Guest post by Bob Tisdale
This is the first of a series of posts that address many of the myths and misunderstandings about the tropical Pacific processes that herald themselves during El Niño and La Niña events. Most of the content will be chapters from my recently published ebook Who Turned on the Heat?
For almost 4 years, my presentations about the long-term effects of El Niño and La Niña events indicate the global oceans over the past 30+ years have warmed naturally. This puzzles many proponents of anthropogenic global warming. They see the often-used name for the coupled ocean-atmosphere process—El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)—and assume the processes are oscillatory or cyclical. They will then post a comment to the effect of:
What part of oscillation don’t you understand?
Or
Haven’t you ever heard of the ENSO cycle? El Niño and La Niña are parts of a cycle. How can a cycle cause long-term global warming?
Comments like that are the first clue their authors are arguing from ignorance; that is, they have no understanding of the subjects being discussed—none whatsoever.
First off, it indicates those persons have never examined an ENSO index, such as the sea surface temperature anomalies of the NINO3.4 region—an area along the eastern equatorial Pacific bordered by the coordinates of 5S-5N, 170W-120W. ENSO indices are used to indicate how often El Niño and La Niña events happen, how strong they were, and how long they lasted. If El Niño and La Niña events were cyclical, they’d transition between El Niño and La Niña then back to El Niño and on to La Niña again, and so on. But they don’t cycle between El Niños and La Niñas. There can be back-to-back and back-to-back-back El Niño conditions without La Niña conditions appearing between them. See Figure 1. And there can be the double-dip La Niñas, like we’ve experienced recently.
Figure 1
Part of the confusion stems from the term El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which is really the combination of two names. Some of the confusion stems from the attempts of climate modelers who often treat the processes of ENSO as cycles in their failed attempts to simulate ENSO.
CHAPTER 2.1 DO THE WORDS “OSCILLATION” AND “CYCLE” IN THE NAMES “EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION AND “ENSO CYCLE” CAUSE MISUNDERSTANDINGS?
The words oscillation and cycle are used to describe the processes of El Niño and La Niña events as a single phenomenon. The commonly used term ENSO stands for El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The seemingly redundant term ENSO Cycle (El Niño-Southern Oscillation Cycle) is also used often. Many persons assume because cycle and oscillation are used to describe El Niño and La Niña that the two states oppose and offset one another, that a La Niña will counteract an El Niño. Bad assumptions. They definitely do not work that way.
The most obvious difference between the two states, which we discuss in Sections 1 and 3, is, El Niño events randomly release vast amounts of warm water from below the surface of the west Pacific Warm Pool and spread it across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, but the reverse does not occur during La Niña events.
Are El Niño and La Niña events cyclical or oscillatory? Some parts are, and some parts aren’t. We’ll discuss this further in Chapter 4.17 ENSO – A Cycle or Series of Events?
AN OVERVIEW OF THE TERMS EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION AND ENSO CYCLE
El Niño-Southern Oscillation is the combination of two names. The term is said to have been coined by Rasmussen and Carpenter in their (1982) paper Variations in Tropical Sea Surface Temperature and Surface Wind Fields Associated with the Southern Oscillation/El Niño. Let’s see what Rasmussen and Carpenter have to say about the individual components. Their Introduction begins with the term El Niño:
The interannual variability of sea surface temperature (SST) along the Peru-Ecuador coast is dominated by the El Niño phenomenon. The name El Niño was originally applied to a weak warm coastal current which annually runs southward along the coast of Ecuador around the Christmas season (Wyrtki 1975). In scientific usage, the term has now become more narrowly associated with the extreme warmings which occur every few years (Wyrtki 1979a), and which result in catastrophic effects on the ecological system of the region. In more recent years, Ramage (1975), Weare et al. (1976), and others have used the term to encompass the larger-scale features of the warming event; i.e., the upwelling area along both the equator and the South American coast.
A few paragraphs later, Rasmussen and Carpenter describe the Southern Oscillation after discussing some initial findings from as far back as 1897:
It remained, however, for Sir Gilbert Walker, in a classical series of papers (Walker, 1923, 1924, 1928; Walker and Bliss, 1930, 1932, 1937) to name the SO [Southern Oscillation] and describe the salient features of the surface pressure, temperature and precipitation fluctuations.
The full title of the first Walker paper is WALKER, G. T. (1923). Correlation in seasonal variations of weather. VIII. A preliminary study of world-weather. Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Department 24(Part 4) 75–131.
These papers by Walker were not discussions of El Niño, however. The link between El Niño and the Southern Oscillation wasn’t established until the 1960s. Therefore, the word oscillation in Southern Oscillation does not apply to El Niño and La Niña events or their processes. It only applies to the impacts of El Niño and La Niña on the sea level pressures in Tahiti and Darwin, Australia.
The sequence of papers and the advancement in ENSO research is further described in Rasmussen and Carpenter (1982).
Then there’s the term “ENSO Cycle”. The NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and many others, including me, use the phrase to describe El Niño and La Niña events and the variations from one state to the other. Refer to the CPC’s wonderful series of ENSO-related web pages ENSO Cycle that we’ll use for further discussions in Chapter 4.14 Impacts of ENSO Events on Regional Temperature and Precipitation.
DEFINITIONS OF OSCILLATION AND CYCLE
The Wikipedia definition of Oscillation begins:
Oscillation is the repetitive variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value (often a point of equilibrium) or between two or more different states.
El Niño and La Niña events do not repeat in time, there are very few things that are repetitive in ENSO, so by this definition, ENSO isn’t a true oscillation. In fact, Wikipedia writes in their initial description of El Niño-Southern Oscillation.
El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, is a quasiperiodicclimate pattern that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean roughly every five years.
Oscillation is much easier to write than “quasiperiodic climate pattern”. To add confusion, “pattern” has multiple meanings. It could be used as “pattern in time”, or to describe a “spatial pattern”, as in the warming or cooling of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.
Webster has a number of definitions for the word cycle. The one that fits ENSO best is:
1: a recurring series of events: as…
c : a series of ecological stages through which a substance tends to pass and which usually but not always leads back to the starting point <the cycle of nitrogen in the living world>
Because an El Niño event does not always lead to a La Niña event and because La Niña events can be followed by another independent La Niña event, this definition of cycle under “c” is applicable to ENSO.
The term Southern Oscillation is used to represent the effects of El Niño and La Niña on the sea level pressure of the off-equatorial South Pacific. We’ll discuss it further in Chapter 4.3 ENSO Indices. Also discussed in that chapter, there’s another widely used ENSO index. It represents the effects of El Niño and La Niña events on the sea surface temperature anomalies of the equatorial Pacific region called NINO3.4, which is bounded by the coordinates of 5S-5N, 170W-120W. The Southern Oscillation Index and NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies do NOT represent the process of ENSO. They are used only to indicate the frequency, strength and duration of El Niño and La Niña events. They indicate nothing more. They do not represent the process of ENSO, only its effect on the variable being measured for the index.
RECAP
El Niño-Southern Oscillation and ENSO Cycle are convenient phrases used to describe El Niño and La Niña. El Niño and La Niña events are not repetitive in time so they are not true oscillations. If it’s understood that an ENSO cycle may not lead to another series of El Niño and La Niña events nor even lead to the opposite phase, then cycle is applicable.
It’s a lot easier to write El Niño-Southern Oscillation than it is to write El Niño-La Niña/Sea Level Pressure Difference Between Darwin and Tahiti Quasiperiodic Climate Pattern.
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CHAPTER 4.17: ENSO – A CYCLE OR SERIES OF EVENTS?
If you were to Google ENSO and cycle, you’d get over 700,000 results. Limit your search to Google Scholar and there are more than 39,000 results. Place “ENSO cycle” in quotes and there’s almost 5,800. One of the reasons: ENSO stands for El Niño-Southern Oscillation and oscillation implies cyclical behavior. Another reason: the delayed oscillator theory suggests that one phase leads to the next, and that sure sounds like a cycle. However, is ENSO really a cycle?
The need to treat ENSO as a cycle arises from the attempts to model ENSO with computers. Mother Nature, however, apparently isn’t concerned about our ability to model it. While parts of ENSO act as a cycle, the evolution of an El Niño event requires a basically random event to initiate it. Therefore, to answer the title question of this chapter, ENSO is a combination of the two.
Kessler (2002) Is ENSO a cycle or a series of events? discusses how observational data suggest that El Niño events are event-like disturbances, while other phases display the behavior of a cycle. The abstract reads:
After early ideas that saw El Niños as isolated events, the advent of coupled models brought the conception of ENSO as a cycle in which each phase led to the next in a self-sustained oscillation. Twenty-two years of observations that represent the El Niño and La Niña peaks (east Pacific SST) and the memory of the system (zonal-mean warm water volume) suggest a distinct break in the cycle, in which the coupled system is able to remain in a weak La Niña state for up to two years, so that memory of previous influences would be lost. Similarly, while the amplitude of anomalies persists from the onset of a warm event through its termination, there is no such persistence across the La Niña break. These observations suggest that El Niños are in fact event-like disturbances to a stable basic state, requiring an initiating impulse not contained in the dynamics of the cycle itself.
When studying this subject and looking for additional papers, it is important to isolate discussions of models and the efforts being taken to improve them. Models are not reality. They are attempts to simulate Mother Nature with computers. The discussion of whether ENSO is a cycle or a series of events is an observations-based discussion. Some of the model-based papers do include discussions of observations, but you have to make sure you’re basing your understandings of ENSO on the observations and not the models in those papers. That pretty much holds true for all climate and climate change papers.
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THE REST OF THIS SERIES
The remainder of this series of posts will be taken from the following myths and failed arguments. They’re from Section 7 of my book Who Turned on the Heat? I may select them out of the order they’ve been presented here, and I’ll try to remember to include links to the other posts in these lists as the new posts are published.
A New Myth – ENSO Balances Out to Zero over the Long Term
Failed Argument – El Niño Events Don’t Create Heat
Myth – ENSO Has No Trend and Cannot Contribute to Long-Term Warming
Myth – The Effects of La Niña Events on Global Surface Temperatures Oppose those of El Niño Events
Myth – El Niño Events Dominated the Recent Warming Period Because of Greenhouse Gases
Myth – ENSO Only Adds Noise to the Instrument Temperature Record and We Can Determine its Effects through Linear Regression Analysis, Then Remove Those Effects, Leaving the Anthropogenic Global Warming Signal
Myth – The Warm Water Available for El Niño Events Can Only be Explained by Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas Forcing
Myth – The Frequency and Strength of El Niño and La Niña Events are Dictated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
And I’ll include a few of the failed arguments that have been presented in defense of anthropogenic warming of the global oceans.
Failed Argument – The East Indian-West Pacific and East Pacific Sea Surface Temperature Datasets are Inversely Related. That Is, There’s a Seesaw Effect. One Warms, the Other Cools. They Counteract One Another.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE EL NIÑO AND LA NIÑA AND THEIR LONG-TERM EFFECTS ON GLOBAL SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES?
Why should you be interested? Sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not manmade greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal. That is, the warming of the global oceans has been caused by Mother Nature, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
I’ve recently published my e-book (pdf) about the phenomena called El Niño and La Niña. It’s titled Who Turned on the Heat? with the subtitle The Unsuspected Global Warming Culprit, El Niño Southern Oscillation. It is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 30 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data that’s available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.
Who Turned on the Heat?was introduced in the blog post Everything You Every Wanted to Know about El Niño and La Niña… …Well Just about Everything. The Updated Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing. The book was updated recently to correct a few typos.
Please buy a copy. (Credit/Debit Card through PayPal. You do NOT need to open a PayPal account.). It’s only US$8.00.
VIDEOS
For those who’d like a more detailed preview of Who Turned on the Heat? see Part 1 and Part 2 of the video series The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans. Part 1 appeared in the 24-hour WattsUpWithThat TV (WUWT-TV) special in November 2012. You may also be interested in the video Dear President Obama: A Video Memo about Climate Change.
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george e. smith says:
…maybe some juvenile Alzheimers thrown in on my part
========================
If you even suspect this to be true–I hope it isn’t–it wouldn’t hurt to try something cheap and safe that might help.
@- Liberal Skeptic
“Has the strength of past ENSO ever been plotted against the suns oscillations? That would be interesting to see.”
Yes.
No significant correlation.
The recent warming up to the 1998 hot ENSO were occuring during a period of reducing solar output.
Bob Tisdale says: “I did answer your question. You claim to be from Michigan but English appears to be a second language for you.”
Ah, now the problem is my English. But apparently, I _have_ got my Qs across just fine.
Bob Tisdale says: “Actually I have explained it. Maybe you weren’t paying attention at the time.”
You know, you like to say the AGW scientists don’t know what they are talking about, but at the end of the day they have a spread sheet out of their computers and all the numbers add up. Something goes in, it sloshes about in the modeling computer, but what comes out equals what goes in. You know, that “math” thing?
You have the sloshing about part right, but you have failed to do the math. And in the end, that’s the real deal. Why don’t you just do it and present it in a simple table? Until you do that, your “hypothesis” is a verbal shell game.
No English necessary.
I have long appreciated Bob’s effort in analyzing ENSO. I think he has done a great job of describing the phenomena during the warm phase of the PDO. However, I think he is only half done (sorry Bob). As we have seen with the recent fizzle of what appeared to be a coming El Niño event, it may very well be that ENSO acts differently during the cool phase of the PDO.
IIRC, Bob believes the PDO is mostly an aftereffect of ENSO, but I’m not so sure and I think it may take more study to understand the full interaction of the North Pacific and the Tropical Pacific.
It may turn out that ENSO is a periodic oscillation after all, it just takes decades if not centuries to complete one cycle. And, it may not as well. Since it may very well be that ENSO is driven primarily by changes in the Sun, the answer would depend on whether one thinks the Sun’s changes are periodic and how long that period takes.
Bob Tisdale
Your video takes too long: too long to download and too long to view. You need some format that is readily scanned, so that items of particular interest might be located and read. I am not new to WUWT. I am not new to El Nino, or climatology, nor to any of the natural sciences. I hope that you do not regard me as a troll for asking such questions. I am sorry that you think that I am simply ignoring what you post. I have seen your postings here and scanned them for a comprehensive treatment of the natural processes of El Nino-ENSO, of which I understand to some degree, but in your postings that I have viewed here, I saw nothing that addressed such natural processes in an adequate manner, in my view. I could buy your 561 page book, but so far I have seen no indication that you address such processes in that book, or that you understand the importance of giving such processes a thorough treatment. You see the problem. I hope that you profit from this criticism and that you do not refer me to something else that takes an hour to download (I have a slow satellite) and an hour to view. If you are going to post here, you need to address yourself to the problem of answering questions without attributing trolling to the questioner, or without referring him to such an impossible video, in my view. For the record, I am a confirmed skeptic. Thank you.
trafamadore says:
December 3, 2012 at 8:36 pm
…it seems you really can’t explain where the extra energy comes from.
I think I can.
And I could say it in less than one sentence.
Go on, then. And in less than one sentence, please.
@Bob Tinsdale, So are you saying or agreeing with the notion that La Ninas allow more insolation to be absorbed by the ocean waters and stored by 1) Reduced cloud cover 2) Exposing cooler water to heating (which increases uptake and reduces evaporative loss) 3) Some other mechanism? If so then wouldn’t we expect long term heating to be associated with an increase in the frequency or durations of La Ninas over El Ninos from past rates?
Perhaps there is a relationship between the solar energy content of the ocean and the frequency of El Niño events. In other words, maybe the ocean is trying to reach an energy equilibrium and the El Niño is triggered more often when the energy (heat) is above a certain threshold.
Mr. Tisdale
Thanks for the article. As I was looking at Figure 1, however, I was wondering what makes some of the squiggles El Nino or La Nina, I couldn’t quite remember.. So I looked around and found the ENSO pages here and there I saw some charts with lines for “El Nino Threshold” and “La Nina Threshold.” Now I think I understand. I at least comprehend your point. It would be helpful to passers-by who are working around edges of their knowledge If you added those lines to Figure 1.
“There can be back-to-back and back-to-back-back El Niño conditions without La Niña conditions appearing between them. See Figure 1. And there can be the double-dip La Niñas, like we’ve experienced recently.”
Bob, I read this as meaing that there can be El Ninos followed by El Ninos, without intervening La Ninas, and vice versa. I assumed that the meaning of “double-dip” in this context was a pair of La Ninas without an intervening El Nino, which does not seem to be the case from figure 1, and which you now say you didn’t say or imply.
In which case, what do you mean by “double-dip” if it is not related to two adjacent La Ninas?
Steele says:
December 4, 2012 at 6:30 am
Perhaps there is a relationship between the solar energy content of the ocean and the frequency of El Niño events. In other words, maybe the ocean is trying to reach an energy equilibrium and the El Niño is triggered more often when the energy (heat) is above a certain threshold.
I think there is a strong chance that is to at least some extent true. El Nino/Nina is a fundamental feedback mechanism.
It is interesting that even Mann had paper in 2000 linking volcanoes to more frequent La Ninas and others have published showing increased El Nino in the year following a major explosive eruption and increased likelihood of La Nino three years later.
Though Mann probably did not realise it (he was just wanting to pump up the amount of volcano effect they could add to the models) both these results show Nino/Nina as negative feedback:
Immediate release of ocean heat via El Nino to compensate for the blocking effect of volcanic ash and the later La Nina as a mechanism to recharge the ocean heat content for this loss.
@ur momisugly trafamadore says: December 4, 2012 at 4:45 am
“You know, you like to say the AGW scientists don’t know what they are talking about, but at the end of the day they have a spread sheet out of their computers and all the numbers add up. ”
I can give you a list of numbers, you can plug them into an excel spreadsheet, and they will add up. They will tell you nothing, but they will add up. I guess what you are trying to say is that most alarmists have neat spread sheets with pretty numbers that add up – but tell us nothing.
You have to attach meaning to the numbers, and that is where Alarmists have failed. Their numbers (models) have yet to predict anything accurately, or add to the body of knowledge in general. But like you indicate – they are pretty and add up.
Oh yes, the corollary to the negative feedback is that the climate self compensates for much of the effect of volcanoes. This means that the already exaggerated volcanic cooling built into the models is unjustified.
Significantly, this volcanic cooling is one factor that is used to justify pumping up the CO2 forcing from what the physics actually says it is and the roughly 3 times greater values of the models via unsubstantiated, hypothetical “positive feedbacks”.
BM says: “If so then wouldn’t we expect long term heating to be associated with an increase in the frequency or durations of La Ninas over El Ninos from past rates?”
For surface surface temperatures, no; for ocean heat content, not necessarily.
On the no side: During a period when El Nino events are dominant, more warm water than normal is released and redistributed from the tropical Pacific. Global temperatures have to warm during a multidecadal period when El Niño events dominate.
With respect to ocean heat content, the instrument temperature record for the tropical Pacific indicates it warmed during the 3-year La Niña events of 1954-57, 1973-76 and 1998-01. But it also warmed very substantially in response to the 1995/96 La Niña:
http://i45.tinypic.com/11uz2c0.jpg
BTW: There’s no “n” in Tisdale.
Chris4692: Sorry for not including that in this post. I’ll try to keep that in mind for the remainder of this series. Thanks.
Okay, so what is seen as “cycles” is irregular, somewhat chaotic. Non-linear. BUT, there are patterns, and if you can’t predict when an El Nino or La Nina exactly occur, there are probabilistic ways of looking at them.
So, the finer point noted, take the historical non-cyclical events, if you will, and apply these shifts of something in time to the temperature cycles (are we allowed to say that the temperature profile has cycles or just historical events of rising and falling temperatures?), we see there are correlations. Okay, correlations are not causations. Unless they are. But they could indicate common causuality and so be useful.
If you push definitions too hard you find you know nothing about everything. What you are really saying is that nothing is deterministic, everything is probabilistic. Okay, now can we say that at a coarse level (say, of climate?), there are internal variations due to cross-affecting mechanisms that for periods of time not quite determinable, produce fascimiles of cyclicity that can be used in a skeptical manner to explain the recent past and predict the near future?
Some patterns are illusions, but not all patterns are illusions. And some patterns, though caused by unknown mechanisms, are useful, even if their use is temporary.
elftone says, in reply to trafamadore: “Go on, then. And in less than one sentence, please.”
Thanks. That’s hysterically funny. (And you got me with mug to face. Nothing better than a good sinus wash with coffee.)
An observation related to the article head image, December-February and the sideways V in brown shown as Dry.
On a number of occasions I have noticed a warm streak from the tropical Atlantic diagonally across the Sahara to the middle east, such as in mapped RSS or UAH low troposphere data.
Quite recently I noticed a diagonal cloud street the same location, and perhaps something similar toward southern Africa. Earlier today I captured a full disc image which shows this if not a particularly clear example
A few days ago a high resolution image was constructed which happens to show a cloud street but does not show all of Africa, here (warning, a large image)
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/image-470.jpg
Full disc image captured earlier today 4th Dec is here, low resolution
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/eumetsat_msg_rgb-dec-4.jpg
Is there some kind of similar process going on with the seed core tropical South America instead of Indonesia region?
I note the clouds and warmth seems to avoid tropical Africa. Given this is part of the intense convective driver of the primary global circulation cells (Hadley) which lofts water but will tend to be drier and colder after raining out some of it, could this be involved in northward and southward flow?
mpainter: Sorry if I sounded crabby in my last reply. It happens sometimes when I dictate through speech recognition software. I’m not as selective with wording, but it does save lots of time.
A good starting place is the following post. There lots of other posts linked to it that discuss fundamentals of ENSO processes:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/revised-post-on-foster-and-rahmstorf-2011/
Regards
trafamadore says: “You know, you like to say the AGW scientists don’t know what they are talking about, but at the end of the day they have a spread sheet out of their computers and all the numbers add up.”
Really? Have you ever examined the outputs of climate models, trafamador? I have. For examples, see here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/part-1-%e2%80%93-satellite-era-sea-surface-temperature-versus-ipcc-hindcastprojections/
And here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/492/
And here:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/on-the-ipccs-undue-confidence-in-coupled-ocean-atmosphere-climate-models-a-summary-of-recent-posts/
They’re modeling something, trafamadore, but it’s not this Earth.
@-Bob Tisdale
“It’s not a hypothesis, izen. It’s how the data accounts for its warming.”
No, the data describes the warming, it does not explain it. For instance it does not explain why the ENSO fluctuations have CAUSED ~0.7degC warning in the last few decades. It only describes the warming in the SST data. The data shows what is happening, not why.
You might like to consider that atmospheric changes could be altering the amount of energy lost during the El Nino phases….
@-“Please provide a link to the dataset that presents the instrument-based temperature measurements for “several thousand years of ENSO”.
Well here is one, –
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/yan2011/yan2011soipr.txt
But there are many more here…
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/recons.html
Steveta_uk says: “In which case, what do you mean by “double-dip” if it is not related to two adjacent La Ninas?”
There was a La Niña during the 2010/11 ENSO season followed by a separate La Niña during the 2011/12 ENSO season. So I’m defining a double-dip La Niña as back-to-back ENSO seasons with separate La Niñas. Prior to that, but separated by the 2009/10 El Niño, was another double-dip La Niña. It included the 2007/08 La Niña followed by a separate ENSO season of 2008/09 when sea surface temperatures entered La Niña conditions (but didn’t necessarily qualify as an “official” La Niña according to NOAA ONI index.)
Regards
“You know, you like to say the AGW scientists don’t know what they are talking about, but at the end of the day they have a spread sheet out of their computers and all the numbers add up. Something goes in, it sloshes about in the modeling computer, but what comes out equals what goes in. You know, that “math” thing?”
Years ago I played around with a game named “Traveller”. It was a role-playing game with a serious math fetish. You could use their rules to design scientifically plausible (for that time, and given the limits of ’80s era calculators and PCs) planetary systems, for example. That game made math fun, turned me from a D-student in grade school to an A+ student through junior high and high school.
I had massive spreadsheets that let me use their rules to design super-science vehicles. I remember a tank that was 3m high, 6m wide, 8m long — and with a gun whose “splash” covered the side of a 20-story building. It had a fusion power plant and an anti-gravity drive that let it fly.
All the numbers added up. Something went in, sloshed around, and what came out was valid.
According to the assumptions I built into the spreadsheet, which were the assumptions built into the rules, which were pure, unadulterated fiction.
The “AGW scientists” may have models that “add up”. That “math thing” may line up for their programs. But what are their underlying assumptions? Are those assumptions valid?
So I’m doing a little thinking out loud here. I don’t claim to have any special knowledge but I’m wondering if looking at temperature anomalies over the long term is the correct way to classify El Nino/La Nina events? Might it be more appropriate to look at the magnitude of change from the last min/max?
Right now we’re in ENSO neutral conditions but this year the weather is acting more like a major El Nino is underway…. at least here in California.
The typical California winter starts out in the fall with a number of cold lows dropping down from the Gulf of Alaska and/or “inside sliders” that produce a number of north wind events after their passage. Then during January/February/March the storms come more out of the west with somewhat warmer temperatures. There are seldom any north wind events after these storms. Then there’s a return to the more northern storms in March/April/May with some more north wind events.
La Ninas often lack the warmer mid winter storms producing a colder winter. El Ninos have a much longer period of warm westerly storms often beginning in the fall and lasting through a portion of spring. There are fewer and weaker north wind events.
So far this fall is following the typical El Nino pattern, few early cold storms and north wind events and an early start to the warm westerly storms; i.e. the pineapple express or atmospheric river events.
The temperature anomalies show a substantial positive swing from the last La Nina minimum even though current temperatures haven’t risen to official El Nino status.
Is this going to be a strong El Nino winter with more flooding to come in California? April 15th, 2013 will be a good time to look back on the winter of 2012/13.
“They’re modeling something, trafamadore, but it’s not this Earth.”
A “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist” reference? Nice.