UNISYS Current Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Plot – click to enlarge
From the Georgia Institute of Technology
Climate change may alter natural climate cycles of Pacific
While it’s still hotly debated among scientists whether climate change causes a shift from the traditional form of El Nino to one known as El Nino Modoki, online in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists now say that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.
El Nino is a periodic warming in the eastern tropical Pacific that occurs along the coast of South America. Recently, scientists have noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific rather than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon known as El Nino Modoki (Modoki is a Japanese term for “similar, but different”).
Last year, the journal Nature published a paper that found climate change is behind this shift from El Nino to El Nino Modoki. While the findings of that paper are still being debated, this latest paper in Nature Geoscience presents evidence that El Nino Modoki drives a climate pattern known as the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO).
“We’ve found that El Nino Modoki is responsible for changes in the NPGO,”said Emanuele Di Lorenzo, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “The reason this is important is because the NPGO has significant effects on fish stocks and ocean nutrient distributions in the Pacific, especially along the west coast of the United States.”
The NPGO, first named two years ago by Di Lorenzo and colleagues in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, explained for the first time long-term changes in ocean circulation of the North Pacific, which scientists now link to an increasing number of dramatic transitions in coastal marine ecosystems.
“The ecosystems of the Pacific may very well become more sensitive to the NPGO in the future,” said Di Lorenzo. “Our data show that this NPGO is definitively linked to El Nino Modoki, so as Modoki becomes more frequent in the central tropical Pacific, the NPGO will also intensify.”
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Tall Bloke said: “This explains why global ocean heat-energy content has been falling since 2003, when the sunspot number dropped below 40. This is why the el nino events we’ve seen since 2003 hav been more diffuse and ‘Modoki’ in nature. ”
El Niño “Modoki” events occurred in 1991-92, 1994-95, 2002-03, 2004-05 and 2009-10. 2 of those events started with SSN at 120 or above (4/1991 140SSN and 4/2002 120SSN) The Japanese 2006 study relegated the differences to two periods broken at 1978.
There were two El Ninos between 1979 and 1991 so I don’t know why they chose 1978/79 for the date to show change in Modoki frequency since the details are behind a paywall.
Once again Nature Magazine forgot the disclaimer, No science was used in the creation of this product.
One of the warm “singular points” is on the Japan Sea side (called “Backside Japan” in Japanese) of my country, and these days cold air is coming down from Siberia. This causes atmospheric instability, and two tornadoes blew up several roofs and cars yesterday.
What is this el nino molorki (sounds like: malarky)?
If you look at the polar graphs like this on posted by Ryan Maue on the ice pages;
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/extreme/gfs/current/nh_raw_temp_000.png
You can see right now the surge of warm moist air sitting on the arctic cap, is just like the one that was coming up over Greenland last week. These surges are the result of the lunar declinational tides reaching the same angle at culmination as the apparent sun angle at culmination. This harmonic convergence of the solar and lunar air tides, is able to drive larger more consolidated equatorial air masses that are being pulsed by every 13.7 and 27.3 day lunar declination culmination onto the arctic dispatching cold dry air out the other side of the globe.
Thus consolidated, the jet streams that follow the edges of these surges of competing temperatures, form massive loops with blocking highs, formed out of the polar return pulses to the mid-latitudes. The monsoonal flows from the equator on the warm pulses give us the massive flooding due to the greater than average size of the tidal bulges. So it follows that the hot dry peat burning spell, and the soggy bottom of Pakistan, and the tropical storms over the Atlantic, some with vorticity is just the result of the 18.6 year pattern of lunar declination.
When we get past a couple more years, then the angle of declination culmination will be lower ~21 degrees, for about 6 years, 3 down to 18 and 3 back up to this point again. The jet streams will get much smoother and separate more as the tidal pulses will mix in the mid-latitudes and not make inroads into the Arctic. The greater through mixing in between the more separated polar jet and the tropical trades, will help to keep the skies clear in most of the mid-latitudes, and cloudy around the equator, the poles colder as the circumpolar jets will act more like the Southern pole does now.
This should give an increase in polar sea ice on both poles. But I would expect less snow above 80 degrees North.
The other process that concerns the raising and lowering of the polar jet streams is the total flux of EMF fields being coupled into the earth because of the solar activity level and the solar wind. When stable and with very little change the Polar Jet streams, and LOD will be smooth with inductive shifts to higher levels of EMF flux, the zonal flow rates will increase along with the LOD shorting, and cloudiness along the ITCZ will decrease although the speed of the trade winds, moisture vapor content, and resultant specific heat will increase. ENSO effect as you call it, is the combination of these effects due to this interaction between the two processes both the lunar declinational tidal effects in the air and oceans, and the shifts in solar wind speed modulated by the interactions of the other planets with the sun/earth/moon system.
This complex repeating pattern has had at least 3 billion years to stabilize into a mnemonic balance of interlocking cycles, with gradual shifts as new in falling material is incorporated into the bodies, and the particle flow in the solar wind takes the refuse back out toward the heliopause.
To not consider these drivers of the resultant turbulence in the global circulation, that stir the mix continually, as important to study as the paths of the storms, soot, and volcanic ash that float around on these currents, was a mistake made back in the 1950’s, when weather forecasting teams first got hooked on numerical models. Now following in their standard practice, Climate Scientist are using models that do not incorporate these long term drivers of the weather to predict the climate as well.
When university backed research is done to find the connections between the Sun/earth/moon system and the rest of the solar system, then these forecasting problems will just go away, because they won’t listen to some “off the street idea” from someone with out the ability to publish in a journal to be peer reviewed.
Pat Moffitt says:
October 18, 2010 at 7:41 am
Fascinating – I was not aware that salmon studies were the first to show up the PDO (my research focus is more on Atlantic history). Thanks!
Hadley/GISS/RSS/UAH/NOAA are now in for September. This is the first time in the satellite temperature record (i.e. since approx 1979) that the Hadley 12-month running mean anomaly is lower than the equivalant RSS and UAH 12-month running means. Given that Hadley’s baseline mean is from a colder era, that’s something. At the end of 1998, RSS (but not UAH) had a very slightly higher 12-month running mean. At the top of a major El Nino, the surface records’ (Hadley/GISS/NOAA) 12-month-running-mean seems to turn downwards approximately 3 months so before the satellite records’ (RSS/UAH) 12-month-running-mean. Sea-Surface-Temperatures are included in the surface record data immediately, but it seems to take a while for the cooling sea to cool off the lower troposphere.
I wish the fellows who come up with the quotas for fishermen would frame this passage and put it up on the walls of their offices. All too often, when the populations of a certain fish crash, the fishermen get blamed for over-fishing. Then, when the population of the same fish booms, the fishermen (or hunters, or pesticides, or what-have-you,) gets blamed for reducing the population of whatever it is that preys on that particular fish.
This is not to say I approve of over-fishing such as the Russians did, off the New England coast in the 1960′s and early 1970′s. However when a bureaucrat points a blaming finger at a small fishing boat, I think it is more a sign that he is ignorant of nature, (and also that he is slightly power-mad,) than it is a sign that he understands the sea as much as fishermen do.
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Well the bureaucrats, as always, miss it!
In reality, the finger pointed at the small fishing boat, Caleb, as you say, is bogus.
They do what they do, and with relatively no harm.
The real harm [and where I point my finger]: is from the industrial fishing [overfishing] “industries”, such as Omega Protein.
Grrrrr. Omega ******* Protein
Or point a finger at the billion dollar shark finning industry courtesy of China.
Both of the foregoing need a finger pointed at them….and a finger where it hurts!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Arno Arrak says:
October 18, 2010 at 8:29 am
Your explanation of ENSO as esentially a wave phenomenon runs afoul of physical basics. Waves transport energy rather than matter, which moves in quasi-stationary wave-induced orbits. The fundamental “sloshing” mode of Pacific Ocean basin resonance has a period on the order of days. No significant such short-term oscillation is observed . Eastward Kelvin waves are involved in dispersing energy from wind-induced surface deformations in the Western Pacific along the equatorial wave guide. They take ~2mos to traverse the Pacific and never “splash” pools of warm water onto the South American coast.
El Nino, on the other hand, last several months and produce the episodic Peru Coastal Current, which is a tongue of the equatorial counter current that displaces the Humboldt Current when trade winds weaken. It is the transport of warm water from the Western Pacific by currents, rather than waves, that creates the classic El Nino phenomenon. Modoki is but a chaotic variation on this pattern, absent the current gyres that usually form at the eastern terminus.
Tallbloke Oct 18th at 4.33 a.m.
Thanks for the insight into the connection between El Nino Modoki and increasing humidity. It answers perfectly a question of mine of recent origin. A friend passed on to me a large amount of tabled data for my location, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
The data all comes in tabled form. Looking at hundreds or so numbers is not easy on the eyes. To pick up trends and highlights I decided to colour code each excel cell depending upon the numerical strength for each different table. A laborious process but with pleasing results in the end.
When I looked at the Relative Humidity I was struck by the increasing level of humidity over the past 30 or so years. I was curious as to what could be the cause of the increase? Your comment about El Nino Modoki ‘resulting in a general increase in humidity worldwide,’ got me to comparing the Modoki El Nino Index Ranking for the overlapping period available to me, 1950-2000.
On the MEI table La Ninas are dark blue at their strongest to light blue, while the El Ninos go from orange through mauve and onto deep red for the strongest values. For the Relative Humidity table the lowest humidity values are yellow then orange before changing to an ever increasingly darker blue and finally onto black.
With the tables showing the monthly figures the Southern Hemisphere winter (with the highest humidity values) dominates the centre of the table. I frame grabbed each table and placed beside each other in a word document. The RH table at a glance shows that the summers were less humid from the 1950’s through to the mid ’70’s. On the MEI table next to it the same period shows a strong tendancy towards La Nina.
From 1975 to 2000 the reverse happens.
I feel that this is a very simmple confirmation of your statement and should be easily duplicated elsewhere.
Cheers
Coops
Very important stuff:
sky wrote:
“El Nino, on the other hand, last several months and produce the episodic Peru Coastal Current, which is a tongue of the equatorial counter current that displaces the Humboldt Current when trade winds weaken. […] Modoki is but a chaotic variation on this pattern, absent the current gyres that usually form at the eastern terminus.”