In the last month, the Arctic Oscillation Index (AO) has gone strongly negative. You can see that it headed to its negative peak right about the time the Copenhagen Climate Conference started, so it is no wonder that they ironically experienced cold and snow there. It is also a setup for the record snow and cold Canada and the USA has seen recently.
Source: NOAA Climate Predication Center Daily AO Index
With this change happening, the setup for an increased Arctic Sea Ice Maximum is enhanced this year, likely to happen sometime around March 1st, 2010.
NSIDC has an interesting writeup and graphic on the AO:
From NSIDC:
The Arctic Oscillation refers to opposing atmospheric pressure patterns in northern middle and high latitudes.
The oscillation exhibits a “negative phase” with relatively high pressure over the polar region and low pressure at midlatitudes (about 45 degrees North), and a “positive phase” in which the pattern is reversed. In the positive phase, higher pressure at midlatitudes drives ocean storms farther north, and changes in the circulation pattern bring wetter weather to Alaska, Scotland and Scandinavia, as well as drier conditions to the western United States and the Mediterranean. In the positive phase, frigid winter air does not extend as far into the middle of North America as it would during the negative phase of the oscillation. This keeps much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains warmer than normal, but leaves Greenland and Newfoundland colder than usual. Weather patterns in the negative phase are in general “opposite” to those of the positive phase, as illustrated below.
Over most of the past century, the Arctic Oscillation alternated between its positive and negative phases. Starting in the 1970s, however, the oscillation has tended to stay in the positive phase, causing lower than normal arctic air pressure and higher than normal temperatures in much of the United States and northern Eurasia.
As we see in this graph below, we’ve seen more red (positive) than blue (negative) phases of the AO in the last 30–40 years. Whether this is short period negative excursion or the start of a longer trend is unknown.
Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center
There are other indicators recently of a flip in patterns, notable is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which changed last year, but we also see the North Atlantic Oscillation in a negative phase as well. Whether it will remain negative or not we’ll soon know, but note that it has been negative the majority of time since August 31st.
Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center
Since 2000, it has seen a fair amount of negative time also:
Source: NOAA Climate Prediction Center
The climate change seems to be changing now.
h/t to Werner Weber
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
My scenario would explain the current negative AO as follows:
i) A quieter sun would result in more stability in the layers of the atmosphere from stratosphere upwards and so a reduced rate of energy loss to space.
ii) A positive ocean phase would energise the hydrological cycle and push more energy into the stratosphere where it would accumulate because of the reduced rate of radiation to space.
iii) the warmer stratosphere would in turn inhibit the speed of the hydrological cycle allowing more powerful polar high pressure systems that would try to push the jets equatorward against the influence of the positive oceans trying to push them poleward.
Thus I think sudden stratospheric warming is a consequence of energy being pumped up into the stratosphere by the oceans and the energised hydrological cycle. A warming stratosphere will induce cooling of the air in higher latitudes because the air that went up to dump it’s energy in the stratosphere then has to descend again in high pressure cells.
The big question is: What is the motor of those changes?
Meteorologists seldom look higher than the stratosphere. Some of them look into the sea too. Their prognosis seem to be falsified already.
As someone pointed out, this corresponds quite well with Piers Corbyn’s forecasts. Is that pure chance or has the guy got a real track? Not yet falsified as far as I can see.
And how about Svensmark? Sparse sunspots for the last two years should be followed by cooling, according to him. Does his theory still hold?
” DirkH (19:51:44) :
BTW Mojib Latif , german Climatologist in Kiel, has predicted something like this with a computer model that incorporates the thermohaline convection. He’s a convinced warmist and warns that this will give us only a break before rapid warming happens (no surprise there).
”
Though that seems like an “ad hoc hypothesis” aimed to save the AGW theory, it will soon be honestly tested against reality.
(OOoopppps sorry Antony I posted those other comments #140 or so in this thread> Our current weather: A test for forecast models – December shaping up to be one of the coldest on record in the USA, not “the Unbearable Complexity of Climate as mentioned above…
Trivial re-expression reveals shared AO & NAO phasing:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/fAO_fNAO.png
The phasing is shared with AMO, PDO, aa index, & others much of the time.
Max Hugoson (19:46:33) :
Maybe you need one of these?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/gallery-e6frg6n6-1225814393965?page=2
Timothy Also this ice extent probably more reliable as it updated daily AMSR/CT takes their time and might do some adjusting to suit AGW agenda who knows? Note since October 1 most ice extent data not reliable probably been adjusted down to suit the agenda but even with this they cannot prevent showing that ice will problably go “over” anomaly
timothy link previous was
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
The bouncing of the various indices is not independent:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChristmasTreeIndex.PNG
The IJIS data is known to under report the actual ice extent by up to 1 million km2. This is due to ice reflectivity. I am actually fairly happy with the IJIS dataset, even though I know it under reports the actual ice extent, since they flat out tell you that they do. I am less happy with the analysis put out by the NSIDC. However, their daily map is still fairly accurate.
AMSR-E ice recovery shows 5, possibly 6 negative downturns (less ice) during this Fall’s recovery. None of the other years shows any downturns at all. Is there something happening to the AMSR-E data this Fall?
Wayne, hurricane paths tend to be very chaotic under negative AO conditions with some traveling up the East coast and some hitting South America and missing the Gulf. Some still hit the Gulf but the tracks look like a plate of spaghetti. They are very predictable and pointed right in to the Gulf during positive swings, almost like the strands of a woman’s long flowing hair.
geo (21:36:01) :
I just sometimes feel a need to raise the flag of science against accepting “natural variation” as a sufficient explanation –I just get a little hackle-raising going against the “Posoiden Is Angry” feeling it evokes.
I’d would think that the majority of posters here take a position far removed from simply accepting natural-variation as a final and definitive answer. Yes we need to know more about why and how the climate changes; natural human inquisitiveness drives us down that road, unfortunately there’s currently a series of big road blocks on that highway and they don’t like to let “deniers” through, so efforts tend to be focused on removing the road blocks (or junta behind them)…
Cheers
Mark
Peter of Sydney (19:53:38) : How come all this cooling around much of the world over the recent few months is not reflected in the official surface temperature readings as reported by NASA? I smell a rat.
Well you might… NOAA via NCDC, creates the GHCN data set that is the ‘base’ data (have trouble calling it ‘raw’ since it isn’t…) that goes into CIStemp (and if the leaked emails are to be believed substantially matches CRU, and so HadCRUT, and the NCDC adjusted, and even the Japanese series). That data series has had cold thermometers strongly removed in recent years (since 1989 or so) but they are left in the baseline. IMHO, this biases the input data via thermometer change so much that it swamps the ability of the “anomaly process” to recover a valid anomaly.
In other words, the input temperatures are cooked. A lot. 90% of peak thermometer count has been deleted. California, for example, has 4 surviving thermometers. One at SFO Airport near the San Franciso Bay (final approach is over water… water moderates cold…) and three are “near the beach” in Southern California. Places like San Diego, LA, Santa Maria. Nice warm SoCal beach weather. (San Diego is darned near paradise. 70 something F almost year round -/+ a little. You can grow bananas and get fruit – that is, the real tropical bananas, not those fruitless cool tolerant things…)
So how can you get “cold” in California when you leave out the Cascades, the glaciers of Mount Shasta, the Ski Resorts of the Sierra Nevada… Heck, the whole northern 1/3 of the state. Similar things are done to the rest of the world. For more details, tour the world thermometer deletions here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/ghcn-the-global-analysis/
Re: Roger Knights (21:49:57)
Sea ice data links:
http://polynya.gsfc.nasa.gov/seaice_datasets.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/timeseries.1870-2008
AndyW (22:04:20) “The Arctic Dipole pattern will have to be taken into consideration too I suppose for estimates on maxima. Currently it is not very active it seems.”
Can you share a link to the ADA time series Andy?
Related:
Recommended to all:
Wang, J.; Zhang, J.; Watanabe, E.; Ikeda, M.; Mizobata, K.; Walsh, J.E.; Bai, X.; & Wu, B. (2009). Is the Dipole Anomaly a major driver to record lows in Arctic summer sea ice extent? Geophysical Research Letters 36, L05706. doi:10.1029/2008GL036706.
ftp://ftp.glerl.noaa.gov/wang/Related_Papers/Wang_paper63_2009_GRL.pdf
A graph clearly showing relationship between the southern oscillation (atmospheric pressure) and sea surface temperature (el nino, la nina):
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/cgi-tao/cover.cgi?P1=/tao/jsdisplay/plots/gif/soi_110w_80.gif&P2=700&P3=607&script=jsdisplay/scripts/biggif_startup.csh
>>REPLY: The diagnosis was wrong, it just had a bad case
>>of a cold. -Anthony
A bıt lıke the dıagnosıs for Swıne Flu beıng wrong. I thınk the global authorıtıes are rapıdly runnıng out of scare storıes to scare us wıth.
Once bıtten ……..
.
Mapou (21:36:00) : Can someone please explain in simple language what the implications are with respect to the AGW hypothesis.
My understanding is that this means we had an arctic air pattern that gave us extra warm weather for many years over North America and Europe (where most of the thermometers are located) and that regime has ended. We’ve now entered and air pattern (perhaps due to changes in solar output, or perhaps due to natural oscillations – the why is unclear) that tends to much colder weather.
If we “go cold” as we were warm before, the AGW thesis ends up critically wounded (perhaps fatally) due to a very long period of cold when AGW predicts warming.
I suspect the “Warmers” position will be that “it’s only weather and the warming will be hidden in the pipeline to reassert itself in 20 years with a vengence”. Only I never have been able to find that pipeline they talk about…
But I could be wrong in this explanation. I’m still learning this arctic oscillation stuff…
Another take on cooling from NOAA
http://www.tulsabeacon.com/?p=3388
‘With this change happening, the setup for an increased Arctic Sea Ice Maximum is enhanced this year, likely to happen sometime around March 1st, 2010.’
I’m not sure that is totally sure, given the c. 10C above average temperatures recorded for the past 3 months north of 80N. I agree, it’s now down to a suitable minimum for this time of year, but there’s definitely been a significant season of higher than average temperatures in the Arctic.
To date, this year, it appears that Hudson Bay took slightly longer to freeze over, the Bering Strait region froze early, but has been returning to normal coverage since, ice N. of the siberian coastline has been regenerating more rapidly this winter than might have been expected and Newfoundland/mouth of the St Lawrence appear not yet to be freezing on time.
No doubt one of our expert contributors will have some interesting insights to explain all that?
Richard Holle (23:16:52) : I have not the computing power, or data base needed to add these decade long cycles, into the process I am already using, to define how these patterns are also coupled into the rest of the process. But would love to give it a go, when time and money becomes available.
It does not take as much hardware as you might think. The supercomputer of 1989 is the laptop of today. In many cases, this exquist hardware has the performance sucked out of it by very highly inefficient software. Use a highly effiicent software base and you can rediscover what you have.
I run GIStemp on a box that started life as a x486 box. It was “upgraded” about a decade ago to an AMD CPU at 400 Mhz and has 132 MB of memory. Most folks would consider it completely useless. But with Red Hat Linux on it, it becomes a quite effective compute engine. (I think BSD might be even a bit more efficient, but have not done the benchmark.)
Further, you can make a supercomputer out of a gaggle of such “junk” machines by running them as a “cluster”. For an example of a free super computer made in this way (with Beowulf) see:
http://www.extremelinux.info/stonesoup/
At one time a guy at ORNL (Oak Ridge) could not get funding for the computes he needed. So he collected ‘discards’ and made a free supercomputer. You can too.
What with Christmas just passed, there will be a lot of “junk” available for free that can be clustered for free. ( I once made a 7 node Beowolf from discards just for fun. My present GIStemp box is one of the original nodes. 2 others are in the garage. I didn’t need to dig them out to make GIStemp go.)
A nice “how to” book:
http://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Computing-Scientific-Engineering-Computation/dp/0262692929
And yes, you can do this on MS software (“but it would be wrong” 😉
http://www.amazon.com/Beowulf-Computing-Scientific-Engineering-Computation/dp/0262692759
Just Google “Beowulf supercomputer” if you want to know more. It’s not very hard to build one. Figuring out what to do with it once you have it, that’s harder 😉
“So, I had this REALLY BIG Hammer, and I saw this little problem … ” 😉
Someone needs to rescue “Climate” before it becomes as obsolete a word as “Phrenology”!
Repy: nice. ~ ctm
The more I have been thinking about our central European climate, the more I am convinced the warming since mid-80ties has been caused by changes in air circulation. Cold winter (like 2005/06) is always caused by lot of arctic air coming down here, while warm winter (like 2006/07) by steady flux of warm air from south-west. The same is valid for summers. We have been receiving more often warm air from subtropics than from arctic, simple as that. According to greenhouse theory, we should be receiving the same amount of arctic air, but warmer which is not the case.
To anyone experienced in meteorology here, I checked the trends for individual months in KNMI Climate Explorer for Central Europe since 1900 and found very surprising results: there are months, which show almost no trend during last 110 years (September, December, February, March) and there are summer months, which show pronounced warming since 1980s (April-August).
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tsicrutem3_17-25E_45-52N_nmonth.png
I have compared those trends since 1979 with satellite data for given area, and even the summer warming is a bit less pronounced (plenty of our met stations here are the airport ones), there is the same pattern: some months do warm during the century, but some do not. So either the “strengthened greenhouse effect” take vacations during some months or there is something completely different going on.
E.M.Smith (01:19:44) :
Well you might… NOAA via NCDC, creates the GHCN data set that is the ‘base’ data (have trouble calling it ‘raw’ since it isn’t…) that goes into CIStemp (and if the leaked emails are to be believed substantially matches CRU, and so HadCRUT, and the NCDC adjusted, and even the Japanese series).
So how do you explain the high UAH satellite anomalies?
So how can you get “cold” in California when you leave out the Cascades, the glaciers of Mount Shasta, the Ski Resorts of the Sierra Nevada…
“You” use anomalies. If the 1951-1980 mean temperature for a station is 25C (77F) and in 2009 it only reads 23C (73F) then the anomaly will be -2, i.e. the anomaly will be ‘cold’ even though the climate/weather is still warm.
I any case, as I said above, satellite readings are also showing high anomalies and have a similar 30 year warming trend over the US as the GISS record.
Slightly OT, but wasn’t one focus of old Dr. Bill Gray cycles like this?
Back in the 1980’s, when Hansen was predicting an ice age, Dr. Gray stated that there would be warming. Gray was right and Hansen was wrong, but for some reason, (perhaps due to Gore becoming VP,) Hansen was rewarded for his incorrectness as Dr. Gray was frustrated in his efforts to gain funding.
Hansen then switched over to predicting warming, but Dr. Gray stated the warming was only a cycle, and cooling would return. It looks like once again Dr. Gray was right and Hansen was wrong.
It is my understanding that NASA turned down eight separate requests from Dr. Gray for the funding needed to research the AMO and other cycles. He wanted to better understand components such as Thermohaline Circulation, but instead we have spent millions, perhaps billions, on fudging surface temperature data and building computer models which don’t work.
I was wondering if anyone knows the details of Dr. Gray’s requests for funding. It would be interesting to know exactly what he wanted to study. Using 20-20 hindsight, I imagine we might wish we had studied what Dr. Gray wanted us to study. We might very well have a better idea what the current AO cycle means.
I know this is a bit like crying over spilled milk, but it also is history…and those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.