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.
Leif Svalgaard (08:00:25) :
erlhapp (04:29:11) :
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.
I wouldn’t expect you to, that was the whole point, as there isn’t any. Try to research if there is any other explanation out there [there is]. Surely there must be lots of research done on the amplified variation, or are you trying to tell me that nobody has ever noticed this before?
My reply:
There is a reference to amplified variation but the cause is not identified.
If the amplified variation has been noticed it seems to be kept very quiet. I suspect it’s the elephant in the room that people can not afford to acknowledge.
With reference to this phase. “the whole point, as there isn’t any”. I suggest that you actually have a look for yourself.
But how am I to receive this? “Try to research if there is any other explanation out there [there is].” Am I to be looking for an explanation for something that does not exist or am I to infer that you are aware of the variation and the cause of the variation but you want to keep it quiet?
Leif Svalgaard (11:22:03) :
Are you telling me that the QBO in the stratospheric temperature, wind and ozone content is driven by change in the troposphere?
Are you telling me that the QBO in the southern polar vortex is driven from the troposphere?
Are you aware that there are two schools of thought on this?
This is an absolutely critical issue.
erlhapp (17:07:32)
“In this circumstance statistical analysis will deny causation.”
I’m not convinced that this is exactly what you meant to say – and it’s not clear to which statistical methods you are referring…
…but I get your point about the need to properly account for conditioning variables – sounds like a lot of work for the (open) system you are studying, particularly given the constraints on data acquisition.
Paul Vaughan (15:38:50) :
I appreciate your understanding of FFT – & your contribution to this discussion. I’m also conveying that I wouldn’t stop at FFT because I am (generally) curious about details and willing to use tools that cast light from a great variety of other directions.
We are looking at real world systems here. You have temperature, TSI, and time. Apart from plotting temp vs TSI Theres not a lot more I can think of (TEF may be different but no one has poinred out the data for this (or for that matter described its difference from TSI)).
You obviously can think of other treatments of this data – perhaps you would care to enlighten me. Thanks.
erlhapp (17:07:32) :
There is no 11 year signal. A tropical cooling event occurs at both minimum and maximum.
There is no real 22 year cycle evident in the averaged FFTs either.
There is a QBO signal in temperature and ozone concentration at the equator between 12°N and 12°S at all levels upwards of 200hPa. This has an average periodicy of 27.1 months for data after 1948. That periodicy is derived from changes in the polar vortex and it propagates towards the equator with a variable lag that increases towards the end of each solar cycle.
Surprisingly the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) could be showing up in the averaged FFTs (it does not show up in CET (too far north!) – there is a raising of noise level around 2.25 years. However the NAO (north atlantic oscillation) also shows peaks at 2.5 and 2.7 years! and surprisingly do not show up on the CET FFT
bill (12:35:13) :
“Have you figures for TEF or a plot – its not something I have come across.”
There is no such index as the TEF. Supposedly it includes besides TSI, cosmic rays, solar wind, magnetic fields, potential energy, relativistic energy, angel wings beating, you name it. All of these are such a minute addition to TSI that they are off to the right somewhere way off the last decimal of TSI. TEF is a totally meaningless concept.
erlhapp (17:30:29) :
I suspect it’s the elephant in the room that people can not afford to acknowledge.
There are no conspiracy here. What nonsense!
Am I to be looking for an explanation for something that does not exist or am I to infer that you are aware of the variation and the cause of the variation but you want to keep it quiet?
No, the phenomenon is real, has a well understood explanation, just go and look for it. It gave a pointer with references. Do a Google search. Nobody want to keep anything quiet.
Leif Svalgaard (11:22:03) :
Are you aware that there are two schools of thought on this?
This is an absolutely critical issue.
There is a sound scientific school of thought and perhaps all kinds of weird and strange ideas which we don’t need to take seriously.
Paul Vaughan (17:55:27) :
RE: erlhapp (17:07:32)
“In this circumstance statistical analysis will deny causation.”
Let me try again.
Firstly, in terms of interval the solar change does not run to a consistent interval.
Secondly, in relation to the solar stimulus the heating episodes in the tropics depend upon what is happening to the atmosphere and that depends upon two variables only one of which is reflected in the geomagnetic indices. These two variables are firstly ionising irradiance and secondly geomagnetic activity driven by the relationship between the Earths magnetic field (itself changing) and the the solar wind which is a bundle of interesting variables in itself.
When you look at the Earth system you find that the change in ozone that propagates from the poles does so in such a way as the interval of time between stimulus in the polar vortex and response at low latitudes is variable depending upon the stage of the solar cycle. The warming event is also dependent in its timing on change in cloud cover in the subtropics. It does not always manifest at the same latitude.
The interval of time between stimulus and response is variable and we are a long way short of accounting for all the variables when we plot the SOI against the AP index.
I am no statistician. But I know that when something depends upon a variable that is not accounted for the baby frequently gets thrown out with the bath water.
Leif,
Don’t be coy. Please give me two or three words for that Google search that you have obviously found to be revealing.
erlhapp (22:12:06) :
Please give me two or three words for that Google search that you have obviously found to be revealing.
I don’t do Google searches. I read the relevant scientific literature. I have already given you a pointer. Follow some of the references. Or simply Google ‘gravity waves SAO’ or ‘gravity waves QBO’ ; what is so hard about coming up with that yourself?
Leif,
erlhapp (17:30:29) :
“I suspect it’s the elephant in the room that people can not afford to acknowledge”.
You say: “There are no conspiracy here. What nonsense!”
I am not suggesting a conspiracy. Just blind spots due to rigid ideology conditioning the way people look at things. For instance, if greenhouse theory is an article of faith it is very hard for people to see alternative explanations for things. They will not even look at the atmospheric temperature data to see how far up the warming extends. So, their conception of the way things work is never challenged by observations that don’t conform with their view of the world.
I am surprised at the number of people who assume that the mid to upper troposphere is warming because of their understanding of radiative theory. But, it is not warming at all in those places where outgoing radiation is strongest. The only case of long term upper atmosphere warming occurs in those high latitude locations where there is no sunlight for some months of the year and it is during the period of the long night that the warming occurs.
erlhapp (22:29:49) :
I am not suggesting a conspiracy. Just blind spots
“If the amplified variation has been noticed it seems to be kept very quiet. I suspect it’s the elephant in the room that people can not afford to acknowledge. […] cause of the variation but you want to keep it quiet?
Keeping this quiet against better knowledge is not just a ‘blind spot’…
Leif,
OK. Gravity waves. Fairies in the bottom of the garden. Supposedly responsible for the QBO in the stratosphere and sudden stratospheric warmings.
One word. Unphysical.
erlhapp (23:46:06) :
One word. Unphysical.
What do you know about physics?
Leif Svalgaard (20:43:01) :
There is no such index as the TEF. Supposedly it includes besides TSI, cosmic rays, solar wind, magnetic fields, potential energy, relativistic energy, angel wings beating, …
Thanks for that Leif
Perhaps if you had monthly amplitudes for the angels wing beats I could incorporate them into an FFT!
Re: bill (18:17:54)
2 places to start:
1) Wavelet analysis
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/wonderful-world-of-wavelets/
http://www.ecs.syr.edu/faculty/lewalle/tutor/tutor.html
http://paos.colorado.edu/research/wavelets/
http://www.ce.umn.edu/~foufoula/papers/efg_022.pdf
2) Recurrence methods
http://www.recurrence-plot.tk/
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lizb/rps.html
Leif gives a nice example of an application of the former in a univariate scenario:
http://www.leif.org/research/Asymmetric%20Rosenberg-Coleman%20Effect.pdf
There are also windowed versions of FFT, but of course results vary with window-parameters.
Time-integrated cross-correlation analysis is another useful tool. (One can produce informative timescale-lag correlation-color-contour plots that convey information about periodicity. The beauty of the method is its intuitive simplicity.)
All of these methods can avalanche mountains of information on an investigator, particularly since there are variations on methods (each with its own benefits & drawbacks).
If nature only threw stationary sine waves at us, wide-window FFT would be enough. The main point is that spatiotemporal heterogeneity exists and that regardless of the set of methods employed (there are others), there is often important information to be gained by exploring the sensitivity of parameter estimates to scale variations across space & time.
Going a step further:
Cross-recurrence & cross-wavelet methods are useful for investigating nonlinear relationships & synchronicity. The latter depend on the use of complex (& hypercomplex) numbers. (See the various websites for details.)
– – –
erlhapp (22:01:47)
“[…] when something depends upon a variable that is not accounted for […]”
The more quantitative you can be in nailing down the details of the conditioning variables, the lighter your (currently complex verbal) communication-burden will become. I wish you endurance, penetrating insight, lots of accurate data, & resilience in your investigations of these complex phenomena.
Leif Svalgaard (22:28:25) :
Let me interpret the situation as it stands.
We agree that there is an amplified variation of temperature above 400hPa and it is associated with the QBO, however caused.
Is that correct?
Paul Vaughan (01:40:34) :
“I wish you endurance, penetrating insight, lots of accurate data, & resilience in your investigations of these complex phenomena.”
No one could wish for more than that. I thank you for your generosity. From the description of the data handling tools that you possess it seems that you are the right man for the job.
I suggest you have a close look at the phenomena of “sudden stratospheric warmings” and associated changes in surface atmospheric pressure at the poles by comparison with the Equator. An excellent source for atmospheric data is here: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl
Please read this: http://climatechange1.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/the-atmosphere-dancing-in-the-solar-wind-el-nino-shows-his-face/
Leif
You ask, “What do you know about physics?”
I know a lot about the dynamics of the climate system from diligent, painstaking analysis of a mountain of climate data. I base what I say on what I observe. A fine understanding of the physics of a part of the whole will only get you so far.
Apart from that I have resilience, and perhaps it is just as well.
I believe that the answers we seek will be found via an examination of the existing record. There is enough data of acceptable quality already there.
erlhapp (03:51:24) :
<iWe agree that there is an amplified variation of temperature above 400hPa and it is associated with the QBO, however caused.
You can learn more about the QBO here
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~cwhung/qbo.html
and here:
http://ugamp.nerc.ac.uk/hot/ajh/qbo.htm
erlhapp (03:51:24) :
We agree that there is an amplified variation of temperature above 400hPa and it is associated with the QBO, however caused.
You can learn more about the QBO here
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~cwhung/qbo.html
and here:
http://ugamp.nerc.ac.uk/hot/ajh/qbo.htm
Bill – Check out Figure T_est_05 shows this longer wave, with about a 50 year period.
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/t_est_05-NVRm1.gif
This looks close to your 57 yr wave, both from the sun and the Hadcet data. It also has a fairly strong amplitude. It also shows that there is a peaking about the year 2000. This peaking around the year 2000 of this and other wave would suggest that the recent warm up could be due to the re-enforcement of several waves such as the 50 and 10 year wave.
Paul Vaughan: You wrote, “I have an algorithm that checks all of the (standard) possibilities. Based on its output, your assessment is (basically) correct.”
Can your algorithm pluck out repeats in signals?
ENSO events create Rossby and Kelvin waves. Some have been reported to linger in the Pacific SST records for over a decade. I would assume they’d rattle around all the oceans also, effecting climate and global temperatures longer than one would expect. With that in mind, I went looking to see if ENSO signals repeat in the global temperature anomaly record. (Not a repeat in the NINO SST records, but in the global temperature anomaly records: GISTEMP, for example.) The timing of the El Nino events, large and small, should give them a “fingerprint” of sorts. I believe with my poor statistics and signal processing I was able to coax two ENSO “echoes” (for lack of a better word) out of the global temperature anomaly data: the first was 24 months later and the second was 44 months from the original events. All the events lined up. My abilities in those fields are so poor I won’t write up my methods. Give me a few hours and I’ll give you a link to a better explanation, though.
Paul Vaughan: I’m going to put off posting any more discussion of those repeated ENSO signals. I want to study it more. What I found was probably just a product of my poor signal processing capabilites.
Regards
Re: Bob Tisdale (13:52:54) & (15:59:11)
These topics are of interest. There may be occasion to discuss this further moving forward.
Bob: “Can your algorithm pluck out repeats in signals?”
Loosely speaking, yes – and if some particular features of a dataset roused suspicions about some particular pattern, I could adjust the algorithm to look for that pattern (or for a class of patterns) without too much trouble.
– – –
Re: erlhapp (03:51:24)
Thanks for pointing me towards some interesting data. This is a complex area into which to venture, so I may wait until a time when I can get really serious about it before I have an intense go at it, but I can comment now that I’ve seen enough of the literature on this to mark it “audit-worthy”.
Charles, my train of thought expressed logically I hope, I’m trying to envision how ozone warming may be reducing despite ozone volume increase – i.e. is the reduced energy input a bigger factor than increased energy output of recovering ozone?
The factors I can think of that may be important:
Reduced solar UV and proton emission aids ozone recovery (in comb. with other factors) but the reduced UV radiation reduces ozone warming.
Less energy reaching the surface due to reduced TSI and increased ozone means less upward IR.
Less WV in the upper atmosphere due to reduced convection means less strato cloud that would also aid ozone recovery but contribute to cooling.
Just another angel wingbeat?
(excuse my L plates)
Sorry, the above comment was intended for
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/25/examining-sorce-data-shows-the-sun-continues-its-slide-toward-somnolence/
bill: By all means verify what I’ve said, may I suggest however using academics without vested interests.
Leif is not an academic, is an AGW apologist and is not above rank falsehoods.
“TEF is a totally meaningless concept.”
“Lassen’s work is critically flawed and has been soundly rejected.”
Leif Svalgaard (07:15:28) :
Leif,
Thank you for the references the former of which was new to me. Some notes follow that I hope will be of interest.
Huang remarks on the association of the westerly phase of the QBO with the ‘El Nino’. My own observations are based on data for the period since 1948. Tropical warming events (SST 20°N to 20°S) are indeed associated with the QBO (and therefore also the SOI) but not always with the Westerly phase. I think that there are reasons for that relating to speed of propagation and centre of warming not always being in the same hemisphere or same latitude.
The QBO is strongest at 20hPa. The QBO is present in 20hPa temperature data at all latitudes right through to the poles. At the equator it looks like a sine wave but at the pole more like a bolt of lightning. If it were the other way round my instinct would be that it propagated from the equator to the Poles.
The greatest amplitudes in the 20hPa thermal variation is found at the poles.
The QBO temperature change is associated with change in ozone concentration and is to my mind strictly a product of change in the polar vortex. The vortex contains no ozone. It contains nitrogen oxides from the mesosphere that erode ozone. The propagation of temperature between the poles and about 15° of latitude involve a gradual dampening of the temperature variation. In the equatorial zone, where the propagation zones merge, it is amplified.
The propagation is fast in the upswing of the solar cycle and slows appreciably in late cycle. This is a striking phenomenon. It can be observed by manually tracing across the peaks.
Tropical warming events and peaks in 20hPa temperature at the equator are strikingly conjunctional, especially prior to 1991. Since 1948 there have been 28 peaks in 20hPa temperature. On 11 occasion’s peak sea surface temperature was experienced during troughs rather than peaks in 20hPa temperature. All eight instances of peak sea surface temperature after 1991 have occurred in troughs in 20hPa temperature.
The period of the QBO oscillation after sunspot maximum in cycle 23 has been close to 24 months. It looks as if sea surface temperatures may have already peaked for the current cycle of the equatorial QBO which peaked about eight months ago. There is some chance that they might increase until September because the trough in 20hPa temperature is still to come and there are bodies of warming water still moving towards the equator from about 30°S.
Another reason to think that there is more warming to come over the next few months is that peak sea surface temperature 20°N to 20°S is currently associated with peak temperature of NH waters in northern hemisphere summer.
It is of interest to discover that some predictions of ENSO use the expected wind anomalies at 30mb and 50mb to forecast the strength and timing of the event.
There is nothing chaotic or noisy about this aspect of the climate system. You could argue I suppose that ENSO is an internal oscillation of the climate system and it causes the stratospheric QBO with the greatest change in upper atmosphere temperature occurring at the poles. But, in my book you need to look harder at the evidence.
A note for Bob Tisdale: Repeating ENSO signals have a physical basis in the regularity of the period of the stratospheric QBO