Our WUWT ENSO meter in the right sidebar has ticked down twice in the last week, and the most important 3-4 region of the Pacific monitored for ENSO conditions looks like it is in freefall:
In their weekly discussion posted Monday, April 6th, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center had this to say:
During the last four weeks, equatorial SST anomalies notably decreased in the central and east-central Pacific, while increasing in the far eastern Pacific.
Karen Braun, Reuters writes this article:
Not only is the atmosphere supporting a faster switch to La Niña, but so is a revised model prediction after an error that massively skewing the results was corrected.
The decay of El Niño and the onset of La Niña, the cold phase of tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures, are occurring more rapidly than it would appear.
The timing of La Niña’s arrival is important to commodities markets as La Niña has vastly different effects on global climate than its warm counterpart, El Niño.
For example, in agriculture markets, if La Niña moves in on the early end of the range by June or July, U.S. summer crops could face complications with dry and hot weather. But dry regions of Australia, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa could receive ample rainfall prior to the peak of their next crop season.
The lingering of extremely warm waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean has led to some flawed assumptions that El Niño is decaying at a slower pace than in previous years, and that the transition to La Niña will happen later than initially expected.
But the platform for La Niña’s entrance has been in the assembly phase since late last year, and new data suggests that construction is nearly complete.
There are a couple of key atmospheric and oceanic variables that we watch for to signal the switch from El Niño to La Niña, and now more than ever, these variables are pulling the final plugs on El Niño
The cold pool just beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean continues its rapid expansion, and it has nearly overcome the El Niño warmth on the surface, making remarkable strides in the final three weeks of March
The anomaly lost heat during March at the same rate as in February, and decidedly cool waters now dominate the subsurface Pacific Ocean
A slowdown or reversal in this cooling trend does not seem likely as the atmosphere is becoming increasingly supportive of it. The Southern Oscillation Index, a measure of pressure tendencies over the Pacific Ocean, made a massive leap out of El Niño-favoring territory last month and is now ahead of the pace of similar years 1998 and 2010 (tmsnrt.rs/1TwETSN).
Another key supporting variable, trade winds in the western and central Pacific, no longer favor El Niño though they are not definitively in the La Niña camp, either. But if the SOI continues on its upward trend, the winds might be encouraged to strengthen, moving the Pacific Ocean closer to La Niña (tmsnrt.rs/1N5eMMe).
A graph of sea surface temperature anomalies in the defining Niño 3.4 region suggests that yes, 2016 is decaying at a slower rate than the other years.
But given both the record peak it is coming from and the recent changes in the ocean and atmosphere, it would actually not be surprising to see the transition happen just as quickly as in 1998, if we truly are to enter into a stronger La Niña (tmsnrt.rs/1N5ek0p).
– See more at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-weather-lanina-braun-idUSKCN0X215F
More graphs and data at the WUWT ENSO Reference Page
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“A slowdown or reversal in this cooling trend does not seem likely as the atmosphere is becoming increasingly supportive of it.”
If only we had more CO2 in the atmosphere….
Funny thing, after the big 1998 El Niño spike, all the Warmists were frothing and screeching about “tipping points” and predicting boiling oceans and all sorts of other claptrap.
I haven’t seen a single reference to “tipping points” after the last one.
Does indicate that they are losing confidence in the more apocalyptic aspects of their alarmist obsession?
“Does indicate that they are losing confidence in the more apocalyptic aspects of their alarmist obsession?”
Nope, they’re just busy campaigning for Bernie.
People like Richard Alley have talked about an tipping in Arctic sea ice dating to around then….
Ocean heat content has also been on a tear for at least 2 decades:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Patrick B,
NOAA has been caught red-handed “adjusting” parameters to show purported global warming. They now use the “adjusted” ARGO numbers to make your scary charts.
When the ARGO array was first commissioned, every one of the thousands of submersibles was calibrated and approved.
But the gov’t bureaucrats didn’t like what they found:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Argo_Heat_Content.jpg
So now the ‘problem’ is fixed — and ARGO shows what they want it to show.
You can believe them. I don’t; I’m not that credulous. When our scientifically illiterate president issues their marching orders, the message is clear: the department heads are at-will appointees who can be replaced without cause. So when the president says, “It’s my way or the highway,” it’s not surprising that they do it his way.
dbstealey: Adjusting raw data is absolutely necessary in order to control for biases, and is done in every scientific field.
This is an old subject by now. Best article I know of on this is
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroughly-fabricated-the-truth-about-global-temperature-data/
The bias in the adjustments are a feature, not a bug. The temperature anomalies are man-made but not in the physical sense.
Patrick B, not once in the article you linked to is ARGO mentioned. You have to adjust satellite data, of course. And by the way, they l1e by omission.
l have been warning for awhile now, that the recent warming may come to a end sooner then many may think. lts the way the weather has been behaving over the winter and spring that has been giving me the clues. First the extending of the Russian highs to the south during the winter that were sending large amounts of warm air into the Arctic. lf the climate system was wanting to lose heat in a hurry, then this is one of the best ways of doing it. Also with the Arctic been running much warmer then average during the winter. that in itself must have been taking a fair amount of heat out of the system, and this heat had to have been coming from somewhere. Plus the fact that while the Arctic has been running warm this winter. The Hudson Bay area has not been joining with this warming. Given this area’s climate history then l would have wanted to see it joining in with this warming. The fact that it bucked this warming trend, suggested to me that this warming was not for the long term.
I agree. The North Pole was like a chimney with the damper left open last winter. The planet wasted a lot of perfectly good warmth. Also the surges of Atlantic air pushed the ice up towards the Pole rather than allowing it to be flushed south. The Russians are having a hard time establishing their yearly base up at the Pole because the ice is so crisscrossed with pressure ridges.
https://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2016/04/06/arctic-sea-ice-video-of-jet-landing-on-cracked-sea-ice/
great analogy caleb,a chimney with an open damper. it always makes me smile when people get excited about the arctic being warmer than usual in the winter, apparently forgetting that is where so much warmth leaves the planet permanently.
we are very close to seeing a negative pdo, amo and la nina all coinciding . interesting times.
Interesting indeed. We have no modern records of the details of what a “Quiet Sun” entails. Expect the unexpected.
You’re seriously jumping the gun — it’s far from clear there is going to be a La Nina.
Every strong El Nino on the MEI is followed by a La Nina. Why do you think that this time around might be different?
That’s clearly not true, if you look at the data. Examples: 1957, 1958, 1965, 1976, 1977, 1991, 2002.
Here’s the data:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html
There doesn’t seem to be a pattern in the data. I saw 9 El Nino followed by La Nina, 8 followed by Neutral and 2 followed by El Nino.
Patric, is the opposite of “jumping the gun” being “slow”?
One observation I would make comparing this El Nino with the 97/98 event is that this has occurred just after solar maximum whilst the 97/98 event occurred shortly after solar minimum. I recall a research paper advising that temps during solar max are approx 0.2C higher than solar minimum. When you take this into account the global temps, as measured by UAH would not have exceeded the 97/98 had they occurred at similar points in the solar cycle.
I think similarly. This upcoming La Nina/negative ENSO conditions will be followed by a solar minimum, which in itself is always a cooler period. This could mean that we will not see an upward step change in the years afterwards. After the 1998/2000 La Nina the Sun was rising to a maximum in the years that followed.
Not according Seth.
http://wowway.net/news/read/article/the_associated_press-another_study_says_warming_may_be_worse_than_exper-ap
Talk about “worse than we thought!”.
The models are wrong (at best unreliable when it comes to policy effecting the welfare of the people that call this little rock home) because because they overestimated temps vs observations, which is ignored or denied by CAGW adherents.
This is the first time I’ve noticed one of them admitting the models are wrong…. but because they underestimate future temps.
I wonder if the Hansen and Borenstein family trees cross somewhere?
..Instead of trading Carbon Credits, how about trading NOAA / NASA thermometer readings ?? They are both imaginary any ways !
Dropping like a rock and here goes a brick or three into the toilet tanks.
Remembering that cold is merely the absence of heat, these “belches” of heat from the oceans into the atmosphere are seemingly much underappreciated. After close to 60 years in the St. Louis MO region, I’m grateful for mild winters whatever years they do happen here.
The alarming warming of Antarctica is there for all to see
It’s worse than we thought. We must act now! (O wait – we’re actors already) /sarc
El Nino is gone. Went surfing yesterday at Pacifica, south of San Francisco. It was cold. The last couple years it was obviously warmer than normal. I’ve surfed there 30 years, sometimes with a wrist thermometer (not this time). Yesterday, it was colder than normal. I got ice cream head. I just looked it up the temperature data from the NOAA buoy. After reading on this site about the other messed up data, I should have known it would be off.
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=46012
Yesterday was no where near 57 degrees (f). in the water, shown on their chart. It shows a drop in temp today to 54. Yesterday it could have been 54 or less. Who knows for sure if it was colder than normal, maybe it was the swell bringing up colder water. But El Nino is definitely gone.
i think there has to be a large amount of interpretation going on with sea surface temp readings ,many areas in the north east atlantic were off by several degrees c last year and there was a lot of cold water around the sea of cortez that never showed up on the charts either.
I’ve been thinking it’s about time to explain how the WUWT ENSO meter gets updated, and this is a fine opening.
First, my computer updates it. Once a week. (Or less often if the source is broken.)
Currently I’m using http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/nino_3.4.txt as my data source, I figure the Australians are closer to it and they look after the related SOI index too. That file gets a new line every Monday morning, here’s what they’ve added starting with the peak anomaly last November:
A monotonic decline except for one blip before Christmas.
The program takes that data, and if the last line is new, rounds the temperature to the nearest 0.1, picks out the matching meter image and copies it to my web site’s wuwt/elninometer-current.gif where the web host’s cache may not show it for another day or so.
Another source I’ve used is the less reliable http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/wksst8110.for . Their data looks like:
Weekly SST data starts week centered on 3Jan1990 Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 03JAN1990 23.4-0.4 25.1-0.3 26.6 0.0 28.6 0.3 ... 11NOV2015 23.5 2.0 27.9 3.0 29.7 3.0 30.3 1.7 18NOV2015 23.8 2.1 28.0 3.0 29.7 3.1 30.4 1.8 25NOV2015 24.4 2.4 28.0 3.0 29.6 3.0 30.3 1.8 ... 02MAR2016 27.3 1.0 28.6 1.8 28.9 1.9 29.5 1.4 09MAR2016 27.7 1.2 28.6 1.6 28.9 1.8 29.6 1.5 16MAR2016 27.5 1.0 28.8 1.7 28.9 1.7 29.6 1.4 23MAR2016 27.2 0.9 28.6 1.4 28.8 1.5 29.5 1.2 30MAR2016 27.5 1.5 28.9 1.6 29.0 1.5 29.5 1.1Yes, the data are different. I don’t know if one set is better. At least they track each other pretty well.
Quicker than predicted? Anyone following what Joe D and I have been up to have known this was coming from back in spring ( and longer than that, its part of a long term stand I have been alluding to for years as to what happens after the ensos).. It depends on who was predicting what.
The Nino 3.4 temperature anomaly is still bigger than in 1998:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/wksst8110.for
Phil Jones the world’s # 1 climatologist admitted it stopped warming in 1998 and that in fact it was slightly cooler since then; in 2005, when he told scientist John Christy he would never let the scientific community find out about it,
in his Feb 2010 BBC don’t go to jail interview,
and his employer Met Office admitted the same thing in 2013 when they published their press release named
”The Recent Pause In Warming” wherein they published three reports about the ”15 year pause in global warming since 1998.
So you’re just another ”Pot’s like Heroin” class chemistry reader who thinks because government officials say something, that means it’s real.
Joe Bastardi’s free Saturday Morning Summaries are great, and Joe is right. weatherbell,com. Haven’t missed them for almost three years He’s been calling it correctly for MONTHS. Not days. Not weeks. MONTHS and months ahead of everyone.
http://www.weatherbell.com
The connection between the departing El Nino and the arriving La Nina is this: both are part of an harmonic oscillation of Pacific ocean water from side to side in the Mid-Pacific. If you blow across the end of a glass tube you get its fundamental tone which is determined by the dimensions of the tube. Trade winds are the equivalent of blowing across the end of a rube and the ocean answers with its own fundamental tone: one El Nino peak every four-five years or so. First, trade winds pile up warm water in the Indo-Pacific Warn Pool, the warmest water on the planet. When the water there has reached peak height reverse flow by gravity starts. An El Nino wave forms, crosses the ocean from west to east along the equatorial counter-current, and runs ashore in South America. The Nino3.4 observation post sits right on top of that equatorial counter-current and watches the El Nino waves go by. It records them before they have reached South America, hence the delay before the El Nino gets to us. When it reaches South America it spreads put north and south along the coast and warms the air above it. Warm air rises, joins the westerlies, and we notice that an El Nino has started. And so do the Europeans and the Japanese when these westerlies reach their land. But any wave that runs ashore must also retreat. When the El Nino wave retreats the water level behind it drops around half a meter, cold waster from below fills this vacuum, and a La Nina has started. As much as the EL Nino warned the atmosphere, the La Nina will now cool it and global temperature remains the same.. El Nino has been active ever since the Panamanian Seaway closed and thereby established the current system of Pacific currents. There is no counterpart to El Nino in the Atlantic or Indian oceans because there is no place there to pile up water as happens in the Pacific. And forget Hansen’s fantasy of an El Nino-like Miocene.
Thank you.
That was the most logical and sensible explanation of the El Nino and La Nina events that I have ever read.
Common sense reasoning can explain MOST ALL of the “magical events” that so many people are constantly claiming are occurring in the natural world around us.
Their nurtured obsession with said “magical events” ……. is religion, not science.
There is nothing in the natural world that is truly “cyclic”….. either inter-yearly or multi-yearly, ….. other than the changing of the equinoxes.
Thank you.
That was the most logical and sensible explanation of the El Nino and La Nina events that I have ever read.
Common sense reasoning most always provides the best explanation for all of the “magical events” that the miseducated populace claim are occurring in the natural world around them.
There is nothing in the natural world that we inhabit that is truly “cyclic”, ….. be it inter-yearly or multi-yearly, …… other than the “changing of the equinoxes”.
OOOPS, sorry bout the 2nd post. My Internet Explorer “terminated” when I hit the “post message” tab …. so I tried to re-key my commentary ……. and … my new Dell CP w/ System10 is FUBAR.
Interesting. When did the Panamanian Seaway close?
MRW, a long, long time ago, to wit:
No, No it is the clouds.
” Global warming may be far worse than thought, cloud analysis suggests
Researchers find clouds contain more liquid – as opposed to ice – than was previously believed, threatening greater increase in temperatures”
“One of this paper’s authors, Dr Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said research has already shown “major errors in climate simulations associated with clouds”.
Trenberth said there is “some art” to working out the role of clouds, given their annual cycles and distribution, with uncertainty over whether climate sensitivity is significantly changed.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/07/clouds-climate-change-analysis-liquid-ice-global-warming
Some “art”, not science?
Without reading the comments yet, let me ask what is going on in the north pacific. Where did the ‘cold blob’ come from? A couple/few of years age a ‘warm blob’ started in the same place. Nino has the spotlight but what about the north pacific?
Just sayin’.
Let’s say global temperature does, indeed, take a dump. Does anyone imagine the climate change industry will simply fold its tent and slip off into the night? No siree! The same players would be milking “man-made global cooling”. You’d see horror stories of the coming Ice Age, Photoshop images of port cities stranded miles from the nearest ocean and great academic tomes plotting the predicted North American glacier paths.
What they’ll do is to move on to something else. The Greens/Left have done this for decades. I strongly suspect they will highlight the unnatural level of radio waves in the air. We have, after all, filled the lower troposphere with microwave radiation. Some ‘scientist’ will announce a paper saying that it causes cancer…just watch, wait, and see.
One thing is clear that in general when El Nino is intensive so also is the La Nina; when El Nino is weak so also the La Nina — peak and depression.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Vice versa is not true — weak/intensive La Nina may not lead to weak/intensive El Nino. This is also true in the Indian Southwest Monsoon rainfall. Deficit rainfall in El Nino leads to surplus rainfall in the next year. On the contrary, surplus rainfall in La Nina year may not lead to deficit rainfall in the next year.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
The Reuters article concludes with this: “Now the model predicts a healthy La Niña by July, further dismantling the delayed La Niña theory.”
That appears false. Neither the current CFSv2 model mean nor the average of models in the IRI/CPC plume predict a La Nina by July.
This week’s CFSv2 output barely predicts -0.5 in the Aug-Oct quarter.
The mid-March plume gives 52% odds of a La Nina (barely) starting in the Nov-Dec-Jan quarter.
The IRI/CPC consensus of analysts gives 50% odds in the Aug-Oct quarter, slowly rising afterwards.
http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
OTOH, that cold subsurface water sure looks like it’s ready to bust out all over. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Solar basis for everything:
1) Since 1650 the Sun has essentially been on average increasing in output as indicated by the Sunspot record.
2) The Solar Cycle 24 is the smallest in recent record [last 100 years][1913 was about equal].
3) The Earth has warmed for the last 300 years.
4) The Oceans, as an integral of energy storage are the warmest ever.
5) As Solar output decreases, based on the Solar Flux Proxy [energy actually reaching the Earth], we will have warm oceans and cool land masses, This is due to the land masses not retaining as much heat as the oceans.
6) Since the El Nino/La Nina are both about stored ocean heat [cold], reduced Solar output means less Trade Winds and a reduced Hadley Cell.
7) Reduced Hadley Cell means that the Jet Streams will move further South in the North and further North in the South. Basically, the cold will arrive.
8) Calculations show about 0.1C/2 years.
9) In 10 years, the Global temperature could be down 0.5C.
I have a problem with 4 (or rather, you do). You cannot say “ever”. Apart from anything else, it’s incorrect.
You are correct. Oceans “warmest ever” refers to the last 350 years.
Its been cooling in Northern Europe this past 10 years. Springs are later and winter sets in earlier. It all adds up tong winter. Day light hours does not change. Hopefully it sill not last more than 40 years, but it may last several hundred years. Happened before