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| Contact: Christopher Vaccaro FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
202-536-8911 (cellular) July 9, 2009 |
El Niño Arrives; Expected to Persist through Winter 2009-10
NOAA scientists today announced the arrival of El Niño, a climate phenomenon with a significant influence on global weather, ocean conditions and marine fisheries. El Niño, the periodic warming of central and eastern tropical Pacific waters, occurs on average every two to five years and typically lasts about 12 months.
NOAA expects this El Niño to continue developing during the next several months, with further strengthening possible. The event is expected to last through winter 2009-10.
“Advanced climate science allows us to alert industries, governments and emergency managers about the weather conditions El Niño may bring so these can be factored into decision-making and ultimately protect life, property and the economy,” said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.
El Niño’s impacts depend on a variety of factors, such as intensity and extent of ocean warming, and the time of year. Contrary to popular belief, not all effects are negative. On the positive side, El Niño can help to suppress Atlantic hurricane activity. In the United States, it typically brings beneficial winter precipitation to the arid Southwest, less wintry weather across the North, and a reduced risk of Florida wildfires.
El Niño’s negative impacts have included damaging winter storms in California and increased storminess across the southern United States. Some past El Niño’s have also produced severe flooding and mudslides in Central and South America, and drought in Indonesia.
An El Niño event may significantly diminish ocean productivity off the west coast by limiting weather patterns that cause upwelling, or nutrient circulation in the ocean. These nutrients are the foundation of a vibrant marine food web and could negatively impact food sources for several types of birds, fish and marine mammals.
In its monthly El Niño diagnostics discussion today, scientists with the NOAA National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center noted weekly eastern equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures were at least 1.0 degree C above average at the end of June. The most recent El Niño occurred in 2006.
El Niño includes weaker trade winds, increased rainfall over the central tropical Pacific, and decreased rainfall in Indonesia. These vast rainfall patterns in the tropics are responsible for many of El Niño’s global effects on weather patterns.
NOAA will continue to monitor the rapidly evolving situation in the tropical Pacific, and will provide more detailed information on possible Atlantic hurricane impacts in its updated Seasonal Hurricane Outlook scheduled for release on August 6, 2009.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources. Visit http://www.noaa.gov.
On the Web:
Forecast: http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html
NOAA’s El Niño site: http://www.elnino.noaa.gov
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Bob Tisdale (13:00:31) :
IMO, OHC has little value as a dataset because of the differences. In other words, there is no OHC real story.
Frustrating isn’t it?
🙁
Jeff Id (09:47:00) : “It’s been a strangely cool summer so far in Chicago area. I for one will welcome the warm weather – winter sucks.”
NW Indiana here, and I can vouch for that statement. I’ve only had my AC on maybe five times this year so far. And last winter, I could store food on my enclosed front porch instead of running the freezer. Been pretty good to my energy bills, I’d say. And I didn’t adopt a single green change in my life. It wasn’t quite as pronounced, but last spring was a bit slow in coming. A very rainy and muggy summer, though!
Anyway, I rather like the cooler summer season, myself.
While it may be cold in some Canadian regions, it’s plenty warm here, up to the mid 100’s in extreme southwestern Kansas, however despite getting forecasts of 100 degrees here in Wichita today, the temps. stopped dead at 90-91 around noon and only managed 2-3 degrees since then with little cloud cover, the heatwave has had a little trouble getting started in my part of the state and still looking that way.
Just to note, western Kansas gets a wider variety of temperatures during the Summer than here in Wichita from my observations, they’ve been known to have their highest highs being several degrees higher than Wichita and also their lowest highs being a bit lower.
Intellicast’s forecast maps is showing cold air regions moving around in various locations in Canada and the American Northwest over the next 5 days, including what seems to be a fairly cool’ish air mass for summer over Eastern Canada, definately colder than Alaska and many areas in Russia.
If this is the El Nino, can you imagine what the next La Nina is going to be like? Keep in mind folks, they’re not predicting an El Nino, they’re saying we’ve been in one. And yet the June sattelite temperature anomaly ~ 0!
Obviously we are well aware of the possibilites with climate.
It could warm. It could cool. It could remain stagnant.
AGW thought: humans are at fault. we must stop warming.
AGW skeptic thought: humans are not at fault. we hope it cools.
In the end, we’re essentially in want of the same thing. We want cooling?
Perhaps it’s too warm for some of us!
Wishing for an ice ige would be a bit overkill…to prove the AGW side wrong that is. But only if the saying ‘because what you wish for’…came true.
I do say though, the AGW side comes from a good place. They have genuine concern for something they are convinced of 100%. Better to side on the precautionary measures than to not. It is a frame of motivation from fear.
Many skeptics are 100% convinced that AGW theory is wrong. Probably because of the tendency for humans to get caught up in worry and thought…not to mention hubris. They are not intimidated by warming, for they know they can and will adjust to natures bidding. It is a frame of motivation from curiousity.
In the long run…5 billion years…humans are doomed, but in ’til then or to whatever comes before, we’ll have to keep arguing to see who’s more right.
Suppose that’s the moral of the story. Humans like to fight over who’s superior. Thought, behavior, you name it. This is just another example.
Have you noticed that the PDO is also RED ?…I think that´s too much…no joke.
KW (13:53:08) : The moral of the story… is that there are some of us who can not “sell our soul to the devil” and unable to tolerate lies. The trouble is that the world is upside down.
The most recent similar period that had an El Nino during a cool PDO and cool AMO was the 1965-1966 event.[ also just after a 1964 solar minimum]. The El Nino was a moderate one that lasted for about 11months[june -april . The annual PDO continued cool and declined from [-0.31] in 1965 to [-0.46] in 1966. It warmed the winters slightly but US ANNUAL CONTIGUOUS TEMPERATURE ANOAMALY[GISS] actually went down from [-0.11C] in 1965 to [-0.25C ] in 1966 .Global temperature anomaly [Crutem3] basically was the same [1965 was[- 0.216 C] and 1966 was [-0.147 C] The annual AMO had just gone negative in 1964 [ just like now in 2009] . IT went up from [-0.145 ] to [+0.018] and then continued negative in 1967. Canadian Annual temperature anomalies warmed slightly from [-0.6C ] to [-0.2C]. Canadian winters had below normal temperatures both years but 1966 was slightly warmer than 1966 [but still quite cold .] If things develop similar as then , this El Nino may not be a significant event and the cool pattern may continue since it seems to be the prevailing natural cycle.
It would really be useful to have an animation of that map.
matt v. (14:41:47) :
So, what you’re saying that it is cycling and that has been seen before… I agree. In fact, all the “old” people I know all see this as a natural and repeating cycles. Nothing to get excited over. Deja Vu.
Aside from their utterly arrogant statement:
“NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources”
and their hype about dastardly destructive El Ninos, NOAA is simply announcing that the beginning of El Nino Conditions has arrived. We should be able to differentiate among:
-El Nino Conditions advisory with less than 3 consecutive months with ONI greater than or equal to +0.5 C;
-El Nino Episode with 5 or more consecutive months the same; and
-El Nino Event with 5 consecutive overlapping 3-month seasons, e.g., 15 months or longer. (Defs from Basil and Pamela Gray, the latter with a little different definition).
And, of course, whether we have an Episode or not tells us nothing about the effects of human-created CO2. (The statement is rather god-like, isn’t it?)
I like Anna V’s question: What EXACTLY, with as much scientific precision as possible, brought us out of the Little Ice Age and continues to permit us to warm, even if we turn a little cooler in our warmth. It was not CO2!
Lastly, since California ALWAYS seems to have trouble with droughts, and since we developed our water system for our magnificent agriculture, not for our subsequent urban population increase, shouldn’t we be thinking about developing additional sources of water? Roger Sowell, E.M. Smith have provided ideas. It seems we (NOAA?) should stop whining about Little Boy/Little Girl-caused droughts and use some of that stimulus money to begin desalination of ocean water and transport of water from the north (partnership with Canada?) to the south, and not only in the West. Let’s do something productive with all our requisitioned tax dollars.
matt v. 14:41:47
Thanks, matt. You da man.
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Since the La Nina regional climate impact climatology appears to have been pretty close for the recent La Nina (the South American drought conditions seem to have been missed) …
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/La_Nina_regional_impacts.gif
… We might as well have a look at the regional climate impacts from an El Nino (it will take a few months before these effects will start to be felt assuming the El Nino continues).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/El_Nino_regional_impacts.gif
pyromancer76 (14:53:09) :
“… transport of water from the north (partnership with Canada?) to the south…”
This is already happening. We send good water at a very low price to south of the boarder and the south sells it back to us in bottles but at a much higher price… very profitable operations.
The English Channel feels like it has warmed up a bit over the last few weeks!
I agree that the situation is assymetric. If things cool down for the next 10 years, AGW is done. If things warm up for the next 10 years, AGW becomes more likely but is not established.
What would convince me is if the warmists made bona fide “fingerprint” predictions. For example if they predict drought in Australia; increased rainfall in California; and so forth. And then all of those predictions came true.
They would have to be bona fide predictions though. It doesn’t count if they make predictions after the fact. It doesn’t count either if different warmists make conflicting predictions. The predictions should be “consensus” predictions.
But I doubt that the warmists will ever lock themselves in to a position like that. It’s telling that they act just like TV psychics by limiting themselves to vague, difficult-to-falsify predictions full of weasel words.
Will an El Nino lead to a record temperature?
For GISS the record was in 2005. If the El Nino develops, it will influence temperatures most in 2010, which is 5 years on, so we should be about 0.1 degrees warmer. A typical El Nino seems to cause an increase in temperature of about 0.1 to 0.2 degrees, so this suggests a quite high chance, but not certainty that 2010 will be a record if the el nino does develop.
For RSS and Uah, 1998 is the record. 12 years of warming is about 0.24 degrees warmer. however for each of these series, the response to the 1998 el nino was a warming of about 0.5 degrees. To beat this, even with 0.24 degrees of warming we need an El Nino response of 0.26 which is much harder then the requirement for GISS to be a record.
For HADCRUT 1998 was the record, and was about 0.25 degrees warmer than trend. THe HADCRUT trend should be about at record level in 2010, so any El Nino should beat HADCRUT fairly easily.
What could go wrong with these predictions? Solar, aerosols and PDO/other multi decade variations have not been considered, so could cause errors in these predictions.
In summary I predict that if we get an El Nino, 2010 will be a record for some temperature records, but not for others. We will have headlines about the warmest year ever based on whichever temp series does beat the record, and counter claims on certain blogs that the record was not beaten based on whichever temperature series does not beat the record.
Allan MacRae,
Thank you for sharing the Yeats poem.
My condolences on your frozen beer. While it might be hyperbole to say that it might boil where I am (Dallas), believe me, it’s Africa hot here. I don’t care about global cooling, I want Texas cooling.
There must be some Panglossian perfect climate somewhere between Canada and Texas where the beer doesn’t freeze on the porch and you don’t burn the soles of your feet running to the pool to jump into bath water.
This sounds very similar tot he breathless announcement of the arrival of a strong solar cycle a few weeks ago.
This el Nino, at this point, seems not very robust.
And let us not foget how Hansen was predicting a strong El Nino this year.
I predict that in a years time it’ll be NH summer 2010 and RealClimate will still have dozens of visitors every week.
brazil84 (16:12:06) :
I agree that the situation is assymetric. If things cool down for the next 10 years, AGW is done. If things warm up for the next 10 years, AGW becomes more likely but is not established.
——————–
No, I think the AGWiers will say that if things cool down for the next 10 years, its climate variability, but if things warm up in the next 10 months, its definitely Anthropogenic Global Warming and the Human Race is fully responsible.
CNN Weather report:
We have an El Ninjo situation now and it’s getting warmer.
RAY,KIM, Allan Macrae
I agree with several previous bloggers that we should continue to highlight to the public the potential risks of possible upcoming the natural cycle of cooler weather that may be ahead[ despite the short term El Nino that may come], like serious loss of crops, need for more fuel for winters [potential shortage of heating oil] , bigger spring floods , greater risk of f3-f5 tornadoes , more ice storms ,etc. ]One season does not make a climate , but 10 years of declining least square trend slopes of global temperatures, ocean SST, and [AMO, PDO/ENSO CYCLES] does indicate more than just short term weather ahead. The real global warming only lasted for 14 years [1994-2008] when AMO and PDO were both warm . Both now seem to be heading for a period when both may be cool like 1964-1974 and again 1902-1917. Having said that I am also aware that Nature is full of surprises and the future is not always as the past.
matt v. 17:04:52
Yup, I very much agree. Another 20-30 years of cooling from this phase of the PDO will produce crop failures and starvation among the poorest of this earth. If the sun is getting into the act with a new Grand Minimum, the cooling will be holocaustic. We far more likely face a climate catastrophe from not adapting to the cooling that is happening than from not mitigating a global warming that isn’t happening.
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This evening, while distracted by food, I thought I heard Brian Williams and a woman on NBC say that the cool and unusual weather of the last few months was due to EL Nino, which NOAA predicted would continue to 2010.
Did anyone else watch that? Did I hear that correctly?