From AGU:
The warm and wet winter of 1997 brought California floods, Florida tornadoes, and an ice storm in the American northeast, prompting climatologists to dub it the El Niño of the century. Earlier this year, climate scientists thought the coming winter might bring similar extremes, as equatorial Pacific Ocean conditions resembled those seen in early 1997. But the signals weakened by summer, and the El Niño predictions were downgraded. Menkes et al. used simulations to examine the differences between the two years.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is defined by abnormally warm sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean and weaker than usual trade winds. In a typical year, southeast trade winds push surface water toward the western Pacific “warm pool”–a region essential to Earth’s climate. The trade winds dramatically weaken or even reverse in El Niño years, and the warm pool extends its reach east.
Scientists have struggled to predict El Niño due to irregularities in the shape, amplitude, and timing of the surges of warm water. Previous studies suggested that short-lived westerly wind pulses (i.e. one to two weeks long) could contribute to this irregularity by triggering and sustaining El Niño events.
To understand the vanishing 2014 El Niño, the authors used computer simulations and examined the wind’s role. The researchers find pronounced differences between 1997 and 2014. Both years saw strong westerly wind events between January and March, but those disappeared this year as spring approached. In contrast, the westerly winds persisted through summer in 1997.
In the past, it was thought that westerly wind pulses were three times as likely to form if the warm pool extended east of the dateline. That did not occur this year. The team says their analysis shows that El Niño’s strength might depend on these short-lived and possibly unpredictable pulses.
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I suggested couple of months ago that El Ninos are triggered by rapidly cooling Northern Hemisphere (Measured by UAH MSU NH dataset) and it seems that my EL Nino predictor is working pretty well:
As you can see, for the current year cooling of the NH wasnt strong enough to trigger full scale El Nino.
Ok, Html links are not working, so here is the link:
So why wasn’t there a rapid cooling just before the El Niño in the early ’80s? The cooling then was even weaker than the cooling this year that’s highlighted with a blue circle, yet it resulted in an El Niño. Also, the El Niño in 2002 wasn’t preceded by any cooling.
I fine tuned the algorithm little bit, so now it also predicts correctly the 1982 El Nino event.. So only false positive is 2004. As you can see it has predicted correctly all the major El nino events.
I’m told that, in Spanish, “El Niño” means “The Niño”. Just fyi.
It means “The Boy,” which is a reference to the Christ child, since the reported phenomenon usually occurs around Christmas time.
Pools of warm water known as Kelvin waves can be seen traveling eastward along the equator (black line) in this Sept. 17, 2009, image from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite.
Hmm…if it’s a Sept. 17, 2009, image, why does the image itself have “Sep 20 1997”?
Seriously ? 🙂
Why does the rain in Spain fall mainly on the plain?
Weather models show a powerful,Pacific jet stream aimed at the West Coast next week. Question in my mind is not will it happen but how far south will the storms/fronts be and how far south will the rains fall?
Certainly some areas with severe drought will get beneficial rains.
The El Niño is interesting , but the trade winds are driven almost directly by Solar Energy Input driving the Hadley Cells!! Reduced Solar input generates lessor Hadley cells causing less energetic trade winds.
Most all want an El Niño so that there will be rain/snow in California. Unfortunately, that “weather” is driven by the Jet Stream which is controlled by the Northern Pacific Ocean water temperature. Japan’s waters are very cold. Washington State’s waters are warm. Jet Steam continues its path of south by Japan, north by Washington State. This gives no rain for California!!
Humans should not be living in areas outside the semi-humid, humid tropics, sub-tropics. You basicallly cannot do much with your life (swimming, Sports, visual natural beauty, being able to be outside all the time, lighting, real rain, not drizzle, thunder, real storms, no cold, warmth) recent happyness Gallup polls put top 12 ALL countries within tropics subtropics, mainly South America.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/worlds-happiest-country-would-you-believe-paraguay-n110981
Talk about the utter stupidity, naivety and ignorance of the warmist ideology. Warmth is related to happinessexcept in extreme poverty (africa)
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/color_newdisp_anomaly_global_lat_lon_ophi0.png
As Joe Bastardi has said we presently have a weak El Nino and this chart shows it. It may not persist but it is present on this chart.
More importantly the climate is acting in response to a very weak El Nino. If we revert to neutral that could mean even colder weather for the U.S.A if AO stays negative.
At least we are in Nov and not June. Even a little bit of persistence will mean relatively warm SSTs where it counts, during the big rain months of DJF.
(Quoting)
“In the past, it was thought that westerly wind pulses were three times as likely to form if the warm pool extended east of the dateline. That did not occur this year. The team says their analysis shows that El Niño’s strength might depend on these short-lived and possibly unpredictable pulses.”
Dudes, sounds like back to the ol’ drawing board to me…
Why this uncertainty? Just build a computer model. Geez. This is the 21th century.
You know, maybe the climate system IS chaotic.