I was pointed to this graph by an email from WUWT reader Phil Ravenscroft and I’m reposting it here for discussion.
While the correlation looks plausible, it seems almost too good. Since the email tip for this graph did not include the source data files, I was ready to dismiss it.
UPDATE: my first impression was the correct one – see comments
But in doing my own research, I found myself being led back to late John Daly and his references to Theodor Landscheidt in this page. While I don’t put much stock in Landscheidt’s barycentric theories, I’ve never known John Daly to pursue a wild hare. Looking further, in the peer reviewed literature, there is this paper:
Connection between ENSO phenomena and solar and geomagnetic activity (PDF) by M A. Nuzhdina, Astronomical Observatory of Kiev National T. Shevchenko University, Kiev, Ukraine in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (2002) 2: 83–89. European Geophysical Society.
I find this passage interesting:
The analysis of planetary fields of pressure shows that they
are connected both with the 11-year and the 22-year solar cycles
(Wagner, 1971). The atmospheric barometric centers,
Icelandic and Aleut depressions, Pacific, Siberian, Azores
anticyclones in the northern hemisphere, displace close to
the maxima of 11-year solar cycles. The Azores and Icelandic
barometric centers tend to displace on the east close
to the maximum of a solar cycle (Herman and Goldberg,
1978). The clockwise circulation, connected with Azores anticyclone,
causes passat winds in the north-east direction.
The response of barometric formations at the midday regions
of the Earth (namely, recess or filling of cyclones or
strengthening or destruction of anticyclones) depends upon
tbe sign of the magnetic field of the sunspot which is crossing
the central meridian of the Sun (Nuzhdina and Barkova,
1983). Spontaneous phenomena of solar activity (solar
flares) and crossings by the Earth of an IMF sector boundary
are accompanied by changes of atmospheric pressure and
cyclonic activity in some regions Mustel, 1972; Roberts and
Olsen, 1973; Herman and Goldberg, 1978). A low-pressure
region in the gulf of Alaska is more significant, when the
IMF is directed away from the Sun, than towards (Wilcox,
1978).
The authors conclude:
– QB and QA oscillations in ENSO data are coherent with
the same oscillation in Ap-index and Wolf number data. 5.3-year oscillation is coherent in ENSO and Wolf number data.
– In our opinion, cyclic dynamics of ENSO phenomena
are due to solar activity and geomagnetic variations.
It is background long-period variations on which high frequency
oscillations are imposed.
This is an interesting concept and worth further discussion. My goal in posting this is to have our team of WUWT readers take a good hard look at this and see if the SOI – Ap graph has any merit.
I’m traveling today, so have at it. Please, please, keep on topic. Lately people have just been posting random links and OT’s.
A few people have made comments about fine-details & high-frequencies in the context of “wiggle-matching”.
Suggestion:
Pause to consider what the fields of chaos & fractal geometry are all about. Coupling is distinct from synchronicity. Spatiotemporal heterogeneity exists.
Whether or not it is easy we have got to wrap our heads around the variability of parameter estimates with scale. (This is a hard-learned lesson that has been hammered like thunder in some disciplines.)
Leif,
“Here is one example:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1114867v1”
No mention of any mechanism there. I do remember you quoting that article before. Another particularly useless modeling study with no mention of the parameters that are built in.
John F. Hultquist
Mid latitude high pressure cells connect the lower stratosphere with the troposphere bringing air from above towards the surface. The result is an enrichment of mid latitude air with ozone from the stratosphere at altitudes above about 400hPa.
Polar highs connect the mesosphere with the surface. They are very low in ozone content. They are rich in nitrogen oxides that destroy ozone. They mix air into the stratosphere and condition the ozone content of the lower stratosphere/upper troposphere. These vortexes change in strength on QBO time scales i.e. 27.1 months average but almost an even two years in late cycle 23.
The relationship between the aa index of geomagnetic activity and the erosive activity of the Antarctic vortex has been established by Hood and if you are interested I can find the reference.
George E. Smith
Want to understand climate? you need to bone up on these two indices. The S.O.I. simply reflects the timing of warming events in the tropics. Its the SO in ENSO. That is El Nino Southern Oscillation.
Taking Leif’s data for AP and SOI data from
ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/sco/soi/soiplaintext.html
And doing a FFT on both gives this output
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2844/apvssoifft.jpg
Note that an FFT will show frequencies/periods and will therefore show a correlation of effects of SOI to AP or Ap to SOI. If SOI lags AP by less than the repetition rate of AP then this will show up on SOI as a peak at the same rate (phase of data is lost in the FFT)
The AP has 11 year cycle (to the accuracy of a 1024 pt FFT)
The SOI index has nothing near.
The SOI FFT MAY show a repetition of between 2 and 9 years idicated by a raise in the “noise” level over that period.
Basil (08:16:07) :
My apologies: Leif, not Lief. I knew I should have proofread that posting. My fingers are hard-wired to type “i before e, except after c.”
Leif:
Is that pronounced “life” or “leaf” ?
“”” erlhapp (16:02:56) :
George E. Smith
Want to understand climate? you need to bone up on these two indices. The S.O.I. simply reflects the timing of warming events in the tropics. Its the SO in ENSO. That is El Nino Southern Oscillation. “””
Well actually, I’m not that interested in “climate” or “climate science”; Meteorology maybe; but the only “Climate” issue that is of much concern to me is what controls the temperature range of this planet.
And I already know the answer to that; it’s the water. Water is the most abundant “greenhouse gas” by far, and is responsible for the earth not being a frozen rock. But water; unlike ANY OTHER GHG exists in all three phases in the atmopshere, and in the liquid/solid phases in the form of clouds, water produces a cooling influence; so all by itself water keeps the earth in a stable temperature range by simply adjusting the amount of cloud cover as other system variables change.
So long as those oceans remain there; and the laws of physics don’t change; we can neither raise nor lower the temperature of this planet very much even if we wanted to.
And if we could; where would YOU set the thermostat knob ?
But I’m glad that there are people who worry about El Nino, and ENSO, besides my favorite meteorologists; but I wish some of them would learn some physics; it would be so much help to them; and it would be wonderful if the Universities that taught “climate science” or “climatology” included the general theory of sampled data systems in their freshman year. Maybe then the Japanese equivalent to our National Academy of Sciences, would not describe their work as akin to “ancient astrology”.
George
Bob Tisdale (09:38:31) :
Here’s my pathetic effort. I didn’t scale the SOI to match the AP but I did invert it so the warm phase of the SOI was in sync with elevated AP numbers. I think I might use both our methods and see if we can massage a fit.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/AP-SOI.jpg
There are lots of little correlations in climate with all these different indices (solar, ocean, winds, pressures, global warming theory inputs).
The correlations appear very strong sometimes and then the correlations go away.
I think you should always start with “is there a real physical explanation for this correlation” – what is the physical explanation for the AP index to impact the SOI.
Well, the SOI is just the difference in atmospheric pressure between Darwin and Tahiti. There is no logical reason why the AP index should impact this measure. Maybe there is one but I can’t see it.
When we examine the SOI and ask why does it provide an indicator of the ENSO (in fact, the Southern Oscillation is part of the name for the ENSO), the difference in pressures provides an indication of how the winds over the ENSO regions will behave – pressure and temperature differentials determine winds which helps determine the ENSO so there is a physical explanation.
The next thing one needs to do is examine the actual numbers. I can’t tell you how many times I have read this paper or saw that chart and then downloaded the actual data and found the actual data takes you to a completely different conclusion.
The next thing one needs to do is check whether the correlation continues throughout time at a sufficient level. The correlations come and go so one needs to go back in time as far as possible to see if the correlation continues.
For the SOI versus the ENSO, oh yeah, the correlation seems to always be very strong throughout the entire record. They are slightly off-track for small periods of time but not much.
I always look first for the physical explanation and then see where the real actual numbers go and then see whether the correlation continues throughout the available record. If it doesn’t pass all of these tests, it should go in the recycle bin.
It seems the BBC is deliberately cherry picking data and experts to try and dismiss the connect between climate and the solar cycle.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/8890
When does this kind of action go from clumsy to deliberately shading the full truth?
Cheers, AJStrata
Anna V wrote: “Now, in my view, there is a better probability that the fluid dynamics of the sun induced plasma is governed by similar equations as the heat inputted in the oceans than that the yellow curve is driving the mauve curve.”
Wow. That is objective, hard, HARD truth.
Well said, as always, Anna.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
erlhapp (16:02:56) “ the aa index of geomagnetic activity and the erosive activity of the Antarctic vortex has been established by Hood and if you are interested I can find the reference.”
I looked but haven’t found this but I am reading the material on your Climate Change site with Wolk. Also, have read a little of the material on your personal home site. So, thanks for your answer (above) and if you find the thing by Hood, great. John
gary gulrud (12:19:40) :
> Don’t want to feed panic but swine flu story is breaking big.
Yeah, ever since I first heard about the 1918 “Spanish” flu on Upstairs, Downstairs I’ve been looking out for a repeat. The Avian flu doesn’t seem to have caught on because it needs a mutation to be active in people’s cooler lungs. There may be other blockers, I rather expected the Avian flu to have made the jump a couple years ago.
At the beginning phases of a disease outbreak there’s so little known about ease of transmission, virulence, etc that speculation runs rampant. We’ll have to watch it for the next couple of weeks. A good site to monitor is http://cdc.gov/flu/swine/investigation.htm
I read “The Great Influenza” a couple years ago and was amazed at how many people and military bases in New England were involved. The strain may have evolved in Kansas, another surprise! The book is too long, but does have a lot of worthwhile information.
David L. Hagen (12:36:26) :
gary galrud
I don’t see any correlation between swine flu with solar cycles or southern oscillation index. Please post on the National Enquirer etc.
Um, in modest defense of Gary, there is a historical correlation of plagues with solar minimums and cold events (especially Bond Events). These are presumed to be due to cold, but given what we know now, I’d also suspect that increased cosmic rays might well increase mutation rates of viruses.
Just heard on the news that this particular swine flu is a never seen before combination of bits of swine, bird, and human flu. (Not in itself unusual in that flu is prone to lots of mutation and gene swapping between species). Usually, though, it’s just one bit at a time. This one (from first reports) is more like a 4 way cross. A bit odd… and remember that the killer Spanish Flu epidemic was in 1918, just after a very low solar AP period…
It would be interesting to plot the occurance of epidemics vs solar cycles and SOI…PDO, etc. Not a far fetched thing at all, just looking for where the “pin action” finally settles down…
Re: bill (16:03:03)
Keep in mind that these are non-stationary time series (so FFT isn’t going to reveal everything that might be of interest).
–
Re: Bill Illis (18:07:16)
I hope you pause to consider the possibility of lurking conditioning variables (some of which may act as simply as a mere switch).
Bill Illis (18:07:16) :
I used both our methods and there is a casual correlation but nothing to submit for peer review. Even if it were stronger I would first be looking at some bias in one or both the data sets. Possibly orbital. It’s no where near as good a fit as the one Anthony posted. Perhaps they found the same casual relationship and weaved a little data magic.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/AP-SOI2.jpg
When I see one of these MS Excel plots with the default horizontal gridlines in place, the default gray background, vertical text direction on the x-axis, a title caption that more or less repeats the y-axis label, and the dreaded “mauve” and yellow series colors, it often signals that the author is not experienced at analyzing data, and is liable to have made one or more errors. This common format results from using the “Line” rather than “XY” chart format in Excel and then having to delete an unexpected data series. Since the author is probably not proficient at graphing data in MS Excel, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they simply plotted the wrong data, perhaps one original data set and a transformed version, rather than the two independent data sets they intended.
Yes, it’s an indirect measure, but my experience in reviewing many papers for publication has been that when the authors haven’t put much thought or effort into how their graphics are created and presented, then it is often the case that they haven’t put much thought or effort into how their data was collected and analyzed either.
Bob Tisdale (09:38:31) :
Thanks Leif and Arnost for the data. So here are two comparison graphs with the AP Index and SOI datasets. I had to scale the SOI to provide any worthwhile comparison. The equation is on the graphs.
Here’s the AP Index and Scaled SOI without filtering:
http://i40.tinypic.com/1z1shhx.jpg
And here’s the same data with 12-month running-average filters:
http://i42.tinypic.com/23vx2mp.jpg
I don’t see any correlation. None at all.
Thanks Bob, would it be possible to show a comparison again, but with a 5 year lag between these two. IMHO there does appear to be some correlation but it lags. I suspect that a percentage of the changes in Solar AP have an near immediate effect on the southern oscillation index but the remainder seems to go into hiding for about five years.
Thanks again
John F. Hultquist (21:10:24) :
The Hood paper relates production of nitrogen oxides to Energetic Particle Precipitation events but has some very interesting points in relation to solar and ENSO connections.
http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/SPARC/SPARC2008GA/Oral/day3_Hood.pdf
Recently it was realized that production is continuous, is modulated by the solar wind and influences ozone via the polar night jet.
Periodic Modulations in Thermospheric Composition by Solar Wind High Speed Streams
Crowley, G.; Reynolds, A.; Thayer, J.; Lei, J.; Paxton, L.; Christensen, A.; Zhang, Y.; Meier, R.; Strickland, D.
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #SA21B-1550
We report on periodicities observed in the column density ratio, ΣO/N2, correlated with periodicities in solar wind speed and Kp index. The recently discovered solar-terrestrial connection between rotating solar coronal holes and mass density variations in the Earth’s thermosphere by Lei et al. (2008) and Thayer et al. (2008) prompted this study and has led to further insight regarding the thermosphere response to periodic high-speed solar wind streams and recurrent geomagnetic activity. In particular, ΣO/ N2 ratios, measured by the Global Ultraviolet Imager (GUVI) instrument flown on the TIMED satellite, demonstrate strong 9 and 7 day oscillations in 2005 and 2006, respectively, that are well correlated with the solar wind speed and Kp index. More importantly, the ΣO/ N2 ratio response peaks at high latitudes, as opposed to the mass density response being global, indicating that vertical winds are active at the higher latitudes while lower latitudes experience primarily thermal expansion.
Leif Svalgaard (11:07:39) :
I see that the worthy Jim E Hansen and Gavin A Schmidt are listed as joint authors in the pantheon of warmers sheltering together in the reference you cite at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1114867v1”
Do you have anything from anyone whose work is grounded in observation rather than ideology. I do assure you that I read very widely but I see no reference to the amplified variation of temperature between 400hP and the tropopause and its relation to ozone content and the solar QBO. Given the importance of this phenomenon in modulating cirrus cloud and solar radiation I would have thought you would have given it more attention. But perhaps you are not interested in finding the connection between solar variability and surface temperature.
But don’t worry about references, tell me in your own words what is responsible and why it is inconsequential.
And don’t tell me this is OT because in fact it is absolutely central to this thread.
MartinGAtkins: You wrote, “I didn’t scale the SOI to match the AP but I did invert it…”
Keep in mind that the original graph in this post, the graph that started all discussion, did not invert the SOI.
Paul Vaughan (22:55:10) :
Re: bill (16:03:03)
Keep in mind that these are non-stationary time series (so FFT isn’t going to reveal everything that might be of interest).
Not sure what you are saying here.
An FFT:
a pure sine wave with a period of 11 year will produce a narrowpeak at the 1 year interval – no other peaks will be produced
a pure sine wave with a period of 11 year mixed with a large amount of noise will produce a narrowpeak at the 1 year interval and many randomly placed peaks either side (caused by the noise)
A pulse at 11 year interval will produce a peak at 11 years plus sucessively lower peaks at 2, 3, 4, etc intervals (depends on shape of pulse.
A sinewve with an average period of 11 year but which varies from 8 to 14 years randomly will produce a board peak centred exactly at 11 year.
2 FFTs of signal each of 11 year repetition rate one with a peak that occurs in year 6 (for example) and the other that has the peak in year 12 (for example) will (within the limits of a low sample FFT) produce the same peak at 11 years – the phase of the signal is not material to the FFT output.
My FFTS show the ap with a STRONG peak at approx 11 years
The SOI has NO peak NO Broad peak and NO raised noise level centred on 11 years. It can therefore be asserted that there is no influence of AP on SOI that is not below the noise level.
Kelvin Kubala (04:08:56) :
…
Thanks Bob, would it be possible to show a comparison again, but with a 5 year lag between these two. IMHO there does appear to be some correlation but it lags…
See my FFT explanation above .
My original post:
Bill (16:03:03) : …
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2844/apvssoifft.jpg
Note that an FFT will show frequencies/periods and will therefore show a correlation of effects of SOI to AP or Ap to SOI. If SOI lags AP by less than the repetition rate of AP then this will show up on SOI as a peak at the same rate (phase of data is lost in the FFT)
The AP has 11 year cycle (to the accuracy of a 1024 pt FFT)
The SOI index has nothing near.
The SOI FFT MAY show a repetition of between 2 and 9 years indicated by a raise in the “noise” level over that period I would add that there is NO raise in noise level around the peak of the AP
I’m presently working on a website tying together many independent researchers’ theories. This ties in well with the barycenter theory and Oliver Manuel’s neutron core model of the Sun. The barycenter cycle appears to cause the magnetic neutron core of the Sun to flip every eleven years. We are presently in an extremely rare situation where the barycenter follows tightly to the surface of the Sun for an extended period of time, thus the solar neutron core is not being tugged by gravity to flip. The effect will likely last longer than a weaker event during the Maunder Minimum.
It will be another month or so before the web pages are published, but I’m giving a heads up if others are interested in starting a parallel inquiry.
Bob Tisdale (04:40:03) :
>> MartinGAtkins: You wrote, “I didn’t scale the SOI to match the AP but I did invert it…”
>Keep in mind that the original graph in this post, the graph that started all discussion, did not invert the SOI.
The problem with understanding our climate is that it’s walking to and from that school where it was uphill in both directions.
Sorry folks, I blew it!
The graph is too good to be true, as several suspected, but it took me a while to track what I had done wrong. I picked an Excel grapher that does not allow the different graphs to cross. When you read the numbers, they are OK, but it squashes the lower trace down, so that it inevitably looks a far better than it is in reality.
Back to the drawing board. I tried to recant in all directions, but did not realise this one had run away. There is some sort of a fit, at least between the very big El Nino’s, the low SOI numbers (when there are several in a row), and the low Ap Index numbers, but it is not nearly as good as the incorrect graph that starts this thread suggests.
Andrew Guentner picked the problem exactly. Who needs peer review, this lot works fine. Blunder and you are shot from the sky in short order. Thanks Andrew.
Thanks anyway, Anthony, and again. apologies all.
Peter Ravenscroft
Peter Ravenscroft.
Here’s an example of extracting a repetative signal from a noisy environment
A pure sine wave – no distortion and no noise is shown for comparison
the Noisy signal has both random amplitude noise and random frequency modulation applied.
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/7392/fftextactionsigfromnois.jpg
Bob Tisdale (04:40:03) :
Fair enough. When I eyeballed the graph it look like that is what had been done. Of course that means that they casually correlate in the opposite direction.
I feel a new theory is about to be born.