Updates to and ENSO Observations from the WUWT Ocean Reference Page

Ric Werme says: April 26, 2013 at 11:22 am
Shane O. says: April 26, 2013 at 11:25 am
In order to avoid further confusion I’ve added “Including 7 Day Forecast” to all of the NYCOM graphics titles in this article and on the WUWT Ocean Reference Page.

rgbatduke says: April 26, 2013 at 10:18 am
As for its basic assertion, that the Earth’s climate system is rife with, and perhaps best described by, precisely these sorts of non-equilibrium self-organizing chaotic patterns, I think there is no doubt of it.
It seems that all of the elements are there, e.g. in his article Phil Salmon wrote of Matthias Bertram’s thesis that:

The author goes on to analyze several experimental non-equilibrium pattern systems, including the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. He outlines the essential conditions for the operation of a nonlinear oscillator such as a far from equilibrium state, and an “excitable medium”, that is, a medium within which localized positive feedbacks can be initiated and run their course according to their associated refractory period.

In terms of that “excitable medium”,

“The oceanic or limnological Mixed Layer;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_layer
is a layer in which active turbulence has homogenized some range of depths. The surface mixed layer is a layer where this turbulence is generated by winds, cooling, or processes such as evaporation or sea ice formation which result in an increase in salinity.” The atmospheric mixed layer is a zone having nearly constant potential temperature and specific humidity with height. The depth of the atmospheric mixed layer is known as the mixing height. Turbulence typically plays a role in the formation of fluid mixed layers.”
“The mixed layer plays an important role in the physical climate. Because the specific heat of ocean water is much larger than that of air, the top 2.5 m of the ocean holds as much heat as the entire atmosphere above it. Thus the heat required to change a mixed layer of 25 m by 1 °C would be sufficient to raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 10 °C. The depth of the mixed layer is thus very important for determining the temperature range in oceanic and coastal regions. In addition, the heat stored within the oceanic mixed layer provides a source for heat that drives global variability such as El Nino.

X Anomaly says: April 26, 2013 at 3:51 pm
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/clim/sst.shtml
Yes, that’s very helpful I’ve added the following images to the Ocean Reference page:
Global Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly – Daily
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Global Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly – Weekly
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Global Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly – Monthly
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Global Sea Surface Temperature
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Also the following Time based Longitude/Latitude Sea Surface Temperature images are interesting in visualizing ENSO as Non-Equilibrium Pattern System:
Yearly Trends
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Long Term Anomaly (3.5N-3.5S)
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Longitudinally Averaged Anomaly
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"] NOAA – Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Thank you

dbstealey says: April 26, 2013 at 8:15 pm
I would save that excellent and fun question to sandbag the next presumptuous Warmist commenter pretending to pass himself off as a climate expert.
It would be even better asked in person! ☺
I can’t even get a Warmist to comment on my threads these days, there has to be someone out there who can explain how this all ties back to anthropogenic CO2 emissions… I wonder if the Warmist blog troll funding is drying up…

phlogiston says: April 27, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Further to Wang et al.2012:

“3. ENSO mechanisms
The theoretical explanations of ENSO can be loosely grouped into two frameworks. First, El Niño is one phase of a self-sustained, unstable, and naturally oscillatory mode of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system. Second, El Niño is a stable (or damped) mode triggered by or interacted with stochastic forcing or noise such as westerly wind bursts and Madden-Julian Oscillation events (e.g., Gebbie et al., 2007) and the tropical instability waves in the eastern Pacific Ocean (e.g., An, 2008). In either framework, ENSO involves the positive ocean-atmosphere feedback of Bjerknes (1969). The early idea of Wyrtki’s (1975) sea level “buildup” in the western Pacific warm pool treats El Niño as an isolated event. Wyrtkisuggested that prior to El Niño, the easterly trade winds strengthened, and there was a “buildup” in sea level in the western Pacific warm pool. A “trigger” is a rapid collapse of the easterly trade winds. When this happens, the accumulated warm water in the western Pacific would surge eastward in the form of equatorial downwelling Kelvin waves to initiate an El Niño event.”
“The issue of ENSO as a self-sustained oscillation mode or a stable mode triggered by random forcing is not settled. It is possible that ENSO is a self-sustained mode during some periods, a stable mode during others, or a mode that is intermediate or mixed between the former and the latter. The predictability of ENSO is more limited if ENSO is a stable mode triggered by stochastic forcing than if ENSO is a self-sustained mode, because the former depends on random disturbances.” http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/cdeser/Docs/submitted.wang.enso_review.pdf

phlogiston says: April 28, 2013 at 8:58 am
What do Wang et al. mean by “stochastic forcing”? Periodic forcing I can understand, from orbital, tidal etc rhythms, but what would provide stochastic forcing?
Per Wang et al.:

“3.2. A stable mode triggered by stochastic forcing
Another view of ENSO is that El Niños are a series of discrete warm events punctuating periods of neutral or cold conditions (La Niñas). That is, ENSO can be characterized as a stable (or damped) mode triggered by stochastic atmospheric/oceanic forcing (e.g., Lau, 1985; Pendland and Sardeshmukh, 1995; Moore and Kleeman, 1999; Philander and Fedorov, 2003; Kessler, 2003). This hypothesis proposes that disturbances external to the coupled system are the source of random forcing that drives ENSO. An attractive feature of this hypothesis is that it offers a natural explanation in terms of noise for the irregular behavior of ENSO variability. Since this view of ENSO requires the presence of “noise”, it easily explains why each El Niño is distinct and El Niño is so difficult to predict (e.g., Landsea and Knaff, 2000; Philander and Fedorov, 2003). The external atmospheric forcing may include the Madden-Julian Oscillation and westerly wind bursts (e.g.,Gebbie et al., 2007), and the oceanic noise may involve the tropical instability waves (e.g., An, 2008).
No matter whether El Niño is a self-sustained oscillator or a stable mode triggered by stochastic forcing, El Niño begins with warm SST anomalies in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific. After an El Niño reaches its mature phase, negative feedbacks are required to terminate growth of the mature El Niño anomalies in the central and eastern Pacific. In other words, the negative feedbacks of the delayed oscillator, the recharge oscillator, the western Pacific oscillator, and the advective-reflective oscillator may be still valid for demise of an El Niño, even if El Niño is regarded as a stable mode triggered by stochastic forcing. As discussed by Mantua and Battistti (1994), a sequence of independent warm events can still be consistent with delayed oscillator physics, since the termination of an individual El Niño event still requires negative feedback that can be provided by wave reflection at the western boundary.”

This paper, “Ensemble-mean dynamics of the ENSO recharge oscillator under state-dependent stochastic forcing” by Jin et al., 2007;
http://www.academia.edu/2780504/Ensemble-mean_dynamics_of_the_ENSO_recharge_oscillator_under_state-dependent_stochastic_forcing
states that:

“In this paper, the conceptual recharge oscillator model for the El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) is utilized to study the influence of fast variability such as that associated with westerly wind bursts (WWB) on dynamics of ENSO and predictability. The ENSO-WWB interaction is simply represented by stochastic forcing modulated by ENSO-related sea surface temperature(SST) anomalies. An analytical framework is developed to describe the ensemble-mean dynamics of ENSO under the stochastic forcing. Numerical ensemble simulations verify the main results derived from the analytical ensemble-mean theory: the state-dependent stochastic forcing enhances the instability of ENSO and its ensemble spread, generates asymmetry in the predictability of the onsets of cold and warm phases of ENSO, and leads to an ensemble-mean bias that may eventually contribute to a climate mean state bias.”
“More-over, not only is ENSO dependent on fast atmospheric variability, but MJO and WWB activity is modulated by temperature anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific [Keen, 1982; Luther et al. , 1983; Gutzler , 1991; Kessler et al., 1995; Kessler and Kleeman, 2000; Vecchi and Harrison, 2000; Yu et al., 2003; Eisenman et al., 2005; Perez et al., 2005]. As conjectured by Keen [1982], Lukas [1988] and Lengaigne et al. [2004], an individual MJO/ WWB can shift the warm pool eastward, making it more likely for more MJO/WWB events to be generated and thus further extensions of the warm water front and developments of Kelvin pulses, which may contribute to the generation of a mature El Nin˜o event. This type of fast and coupled interaction, which can be parameterized in terms of a multiplicative noise source, may have an important influence on ENSO predictability [Lengaigne et al. ,2004], the instability of ENSO [Eisenman et al. , 2005], andthe statistical probability distribution of ENSO [Perez et al. ,2005]. The aim of our study is to develop a new theoretical framework that captures and synthesizes these effects andillustrates the main qualitative differences between the additive [e.g., Penland and Sardeshmukh, 1995; Thompson and Battisti, 2000; Zavala-Garay et al., 2005] and state-dependent (multiplicative) stochastic forcing on the dynamics of ENSO.”
“The stochastic forcing terms [sx(t)G] and [asx(t)G] represent the effects of fast atmospheric wind anomalies (short de-correlation timescales) on the eastern equatorial SST anomalies and the equatorial heat content variations, respectively. The proportionality coefficient a reflects the fact that the same stochastic wind stress can serve as the forcing for SST and also for the recharge and discharge of the equatorial heat-content anomalies.”

Danny says: April 30, 2013 at 1:43 am
The link to Scaffeta’s forecast page seems to be broken.
Corrected, thanks.