NOAA Mixing Their Niños

Guest post by Paul Homewood

In their attempts to disguise the fact that 2012 will likely turn out to be one of the colder years this century, NOAA have made the ludicrous, and frankly dishonest, claim that this year will be the “hottest La Niña” year on record.

But is it a La Niña year?

NOAA’s own Multivariate ENSO Index is shown below.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/

And the monthly numbers:-

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html

To November, the index averages +0.160, which would be classified as between neutral and weak El Niño. The monthly rankings below also confirm that the index for the year is above average, coming in at 36th out of 63. (The rankings run from 1950-2012). The July ranking of 57 shows that there were only 6 July’s that had a higher MEI.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/rank.html

And did this ENSO transition from negative (La Niña) to positive (El Niño) have any effect on temperature during the year? You betcha!

Take a look at UAH, for instance.

http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

UAH anomalies hit a low point of –0.13C in Jan/Feb, and then bounced up to 0.34C in October, before sinking back to 0.28C in November as the El Niño fizzled out.

For NOAA to pretend that 2012 was a La Nina year, and then use temperatures, heavily affected by El Niño conditions throughout the summer, to “prove” that it is the hottest La Nina year is not something real scientists do.

For a more realistic comparison, the last 12 month period, when ENSO was pretty neutral, was April 2001-March 2002, when the MEI averaged minus 0.003. The UAH temperature anomaly was 0.157C for that period, and compares with a current figure for the last 12 months of 0.150C. This, of course, suggests little underlying change in global temperature for the last 10 years.

But, it seems , NOAA are more interested in propaganda than the truth.