Could we be in for a Super El Niño this year like the one in 1997/98?
Dr. Ryan Maue is seeing hints of a beginning in ocean heat content satellite visualizations.
Maue writes on Twitter:
Quick look at 1997 TC Ocean Heat content anomaly for April 4 shows equatorial extreme + anoms … compare to 2014
And here is April 2014:
Maue writes on Twitter:
Here’s the April 4, 2014 TC Ocean Heat content e.g. depth of 26° isotherm. Like 1997
Certainly, some similarities exist, and it appears the warm pool is just a bit bigger than the one in 1997. If the forecast is to be relied on, we expect to see some sort of ENSO event this year:
![nino34Mon[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/nino34mon1.gif)
More at the WUWT ENSO page
Of course, there’s no doubt that should this build into a full-blown ENSO event, we’ll hear things like “Trenberth’s missing heat has returned, and it’s angry” and “the global warming pause that we didn’t admit existed before is now over”
eric1skeptic says:
April 4, 2014 at 6:36 pm
It’s important to keep in mind there has been no “halt” in temperature rise over the past 17 years. The “pause” mostly means a statistically insignificant rise, but a rise nonetheless.
It depends on your data set. As of the end of March, RSS is flat for 17 years and 8 months: slope = -9.67263e-06 per year
See: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996.55/plot/rss/from:1996.55/trend
Arno Arrak :
please can you give more details on how the extra-warm water interferes with the trade winds of the equatorial western Pacific and makes them relax for a period of months?
John Finn says:
April 4, 2014 at 5:42 pm
We are supposed to be entering (or have entered) a Dalton-like period yet it’s clear that even a moderate El Nino could threaten the 1998 UAH temperature record.
I would be very surprised if it happened in 2014 though. The 13 month average would have to peak in July for the maximum effect of an El Nino. In 1997, the El Nino started in May 1997 and the peak did not come until about March 1998.
Right now, we are still in neutral so there is just not enough time in my opinion to break the 1998 mark this year. As for 2015, who knows?
Eastern Australia often experiences drought during an El Nino, but this time it looks different with a warmer looking Indian Ocean. The first of this years (early) Northwest cloudbands is about to dump billions of dollars of global warming moisture from the Indian Ocean onto Australian farmland, cattle stations and deserts, as it spreads the rain from the N West to the S East. Or so the Weather Channel tells us!
More carbon please!
chuck says:
April 4, 2014 at 1:41 pm
Jeff wrote:
The oceans are much colder today than they were in 1997
Except that thermal expansion resulting in higher sea levels proves you wrong.
.http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/uc_seallevel_2009r2.png
—————————————————————————————————————-
EXCEPT, just eyeballing the PNG chart, it would appear that there has been little to no rise from about 2005 to 2009.
I can’t wait! lol
Greg says:
April 4, 2014 at 4:35 pm
“Spend some time reading up on what is involved in calculating “average” sea height in a stormy sea from a few hundred thousand miles away to within a mm or two, then come back and tell me about how they have no possible “bias”, then we can talk about the political bias of those doing it and presenting the data.”
Along these same lines about accuracy in measuring sea level by satellite. I was just reading up on the Yellowstone Supervolcano again today as it is back in the news. Why is it they can only measure its rate of rise to an accuracy of only 2.5cm per year, but yet can measure the rise of the oceans to 0.1mm/yr ?
stop guessing
El Ninio weak and hurricanes too.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.gif
chuck says
‘When the satellite altimetry confirms the tidal gauge readings you need a better line of argument to confirm “bias” ‘
However the site says –
‘These measurements are continuously calibrated against a network of tide gauges’
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Not “confirmed” but “calibrated against”. So that errors in tidal gauges from subsidence, etc throw out any sort confirmation.
A month ago Judy Curry’s colleague Kim Cobb wrote a comparable article on her blog.
I took the following notes:
“Kim Cobb Georgia Tech
western Pacific equatorial westerly wind bursts preceding big el ninos
http://cobblab.blogspot.ca/2014/03/all-eyes-on-tropical-pacific.html
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZZULPJBNCV0/Uxbc7pexmII/AAAAAAAAASM/Lu4Ewh1foXk/s1600/hovmuller_tao3.jpg “
Uncertainty Monster (or is it Uncertain TAO)?
Kim Cobb writes:
“[…] the TAO array – the only source of direct observations of the tropical Pacific atmospheric winds and subsurface ocean temperature so critical to El Niño’s evolution – is losing buoys at an alarming rate because the ship that serviced them has been sidelined by NOAA’s funding gaps. Data return has dropped to 36% (M. McPhaden, pers. comm.) – the plots you see above are heavily infilled using the few buoys that remain. Just today, the TAO homepage posted a disclaimer warning of poor data quality. This depressing moment in the history of US ocean science is discussed in a recent Nature News piece.”
Main drives to El-Niños are kelvin waves. We have a much more potential kelvin wave, just poking out through the surface. We need more WWB’s to continue pushing the extremely warm body of water to the surface so an El-Niño can materialize. By Summer, El-Niños tend to maximize their heat level, thus, fully “revealing” their selves and what we’re really looking at. Right now, this kelvin wave is the strongest we have had in modern history. In addition, we are in a PDO+ regime, if you haven’t noticed!
Record-breaking Kelvin wave + developing +PDO = Super El-Niño. We have developing WWB’s to keep a healthy flow for the warm basin propagation.
Typical wishy-washy nonsense. Why have we got to wait for sunspots to disappear before there is any solar effect. They didn’t disappear for the entirety of the Dalton Minimum period. They do, however, disappear during each solar minima and were particularly scarce for a long period during the most recent minimum. Solar activity over the past 5 years or so has been at the level it was more than a century ago – global temperatures are not. Solar activity has been in decline for more than 20 years.
Not correct. CO2 has been accumulating at around 2ppm per year. Over a decade this is ~20 ppm which increases the climate forcing ~0.28 w/m2. Natural variability can easily offset that level of forcing. The recent ‘pause’ does not mean a lack of influence from CO2 . However, it does offer support for those who believe sensitivity is lower than 3 deg per CO2 doubling.
I’d settle for that if I were you and forget any notion that the sun is about to deliver a killer blow to AGW theory. It’s not going to happen. The earth is in a long term warming trend (not necessarily a bad thing). It will continue to warm over the decades to come. However, it may not warm as much as the AGW crowd think.
http://www.colby.edu/sts/st215_2004/projects/stations/kwajaleinatoll/index.html
I was under the impression that El ninos require the Pacific trade winds which normally blow in an east west direction reverse so that the warm pool of water is blown east towards the Americas??
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-116.80,2.35,1024
Still blowing east to west.
John Finn
The temperature will go down as a result of the weakening of the polar vortex both the north and south. Clouds will increase over the oceans. Polar low-pressure systems will move in the direction of the tropics.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_o3mr_10_sh_f00.gif
You can already see the asymmetry in the level of ozone over the South Pole.
The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans – Part 1
Bob Tisdale
The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans – Part 2
Bob Tisdale
If a lot of the effect of the el nino is split across years, neither of them will set a record, even if the el nino is very strong.
Adam from Kansas said an interesting thing…CO2 levels jumped at the 1997 El Nino. The oceans store CO2 and when water warms its gas dissolving capacity decreases. It seems that warming might cause CO2 to increase ,not the other way around.
IF such an event is more likely than unlikely, then data must be collected all over that area by all means no matter what the costs may be. But some fearful warmists may sabotage such an operation because the results might endanger their sinecures.
I think we need to look at the longer view. One thing I have noticed is that the La Niña events that follow El Niño events during a -PDO seem to be longer and stronger. So, while the El Niño will most certainly increase the global temperature trend initially, the overall affect after 2-3 years could actually be cooling.
When computing global temperature trends they are usually only considered valid when starting and ending the trends with ENSO consistent points. You can be sure that some alarmists will start showing trends starting at the 1999 La Niña to show serious warming. Once an El Niño starts then the only proper place to start a trend would be a similar spot in the 1997/98 El Niño.
It would be a rare event to have another strong El Nino like the 1997/1998 one so soon after 1998 and during a period when ocean cycles are pointing to a cooling period for the ocean sst . HADSST2 and HADSST3 for the Northern Hemisphere show a decline during the past 10 years .
If true, Californy & the Amer southwest would benefit, at least next winter. And here in the east US we would get rid of these nasty arctic-dominated winters. So go for it, El Nino.