Does The Sea Surface Temperature Record Support The Hypothesis Of Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
This post is an expansion on my earlier post Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies – East Pacific Versus The Rest Of The World. In that post, I broke the satellite-era Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomaly data for the global oceans into two subsets. The volcano-adjusted East Pacific SST anomaly data (90S-90N, 180-80W) shows no rise for the past 30 years and the SST anomalies for the Rest-Of-The-World (90S-90N, 80W-180) rose in two easily discernable steps. I used period average SST anomalies to highlight the steps.
This post is also similar in content to the post How Can Things So Obvious Be Overlooked By The Climate Science Community? But in this one, I provided a better way to divide the decade-plus periods that run from the end of the 1986/87/88 El Niño to the beginning of the 1997/98 El Niño and from end of the 1997/98 El Nino to the beginning of the 2009/10 El Niño. This allows for a more consistent way to illustrate the actual Rest-Of-The-World SST anomaly trends between those significant ENSO events.
THE ONE-WORD ANSWER TO THE TITLE QUESTION IS NO.
The satellite-era Sea Surface Temperature record indicates they rose only in response to significant El Niño events. In other words, the Sea Surface Temperature data contradicts the IPCC hypothesis that most of the rise is caused by an increase in Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases.
The fact that the satellite-era SST anomalies do not support AGW is very easy to illustrate with two graphs, Figure 1. They show the satellite-based sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies for two subsets of the global oceans, using Reynolds OI.v2 SST data that runs from November 1981 (the start of that dataset) to the current month of May 2011. The graph on the left illustrates the volcano-adjusted Sea Surface Temperature for the eastern Pacific from pole to pole (90S-90N, 180-80W). That area represents about 33% of the global ocean surface area. There are major variations from year to year caused by El Niño and La Niña events, but the linear trend is basically flat at +0.003 deg C per decade. In other words, there has been no rise in the volcano-adjusted Sea Surface Temperatures for that portion of the global oceans in almost 30 years. The graph on the right illustrates the volcano-adjusted SST anomalies for the rest of the world from pole to pole (90S-90N, 80E-180). The SST anomalies for this portion of the globe show two distinct upward steps with periods of relatively little (if any) rise between those steps. The upward steps are highlighted by the average SST anomalies for the periods between the upward shifts caused by El Niño-Southern Oscillation events. There is an upward step in 1987 that occurs in response to the 1986/87/88 El Niño, and there is an upward step in 1997, which is a response to the 1997/98 El Niño. Note how the Rest-Of-The-World SST data appears to be in the process of another upward step in response to the 2009/10 El Niño.
Figure 1
Figures 2 and 3 are full-sized versions of the volcano-adjusted East Pacific and Rest-Of-The-World SST anomaly graphs. These datasets were first discussed in my post Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies – East Pacific Versus The Rest Of The World, and they have appeared in my monthly SST anomaly updates since then. Two notes: The Sea Surface Temperature dataset used in this post is NOAA Optimum Interpolation, version 2 SST, also known as Reynolds OI.v2. And as noted during the discussion of Figure 1, both subsets have been adjusted for the effects of the explosive volcanic eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. I performed a linear regression analysis on global SST anomalies to account for the impacts of the volcanic aerosols. This was discussed in the post linked above.
Figure 2
############################################
Figure 3
THE REST-OF-THE-WORLD SST ANOMALY TRENDS BETWEEN THE SIGNIFICANT EL NIÑO EVENTS
Above I described the Rest-Of-The-World SST data as having two distinct upward steps with periods of relatively little (if any) rise between those steps. Actually, the linear trend for the period between the El Niño events of 1986/87/88 and 1997/98 is -0.01 deg C per decade and for the period between the El Niño events of 1997/98 and 2009/10 it’s +0.001 deg C per decade. Refer to Figure 4. In other words, the volcano-adjusted Rest-Of-The-World Sea Surface Temperature anomalies rose in response the significant El Niño events of 1986/87/88 and 1997/98, and then the sea surface temperatures did not rise over the decade (plus) periods that followed.
Figure 4
To establish the periods between the significant El Niño events, I used the NOAA Oceanic Nino Index(ONI) to determine the official months of the 1986/87/88, 1998/98, and 2009/10 El Niño events.. There is a 6-month lag between NINO3.4 SST anomalies and the response of the Rest-Of-The-World SST anomalies during the evolution phase of the 1997/98 El Niño. So I lagged the ONI data by six months and deleted all of the Rest-Of-The-World SST data that corresponded to the El Niño events of the 1986/87/88, 1998/98, and 2009/10 El Niño events. Then I performed the trend analyses on the data for the two periods that remained.
There will be those who will attempt to downplay the trend analyses shown in Figures 4 by stating that I’ve excluded the data after June 2009 to hide a rise in SST anomalies. In reality, I’ve excluded that recent data because the 2009/10 El Niño appears to be causing yet another upward step as shown in Figure 3.
CLOSING
Unless Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases only impacted Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies during the 1986/87/88 and 1997/98 El Niño events, there is no evidence of Anthropogenic Global Warming in the satellite-era Sea Surface Temperature data. The volcano-adjusted East Pacific Ocean Sea Surface Temperature anomalies have not risen in 30 years. For the Rest Of The World, the volcano-adjusted Sea Surface Temperature anomalies rose only during the El Niño events of 1986/87/88 and 1997/98, but between the 1986/87/88 and 1997/98 El Niño events and between the 1997/98 and 2009/10 El Niño events, there was no rise in the volcano-adjusted Rest-Of-The-World Sea Surface Temperatures.
I have presented and described ENSO and the multiyear aftereffects of ENSO in numerous posts over the past years. Links to many of them are listed under the heading of FURTHER INFORMATION.
ENSO is a process that periodically discharges heat from the oceans and redistributes warm waters from the tropical Pacific. ENSO also recharges the tropical Pacific Ocean Heat through a periodic increase in Downward Shortwave Radiation. In that respect, ENSO events are fueled by a periodic increase in natural radiative forcing (solar energy) over the tropical Pacific. When El Niño events dominate a multidecadal era, indicating the tropical Pacific is releasing and distributing more ocean heat than “normal”, global surface temperatures rise. The opposite holds true during epochs when La Niña events dominate.
SOURCES
SST anomaly data is available through the NOAA NOMADS website:
http://nomad1.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh
or:
http://nomad3.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/pdisp_sst.sh?lite
The GISS Global Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness data is available here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/tau_line.txt
FURTHER INFORMATION
My first detailed posts on the multiyear aftereffects of ENSO events are:
Can El Nino Events Explain All of the Global Warming Since 1976? – Part 1
And:
Can El Nino Events Explain All of the Global Warming Since 1976? – Part 2
And:
Supplement To “Can El Nino Events Explain All Of The Warming Since 1976?”
And:
Supplement 2 To “Can El Nino Events Explain All Of The Warming Since 1976?”
And for those who like visual aids, refer to the two videos included in:
La Niña Is Not The Opposite Of El Niño – The Videos.
The impacts of these El Nino events on the North Atlantic are discussed in:
There Are Also El Nino-Induced Step Changes In The North Atlantic
And:
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation Data
I’ve also written a rebuttal post to Tamino’s AMO Post. I hope to have a new post on the North Atlantic posted sometime soon.
The posts related to the effects of ENSO on Ocean Heat Content are here:
ENSO Dominates NODC Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Data
And:
North Atlantic Ocean Heat Content (0-700 Meters) Is Governed By Natural Variables
Additional detailed technical discussions can be found here:
More Detail On The Multiyear Aftereffects Of ENSO – Part 1 – El Nino Events Warm The Oceans
And:
More Detail On The Multiyear Aftereffects Of ENSO – Part 2 – La Nina Events Recharge The Heat Released By El Nino Events AND…During Major Traditional ENSO Events, Warm Water Is Redistributed Via Ocean Currents.
And:
================================================================
Bob Tisdale has worked long and hard to provide well researched and informative content for us all here. May I suggest you buy him a beer? – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Tim Folkerts:
I need to comment on your two points responding to richard verney:
1)Conservation of energy. The lapse rate raises the height of the tropopause rather than warming the surface (though there is some surface warming-see next point).
2) UWLWR. Extra downwelling LWR in my humble opinion has a zero effect on the background energy flow from ocean to air because ALL of it gets converted to more upward flowing convection, conduction, radiation and evaporation. The only part of the ocean that gets any warmer is the region of interaction just a few microns deep. The ocean skin (1mm deep and 0.3C cooler than the ocean bulk below) then appears to provide a buffer so that the temperature differential between the skin (averaged out globally) and the ocean bulk below remains the same so that the energy flow from bulk to skin remains unchanged. Think of it like a tributary joining a river. There is no change in the speed of flow from the river upstream because that is dictated by gravity. In the ocean the energy flow from bulk to skin is dictated by atmospheric pressure which in turn dictates the energy value of the latent heat of vaporisation.
So all the extra energy from GHGs (whether human or not) goes not to warming the ocean bulk nor reducing the rate of cooling of the ocean bulk but rather to changing both the speed of the water cycle and the surface air pressure distribution from an effect on the height of the tropopause. But even so it is a miniscule unmeasurable effect compared to solar and ocean induced natural variability.
Dave Springer says: “How do we know that anthropogenic greenhouse gases aren’t lessening the severity/extent of La Nina and increasing that of El Nino?”
There’s really no way to know for sure due to the availability of reliable long-term SST data. But, with the SST data that’s available, the frequency and magnitude of El Niño versus La Niña events has varied on a decadal/multidecadal basis since 1900. We can see this by smoothing NINO3.4 SST anomaly data with a commonly used 121-month running-average filter:
http://i54.tinypic.com/dh9508.jpg
And looking at the “raw” data, the linear trend of NINO3.4 SST anomalies since 1900 is flat:
http://i56.tinypic.com/a5armb.jpg
Extending the start date back to the beginning of the dataset, we can see that the 1877/78 and 1888/89 El Niño events were of comparable magnitude to the more recent El Niño events.
http://i56.tinypic.com/2eygqpz.jpg
Regards
Bob, I’ve noted that you do not wish to extend your work to cover long past historical events such as MWP and LIA or global (as opposed to regional) cloudiness trends and I’ve accepted your recommendation that one should refer to Pacific Multidecadal Oscillations rather than PDO but I was hoping for your response to a couple of points I made above as follows:
i) I think that the ENSO cycle is directly caused by the fact that the ITCZ is situated north of the equator and not exactly above it. That introduces a solar energy input imbalance within the oceans either side of the ITCZ.. Periodically that imbalance becomes large enough to become unstable and so to restore balance a pulse of warmth is periodically released by the warmer part of the ocean south of the ITCZ to the air and to the broader global oceans on either side of the equator. The fact that the pulse of energy release is spread out across the central Pacific is due to the Earth’s rotation.
ii) Additionally under the influence of solar variability the distance that the ITCZ sits north of the equator changes. It was closer to the equator during the LIA than it was during the MWP and today.
Is there anything in your work which is inconsistent with either of those propositions?
“Seems like what is illustrated here is simply the 500 plus year uptrend of the ca 1000 year climate cycle”
I agree and have proposed just that elsewhere on more than one occasion with a lot of detail in support.
The only feature of the system to vary on that timescale is the level of solar activity and even Schmidt and Mann accepted just such a top down amplification of the solar effect in a paper released in 2001.
Stephen Wilde says: “Bob, I’ve noted that you do not wish to extend your work to cover long past historical events such as MWP and LIA…”
Actually, as I noted in a reply to one of your earlier comments above and on many other threads here at WUWT, I do not study paleoclimatological data. I have no interest in it, and that’s due to the lack of reliable data.. In fact, I spend most of my efforts with satellite-era data because there’s better coverage. You apparently like to speculate on what drives climate on paleoclimatological time scales. That’s your choice. But you should not expect me to have interest in your comments on those topics.
Regards
As always, thanks, Anthony. Based on some of the comments on this thread, it appears I’ll need to write a post with the title ENSO Indices Do Not Represent The ENSO Process.
REPLY: Yikes!
Another way at looking at it is to consider that the La Nina state is the natural position of the Pacific. El Nino is a disturbance that interrupts the natural system which is triggered by the westerlies that occur over the warm pool in the west. This interaction moves the Walker pump further east which weakens the trade winds, and stops the upwelling of cold water off the South American coast which allows it to warm in the East with some sloshing back of what warm water is left in the West. The SOI index has tracked this trigger since the late 1800’s and basically measures the sea level pressure difference between Darwin and Tahiti. When Tahiti sea level pressure is lower than Darwin the trigger for El Nino is present, the state of the warm pool also being a factor. The SOI index is also very close to the PDO when comparing the 30 year trends, long term pressure differentials in the Pacific effectively could be a large part of the PDO cycle.
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/221
The PDO is the indicator/instigator of the ENSO predominant state over decadal time frames. The Pacific equator being the major variable in determining overall trends in global SST’s. PDO/ENSO either warms or cools depending on the balance of the cold water upwelling allowed in the eastern Pacific measured against the amount of solar warming. This balance is then redistributed to the remaining oceans with the Atlantic receiving last (explains why the AMO lags PDO). The upward step changes in world SST since 1981 is expected with a positive PDO along with solar activity being at the top of a wave not seen since the MWP. The solar influence being chemical with a hint of radiative. Negative PDO periods should show a step in the reverse direction, especially when coupled with decreasing solar. This all ties in very nicely with the solar powerwave concept.
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/218
@ur momisugly Bob Tisdale,
I just wanted to offer a few words of encouragement in light of your comment to Anthony above. I had not watched your Youtube videos before tonight and they really clarified your posts for me, and particularly your point that El Nino and La Nina are not opposite phenomena. For the first time I feel I can properly appreciate the importance of your work. If a picture is worth a thousand words, adding time-lapse sequences to the pictures is worth 10,000! I now fully comprehend why the step changes you write about cannot be considered signs of anthropogenic warming from increased CO2 levels.
Thanks!
Jennifer
Bob Tisdale said:
“But you should not expect me to have interest in your comments on those topics.”
My two points to which I was hoping for a response did not refer to the topics you have no interest in. I was directly addressing the very areas you are interested in. They were:
i) I think that the ENSO cycle is directly caused by the fact that the ITCZ is situated north of the equator and not exactly above it. That introduces a solar energy input imbalance within the oceans either side of the ITCZ.. Periodically that imbalance becomes large enough to become unstable and so to restore balance a pulse of warmth is periodically released by the warmer part of the ocean south of the ITCZ to the air and to the broader global oceans on either side of the equator. The fact that the pulse of energy release is spread out across the central Pacific is due to the Earth’s rotation.
ii) Additionally under the influence of solar variability the distance that the ITCZ sits north of the equator changes. It was closer to the equator during the LIA than it was during the MWP and today.
Is there anything in your work which is inconsistent with either of those propositions?
Point i) is especially pertinent since it proposes a physical cause for the basic ENSO phenomenon which has never been suggested before as far as I know.
Point ii) goes to the heart of the limits on the potential scale of the ENSO phenomenon at any given time.
I appreciate your expertise in all matters ENSO and so would appreciate your opinions.
Bob —
Thanks again for your reply. I’m still trying to get my mind around this stuff, but your patient answers are appreciated.
Geoff Sharp says: “Another way at looking at it is to consider that the La Nina state is the natural position of the Pacific.”
The La Nina phase is an exaggerated ENSO-neutral phase, El Nino events are the anomalous phase.
You wrote, “The PDO is the indicator/instigator of the ENSO predominant state over decadal time frames”
Nonsense. We’ve been through this time and again. The PDO is an aftereffect of ENSO, but it’s also influenced by Sea Level pressure and that accounts for the differencs in periodicity. I’ve illustrated it, described it, documented it, and animated it for you, and all you come back with is conjecture. I have no need to argue with you about this, especially when you refuse to document anything. When I ask you for documentation, you provide excuses.
Good bye, Geoff.
vigilantfish says: “I just wanted to offer a few words of encouragement in light of your comment to Anthony above…”
Thanks. It’s nice to know the videos were effective.
Bob Tisdale says:
July 11, 2011 at 2:32 pm
In the ENSO graphs you linked I can easily pick out the dry and wet times in central Texas. The drought of record was in the 1950’s and corresponds perfectly with La Nina conditions that persisted through most of that decade.
The correlation is very good and reliable. If one wanted a record which goes back to before the industrial revolution which began in the 18th century I should think it might be dug up (maybe literally) in histories of central American and Southern Plains natives. One must go back to at least the 16th century or so to make any determination of whether or not industrialization had any significant effect on ENSO. The graph you produced has, since 1950, an easily seen trend of higher lows and and higher highs in SST which hasn’t abated. Any warmist will pounce on that and declare the correlation between industrial activity and less severe La Nina and more severe El Nino is not coincidental but rather causative. I quite agree with you that we can’t know for sure due to limited historical records but the data you produced for my edification only strengthened the case for anthropogenic influence given the trend during the past 60 years. A longer record is needed to clarify that as there are cycles of solar activity with periodicities measured in centuries, millenia, and possibly even longer periods.
@Tisdale (con’t)
Now that I think about it the trend in higher lows and higher highs in ENSO since the 1950’s corresponds perfectly with the Modern Maximum in solar activity. I would bet that the correlation extends back as far as we can manage to find good proxies for ENSO. We have 400 years of sunspot records which are a good proxy for solar magnetic field strength. It seems to me some expert in native American history in what’s now northern Mexico and south central United States should be able to tell us about good and bad years for maize production in the region as the droughts that reliably come with La Nina would have pretty serious effects on the natives’ ability to feed themselves and thus be more likely to be talked about. You could probably even see it just by dating construction activities. In good times when there was plenty of food there’d be expansion of cities and construction of religious monuments and in lean years that activity would (literally and figuratively) dry up. One might even be able to obtain a good record going back thousands of years in the manner as construction expansion and contraction requires no written records but rather just carbon dating of artifacts and estimates of population during those times.
@Stephen Fisher Wilde
“So all the extra energy from GHGs (whether human or not) goes not to warming the ocean bulk nor reducing the rate of cooling of the ocean bulk but rather to changing both the speed of the water cycle”
re; speeding up the water cycle
Bingo! No need to continue past that point. This is the thermostat which limits how warm a water world can become without signifcant change in the heat source (the sun) which drives it.
In basic terms we have a vertically oriented heat pump where the hot side is the ocean surface and the cold side is the cloud deck. The working fluid is water and the mechanism is the phase change between liquid and gas. It’s exactly the same principle used in artificial heat pumps that use working fluids such as freon. The extra energy on the hot side caused by non-condensing GHGs just makes the heat pump run faster and because the energy is transported from hot to cold side is latent heat of vaporization there’s no change in sensible temperature at the hot side. Evaporation, convection, and condensation rate rises instead. More work (physics definition of work) is being performed by the pump as the mass of water being lifted to the cloud deck increases.
An even happier consequence of this is that the speed of horizontally oriented heat pump also increases and the surplus in hot side energy from GHGs results in no sensible temperature change on the hot side (tropics) but rather heat pump speed increases and in the horizontal pump the cold side is the surface at high latitudes. So we get more even heat distribution from low to high latitudes. We’ll see this effect in arctic sea ice extent. This is also thermostatically controlled because as the temperature differential between tropics and poles lessens there is less potential energy to drive the pump. As well, as sea ice increases or decreases this modulates the effectiveness of the polar radiator. As ice extent decreases the ability to dump ocean heat into the atmosphere and from there out to space increases and vice versa.
This is physically how it must be on a water world. Two flies in the ointment are that the earth is 70% water world and GHGs interact quite differently with land surfaces which can and do have a surface temperature increase due to GHGs and the second fly in the ointment is water’s third phase – ice. If it ever gets cold enough for any reason for sea ice to increase in extent for long enough a positive feedback where sea ice breeds even more sea ice takes over. A water world is not a water world if the water’s surface is frozen. In that case the water cycle comes to a screeching halt and GHG influence becomes like over land except in this case the albedo of the “land” rises from the approximate 15% of dirt and rocks to the 90% of ice and snow which is what causes the positive feedback from increasing ice in the first place.
At this point in the earth’s history it is in phase where it is dangerously cold as far as the biosphere is concerned teetering on the edge of being a water world and an ice world. Any sane informed person should be worried, if they worry at all, about cooling not warming. Warming is good. Cooling is bad.
Dave Springer says: “The graph you produced has, since 1950, an easily seen trend of higher lows and and higher highs in SST which hasn’t abated.”
Which graph? I’ve posted and linked numerous.
@Tisdale
The graph you said was the commonly used 121 month rolling average. The others are too noisy to eyeball much of anything.
http://i54.tinypic.com/dh9508.jpg
In this it’s easy to see the drought of record in the 1950’s and every other drought in south central Texas as well as the floods. Since 1950 there is a series of 3-4 higher lows and 3-4 higher highs and, interestingly, since around 1950 sunspot number plateaued at the highest level in the 400 year record of sunspot counts (Modern Maximum) and didn’t begin to retreat until last year or year before into what appears to be shaping up as a grand minimum.
Here’s a data base of the artificial lake I live on you can pull down and graph beginning in 1943. It was actually impounded almost a decade earlier but by 1943 was filled up to conservation pool level (681’MSL).
http://www.lcra.org/library/media/public/docs/histlvls/travis.xls
About a 24 month rolling average I should think would suffice and should look strikingly like the pattern in the 121-month rolling average of ENSO SST you posted.
La Nina and El Nino both wreak havoc here with drought and flood respectively but floods are easier to deal with than droughts. Optimal ENSO state is La Nada.
By the way, Bob, I appreciate you taking an interest in this and responding and hopefully I can pique your interest in finding a proxy for paleo-reconstruction of ENSO. I’m pretty sure it’ll be reflected in maize production since corn is a thirsty crop and that in turn will be reflected in regional archeaology as expansion or contraction of population and city-building of the natives before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Mexico
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080627163156.htm
Maize first domesticated 10,000 years ago in Mexico.
This is probably ideal for estimating rainfall in the region of interest. It’s perfect for carbon dating and botanical experts very likely can tell from grain size or something like that whether it grew in a wet or dry year.
As far as that goes it probably doesn’t have to be cultivated crops but any wild plants that exihibit characteristic changes according to rainfall. I bet the results of that where I live will quite accurately reflect ENSO back to the beginning of the Holocene interglacial.
Sounds like an excellent area for a doctoral thesis for a University of Texas (Austin) post grad. Won’t even be any travel required.
Bob, just noticed an error in the source data readme file. The fourth column is not NINO3.4, but either NINO 4, 3 or 1.2.
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/963/nino34.png
The graph above shows one of those region warming since 1900 and will correct it later.
p.s If you know which NINO region it is please let me know.
Dave Springer said:
“GHGs interact quite differently with land surfaces which can and do have a surface temperature increase due to GHGs ”
True, but horizontal air movements take care of that since the oceans are the majority of the surface and remain in control.
and:
“the second fly in the ointment is water’s third phase – ice. If it ever gets cold enough for any reason for sea ice to increase in extent for long enough a positive feedback where sea ice breeds even more sea ice takes over.”
Not as big a problem as you would think because under cold dry air ice sublimates straight to vapour pretty fast and that involves even bigger energy transfers than liquid to vapour.
Whoops, my previous post should omit part two. I slightly misread Dave’s point.
Bob Tisdale says:
July 12, 2011 at 5:06 am
I have no need to argue with you about this, especially when you refuse to document anything. When I ask you for documentation, you provide excuses.
Hi Bob, good to hear from you again, you must have missed the links I provided again. Read back, I believe there is some good documentation.
Nonsense. We’ve been through this time and again. The PDO is an aftereffect of ENSO, but it’s also influenced by Sea Level pressure and that accounts for the differencs in periodicity. I’ve illustrated it, described it, documented it, and animated it for you, and all you come back with is conjecture.
The ENSO cycle is driven by more than one factor which makes lining up the PDO index a moving target. Sometimes the PDO leads ENSO and vice versa which means the case is not clear, there are a lot of examples where the warming water is in the Pacific NW before the onset of La Nina, I think my graph clearly shows that. The PDO index is also very closely correlated with the Pacific NW SST’s. as shown earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/images/pdo_enso.png
I have stated all along that ESNO might well be the driver of the PDO but maintain it is a useful tool for determining ENSO type/frequency and modulation. The important point is why do we have 30 year periods of one dominating the other… I think the jury is still out and am not convinced by your evidence.
But more importantly I believe your long held theory of La Nina driving the El Nino phase is flawed:
“Also during the La Nina, stronger trade winds reduce cloud cover, which allows more sunlight to warm the tropical Pacific to depth, and through that increase in sunlight, the La Nina recharges the warm water in the Pacific Warm Pool for the next El Nino.”
Perhaps we can discuss this in a calm and rational manner, Anthony permitting?
The data incorrectly named NINO3.4 was actually NINO4 and this is shown below.
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/3429/nino4.png
The 121 month filter shows warming of 0.8c since early 1900’s.
Nino3 is shown here and shows a warming since early 1900’s of about 0.6c.
http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/5819/nino3.png
Nino1.2 is shown here and shows ironically a warming since 1900’s of about 1.2c.
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/2504/nino12.png
Finally Nino3.4 now corrected to the right data shows a warming since early 1900’s of about 0.8c.
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/963/nino34.png
This data set shows quite clearly that since the 1900’s all ocean surface temperatures in ENSO regions (3.4), (3), (4) and (1.2) have warmed since the 1900’s. It does not support Bob’s view and others even that ENSO3.4 at least during this period has remained static. There are 3 phases, 2 warmer and one cooler, but overall SST’s have increased quite significantly at the same time of global SST’s.
Matt G says:
July 12, 2011 at 2:44 pm
This data set shows quite clearly that since the 1900′s all ocean surface temperatures in ENSO regions (3.4), (3), (4) and (1.2) have warmed since the 1900′s
My plot uses the ENSO 3.4 data from HADSST and gets a similar result to you.
Bob Tisdale says:
July 10, 2011 at 7:54 am
An incease in Downward Shortwave Radiation from a La Nina event provides the fuel for the next El Nino. Example: Due to unusually strong trade winds over the western tropical Pacific, the 1995/96 La Nina provided a substantial increase in tropical Pacific OHC.
http://i56.tinypic.com/a5dhy0.jpg
That inreased in Tropical Pacific OHC fueled the 1997/98 “El Nino of the Century.” So the lag was less than two years. Keep in mind the solar cycle was at a minumum while the OHC rose in 1995/96.
Just wondering if this graph is correct, The area is over the whole pacific( should it be the warm pool only after La Nina?) and is 24S and 24S a reasonable area to consider or perhaps too large? The equatorial deep sea records taken at the equator and the 150m deep (taken over the area you use) at the BOM site do not seem to agree with your graph.
http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/oceantemp/pastanal.shtml
Also when looking at 1996 Jan to Dec which is the main area of warm spike on your graph the ENSO 4.3 is actually in a slight El Nino state, the La Nina’s each side are not strong. Would it be worth while plotting the ENSO record over your graph and expanding it out to see the detail?
Looking at the warm pool 120E-150E in early 1997 there is no heat to speak of which would be quite common at the early stage of a big El Nino. I do no see any evidence of a build up of warm pool heat after La Nina before the monster 97/98 El Nino unless we differ on the area of the warm pool?
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/oceanography/wrap_ocean_analysis.pl?id=IDYOC007&year=1997&month=04
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/oceanography/wrap_ocean_analysis.pl?id=IDYOC007&year=1997&month=08