolfo Giurfa (13:08:31) :
WUWT is risking to be prosecuted by the Inquisitionby insinuating again that barycentric nonsense hidden behind these wavy issue.
But, we´ll keep on saying: “E pur si muove”
What we need is all things in place, like Carsten A. Arnholm in their wonderful Solar Motion and Solar Simulator2 programs:
http://arnholm.org/software/index.htm

Many thanks for the compliments, but I can’t see any relation to barycenters in this story. And as has recently been shown in another thread here, the barycenter theory does not stand after close scrutiny. I thought it would, but it didn’t. Science is sufficiently fascinating, and the current thread is a good example of other lines of investigation we should be following. The talk about gamma ray bursts is very interesting for example.

REPLY: I am sufficiently sick enough of hearing about barycentric theory that anyone who posts anything else about it on this thread will have the post run through the byte grinder and reposted a collection of gobbledygook. Don’t make me go there. – Anthony

Anthony,
Rather than clarification, if Barry Wise’ comment “(t)he dashed purple portion is an extrapolation of what the temps would look like without the super El Niño effects” is a justification for excluding all the temperature data since 1997, I’m afraid it raises far more questions than it answers.
REPLY: I understand where you are coming from, but the idea is to illustrate what the trend “might” have looked like without the 97/98 event. In this case Barry used a simple persistence forecasted trend line. As I’ve learned many times on WUWT, no trend line fitted to any type of data presented here would ever be satisfactory to 100% of the readers, someone will always find fault with some aspect of it. So, I’m not too worried that you have issues, it is expected. The point to take away is simply this: had the 97/98 El Nino not occurred, the slope for this dataset would be lower. A variety of different data selection and curve fitting techniques could be applied, each yielding different results. It can be argued ad inifinitum which method and result is best. – Anthony

Tom P (14:14:39) :
Tom, if you reread my original comment the point I was trying to make was that the data after the El Niño is related to it and is a continuation of that spike. With a temperature spike that large that’s a lot of heat that has to go somewhere. Some gets radiated into space but some returns to the system. My conjecture is that the system is acting as a decaying oscillator with the hump above the purple line the second peak after the 97/98 peak. Where the data crosses the purple dashed line (about 2008) I believe is the start of the next positive part of the cycle. As I said, this is conjecture, but if the data continues at about this level for a period of time (which could be a couple of years) and then recrosses the purple trend line I think that supports my belief.

OT and rhetorical but I’ll chance it- Is it just me or are we beginning to experience overtures of hatchet-burying between once-implacable opponents!
Recently, I’ve visited realclimate.com as a sceptic and come away an optimist!
Change is afoot, I think, and we all must weigh up where we go from here!
The last few years of climate-discussion have, sadly, been witness to claim and counter-claim, attack-parry and riposte between, for the most part, highly intelligent individuals whom, while sharing the same level of passion, differ in conclusions!
Time for a truce, I think. Time to consider that our similarities are far more in synch than our differences of opinion superficially may suggest.
Excepting the extremist outliers, our shared belief is identical – we care for this planet. Yes, we differ in the detail-the symptons and the diagnosis – but we do agree!
IMHO- Chris at RealClimate is holding out an olive-branch that signals a simple message- Forget the past- let’s sort out the future!
Thank’s Chris

I think what is being discussed here is a soliton – a constant speed wave or wave packet that remains highly non-dispersive in its energy content for varying intervals in the real world. In various forms (solutions to several types of differential equations some of which describe real phenomena) these have been known and mathematically described for almost two hundred years but received their name only recently. On the world’s oceans there are at any time of the order of ten active solitons that may endure from twenty to two hundred miles before they finally disperse. They are also used as pulse shapes in modern minimally dispersive fibre optic cables. The toroidal vortex of a common smoke ring is a kind of soliton. Lots of information is available on them by just googling soliton. Here’s a good starting point http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/SOLITONPICS/

Barry,
Firstly, if you wish to model the El Niño event as a decaying oscillator, this is not consistent with what would be expected from a rogue wave.
Secondly, a decaying oscillator has an associated fixed period – the zero crossings of your purple line are far from evenly spaced indicating at the very least the behaviour is much more complicated than a simple damped oscillator response.

To clear up this matter about the red & purple lines:
[Re: Tom P (15:44:17)]
The key word in the caption under the graph is “before”. (Note that Barry used it twice.)
The purple line does not just chop off the El Nino event – it also chops off everything after it – (note where it switches from solid to dashed).
So: The dashed segment of the purple line can be considered an extrapolation into the future (based on the past – i.e. on the solid purple segment) that was made just-before the El Nino event (…so this really was a worthwhile example to consider).

chip (16:51:55)
“[…] angular momentum […] aren’t all the windfarms being built/postulated a source of resistance? […]”
Why stop at windfarms? …dams, wells, tall buildings, tidal power, gulf-stream-turbines, airplanes, shipping of materials, etc. – all a ‘huge drag’ on Earth? ….and so the list of perceived “anthropogenic climate change” factors grows …& grows – despite back-of-the-envelope calculations meant to quell imagined amplitudes with reason.

But the 1997-98 El Nino and the temperatures which resulted ARE an outlier.
It has certainly affected the trendline (any simple linear regression trendline is going to respond to a huge outlier spike which is towards the end of the timeline – it is just math).
The only time period in the record which comes close is the 1877-78 El Nino where temps spiked a little higher even.
In fact, it is very interesting (actually more than a little interesting) how similar these two time periods are: being exactly 120 years apart. If it wasn’t for Krakatoa getting in the way, they would probably have exactly the same slope as well.
Here are the same 30 year time periods for the 4 biggest Super El Ninos in the record.
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/9844/superelninos.png

Anthony,
The RSS data, complete and without the El Niño event is here:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/32/rssdata.png
The RSS trend shows a similar small reduction as the UAH data, from 0.0155 to 0.0146 degC/year by excluding the event from the time series.
Unless you can both reject the rogue wave hypothesis for the cause of the 97/8 El Niño and explain why its effect should be the dominant driver for global temperatures more than a decade later, it’s not possible to say we see much of an influence from this event on the long-term temperature trends.
REPLY: Thanks for putting that up, I appreciate it. I should point that you mentioned this earlier:
I wrote: “The point to take away is simply this: had the 97/98 El Nino not occurred, the slope for this dataset would be lower.”
You wrote: “I’m afraid you can’t claim that…”
As I said, it would be lower, and your graph trend lines show exactly that. Lower, not as much as in Barry’s example, but lower nonetheless than if 97/98 data had remained.
Yes we can see from your method the trend would be different than what Barry plotted, no surprises there, but we can still speculate and investigate all we wish on the “rogue wave” theory, it is not negated by your graph. Just out of curiosity, how did you deal with the 97/98 data? Flatten, deleted, spliced? And what trend method did you use? It looks like a polynomial curve fit? This is where the ad infinitum part starts. 😉 – Anthony

Anthony,
There’s nothing in the data or my simple analysis that negates the rogue wave theory per se. It’s Barry’s analysis and derived trend that is inconsistent with it.
I just excluded the data during the event from the time series. It makes no discernible difference to the results if you replace it with a linear or any other reasonable interpolation so I really don’t think there is much room for dispute here.
There is of course a good mathematical reason why this event has a minimal effect on the long-term trends – it is in the middle third of the time series and so has little “leverage” on the slope. When the 97/8 El Niño first appeared in the time series, its initial effect was to greatly exaggerate the warming trend. In six years’ time its effect will be neutral, and beyond that it will contribute negatively, but with decreasing weighting, to the trend.
REPLY: Yes, I agree, start and end points have greater weighting, which is why in Barry’s method, his trend up to 97/98 is lower. – Anthony

It didn’t show when I processed the daily data, guessing because 1998 has a different kind of signature. I don’t want to mislead anyone so I can only apologise.

Then shouldn’t we be seeing something like this on the negative end as well?

Anthony,
Your two approaches to the 97/8 El Niño event contradict each other. Either it can be analysed as
1. a “rogue wave” one of whose defining properties is its transience.
2. a persistent phenomenon which has dominated temperatures up to the present.
You currently appear to advocate the effects of both models operating at the same time.
REPLY: I don’t agree with your line of thinking that they are contradictory, because your thinking assumes the 97/98 event to be essentially a singularity, without any harmonics or return of energy back into the system. As Barry points out in comments, not all of the heat from the El Nino is radiated into space, some goes back into the system via weather, cell transport, oceanic transport, and other mechanisms. By simply removing or flattening the 97/98 data, you don’t remove the effects of that recycled heat in the system, nor can you predict how much of the real data after 97/98 is reflecting the return to equilibrium in the system from that heat event. If the 97/98 El Niño had not occurred, what would be the trend? We don’t know exactly, just as we don’t know how much of the signal after 97/98 is a portion of that heat returned to the system.
In Barry’s case, he extrapolates a trend line as if the event doesn’t happen at all, and the trend continues as it was, basically a persistence forecast for the temperature trend, not unlike some temperature trend forecasts we’ve seen issued by others.
In your case, you remove the 97/98 data, but do not make any adjustment for the effect of the 97/98 event recycling heat back into the system, nor can you, because you don’t know the magnitude.
Each method has its flaws. The ground truth trend (if a 97/98 El Niño did not occur) likely lies somewhere between the red an purple lines Barry plotted, or perhaps between your trend line minus El Niño and the purple line, but we will never know exactly where the trend would have been since we can’t remove the total effect of the El Niño, post event. – Anthony

As others have alluded to here, if you can get a ‘rogue wave’ in the climate then you should be able to get a ‘rogue trough’. I’d like to know if there are any candidates for this in the past.

I realize the heatburn my chopping of the end data is giving to some people but you’re missing my point. IMO there is either a step change after the El Niño or the system is slowly returning to a previous state prior to the event. Just look at the peak values prior to it (in the neighborhood of .03) and after (over .4) with the last peak back to about .3.
Tom P (18:45:29) :
I disagree with your statement that what I’m proposing is at odds with the rogue wave. The temperature change in the atmosphere is related to a change in the forcing, either more energy coming in or being released by a sink. The rogue wave would be cycles of forcings that cause the spike. In this case, the ocean cycles (and maybe some other forcing) released enough heat to spike the global temperature. Once it’s in the atmosphere it’s got to go somewhere. Where did it go? Some was radiated away but some has to stick around because of good ole ghg’s. Why would the temperature spike and then return to previous values if there is residual heat in the system? Why is the slope prior and after the event so different? If not related where did the step after 2001 come from? Probably many answers based on data I’m ignorant of, but the heat has to come from and go to somewhere.

Right after the 1998 event, there was a massive spike in snow accumulation on mountains in the Pacific Northwest region — for example ~9.5 metres, at ~900 metres elevation, at ~49 degees (latitude) north. [FYI: 1m ~= 3.3 feet]
For some refreshing ideas on ENSO, see p.5-6 in:
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/19292/01/ex19.pdf
And if you are up for something a little more complicated – but along the same refreshing line of thinking:
http://forum.decvar.org/presentations/ENSO_WORKSHOP/documents/presentations/posters/Sonechkin-poster.pdf

Take a look at the S&P stock price index 1871-2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IE_Real_SandP_Prices,_Earnings,_and_Dividends_1871-2006.png
Looks to me like the rogue bankers created a rogue wave.

“…During my limited experimentation above I couldn’t get the generator to produce a Draupner type wave…”
If I remember correctly, the idea about the appearance of Draupner waves was that there was a non-linear interaction between several consecutive waves in which one of them “stole” energy from the others nearby to rise to a greater height that was supposedly possible (or with a greater probability that was supposedly possible). In that case, linear addition of waves in a generator is not going to produce a monster wave.
Thinking about it, to “prove” the 1998 Super El Niño was caused by a Draupner wave effect we would need to find a mechanism by which the energy of previous and subsequent El Niños would be “concentrated” into one of the oscilations. If the energy for any of the oscilations is accumulated over several years, we just have to find a physical effect that would allow for the energy to be accumulated in a non-linear way. Maybe here is a PhD thesis for some student in non-linear physics?

Another very interesting thread, thanks everyone. Sometimes it’s difficult to handle too much “fringe” or otherwise unfamiliar stuff all at once, it can easily press our “can’t cope! must explain away or silence!” buttons.
We know that amplification can work, small amplifiers causing big results, which is why soldiers crossing a bridge have to fall out of step. Then there’s the “rogue wave”, well-attested now, perhaps given its own inner strength to continue as per the “soliton” (think of smoke rings). Then there’s the possibility of rare extraterrestrial influences (the January 21st Sudden Stratospheric Warming seems related to an “anomalous x-ray pulsar”; there’s also the evidence, mentioned in this thread, of a super-luminal velocity gravity wave setting off the 2004 tsunami).
I found this paper by Arno Arrak via ICECAP and it’s another fresh “fringe” approach that IMHO is worth looking at even if not perfect. It suggests a correlation between the El Nino Major and gamma ray burst GRB 971214. The time frame is right: December 1997, the time from which the El Nino spike starts. Also the observations on longer-term effects are interesting.

What a cool article. I’m no scientist, and just the other day I was looking at the 98 peak wondering what on earth could cause that. Then I remembered seeing that Freak Wave documentary, and wondered if this was anything similar 🙂

Tallbloke,
“Bob Tisdale has done some great work on the step changes induced by el nino’s.”
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/to:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1999/trend
What is the physical basis for an El Niño event producing a step change in temperature? This can only happen if there is a one-off permanent injection of energy from the event.
You also have to explain why such a step change is only seen with the 97/8 event, and not previously. It is indeed fortunate for our survival that such an El Niño is rare: if we see an uptick of at least 0.1degC every time we experience a Super El Niño, even if it’s no more than once a century after ten thousand years we’d be toast!
Unless Mr Tisdale has some startling new physics underpinning his analysis, presenting such discontinuous temperature trends is scientifically and historically meaningless. On the other hand, I can think of one possible explanation as to why only more recently might an El Niño give the impression of bumping up the temperature: spikes on a noisy upward-trending data series will often appear as steps.
REPLY: ‘You also have to explain why such a step change is only seen with the 97/8 event, and not previously.” Tom, this demonstrates exactly why you are overreaching with your analysis. We have good global temperature data for about 100 years, global SST for about 30. To imply that just because it hasn’t been seen a second time in that 30 years worth of data is to ignore the fact that nature seldom reacts conveniently to our expectations. The 1983 event was masked by El Chicon, prior to that, we have no other examples that have been globally measured. Your logic then of only seeing such a step once would be to deny the existence of rogue waves because it was only measured once at the Draupen oil platform? – Anthony

“Wow many thanks Anthony for the continued free-speech approach to scientific inquiry. The freak wave idea is a good one.
And thanks Hotrod”
Second!

BarryW,
(following day now, overly late 😉
This is an attempt at an overlay. It needs someone to do a lot of detail work on fine grain data to better extract how things move.
http://www.gpsl.net/climate/data/1998-nino-timerelation-2009-04-06a.png
Does it mean anything? The call is with the viewer and the data looks different dependent on how it is low pass filtered. The window I’ve used is I hope most suitable for bringing out what I am trying to show, not that it has a huge effect over other windows.
If the opinion is there is no relationship that is fine, I’m just pondering.
Jason data is different y axis
usual data sources, month for msu, jason on the strange 30-ish per year

Anthony,
“To imply that just because [a step change] hasn’t been seen a second time in that 30 years worth of data is to ignore the fact that nature seldom reacts conveniently to our expectations.”
I went back to 150 years of HadCRUT data to look for El-Niño-induced steps, not just the 40 years of satellite data- there’s just no clear sign of them in the time series. There’s also no sound physical explantation for such a one-off step change and our very existence indicates such undissipated injections of energy cannot have regularly occurred. Such a step hasn’t been seen a second time – in fact there hasn’t been a single clear signature!
“Your logic then of only seeing such a step once would be to deny the existence of rogue waves because it was only measured once at the Draupen oil platform?”
In comparison the Draupen rogue wave has an exceptionally clear signal, with the distinctive characteristics of a high amplitude, short duration and zero integrated amplitude. It also has a number of possible explanations which have a sound physical basis.
The Draupen rogue wave has clear observational and scientific foundations. Supposed El-Niño-induced step changes in temperature have neither.

In response to Don B (10:52:45)
You point out what some regard as a threat to civilization. I do not dismiss claims that it could lead to the loss of enlightenment.
– – – – –
Tom P,
Since you are looking at this technically, I can understand why you might feel the masses are being misled, but how does an expert communicate succinctly to a largely lay-audience?
The power is in the metaphor.
It produces a starting point for discussion – you are contributing by aggressively fine-tuning.
One thing I think you may have overlooked is that the musings about a ‘step’ are inspired by some degree of knowledge of state-changes in systems theory.
For those following along, this is sort of like how ‘normal’ bumps to a bowl containing a ball don’t cause the ball to fly out of the bowl, but a big bump can — and there may be other bowls (i.e. other states) in which the ‘system’ can ‘land’.
Population geneticists speak of ‘genetic landscapes’, for example. Equilibrium dynamics can shift to a new order when the ‘ball’ gets flung over a hill into another valley (since the disturbance is so big the ball can’t just roll back down into its ‘usual’ valley).
Due to their nonlinear nature, state changes aren’t necessarily easy to predict if a system is not known inside-out — and as anna v has wisely pointed out in a recent ‘Watts Up?’ thread, we’re a little short on replication.
I’m not saying ‘who’s right’ & ‘who’s wrong’ on this theme, but the exchange did cause me to review Anthony’s first sentence in the article, which includes, “[…] on WUWT, people often think freely and throw out all sorts of ideas”.
Lucy was right:
New ideas at a pace people can handle?
(with a little restraint)
Thanks hotrod.

Have wave heights been trending lower since January 1st, 1995 at Draupner?