NOAA reaches out to the blogosphere

UPDATE: NOAA has corrected the typos in the illustrations at the new reanalysis intercomparison website.

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NOAA opened two new blogs recently…and a new reanalysis intercomparison website, with a plethora of ENSO-related illustrations.

NOAA ENSO BLOG

I introduced the new NOAA ENSO blog at the end of the recent postThe 2014/15 El Niño – Part 10 – June 2014 Update – Still Waiting for the Feedbacks. With the length of that post, you may have missed it.

The new NOAA ENSO blog is hosted by Michelle L’Heureux and Emily Becker of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and Anthony Barnston of Columbia’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). So far, the posts have been information-filled and geared toward readers without technical backgrounds.

Make sure you bookmark that new blog. Their next post is about the impacts of the evolving El Niño on U.S. weather this boreal winter.

NOAA HURRICANE BLOG

On May 29 this year, NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) published their introductory post at their new blog called the Inside the Eye. So far, that’s the only post. I look forward to their future posts.

NOAA REAL-TIME MULTIPLE REANALYSIS INTERCOMPARISON WEBSITE

Back at the NOAA ENSO blog, Emily Becker introduced the new Real Time Multiple Ocean Reanalysis Intercomparison website in her June 5^th post Details on the June 2014 ENSO discussion. They present the outputs of reanalysis models from NCEP, ECMWF , JMA , GFDL , NASA , BOM. Figure 1 is a sample illustration available from the new Real Time Multiple Ocean Reanalysis Intercomparison website. It shows the subsurface temperature anomalies for the equatorial Pacific (1S-1N) from those reanalyses. It can be found under the heading of SPATIAL MAPS and it’s identified as “Temperature anom. in 1S-1N (X-Z section): last month” there.

Figure 1

I’ve been using the similar pentadal (5-day) cross sections from the NCEP GODAS website for one my animations in my series of posts about the 2014/15 El Niño. (Latest example is here.)

I’m looking forward to trying to use the “Temperature anom. in 5N-10N (X-Z section)” to capture the off-equatorial Rossby wave returning warm leftover warm water from the 2014/15 El Niño as it heads back to the west at the end of the El Niño. Example: we can see the Rossby wave in the 1998 off-equatorial (5N-10N) cross sections following the peak of the 1997/98 El Niño. See Animation 1.

Animation 1

In the past, one of the best ways I’ve been able to show that off-equatorial downwelling Rossby wave is with an animation of sea level residuals from JPL. (See the animation here.)

You may also find the y-z sections of the Pacific informative. Figure 2 is a view, looking to the west, of the subsurface temperature anomalies in the eastern tropical Pacific (120W-90W) for May 1997. The warm anomalies at depth on the equator are caused by the downwelling Kelvin wave that initiated the 1997/98 El Niño.

Figure 2

A year later, May 1998, in Figure 3, we can see the impact of the upwelling Kelvin wave (which ended the 1997/98 El Niño) on the equatorial Pacific, and we can also see the well-formed off-equatorial Rossby at about 5N-10N as its preparing to return the leftover warm water back to the western tropical Pacific.

Figure 3

Animations of those and other cross sections and the maps available from the Real Time Multiple Ocean Reanalysis Intercomparison website should be helpful for an upcoming post about the delayed-oscillator theory of ENSO. IRI used to have a relatively simple presentation of the delayed-oscillator theory but I can no longer find it at their website, after their recent changes there.

Wander around the Real Time Multiple Ocean Reanalysis Intercomparison website. There are numerous things there worth exploring.

NOTE TO THE NOAA REAL-TIME MULTIPLE REANALYSIS INTERCOMPARISON WEBSITE

Temperature is spelled wrong in many of the illustrations available from your website.

Other than that, thanks for a great teaching tool. I look forward to using it.

Regards

Bob