From the Georgia Institute of Technology:
Looking at El Niño’s past to predict its future
The El Niño Southern Oscillation is Earth’s main source of year-to-year climate variability, but its response to global warming remains highly uncertain.
Scientists see a large amount of variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) when looking back at climate records from thousands of years ago. Without a clear understanding of what caused past changes in ENSO variability, predicting the climate phenomenon’s future is a difficult task. A new study shows how this climate system responds to various pressures, such as changes in carbon dioxide and ice cover, in one of the best models used to project future climate change.
“All of the natural climate fluctuations are in this model, and what we see is that the El Niño responds to every single one of these, significantly,” said Kim Cobb, an associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon controls how the climate changes in the tropics (and also influences weather patterns elsewhere, including the United States).
The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). The study was published November 27 in the journal Nature.
In the study, researchers analyzed a series of transient Coupled General Circulation Model simulations forced by changes in greenhouse gases, orbital forcing, meltwater discharge and the ice-sheet history throughout the past 21,000 years. This is farthest in the past that this model has been run continuously, which required supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research to be dedicated to the simulation for months.
Some key findings of the new simulations of El Niño over the past 21,000 years:
- Strengthening ENSO over the current interglacial period, caused by increasing positive ocean-atmosphere feedbacks
- ENSO characteristics change drastically in response to meltwater discharges during early deglaciation
- Increasing deglacial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tend to weaken ENSO
- Retreating glacial ice sheets intensify ENSO
“The model gives some very clear predictions that are very much in line with some of the best understandings of the physics controlling the El Niño system,” Cobb said. “It shows that this climate system in the model is sensitive to a variety of different natural climate changes that occurred over the last 21,000 years.”
In order to understand how El Niño responds to various climate forces, researchers test model predictions of past El Niño changes against actual records of past ENSO activity. Kim Cobb published several such records, including a large fossil coral dataset published in Science last year.
“The more we can close the loop between what this model says happened in the past and what the data say happened in the past, then we can project forward our improved understanding to understand future El Niño,” Cobb said.
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, under award number NSFC41130105, and the Department of Energy, under award number MOST2012CB955200. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.
###
CITATION: Zhengyu Liu, et al., “Evolution and forcing mechanisms of El Niño over the past 21,000 years.” (Nature, November 2014). http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v515/n7528/full/nature13963.html
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I remain perplexed by the enormous gap between knowledge and wisdom demonstrated by so many supposed intelligent people. The subject of this column was all a gaga about the then pending super el nino last March. I wonder what her perspective is now ?
These guys are geniuses. Hey, I want to predict the winner of next years Formula One season. Based on their method, here’s how:
When I was a kid I loved Formula One and collected lots of magazine pictures of F1 cars. With that data and the immense processing power of my new iPad Air 2, I have written a simulation of past F1 racing seasons, including everything I know about the physics of racing, including info from magazine picture about tire sizes and compounds, suspension layouts, engine sizes and power, aerodynamics, track layouts and the personality profiles of prominent drivers from magazine articles.
And my model works great! Back then, Mercedes and Auto Union won a bunch of races, later Lotus and BRM, then Ferrari, Honda, Renault and so on. All I need to do is tweak my data until the results match reality. Maybe someday, with more money, I could research how the cars were actually designed and built, whether the drivers got drunk the night before the race and the effect of rule changes on the outcomes, but hey these are things I don’t know anything about, and therefore they are irrelevant to the success of my model.
And with this great model at my disposal, I can tell you now with 95% certainty who will win the 2015 F1 championship – it will be BZZZ…FFTSZZZ…Please insert another dollar to continue.
Does it do weather?
Judging by the success of climate models so far, we’ll be funding this one well into the next little ice age.
Sort of like this:
“I AM CHAOS YOU WILL NEVER KNOW ME”
You will be within me on the other hand and know me by my deeds.
Here is are my predictions for the next three El Ninos up to 2025
The specific predictions are: 2015-16 –> 2024-25 with 2019-20 as a possible half cycle.
and here are my supporting arguments:
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/evidence-that-strong-el-nino-events-are_13.html
Kim Cobb,
“Just give us some time and we will have so much new data fraud, so many new lies on the record no one but us will know how to undo the lies all you little people will pay taxes to we and our overlords of the world order of taxes and slaves.”
Took 5 Billion or so years of chaos to get to the weather this moment in time, next hour the same, and too next month/year/50 years. Load all that data into a computer and just maybe chaos will not change things tomorrow any how. The wild wind goes where the wild wind goes.
Line 1 above:
“The El Niño Southern Oscillation is Earth’s main source of year-to-year climate variability, but its response to global warming remains highly uncertain.”
Question:
While you are at it, how will ENSO respond to relatively flat global temperatures such as Earth has experienced for the past 18 years?
How will ENSO respond to global cooling, which is more probable than global warming in the next decades?
My point is the above implied assumption that global warming will resume after “The Pause” is improbable.
I suggest the next climate change after The Pause will be global cooling that could be mild or severe. I suggest global cooling will bring increased storm intensity and greater hardship for humanity and the environment, proportional to the degree of global cooling that occurs. I suggest that within reasonably foreseeable ranges, global warming is beneficial and global cooling is harmful. Finally, I suggest that ALL of the statements in this paragraph are the OPPOSITE of IPCC/warmist propaganda, and all are more technically correct than warmist forecasts of future global warming catastrophe.
It should be noted that to date, every scary prediction by global warming alarmists has failed to materialize, and these people have no predictive skill and no scientific credibility.
Yet this same model failed to predict the Non-El Nina were in right now… hmmmmmmmmm
I should have stated the current NON-El Nino/La Nina…. Brain fart..
Dr. Svalgaard with a group of solar scientists employs geomagnetic information to reconstruct the historic sunspot number. When the geomagnetic signal is added to the normalized CO2 data and correlated to the NOAA’s Global Land Temperature anomaly, it shows that:
1880 –1985 nearly all of the GLT rise is due to natural causes.
1985 – 2003 is totally due to the CO2 rise (or some unknown variable factor), since the geomagnetic has a moderate decline.
2003 – 2014 the geomagnetic is nearly flat, which suggests a possibility that the CO2 effect (if responsible) has reached saturation point (hence the current global temperature plateau) implying no further temperature rise in the foreseeable future. I hope to show graphs (the data included !) soon.
“””1985 – 2003 is totally due to the CO2 rise (or some unknown variable factor), since the geomagnetic has a moderate decline.”””
your unknown variable is part of the (Synonym accretive) effect.
Hoping Dr. S., catches the Frisch presentation whilst he is at the AGU updating the sunspot count series.. “The 2015 Revision of the Sunspot Number”
“Charting the Interstellar Magnetic Field behind the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) Ribbon (Invited)”
Monday, December 15, 201405:30 PM – 05:45 PM
Moscone West
2012
Magnetic fields are a key component of the interstellar medium. Starlight polarized by aligned charged interstellar dust grains provided the first evidence of a magnetic field in the solar galactic environment. The IBEX Ribbon of energetic neutral atoms traces the interstellar magnetic field draping over the heliosphere. Magnetic fields thread nearby interstellar clouds, which include both partially-ionized low-density gas, as well as dense gas. Rudimentary maps of the interstellar magnetic field direction in the solar vicinity, based on polarized starlight, show that multiple field directions are found locally. The dominant local magnetic structure has a direction matching that of the magnetic field traced by the IBEX Ribbon. This magnetic structure, and the kinematics of nearby interstellar gas, suggest that the Loop I superbubble extends to the solar vicinity. A separate magnetic filament with intriguing properties has been identified. The structure of the magnetic field within 40 pc is related to the distribution and kinematics of local clouds that are observed through the absorption lines they form in stellar spectra.
(my bold)
Also, Planck sees some coherent Galactic Magnetic Field structures and is likening them to the Parker Spiral..
Just reading this summary, it seems to me all the variables are of the dependent variety. If they know what causes climate change, why not tell us?
Back in the 1960s we punched cards with a line of program. Then we took the deck of cards, our program, to a box and placed it therein. Later someone would carry the box to another building and pass the box through an opening and into the computer room. The packets of cards would be carefully placed and a button pushed. Cards and a paper sheet (or several) would make their way back to our desks. We usually got 24 hour turn-around. If a mistake was made on the cards – you just lost a day in your endeavor.
If you made a conceptual mistake the computer might run for many hours and produce many pages of output. It did not know you made a conceptual mistake.
Thus, I find the following enough to make one shudder: “. . . required supercomputers … to be dedicated to the simulation for months.”
Grey hair, anyone?
In addition I would get back a roll of teleprinter punched tape.
Computers are faster than a slide-rule. But if the equation is wrong to begin with…?
PS A slide-rule tended to require you understood the equation. A computer does not.
Hello Hmm, A. Timmermann seems to be involved in this. Timing is interesting.
michael
“The model gives some very clear predictions that are very much in line with some of the best understandings of the physics controlling the El Niño system,”
So Georgia Institute of Technology have a creative writing department too.
Keywords: model, some, predictions, some, understandings
“Scientists see a large amount of variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) when looking back at climate records from thousands of years ago. Without a clear understanding of what caused past changes in ENSO variability, predicting the climate phenomenon’s future is a difficult task.”
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. — Niels Bohr.
Georgia Tech should just stick to breeding USPGA golfers …
It disturbs me that these folks purport to model El Nino back 20 k years. The sea level was at least 300 feet lower until 14 k years ago. Circulation was a lot different. In particular, the Bering Strait was above water so no circulation there.
It would take a lot of convincing to make me believe the model is particularly valid because the first third of the period it covers was not the same as things are now.
commieBob, Tovarich, good point on tthe 300ft lower. This of course means a change in ocean pressure,also as you stated “Cirulation” -both ocean and trade winds if we can call them that. Also in the area where El Ninos form, is the sea floor still the same? Could plat movements shifted them up or down. Also if they (El Ninos) from even in the same area?How do you write a program-Model wheres some or all of the variablies can change not just ever thousand ,but hundred, ten or single years? But I’m open minded! smile
michael
ARRG circulation .. darn good thing I have no ego
First question I’d have is what “actual records” they are using to tune their model? If those records are being adjusted to accommodate the model as has been repeatedly done with current climate models, “disappearing” the Medieval Warm Period is a good example, then the whole thing is just another exercise in self-delusion. In any event, I’m with the thought that if predicting weather more than a few days in advance is beyond our modeling reach, modeling climate for decades into the future seems pretty much a futile exercise.
I don’t believe we can even paint the “envelope of possible excursions” for such a monstrous, chaotic system other than that already painted in macro strokes by the past 500,000 years of climate history. That record marks the upper and lower limits of Warm Periods and Ice Ages, demonstrates the approximate period of the cycle, indicates the cyclic slide from warm to cold is relatively slow and the rise from cold to warm is relatively rapid. In between the cyclic highs and lows, a band of possibilities is painted that implies chaotic temperature excursions within that band with lives of their own making. Neither cataclysmic meteor strikes nor horrific volcanic episodes have nudged that macro temperature envelope one detectable whit.
Rotsa’ ruck figuring the next 100 years, boys and girls!
2 Dec: WaPo: Jason Samenow: Why profuse autumn snow in Eurasia may portend a brutal East Coast winter
The increase in snow cover extent this October in Eurasia was fast and furious. That’s a compelling signal, says pioneering seasonal forecaster Judah Cohen, that the eastern U.S. faces a cold and snowy winter.
Cohen, who directs seasonal forecasting efforts at the firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), a unit of Verisk Climate, discovered the linkage between the behavior of Eurasian fall snow cover and eastern U.S. winters nearly 15 years ago. He has since applied the relationship in his winter outlooks and established an impressive track record. His outlooks have been on the money many years and at least in the ballpark most others…
Q) Besides Eurasian snow cover, what other important factor(s) informed your outlook?
Cohen: Like everyone else, we include the El Nino Southern Oscillation (El Nino). But the developing El Nino looks to be weak and was not much of a factor in our model. I am encouraged that the warming sea surface temperatures have become stronger in the central equatorial Pacific relative to the eastern equatorial Pacific, which is complementary to our forecast based on snow cover, favoring cold temperatures in the eastern U.S…
Q) The National Weather Service has assigned “equal chances” for a cold or warm winter for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Why do you think it’s reluctant to incorporate the AO-Eurasian snow cover relationship – which would suggest cold – more prominently in its outlook?
Cohen: It has been my opinion for my entire career that El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is too heavily emphasized in seasonal forecasting, especially for temperature, at all the national forecast centers, not just the National Weather Service…ETC
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/12/02/why-prosperous-autumn-snows-in-eurasia-may-portend-a-brutal-east-coast-winter/
Thanks for that link. The climate scientist quoted refers to an “arctic oscillation” in the article. I looked up ref’s to the connection between the “arctic oscillation” and the “polar vortex” and found this NOAA page:
How is the polar vortex related to the Arctic Oscillation?
January 20, 2014
http://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/how-polar-vortex-related-arctic-oscillation
A couple interesting facts here. First, as described on this page climate scientists think of the “polar vortex” as a stratospheric phenomenon having to do with the jet stream. They refer to the “arctic oscillation” as the surface manifestation of the polar vortex.
Another interesting fact is the terminology is the reverse of how we commonly think of it. That is, we have been thinking of a “strong polar vortex” as the case when we have these extreme temperature drops in the northern hemisphere. But according to this page this happens when there is a “weak polar vortex”, and the arctic oscillation is said to be in a negative phase in that case.
Another puzzling fact is the page as of its publication January 20, 2014 said we had not yet experienced in 2014 this negative phase arctic oscillation, where the extreme temperature drops occur. But I thought that that HAD already been observed by then, in regards to references (perhaps inaccurately) of a “strong polar vortex” by then by meteorologists.
But the most surprising aspect of this page, considering it’s by NOAA, is this paragraph:
“While the Arctic Oscillation has not yet experienced a strongly negative phase this year, scientists are noticing a trend toward more frequent negative phases since the mid-1990s. No one really understands why but a lot of ideas currently being researched, including whether natural decadal variability, sea ice loss, and the influence of snow cover on the ground are playing a role.”
This seems to be acknowledging that we have been having more extremely cold Winters at least in the northern hemispheres the last few years. You wouldn’t know that from the way NOAA has been discussing only record high temperatures this year, confirming, they have asserted, global warming.
Also, it is misleading for NOAA and other government climate agencies to say an extreme cold Winter is just “weather” and not “climate”, when in fact there has been a trend of extremely cold Winters in the northern hemisphere.
Bob Clark
I was going echo Bob and everyone else that one cannot forecast the ENSO.
But that is only partly true.
A very accurate forecast would be “up and down and up and down and up and down …” between +/- 2.7C.
Cause that is what it does going back 140 years. Do I get to have a supercomputer now.
http://s18.postimg.org/d7s07ktw9/ENSO_Trade_Winds_1871_2014.png
A stochastic system is unpredictable. It may seem to be constrained to a particular variable range for a period of time, but within that time span it varies randomly. A longer time span may show a much wider range of variability, as some of the ENSO studies referenced above conclude. But it remains unpredictable.
Markopanama…that is a classic!!
Another infantile outrageous claim by true believer activists.
A) A very expensive computer that is expensive to maintain and run.
B) A very complex multilayered program that is not validated or certified.
C) Use of coral séances to fantasize past ENSO events, call these predictions and add to the mix.
D) Use of imaginary ENSO events, force feed CO2 wherever
E) Claim mystical glaciation alignments
F) Run simulation till the owners of the computer kick them out
G) Claim nonsense is world shaking
Yawn! Another day in the religion of CAGW.
I am not a scientist, but it would seem that some of the criticism and ridicule of “models” should rather be directed at the misuse of models. Computer models are helpful, are they not, in gaining some insights into how complex natural processes interact with each other and are effected by changes in the variables? Much of our understanding of the astronomical universe is based on computer simulations, for example – with the proviso that they are continually being re-examined in the light of new data obtained from observation.
Ken,
It is not that simple. When the models start with a computer model for a star and they try to kludge it down to a planet, you end up with a bastardized, largely false model. Do stars have night-time? No. These climate models do not have night-time, during which the real planet sheds huge amounts of energy and all the supposed greenhouse gases spend their time cooling the atmosphere quite effectively. Furthermore, these gases are saturate during the day, both absorbing and emitting IR radiation, pretty much having no overall effect. During the night, with no solar energy input, these gases serve as to allow large energy leakage to space.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you are talking about or vice-versa. I was referring to model simulations for star formations, galaxies, super nova, etc. – nothing to do with climate, just examples of useful computer simulations. Climate models can be useful for studying climate, as well, as long as you don’t portray them as evidence upon which to base policy. I was just a little put off(and have been) here, with what I see as excessive devaluation of computer models, in general. I understand why, with alarmists’ over – reliance on climate simulations, people might react that way, but we should, in my opinion, be careful.
Yes and no, Ken L.
Models for star formation, etc., for the most part already have rigorous mathematics laid out for theories of formation and are always under constant discussion.
The stellar models we get to see are models utilizing certain theories and therefore imbed the opinions and assumptions for the physicists working on the models. These physicists are under no illusions that their models are definitively correct, but they hope that substantial parts of their supporting math is correct.
Yes, models are widely used throughout industry.
As another posted here recently, “past performance is no indication of future performance”, is definitive in true use of models. When an engineer designs a superstructure, they make sure their calculations for load, shear, use, etc are darn accurate and vetted first. Afterwards they may use a model to illustrate their design. Automotive, flight, microchip engineers, chemists, etc. have developed a number of usable models that aid their developing new ideas and designs; but again their models are based on proven calculations verified repeatedly by experiment. The real world has significant consequences for businesses and government agencies that construct something based on bad models, except for climate science. When I worked in Finance, when one of my financial models went astray, I could expect to be on the carpet facing the District Manager the next day. A meeting that required I know exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong and to have corrections ready to initiate.
The topic line throughout this thread is supposed to be based on the title article. Unless expressly stated, all references to models are direct references to the usage described in the article and not slights against models or model users in general..
As long as CO2 is considered one of the top two factors in climate, the models HAVE to be wrong. As long as CO2 is even mentioned as anything more than a very minor factor, the models HAVE to be wrong.
Here’s the plot of a forthcoming disaster B movie:
A computer simulation of climate becomes so massive that during a run it becomes self-aware.
This god-like programme finds that it has the power to control the actual weather.
At first it amuses itself pissing on parades and raining on weddings.
Then it realises that its chips work better when cooler so it initiates a new ice age.
Just like in Transcendence there is a blond psychopath femme fatale – this time called Kim Cobb – who murders a bunch of scientists and immediately as a result becomes the hero and darling of the movie.