Hovmollering the SST: T-shirt tie-dye design or climate science?

Bob Tisdale: “The Southern Ocean feeds the equatorial Pacific through the Humboldt Current”
Bob Tisdale, but does it exist the Humboldt Current? There is no Antarctic surface cold water that is pushed someway up to the Equator.
What feeds the equatorial Pacific are the subtropical highs. At least they have a main role. And those highs are feeded by the equatorial Pacific.
Then, if Pinatubo had an influence in the start of the 97/98 Enso warm phase, the other two older El Nino (72/73 and 82/83) had no volcanic connection.

RobJM: You wrote, “Hey bob, I think I may have worked out the cause of the cloud decrease! If you look at the lower stratosphere temps and humidity (300hpa) you clearly see that post volcanic eruption, the stratosphere does not return to normal but instead undergoes a classic boom and bust cycle.”
Do you have a link?

Bob Tisdale:
“Apparently you didn’t go to the posts linked to Notes 5 and 6. If you had, you would not have posted your comment. Those posts illustrate and discuss the processes of heat distribution within the Pacific and the troposphere.”
I’ve looked at the links. For your thesis [that SST increases since the 1970s are caused by El Nino events pushing water from deep in the Pacific warm pool to higher latitudes] to be correct, wouldn’t you expect a relaxation in that process to occur? That is, once the anomalous movement of warm water has dissipated, we’d expect the SST to return to their previous levels. Or are you claiming the ocean circulation has entered a new state where more warm water is effectively continuously cycled to the surface?

Bob Tisdale and Nogw,
your idea of how the atmospheric (and oceanic) circulation works is wrong.
No Humboldt current carries cold surface water from the Antarctic to the Galapagos.
The subtropical high pressure winds allow, per the Coriolis Force, the deep cold water to upwell to the surface.
That water was polar in origin but long ago! Very long ago!
Come on, do you think that Antarctic water can travel at the surface of the ocean to the Equator without rising its temperature?

E.M.Smith (10:09:29) :
I stumbled on this little gem:
http://www.applet-magic.com/temptrendNH.htm

That page is a “Favorites” must. It trashes all climate change theories!
That’s what I joked about time ago, when saying “nano-temperatures” differences, impossible to be felt by any human being apart from new-age meteorologists or “stoned” scientists. 🙂

E.M. Smith: You wrote, “I’ve yet to find any kind of chart showing total volcanic activity as a function of time, or even a table of raw data from which to make it. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right places?”
The Sato Index Data is available from GISS at:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/
Specifically:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/tau_line.txt
The Lamb Dust Veil Index goes back further in time:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/04/mann-et-al-weighted-dust-veil-index.html
For further information:
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_CDIAC_NDP13.html
For Lamb Dust Veil Index Data:
ftp://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pub/ndp013/

Well when the land record is questioned, they come up with the ocean record… and Dr. Curry contributes to the fray: “patterns never seen for 50 years… -meaning 50 years ago we had the same pattern… but much less CO2-
“In hot water: World sets ocean temperature record
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein, Ap Science Writer – 42 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Steve Kramer spent an hour and a half swimming in the ocean Sunday — in Maine. The water temperature was 72 degrees — more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City’s water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.
Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he’s ever swam so long in Maine’s coastal waters. “Usually, you’re in five minutes and you’re out,” he said.
It’s not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world’s oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.
The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. That was 1.1 degree higher than the 20th century average, and beat the previous high set in 1998 by a couple hundredths of a degree. The coolest recorded ocean temperature was 59.3 degrees in December 1909.
Meteorologists said there’s a combination of forces at work this year: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.
The Gulf of Mexico, where warm water fuels hurricanes, has temperatures dancing around 90. Most of the water in the Northern Hemisphere has been considerably warmer than normal. The Mediterranean is about three degrees warmer than normal. Higher temperatures rule in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The heat is most noticeable near the Arctic, where water temperatures are as much as 10 degrees above average. The tongues of warm water could help melt sea ice from below and even cause thawing of ice sheets on Greenland, said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Earth Science and Observation Center at the University of Colorado.
Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.
“This warm water we’re seeing doesn’t just disappear next year; it’ll be around for a long time,” said climate scientist Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. It takes five times more energy to warm water than land.
The warmer water “affects weather on the land,” Weaver said. “This is another yet really important indicator of the change that’s occurring.”
Georgia Institute of Technology atmospheric science professor Judith Curry said water is warming in more places than usual, something that has not been seen in more than 50 years.
Add to that an unusual weather pattern this summer where the warmest temperatures seem to be just over oceans, while slightly cooler air is concentrated over land, said Deke Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the climate data center.
The pattern is so unusual that he suggested meteorologists may want to study that pattern to see what’s behind it.
The effects of that warm water are already being seen in coral reefs, said C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coral reef watch. Long-term excessive heat bleaches colorful coral reefs white and sometimes kills them.
Bleaching has started to crop up in the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — much earlier than usual. Typically, bleaching occurs after weeks or months of prolonged high water temperatures. That usually means September or October in the Caribbean, said Eakin. He found bleaching in Guam Wednesday. It’s too early to know if the coral will recover or die. Experts are “bracing for another bad year,” he said.
The problems caused by the El Nino pattern are likely to get worse, the scientists say.
An El Nino occurs when part of the central Pacific warms up, which in turn changes weather patterns worldwide for many months. El Nino and its cooling flip side, La Nina, happen every few years.
During an El Nino, temperatures on water and land tend to rise in many places, leading to an increase in the overall global average temperature. An El Nino has other effects, too, including dampening Atlantic hurricane formation and increasing rainfall and mudslides in Southern California.
Warm water is a required fuel for hurricanes. What’s happening in the oceans “will add extra juice to the hurricanes,” Curry said.
Hurricane activity has been quiet for much of the summer, but that may change soon, she said. Hurricane Bill quickly became a major storm and the National Hurricane Center warned that warm waters are along the path of the hurricane for the next few days.
Hurricanes need specific air conditions, so warmer water alone does not necessarily mean more or bigger storms, said James Franklin, chief hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.”
And yet NSIDC acknowledges it is unlikely we’ll see record mealt in the arctic…

Paolo M: You wrote, “The subtropical high pressure winds allow, per the Coriolis Force, the deep cold water to upwell to the surface.”
Coastal upwelling occurs along the coast, as its name implies. The Humboldt Current extends far out from the coast.
You wrote, “Come on, do you think that Antarctic water can travel at the surface of the ocean to the Equator without rising its temperature?”
Of course it rises in temperature, but SST anomalies were discussed on this post, not SST. The SST anomalies of the waters exiting the Humboldt Current are dependent on many variables. These include the SST anomalies of the waters entering it, ENSO, coastal upwelling, and to reduce the number of items on this list, I’ll combine everything else into “weather noise.” If any one of those variable changes, the SST anomalies of the waters exiting the Humboldt Current will change. The waters entering the Humboldt Current are fed in part from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). If the ACC SST anomalies rise (or fall) over multiyear and decadal periods, the SST anomalies of the waters entering the Humboldt Current rise (or fall), and, in turn, the SST anomalies of the waters exiting the Humboldt Current will rise (or fall).

Re: Bob Tisdale (16:48:50)
Perhaps the most efficient approach will be via:
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl
(which facilitates series-customization by variable, latitude-band, longitude-band, & surface)
It is quite irritating, though, that for whatever reason NOAA uses this seemingly-arbitrary (& unadjustable) lower-time-bound of 1948.