From the “WUWT never reports on anything warm department”, JPL reports El Niño looks like it is on schedule to make a Christmas appearance as “The Boy”. The good news is that it will likely help California’s water situation this year.
From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
El Niño is experiencing a late-fall resurgence. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during October has triggered a strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave. In the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, this warm wave appears as the large area of higher-than-normal sea surface heights (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures) between 170 degrees east and 100 degrees west longitude. A series of similar, weaker events that began in June 2009 initially triggered and has sustained the present El Niño condition.
This image was created with data collected by the U.S./French satellite during a 10-day period centered on November 1, 2009. It shows a red and white area in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that is about 10 to 18 centimeters (4 to 7 inches) above normal. These regions contrast with the western equatorial Pacific, where lower-than-normal sea levels (blue and purple areas) are between 8 to 15 centimeters (3 and 6 inches) below normal. Along the equator, the red and white colors depict areas where sea surface temperatures are more than one to two degrees Celsius above normal (two to four degrees Fahrenheit).
“In the American west, where we are struggling under serious drought conditions, this late-fall charge by El Niño is a pleasant surprise, upping the odds for much-needed rain and an above-normal winter snowpack,” said JPL oceanographer Bill Patzert.
For more information on NASA’s ocean surface topography missions, see http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/ ; or to view the latest Jason data, see http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/science/jason1-quick-look/.
Hopefully I’ll get a chance to turn this into a post tomorrow.
ECMWF has the equatorial subsurface temperature anomaly cross-sections archived here:
http://www.ecmwf.int/products/forecasts/d/charts/ocean/reanalysis/xzmaps/Monthly/
They go back in time quite a ways, but the monthly illustrations lag a few months. They do have the daily “real time” views also, which means, for comparisons to older “super” El Nino events you’d need to compare a recently daily view to the historic monthly views. Here’s the real time link:
http://www.ecmwf.int/products/forecasts/d/charts/ocean/real_time/xzmaps/
To put the recent subsurface anomalies into perspective, here’s the daily view for Nov 13:
http://i35.tinypic.com/vzwmfm.gif
And here’s November 1997 (El Nino of the Century). The current anomalies are nowhere close to it:
http://i35.tinypic.com/2zh4cqw.gif
November 1982. (The 1982/83 El Nino peaked at around the same SST anomaly as the 1997/98) The current one is still short of that one:
http://i35.tinypic.com/2zs1w03.gif
Third on the list of El Nino events was the 1972/73 El Nino and the current subsurface anomalies fall short of its Nov 1972 values:
http://i38.tinypic.com/14ec7wl.gif
Next for your viewing pleasure is Nov 1986 (part way into the 1986/87/88 El Nino). The current values appear a little stronger than it:
http://i38.tinypic.com/24ch5ds.gif
So if (BIG IF) the subsurface anomalies could be used a predictor of the SST anomalies, the current El Nino would peak somewhere between the 1986/87/88 El Nino and the 1992/93 El Nino.
Tonyb, yes the lack of fog MUST have had an impact on temperatures since the late 1970s. The last pea-souper I can remember in my area was the winter of 1978/9. Me and some mates drove 40 miles to a party (we were teens) in fog so thick we nearly drove into the back of a parked lorry. The Mini we were in never had any heater either. Oh teen days – how did we ever get through them alive? 30 years without fog!
Barry Foster (08:44:00) : “Pamela. Thanks, but we don’t get foggy any more. I know it crops up on films (movies) about England, but fact is foggy days pretty much died out here coincidentally in the late 1970s early 1980s. We get the odd day here and there, but NOTHING like the peas-soupers we used to get in the 60s and 70s.”
The foggiest area in London (or the entire UK, for that matter) is found nowadays betwixt St. Margaret St. and the Thames, not far from Westminster Abbey.
Here in north central California, no sign yet of relief from the drought. Cold and clear today, again. Feels more like a La Nina. Would love to see an El Nino, even though it limits backpacking season. In 97/98 El Nino, had permits to climb Mt. Whitney, in mid July, but couldn’t due to enormous snow depth. Even a moderate El Nino would be a relief, providing the Feds don’t flush the additional water out the delta and thru the Golden Gate, as they did this year……fm
Stop the presses everyone, this startling admission from Al Gore himself as of today
http://www.iceagenow.com/Gore_admits_CO2_does_not_cause_majority_of_global_warming.htm
Cap & Trade may be starting its way to the dustbin of history.
According to the same site the snowstorms in China has caused half a billion dollars in damage and caused 7000 buildings to collapse, it’s a good thing we’re not getting something like that here anytime soon in Kansas.
I hope it brings some good snow to my Utah ski resorts. November so far has been really dry. I’m interested in seeing how the Global Temps will react to the strengthening of the El Nino.
Can someone please get to the bottom line here?
I live in Southern Wisconsin.
Am I going to be able to make my backyard skating rink this year?
Hey, I bet those politicians in the Maldives are glad it isn’t heading their way. It would almost bring the sea level back to where it used to be before all this pesky Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas did its stuff!
To see a collection of ENSO forecast go here:
http://iri.columbia.edu/climate/ENSO/currentinfo/SST_table.html
Hey Oregon! Looks like we are getting buckets of El Nino in every which way: fog, rain, hail, and snow. Here in the high desert plain of NE Oregon, Pendleton is drowning in rain! Elgin will soon be covered in carport crushing snow again. That one year, you would have sworn there was no town there, just snow drifts.
Of course, here in California’s San Joaquin Valley, more rain in the winter will mean more tuley fog. Yes Brits – We are the ones who have to live with the fog. On the one hand I like it. You feel this cosey isolation all about you. I used to have fun going out in a field on a foggy night and just get lost in thought. The bad part about the tuley fog… is the traffic accidents. Three or four times a year, during the foggy season, we have freeway pile-ups of sixty to one hundred cars and semi-trucks. It gets brutal.
It looks like a CP-El Nino.
“…Using calculations based on historical El Niño indices, we find that projections of anthropogenic climate change are associated with an increased frequency of the CP-El Niño compared to the EP-El Niño. When restricted to the six climate models with the best representation of the twentieth-century ratio of CP-El Niño to EP-El Niño, the occurrence ratio of CP-El Niño/EP-El Niño is projected to increase as much as five times under global warming. The change is related to a flattening of the thermocline in the equatorial Pacific.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/nature08316.html
It’s 8 degrees F in Enterprise, Oregon right now and a very wet band of moisture is hung up in the Blue Mountains and is about to slide down the Eastern side of the Blues.
Bob Tisdale (09:36:39) :
“Hopefully I’ll get a chance to turn this into a post tomorrow.”
Yes, it will be good to have all the plots under one link.
Thanks, Pamela,I have to drive to Elgin every other day or so from LaGrande,
-that is why Warmists will pull my F-150 4×4 out of my cold,dead, fingers.:-)
Bob Tisdale (09:36:39) :
Hopefully I’ll get a chance to turn this into a post tomorrow.
Any chance of turning the ECMWF cross-sections into an animation? The current cross-section don’t look quite so big after looking at some of the older ones.
” Barry Foster (08:44:00) :
Pamela. Thanks, but we don’t get foggy any more. I know it crops up on films (movies) about England, but fact is foggy days pretty much died out here coincidentally in the late 1970s early 1980s.”
You should try around New Ross In Wexford ,Ireland. Beautiful fog and magic photos.
The Department of Transportation has also increased the height of the road markers in the passes this year (they completely disappeared in the snow banks last year), while increasing chain requirements to all vehicles towing through the Blue Mountain passes, regardless of weight. I wonder where they get their climate news from.
To JimB.
I recall delivering Guinness to a place in the mountains which was “cut-off” by 20′ drifts .That was back in 1962-3 way before Mann and Briffa so hype springs eternal?
Fred, is it just me or do the statistical models have a tighter ring around the observed ENSO? I have observed that one of the statistical models is usually dead on (though not the same one each time) while the dynamical models are off by no small amount.
That COLA CCSM3 is way out there in super El Nino land. It has been the consistent outlier. I wonder if the OLR computations in this dynamical global model are based on the idea that CO2 will decrease OLR’s thus increase SST (how I don’t know), decrease wind, and set us up for super El Nino’s.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ost/climate/STIP/CTB-COLA/Ben_101007.pdf
Your welcome. And that should lar’n ya to remember to offer sacrifices to Gore’s chosen one (after all, I did vote for the idiot) (s).
This means that it will once again be cold enough in Wallowa County to freeze underground sewer lines. Now THAT is DAMNED COLD! This fall I had the local contractor pile a bunch of dirt over my lines for added protection. I think I will add some straw the next time I am at the ranch.
hmm.. to this untrained eye it looks like PDO is cooling again:
October 26
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2009/anomnight.10.26.2009.gif
Compared to November 12
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2009/anomnight.11.12.2009.gif
Allright Pam, you can have your drying out time, if you promise not to complain if California gets an 82/83 super snow El Nino… and proceeds to totally sqaunder it.
It won’t matter if it’s rain or snow here, they still don’t know what they want, and they don’t appreciate what they get. Biggest bunch of ingrates on the planet govern from Sacrameno, the home of the Grinch.