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/.
If you look at the Jet Stream, you have a recipe for Nor’Easters. The rotating pressure cell in the Pacific is keeping what looks like a La Nina track but instead shoves the Jet Stream at the last minute into its El Nino track. Very interesting stuff.
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_norhem_00.gif
Bob Tisdale (13:30:12) : Bill Illis: You asked, “Any chance of turning the ECMWF cross-sections into an animation?”
For this post, I’ll do .gif animation comparisons of those illustrations…
Seems to be a similar “Kelvin wave?” (is that the warm surface water flowing to the east along the equator?) in the Atlantic. The warm water is already along the eastern equatorial Atlantic and possibly deflected mainly northwards along the African coast and the Spanish peninsular.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/satellite/index.uk.php
Which leads me to ask – are there similar “el ninos” in the Atlantic, which seems reasonable. And how do they differ from the Pacific ones? Possible occurring earlier in the season than christmas time?
Wondering why the El Nino got off to an early start in June-July of this year?
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2009/11/here-is-fingerprint-of-instigator-of.html
Philip_B: You wrote, “Are sea level height and SSTs highly correlated or not?”
The SSH anomalies in the illustration at the beginning of this post would primarily reflect the temperature anomalies of the water column, not only SST. The Kelvin wave in the SSH anomaly illustration agrees with the subsurface temperature anomalies more than it does the SST anomalies.
As the thermocline flattens, warm water from the Pacific Warm Pool is sloshing east toward Peru. The cloud cover and precipitation follows the warm water east, upsetting “normal” atmospheric circulation patterns, wind stress and cloud cover in the Pacific and globally. Part of the rise in global temperature is caused by the release of heat from the tropical Pacific to the atmosphere. This can be seen in the drop in tropical Pacific OHC during an El nino. Part of the rise in global temperature is caused by the changes in atmosperic circulation. But I’ve never seen the proportions isolated and quantified. It probably varies per type of El Nino, traditional versus El Nino Modoki, and a multitude of other factors.
Ninderthana, how do you correlate trade wind causes with the lunar connection? The only way El Nino can occur is if the East to West trade winds die down, thus allowing Kelvin waves to propagate from West to East and for the Sun to beat a constant drum into the much calmer equatorial sea surface.
Richard (18:11:51) :
Which leads me to ask – are there similar “el ninos” in the Atlantic, which seems reasonable. And how do they differ from the Pacific ones? Possible occurring earlier in the season than christmas time?
The same kind of thing happens in the Atlantic as well. It doesn’t seem to get as extreme as in the Pacific and the impacts are not as great.
But there are some impacts. This year has been an Atlantic-type La Nina which probably contributed to the low Atlantic hurricane season. SSTs in the hurricane forming regions didn’t go as high as they have been in the past several years.
One can see this in this animation.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anom_anim.html
Does anybody know if the chinese government seeded the clouds that caused the bad snow storms?
This will be welcome at this time of year. Let us see if it can survive into the summer months. Given the narrowness of the band, it will be a test.
And on the other coast –
http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-science/20091112/US.Fish.on.the.Move/
Sigh….
“NASA finds water in moon crater”
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091113/moon_091113/20091113?hub=TopStoriesV2
Pamela Gray (17:02:08) :
Can you tell me why the Jet streams stop at the Pacific Northwest, and is that the normal way it works? Seems to me that an El Nino will shift that Pineapple Express stream up north and slam it into Monterrey to Mendocino.
Quote Pamela:”Good heavens! I-84 is now closed in two places! And before Thanksgiving” -there’s been several nasty wrecks on I-84 due to weather lately.
Regarding the snow markers, I know personally the ODOT director of Maintenance for the area.Local boy, would love to give AlGore a little cab ride in a Rotary…
Bob Tisdale (13:37:44) :
Douglas DC (08:20:22) : “I agree,this is like a typical Cold PDO Nino.”
Please provide examples of other “typical Cold PDO NINO.”
Bob -what I meant was the Cold PDO Ninos seem to be less of an Warm influence
than a general weather producer for the PAC NW in particular.I will get more specific
as I can look some stats and document this position…Any thoughts would be appreciated too…
Bill Illis (18:58:28) :
Richard (18:11:51) : Which leads me to ask – are there similar “el ninos” in the Atlantic, which seems reasonable. And how do they differ from the Pacific ones? Possible occurring earlier in the season than christmas time?
The same kind of thing happens in the Atlantic as well. It doesn’t seem to get as extreme as in the Pacific and the impacts are not as great. ..One can see this in this animation. http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anom_anim.html
That animation shows hot water from the Indian Ocean piling up against south australia at the exact same time the heat wave started there.
On the 5th of November it was cold there and then suddenly the warm waters arrive and whamo – heat wave.
See here http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/temp_maps.cgi?variable=maxanom&area=nat&period=daily&time=history&steps=8
Toggle for later dates and there is an exact match
Aaron W. (19:13:45) : Does anybody know if the chinese government seeded the clouds that caused the bad snow storms?
Yep I know – saw it with me own eyes. Its known as anthropogenic localised cooling.
Well they claim that they caused the first snowfall on Nov2 though some remain sceptical of that claim. Since then there have been snowstorms all over Northern China and unless a little seed has gone a long way – you be the judge.
Thanks for the explanation Bob. Although I’m not sure I’m any the wiser.
The SSH anomalies in the illustration at the beginning of this post would primarily reflect the temperature anomalies of the water column, not only SST.
So it’s a thermal expansion effect.
Nomally the trade winds ‘push’ warm water westward toward the Pacific Warm Pool. During a conventional El Nino the Trades weaken and the warm water ‘slides’ back toward the east.
I’d always interpretted this as a physical transport of water. How else can heat be transferred over distance through the ocean?
Part of the rise in global temperature is caused by the release of heat from the tropical Pacific to the atmosphere.
I was more interested in how much OHC was the cause of El Ninos, as opposed atmospheric circulation (Trade Winds and Kelvin waves) being the cause.
If atmospheric circulation is the cause then El Ninos are irrelevant to global warming and in fact cause global cooling, even as they warm the atmosphere. This is because only the oceans can store significant heat.
An atmospheric cause would mean increased OHC isn’t the cause. However, decreased OHC is clearly the effect. Thus El Ninos deplete the climate’s oceanic heat store causing climate cooling.
Thanks again.
Pamela – try this paper as a starter
Earth rotation and ENSO events: combined excitation of interannual LOD variations by multiscale atmospheric oscillations
Global and Planetary Change
Volume 36, Issues 1-2, March 2003, Pages 89-97
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VF0-47C8SFR-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1092387948&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=94b255502e23cdaa8f653172bd7e7c32
The interannual changes in the Earth’s rotation rate, and hence in the length of day (LOD), are thought to be caused by the variation of the atmospheric angular momentum (AAM). However, there is still a considerable portion of the LOD variations that remain unexplained. Through analyzing the non-atmospheric LOD excitation contributed by the Western Pacific Warm Pool (WPWP) during the period of 1970-2000, the positive effects of the WPWP on the interannual LOD variation are found, although the scale of the warm pool is much smaller than that of the solid Earth. These effects are specifically intensified by the El Niño events, since more components of the LOD-AAM were accounted for by the warm pool excitation in the strong El Niño years. Changes in the Earth’s rotation rate has attracted significant attention, not only because it is an important geodetic issue but also because it has significant value as a global measure of variations within the hydrosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere and solid Earth, and hence the global changes.
Sorry wrote reference right abstract. Reference should read:
Pacific warm pool excitation, earth rotation and El Niño southern oscillations
Yan, Xiao-Hai; Zhou, Yonghong; Pan, Jiayi; Zheng, Dawei; Fang, Mingqiang; Liao, Xinhao; He, Ming-Xia; Liu, W. Timothy; Ding, Xiaoli
Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 29, Issue 21, pp. 27-1
Pamela
Here is another interesting link if you can speak a little German [I just look at the pictures].
http://www.erdrotation.de/ERIS/EN/ResearchUnit/Projects/Project10/project10__node.html
I’m hearing the expression “cold PDO El Nino” and it’s making a sense. Here in eastern NSW, previous El Nino’s have meant drought in the normally wet warm season (with maybe some unseasonal winter downpours). This year we’ve had masses of rain through the later spring after a horribly dry winter: not regular afternoon storms, but a couple of really big dumps. Hardly conclusive, I know, but interesting.
But one very important thing about the last three years is that regardless of Nino, Nina, winter or summer, the winds have been more from the ocean than the inland. There have been westerlies, but nothing like those of just a few years ago, and less dominant overall. Our El Nino spring had some savage moments, like the Great Dust, but mostly it was like a dewy European spring, even when far too dry. Cold PDO?
Then there is Ninderthana’s point about earth’s rotation and climate, and those still wider matters of solar influence mentioned above. Why aren’t governments directing huge scientific resources at these huge issues?
Rhetorical question, of course.
Douglas DC (20:09:46) : “I will get more specific as I can look some stats and document this position…Any thoughts would be appreciated too…”
At present the PDO is positive, so your original statement has a problem, which is why I asked. Also, if you were to plot PDO and NINO34 SST anomaly data togther, you’d discover that the PDO mimics NINO3.4 SST anomalies. The PDO is an aftereffect of ENSO.
Robert Townshend (00:52:42) : You wrote, “I’m hearing the expression “cold PDO El Nino” and it’s making a sense.”
The PDO is presently positive.
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
Philip_B (22:22:17) : Are you asking what initiates the typical El Nino? If that’s your question, then most discussions I’ve read say that a relaxation of the trade winds initiates the El Nino.
Just an observation but the extreme linearity of the it, with its parallelism with the equator points to it being an artefact.
Richard: You wrote, “is that [the Kelvin wave] the warm surface water flowing to the east along the equator?”
An equatorial Kelvin wave like the one in the Pacific shown in the JPL graphic might not have a comparable immediate effect on SST since the majority of the temperature anomaly is subsurface. Here’s a video that compares sea level and SST anomalies from Jan 1996 to Dec 1999, capturing the 1997/98 El Nino.
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/tiffs/videos/sshsst-globalocean.mov
If you stop the video in Jan 1997, the Kelvin wave is very pronounced in the central equatorial Pacific, but the SST anomalies don’t really show it yet. Then as the warm water moves east, some rises to the surface, increasing the SST anomalies.
Here’s a link to the JPL gallery of SSH and El Nino videos:
http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/tiffs/videos/