Animations of Weekly SST Anomaly Maps from January 3, 1996 to July 1, 2009
Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The following four animations of Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies were created using the mapping feature (Full Version) of the NOAA NOMADS system for the weekly OI.v2 SST data:
The “Contour interval for var1” was set at 0.2 deg C to bring out the lower-intensity temperature anomalies. “white” was set at “0” so that blues represented negative anomalies and reds represented positive anomalies. All four videos last for approximately 2 1/2 minutes.
Please click on the videos to watch them in a larger size at YouTube. There they can be expanded to full screen and set to high definition.
ATLANTIC OCEAN
The North Atlantic has the highest SST anomaly linear trend of all of the ocean subsets. Refer to my post Putting The Short-Term Trend Of North Atlantic SST Anomalies Into Perspective. And of the three major ocean subsets, the Atlantic Ocean has the highest OHC linear trend. This is illustrated in my post Levitus et al (2009) Ocean Heat Content – Comparison of The Ocean Basin Data. Does the Atlantic SST Anomaly Animation help show the reasons?
In addition to the surges of heat in the North and South Atlantic during El Nino events, there are a number of paths that warm SST anomalies enter the South Atlantic during ENSO neutral and La Nina periods. Occasionally, the Benguela Current carries these warm water anomalies north along the Southwest Coast of Africa, where they are then carried west by the Atlantic Equatorial Currents. The warm anomalies either return to the South Atlantic, following the currents of the South Atlantic gyre, or they enter the North Atlantic. Once in the North Atlantic, they travel north, and appear to do that quickly. These additions of elevated SST anomalies during La Nina and ENSO-neutral periods also help explain why There Are Also El Nino-Induced Step Changes In The North Atlantic.
Atlantic Ocean SST Anomaly Animation 1996 to 2009
INDIAN OCEAN
The Indian Ocean animation shows very “noisy” SST anomalies, without any obvious reoccurring pattern. I was hoping to illustrate evidence of the Indian Ocean Dipole. In a future post, I’ll try to do so.
Indian Ocean SST Anomaly Animation 1996 to 2009
PACIFIC OCEAN
ENSO events stand out in the Pacific Ocean SST anomaly animation. It is possible to differentiate between traditional El Nino events like the 1997/98 El Nino (initially forms in the eastern equatorial Pacific) and the El Nino Modoki events of 2002/03 and 2004/05 (initially form in the central equatorial Pacific). Occasionally, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) pattern in the North Pacific (north of 20N) makes its presence known, as does the basin-wide pattern of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO).
In a future post, I’ll discuss a sequence of events that appears to occur during traditional El Nino events. Note how, before the formation of the 1997/98 El Nino, the Humboldt Current carries warm Southern Hemisphere SST anomalies up along the west coast of South America to the eastern equatorial Pacific. Yet RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots (refer to RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots…) clearly show that the majority of the heat from the 1997/98 El Nino was transported to the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Does this mean that El Nino events transport heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere?
Pacific Ocean SST Anomaly Animation 1996 to 2009
GLOBAL
In addition to the processes that appear in the videos of the three major oceans and the interactions between them, the Global SST anomaly animation also shows the seasonal shifts in the SST anomalies within the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There also appears to be a shift between them, where the higher SST anomalies appear during the summer months for each hemisphere.
Note also that the Indian Ocean anomalies no longer seem so noisy.
Global SST Anomaly Animation 1996 to 2009
Anna,
For me the fascinating portion of the animation was the North Atlantic. Like Bob said, the warm anomalies there are a nice illustration of how warmer tropical waters are transported poleward. I do agree that it is not so evident in other areas, and I believe much of the heat transport is mixed within the interplay between the oceans and the atmosphere above it. Willis did present idea of this sort when he presented his paper concerning the ITCZ being a thermostat for global climate. Heat transport during El Nino episodes is carried out as much by the atmosphere is it is by the oceans.
Another very cool part of the illustration was the 1997-2000 ENSO event. Granted we won’t probably won’t see such a dramatic El Nino/La Nina cycle anytime so soon, the animation certainly highlights how ENSO cycles. This animation is about as a great use of You Tube -an excellent teaching aid.
Very nice work Bob.
An Inquirer: You wrote, “I understand the usefulness of animnation, but I would like to see a few graphs of the trend in each of the three oceans.”
Here ya go. They’re broken down into Northern and Southern Hemisphere subsets for the Atlantic and Pacific, along with the trends for the Indian, Arctic and Southern Oceans:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/putting-short-term-trend-of-north.html
tallbloke (04:22:29)
Just a suggestion but I think it would be helpful if you do as I now do which is to refer to the air rather than the atmosphere and then look at the oceans as the overwhelming driver of the air both in terms of temperature and the size and position of the air circulation systems.
The reason I say that is that in an article some time ago I found it helpful to refer to both oceans and air combined as the Earth’s ‘atmosphere’ for the specific purpose of slowing down the transmission of solar energy through the Earth system and converting it from shortwave to longwave thereby generating heat energy and setting the overall global equilibrium temperature.
After all, the oceans and the water vapour in the air are both the same substance in different forms and of course the oceans being so large and so dense their proportion of the process of slowing down solar energy transmission vastly overwhelms the contribution of the air (or any variation in the composition of the air) in setting that global equilibrium temperature.
Tyndall et al treated with the air in isolation and so far as that goes their findings are correct. The trouble is that when one considers the climate system as a whole it turns out that changes in the composition of the air do not after all have significant climate implications because of the overwhelming power of the oceans in setting the global equilibrium temperature in the first place and the power of the hydrological cycle in always moving the average global air temperature back towards an ever varying average global sea surface temperature
Every piece of data that I see fits with the ocean surfaces constantly varying the rate of emission of previously stored solar energy to the air and the climate system in the air constantly shifting in response to the oceanic changes in order to both ensure sea surface/surface air equilibrium and at the same time prevent a significant divergence between solar shortwave entering the oceans and longwave leaving the air to space.
The mechanism is the latitudinal positioning of all the air circulation systems combined. That controls the speed of the hydrological cycle and thus the rate of energy transfer from surface to space. As soon as more GHGs try to warm the air they cannot do so because of the control of air temperatures exercised by sea surface temperatures so instead the hydrological cycle speeds up and the excess energy is ejected to space.
I see that as the overarching scenario which accommodates all the new ideas expressed here and elsewhere by knowledgeable sceptics.
Bob, you say: “As shown in the animations, those SST anomalies travel. Surface water that’s warmer or cooler than “normal” is carried from one location to another, and those anomalies move from high latitudes to the tropics and from the tropics to high latitudes. If not “heat transport”, how else would you choose to describe it?”
I’m not sure this description is precisely right. Because you’re dealing with anomalies and the fact that heat is not trapped in a water mass but can radiate into space, there’s an appearance of heat transport that may be greater than it actually is. Notice in the North Atlantic sequence the Gulf Stream doesn’t flow with waves of heat transport from SW to NE, but instead the whole basin seems to throb like a heartbeat. Obviously, there is transport, but I think our brains may be supplying an explanation to the patterns we see in these sequences that’s not completely the case.
Nice work, though. I wonder if a weekly time interval might be more revealing.
Bob Tisdale (04:33:57) :
If not “heat transport”, how else would you choose to describe it?
A function of heat transport? A spatial convolution of heat transport? Like seeing through a distorting lens by T**4 ( hand waving, it sure is not black body).
It is not even a simple projection.
It is logically disorienting to see red in Greenland when the real water temperature is -2C. There is a bit of extra heat but it does not tell us how much, with respet to the tropics, because the correspondence is not linear.
Possibly one could calculate a heat anomaly out of this, if one could approximate the temperature to heat function. That would have straight forward meaning because it would reflect the energy transports involved.
Gary: You wrote, “I’m not sure this description is precisely right. Because you’re dealing with anomalies and the fact that heat is not trapped in a water mass but can radiate into space, there’s an appearance of heat transport that may be greater than it actually is. Notice in the North Atlantic sequence the Gulf Stream doesn’t flow with waves of heat transport from SW to NE, but instead the whole basin seems to throb like a heartbeat. Obviously, there is transport, but I think our brains may be supplying an explanation to the patterns we see in these sequences that’s not completely the case.”
With the “sensitivity” of the contour levels I used, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re seeing a number of coupled ocean-atmosphere processes taking place in addition to ocean currents, etc. That was my hope with those settings. Unfortunately, this eliminated the upper end anomalies, like those in the North Atlantic and the peaks of the ENSO event anomalies in the equatorial Pacific. In fact, in the post when I mentioned heat transport or warm anomalies being carried by currents, I was very specific in the locations: the Humboldt and Benguela Currents. I did mention the North Atlantic, but very briefly. Apparently I led people to watch the North Atlantic when the preliminary action, what I was trying to note, took place in the South Atlantic (and in the South Pacific in the other example).
And yes, one’s want to see a process may lead one to believe that’s what they’re seeing.
Thank you Bob Tisdale, both for the fantastic animations and for the thorough response to my question. One of the reasons I find this site so compelling is that someone like me (an archaeologist), who doesn’t know much about hard core climatology (but I’m learning fast), can ask a simple if naive question and get a useful, informative answer.
😀
Lindsay H: You wrote, “I hope that schools pick up on it, it shows how dynamic the planet is but also shows the stochastic nature of the variability. ”
Thanks. Hopefully they will. One high school science teacher had my video “The Lingering Effects of the 1997/98 El Nino” in his schedule last school year.
Also note how the lingering effects in the East Indian and West Pacific Oceans that were discussed in that video show up quite clearly in their respective videos above. The heat that’s redistributed by an El Nino can hang around for a number of years in the atmosphere and in the oceans.
anna v: In my first response to you, I discussed thermohaline circulation, but you disagreed with my use of heat transport there. But inputting “thermohaline circulation” and “heat transport” into Google Scholar, it comes back with 3,550 hits. The first has the title “An Overlooked Problem in Model Simulations of the Thermohaline Circulation and Heat Transport in the Atlantic Ocean.” Scrolling down the page to the eighth hit provides this quote, “the thermohaline circulation of the ocean (‘THC’) organises the global heat transport (Gordon, 1986).” So my use of heat transport in my earlier comment appears to be commonplace.
Let’s look at how I used heat transport in this post. My first use of the word transport was in the discussion of the Pacific and the effects of El Ninos. I wrote, “Yet RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots (refer to RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots…) clearly show that the majority of the heat from the 1997/98 El Nino was transported to the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.” In case that link doesn’t make it through with the cut and paste, here it is again:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html
So my first use of the term had nothing to do with SST or SST anomalies, which were the bulk of your first comment.
Now let’s look at the common usage of “heat transport” with respect to El Nino events. David Enfield of NOAA in his El Nino FAQ webpage…
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/enso_faq/
…writes, “What happens during an El Niño ‘avalanche’ is that a lot of excess heat gets transported poleward, most frequently through winter storms.”
And that heat would be reflected in an increase in TLT anomalies in mid-to-high latitudes. Again, my use of the term is not outside common practice.
My second use of the word was in the following sentence, “Does this mean that El Nino events transport heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere?”
I fail to see where your discussions of the Southern Ocean and Greenland come into play with that sentence. But maybe transfer would have been more appropriate there.
Bob Tisdale (12:13:08) :
I do not want to confuse the issue. Yes, there is heat transport, and yes, this will show in the temperature anomalies.
What I am saying is that unless the anomalies are turned into Joules per m**3, or even watts/m**2 since we are talking of surface, the eye is fooled about magnitudes in these plots. A red color in the tropics is not in heat content the same as a red color in the arctic/antarctic since the relation of temperature to heat is not linear.
Stephen Wilde (06:16:38) :
As soon as more GHGs try to warm the air they cannot do so because of the control of air temperatures exercised by sea surface temperatures so instead the hydrological cycle speeds up and the excess energy is ejected to space.
I see that as the overarching scenario which accommodates all the new ideas expressed here and elsewhere by knowledgeable sceptics.
Stephen, thanks for the clear post and I agree with the closing segment quoted. Your theory implies any longer term change in global temperature must be due to external forcing. I add that this must imply a terrestrial amplification or ‘positive feedback within limits’. I have been pondering what the balance point is where the oceans emit as much as they absorb, and I think this may be somewhere around an average monthly sunspot count of 42. Perhaps Douglas Adams was right all along.
I am now trying to work out how fast the ocean will dissipate heat at 1and 10 sunspots a month and they rate of oscillation at which it will do it. The currently forming modoki el nino is a kind of proving ground for my ideas. I anticipate a 0.25 – 0.3C uplift in air temp over the next 4 months followed by a slide to an anomaly of -0.3 or a bit lower by next May. This is on the assumption the sun doesn’t burst into high activity, but slowly gains a few more spots/month over the next year. Also assuming a large volcanic eruption doesn’t occur.
tallbloke (12:46:20)
I’d be tickled pink if it came out at 42.
However I’m not sure that the sunspot count is necessarily an adequate proxy for the combined effect of all solar influences on the highly variable rate of energy transfer through the Earth systems of ocean and air (land being pretty much irrelevant because it’s energy storage capability is fixed and negligible).
Agreed that the various ocean oscillations are going to teach us a lot whilst the sun is quiet but for the net effect on the current global temperature trend the net latitudinal position of the air circulation systems is a useful guide if anyone could work it out.
Anyway between you, me, Bob and Willis we are close to a workable new theory of climate here.
The external driver is certainly solar but the Earthly effect from the oceans can be either positive or negative at different times. That explains the size of variation from what would otherwise be expected from solar alone.
If the oceans can amplify by,say, 5 times they can also suppress by 5 times giving a total range of 10 times. That deals quite adequately with the apparent disjunction between the scale of solar variability and the scale of observed climate responses.
I would love for somebody to go back and grab at least the SCAMS data and take this stuff back to the mid 70s. The NEMS data is a bit more iffy. I wonder if the tapes exist anyplace
Shr_Nfr: I do plan to run these maps back as far as the early 1980s or whenever NOMADS stops spitting out maps. I only went back as far as1996 this time because I was interested in watching the responses to the 1997/98 El Nino and all of the aftereffects. I also got tired of downlaoding maps. Next stop will be the 1986/87/88 El Nino.
Bob Tisdale (04:33:57),
“As shown in the animations, those SST anomalies travel. Surface water that’s warmer or cooler than “normal” is carried from one location to another, and those anomalies move from high latitudes to the tropics and from the tropics to high latitudes. If not “heat transport”, how else would you choose to describe it?”
Congratulation’s on the good work put into this,I know that it is an ongoing project.
To clarify the above quote ,would it be helpful to overlay SS current flow?
Keith Minto: You wrote, “To clarify the above quote ,would it be helpful to overlay SS current flow?”
How about a current map instead?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Ocean_currents_1943_(borderless)3.png
It’s large, but detailed.
Stephen Wilde (14:04:24) :
Agreed that the various ocean oscillations are going to teach us a lot whilst the sun is quiet but for the net effect on the current global temperature trend the net latitudinal position of the air circulation systems is a useful guide if anyone could work it out.
Anyway between you, me, Bob and Willis we are close to a workable new theory of climate here.
If the oceans can amplify by,say, 5 times they can also suppress by 5 times giving a total range of 10 times. That deals quite adequately with the apparent disjunction between the scale of solar variability and the scale of observed climate responses.
The energy differentials between the shifting locations of the boundaries of the Hadley cells must be vast, and I agree with your analysis that they could act as a strong governing mechanism on climate. I also think they may be cyclically affected by the lunar declination cycle, which is linked to the drought cycle. To further complicate the issue, Anthony did a study which found an ~18 year cycle in solar data.
I feel I’m still very undereducated and though I think I have some valid calculations which change the landscape, I don’t know how much that might help with a new theory of climate. I am hopeful though, and with the solid work done by Bob, and the excellent inductive hypotheses formed by you and Willis, we’ll get there. Meantime I’ll keep lobbing wild speculations into the mix to see what it jogs. :o)
I believe Nir Shaviv found an order of magnitude forcing in the solar cycle length responses of the ocean. He thinks clouds are the best candidate. If we are going to get clouds to help with our multidecadal problem, we will need to get down and dirty with the ISCCP data. Bob has showed us the way with his excellent analyses of climate critical areas such as Nino 3.4. We need to look at cloud there and in other critical locales and the concomitant XBT and ARGO data to try to work out how much long term cloud cover change affects insolation to important oceanic areas., because global cloud cover indices and even tropical indices don’t vary enough to do the job. Your latitudinal shifts are going to plug into that too.
I think Bob’s animations should help identify those critical areas.
Buckminster Fuller proposed building a huge ‘buckyball’ covered in monitors which could display the earth and overlays of any data required moving at any timescale desired.
I could really do with one of those right now. :o)
Does anyone know of a climate model which will run on a standalone PC?
Bob Tisdale, what great research you provide for us WUWT readers. I hope you and others — Jeff Id for one — can take Anna Vs advice to heart.
anna v (12:44:04) :
“What I am saying is that unless the anomalies are turned into Joules per m**3, or even watts/m**2 since we are talking of surface, the eye is fooled about magnitudes in these plots. A red color in the tropics is not in heat content the same as a red color in the arctic/antarctic since the relation of temperature to heat is not linear.”
Since I am not a scientist, I have trouble articulating many of these issues. However, the colors of the anomaly maps are jarring. They play right into the fiendish minds of AGWers. We see red all over the place when the temp anomaly is a little above 0C. Not right. Not helpful. Can’t a group of researchers get together and develop a different color convention for anomalies. They are not the same thing as SSTs. Please.
I like Willis’s heat-pump idea. Any ‘from Sun’ daily photos showing earlier Cbs during the ’98 El Nino as the ITCZ strips the heat from the ocean and posts it Polewards, would be helpful?
Is there a trade wind index that might give us an idea of evaporation?
Presumably for every rate of insolation of surface water there is a wind that evaporatively cools it . So no matter how hot the Sun is at the water surface there can be a wind that strips the heat (as vapour) before it warms the tropical seas.
No model I’ve heard of suggests that heat in the tropics doesn’t necessarily reach the ocean.
Sandy, the surface evap is mostly from the back radiation from the atmosphere. The sunlight penetrates deeply into the ocean and gets converted to heat.
pyromancer76: You wrote, “However, the colors of the anomaly maps are jarring. They play right into the fiendish minds of AGWers. We see red all over the place when the temp anomaly is a little above 0C. Not right. Not helpful. ”
Relax. Give me a couple of weeks. These are just preliminary videos. Those OI.v2-based SST anomaly maps run back to 1982. As soon as I’ve downloaded a group, I’ll crank out videos that compare the animations to comparison graphs of NINO3.4 SST anomalies and the SST anomalies for the given area: North Atlantic, etc. I’ll start with the Atlantic and show that all the red in the North Atlantic is caused by step changes resulting from the 1986/87/88 and the 1997/98 El Ninos. Then you can upset the fiendish minds of the AGWers.
In the mean time, there here a couple of posts that use graphs to illustrate what I’m talking about:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/02/there-are-also-el-nino-induced-step.html
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/12/lingering-effects-of-199798-el-nino.html
Hopefully, with the videos, those graphs will be more effective.
Regards
Sandy: You asked, “Is there a trade wind index that might give us an idea of evaporation?”
Equatorial Pacific wind data is here:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/data/indices/