By Javier
Two solar physicists, Robert Leamon from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Scott McIntosh from the High Altitude Observatory at Boulder, CO, have made an interesting observation that links changes in solar activity with changes in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
As they reported at the AGU 2017 Fall Meeting, the termination of the solar magnetic activity bands at the solar equator that mark the end of the Hale cycle coincides since the 1960’s with a shift from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific.
“We look at the particulate and radiative implications of these termination points, their temporal recurrence and signature, from the Sun to the Earth, and show the correlated signature of solar cycle termination events and major oceanic oscillations that extend back many decades. A combined one-two punch of reduced particulate forcing and increased radiative forcing that result from the termination of one solar cycle and rapid blossoming of another correlates strongly with a shift from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean.”
More information is available at the talk they gave at the last SORCE Meeting:
Terminators: The Death of Solar Cycles and La Niña 2020
As they say in the talk, the probability that the pattern is due to chance is very low. Particularly since the termination of the magnetic activity bands at the equator coincides quite precisely with the El
Niño-La Niña shift.
Analysis of the ONI (Oceanic Niño Index) data from NOAA, and sunspot number from SIDC shows
the following pattern:
Figure: Top: Six-month smoothed monthly sunspot number from SIDC. Bottom: Oceanic El Niño Index from NOAA. Red and blue boxes mark the El Niño and La Niña periods in the repeating pattern.
Since the 1960’s the early solar minimum is associated with La Niña conditions, the late solar minimum is associated with El Niño conditions, and the rapid increase from minimum to maximum is associated to La Niña conditions again. As the authors note, this pattern did not take place in the 1954 minimum, although the rise in activity was also associated with La Niña conditions then. It is unclear why the ENSO system responded differently at that time, but it is clear that solar activity was not the only factor affecting ENSO.
The pattern appears to be repeating again this minimum. The early minimum has been associated to La Niña conditions and, as we move towards the late minimum, an El Niño is being forecasted for late 2018. The authors made their claim for a 2020 La Niña before the 2018 El Niño was forecasted. Now a repetition of the pattern looks even more probable and we should expect a La Niña when solar activity increases in late 2020 to 2021.
Hmm, typical case of wishful thinking and pareidolia.
2018/19 neutral/weak el nino
2019/20 la nina
2020/21 la nina (and solar minimum)
” New study suggests a temperature drop of up to 1°C by 2020 due to low solar activity
From the HockeySchtick: A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics finds long solar cycles predict lower temperatures during the following solar cycle. A lag of 11 years [the average solar cycle length] is found to provide maximum correlation between solar cycle length and temperature. On the basis of the long sunspot…
June 13, 2014 in Solar.
Remember this ? … This was on WUWT …
The nadir of ‘reduced particulate forcing’ in the last two solar cycles was roughly one year past each cycle minimum, giving rise to the 1997-98 and 2009-10 El Nino episodes. I doubt that the next post sunspot minimum El Nino episode will peak before 2020-21, it could easily peak as late as 2021-22.
Javier I am with you pretty much . Great work!
Javier, could you please post the dates that you used for the “termination of the solar magnetic activity bands at the solar equator”? I can’t find anything like that on the web.
Many thanks,
w.
Willis, I haven’t used any date. I have just reported on the Meeting Abstract and the Talk, and have used a figure based on one of the figures from the talk, with SSN and SOI indexes, to illustrate the post. McIntosh and Leamon have several articles on the migration of the magnetic activity bands, but as far as I can remember no table or list of the dates is provided. I can provide info on the articles if you want to look at them.
Thanks for the response, Javier, I’ll see what I can find.
w.
Javier, i’m surprised that you know who hasn’t showed up yet (☺️)
Latest subsurface data Pacific (5th July 2018)
http://www.bom.gov.au/archive/oceanography/ocean_anals/IDYOC007/IDYOC007.201807.gif
It just hasn’t surfaced.
It doesn’t look like a lot of heat to me.
May 2015 sequence
http://www.bom.gov.au/archive/oceanography/ocean_anals/IDYOC007/IDYOC007.201505.gif
July 2018 sequence
http://www.bom.gov.au/archive/oceanography/ocean_anals/IDYOC007/IDYOC007.201807.gif
Well it is a lot, it’s just not as hot as the last time, and more spread out too. Maybe a mild el-nino from Sept. There’s still a lot of warm water in the west though. It was cool at the surface near Phillipines just two months ago, but the surface has warmed there again since. Maybe this will be a low-intensity and shorter lived event. It does appear to be coming to the surface in the east.
El Nino will be very weak if it occurs at all.
What is so much more important are overall sea surface temperatures in particularly the North Atlantic when it comes to the climate going forward and they are in a down trend.
I’m out of my league here as far as the technical merits of the preceding discussion, but I find the correlation of solar activity with weather and climate to be very plausible. I personally, can, for example, see a correlation of high end severe weather/tornado events on the southern US Great Plains with solar maxima, going back to the April, 1947 Woodward disaster. If anyone has any information concerning research on that subject, I’d be very interested.
Am I to presume that the attribution of current cold events and predictions of imminent dire effects of a ‘grand solar minimum’/Little Ice Age, are not taken seriously by most on this site?
Believe it or not, that is correct…
Sylvia, I’ve never seen anything at all conclusive indicating that cold temperatures on the Earth correlate with solar minima. Instead, I find the following:
As you can see, despite solar activity dropping since 1980, temperatures continued to rise. Go figure.
Best regards,
w.
HadCRU is a pack of lies.
Oh, please. Over the period of interest, say 1960 to the present, HadCRUT is virtually the same as the UAH MSU lower troposphere dataset, or the Berkeley Earth land/ocean dataset, or the GHCN dataset. You can’t get rid of the finding that simply.
In all cases, temperatures go up post 1980, and solar activity goes down.
w.
That is not correct.
Not in TSI according to PMOD
http://www-old.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
And not in F10.7 flux and EUV according to Leif
So it cannot be said that solar activity declined post 1980.
Thanks, Javier.
First, I fear that splicing together model data, HF data, ACRIM I data, ACRIM II data, and Virgo data is far, far from convincing … particularly since there are two scales on the plot, one the “Virgo” scale and the other the old scale, and they differ by about 6 W/m2. This is because the raw data is all over the map, viz:
I’m sure you can see the problems involved in splicing all of those …
Here’s another splice job that DOES show a decrease in solar activity post 1980 …
Do I trust that reconstruction? Not really … just pointing out that different splices give different answers.
Next, even in your preferred reconstruction it is blatantly obvious that average annual TSI 1995 – present is less than the average 1975-1995.
Next, the same is true in the F10.7 flux and EUV data from Leif. The last two cycles are significantly smaller than the two before that.
So yes, Javier, solar activity has indeed been declining for the last few solar cycles, which is why we have all these myriad doomcasting of cold weather … but the actual facts beg to differ.
w.
PS—the best estimate of the TSI that I know of is based on the Group Sunspot Number, which is available here. The estimate is:
TSI = 1360.43 + 0.24 * GroupSunspotNumber ^ 0.7
Again, this shows that solar activity is decreasing, particularly in the last two solar cycles.
You are welcome to believe whatever you want, but sunspots are a proxy for solar activity, not a measurement of solar activity. And the size of the sunspots is not even taken into account. On the other side, TSI, F10.7 flux, and EUV are measurements of different aspects of solar activity.
The bottom line is that a decrease of solar activity from SC21 to SC22 is not at all a solid conclusion, as it depends on what one is measuring.
It can be defended that there was no decline in solar activity before SC23 in the late 1990’s to early 2000’s. Whether you agree or not is a different question, as you are entitled to your opinion.
However, Willis is not entitled to his own facts.
Felix, is it necessary for you to act like a jerk? I asked you to QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING, and instead of doing that, you come back with nasty unsupported uncited handwaving about my facts.
Go whine to someone else. Not interested.
w.
My comment was in response to Javier’s statement that you were entitled to your opinion.
I’m not whining. Just pointing out that your data handling is ludicrous. I’ve repeatedly showed your errors, yet you refuse to rectify them, a la Mann’s statistical buffooneries, as laid bare by McIntyre.
Apparently you were able to pass statistics for psychologists at Sonoma State, but I’m sorry, your exercises in confirmation bias wouldn’t do so in any reviewed scientific paper, unless authored by Michael Mann, whose statistical inanity is even worse than yours.
Javier, you can define the starting point any way you want. The truth is, people are predicting cooling because SOLAR ACTIVITY IS DECREASING … your attempts to deny that obvious fact are hilarious.
And at the same time that we have decreasing solar activity, TEMPERATURES ARE INCREASING.
You are totally unwilling to grasp that nettle, because it totally negates your claim that it’s the sun …
w.
Global temperatures have been decreasing since February 2016.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/10/citizen-scientist-willis-and-the-cloud-radiative-effect/
Felix, if you are going to post a link to Dr. Roy’s totally incorrect analysis to my work, a fair man would also add a link to my response to his BS … Dr. Roy is a long-time scientific hero of mine, but on this subject, he was just plain wrong. He accused me of not crediting someone that, if he’d just done his homework, he would have known that I did credit. And he totally misunderstood my hypothesis … ah, well, he’s a good guy, and we all deserve a mulligan once in a while, even Felix.
My response to Dr. Roy is here … and Felix, you got a mulligan, but please don’t try this underhanded trick again. It is beneath you.
w.
Willis,
Wrong again.
As I said, the lying liars at HadCRU, NOAA and NASA are constrained by the watching satellites in the shenanigans up to which they can get. But for the period before dedicated satellites, ie 1979, they are free to torture the “data” to make them confess.
All those crooked gatekeepers have warmed the cooling cycle from the ’40s to the ’70s, because, having occurred under rising CO2, it falsifies their claim that more CO2 necessarily causes more warming.
Can anyone of your age really be so naive and gullible as to credit Phil Jones, who admits to having lost the original “data” upon which his pack of lies was allegedly built? If so, it must be only because you like the false result, because the cooked books confirm your bias.
Since Jones’ results can’t be repeated, they aren’t science, but a work of fiction. Or fantasy.
Actually temperature hasn’t increased in the 21st century for any cause that we cannot attribute to El Niño. So temperature is not increasing.
And the Sun doesn’t have to work like you think it should work for being responsible for most of the 20th century warming. You make the assumption that temperature should follow sunspots for the Sun to be responsible. That assumption is probably wrong.
Post 1995 warming is largely the AMO responding to declining solar wind pressure, and the reason for the following pause.
High solar activity correlates with warming. Low solar activity correlates with cooling. Solar activity has been high in recent decades, hence warming…
(willis, let’s see where hadcrut goes once the effects from the recent el nino can be definitively said to be over)*
*if memory serves me, hadcrut4 already has global temps nearly down to the anomaly of the pause at this juncture
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000
(news of the demise of the pause is premature… ☺️)
Nobody should take those predictions seriously, Sylvia. Here you have an article with a section dedicated to the prediction of a 21st century solar grand minimum:
https://judithcurry.com/2018/06/28/nature-unbound-ix-21st-century-climate-change/
Long story short: the chance of a SGM in the 21st century is very, very low.
Thanks.
Yes Sylvia very seriously.
My argument Sylvia,
The jig is up this year for AGW, as I have been saying. AGW has hi jacked natural variations within a climatic regime to attribute the recent warming to mankind. That being ENSO,( look at the MEI index over the past 3 or 4 years), lack of explosive major volcanic activity and the sun itself which I say had a warming effect on the climate up until the end of year 2005. Thereafter a cooling effect but lag times have to be taken into consideration.
Year 2018 is a key year because this is the first year my two solar conditions are present in order for solar to have a significant cooling impact on the climate.
They are 10+ years of sub solar activity in general (post 2005-present) and following that a period of very low average solar parameters (which commenced in year 2018).
All solar influence moderated by the geo magnetic field. Sometimes in concert ,sometimes in opposition.
Overall sea surface temperatures one of the keys and the trend is down. It has been down for a year. Albedo being the other ,which I say are both tied to very low prolonged solar conditions.
I have talked about this so much but to get to the chase I see year 2018 as a transitional year to a different climatic regime ,one similar to what was present during the Dalton.
What is prevalent is more often then not when the climate transitions to another regime it usually does it at the top of the previous climatic regime.
Post 1850-2017 the climate has been in the same climatic regime with variations +/- 1C due to ENSO and volcanic activity, which is in no way unique.
The test is on and I like what I see but this is the top of the 1st inning(cooling has scored) but we have many innings to go.
Right, no immanent GSM. One will come eventually, but not this century.
Thanks Javier, thanks Mike Mann, thanks Mr Arrhenius, but I am quite capable of making oscillations without your generous offers of solar, astrophysical and gaseous help. I might use an outside impulse from time to time to energise a longstanding internal oscillation. Your help is gratefully acknowledged but I can do what I do, with or without it.
Yours sincerely,
The Climate.
Sure Phil. In the end it is all a question of mass and energy. The Planet has a huge inertia to climate change, and a chaotic system tends to produce random walks, that in the Earth, given the inertia, never go very far. When the climate changes in a sustained direction for a very long time it is because a sustained forcing, even if small, is acting for a very long time. This is the case with Milankovitch forcing.
So to produce climate change a forcing has to be able to act in a sustained way in a given direction for a century or more. Otherwise it is just noise. That is why we are down to solar variation and greenhouse gases. They are the only ones that fit the bill in the sub-Milankovitch scales. So in the end one has to take sides and decide which one is the biggest contributor to the observed changes. Those that reject both are at lost to explain climate change. If you read Leif Svaalgard’s view on climate change he offers no explanation for it.
In my view the Earth doesn’t change its climate unless it is pushed for a long time in the same direction. And the death hand of Milankovitch is pushing gently all the time in the opposite direction of the changes we have observed over the past three centuries.
Yeah, sure. CO₂ might be acting, and that is what most scientists believe. But the problem is that we have increased CO₂ a lot. A LOT. And the climate is changing almost at the same speed and direction it was changing before we did that.
In my view that rules out CO₂ as the main controller. As we increase the amount of CO₂ and observe little change in temperature, we reduce the available role for CO₂ in the glacial/interglacial cycle, and we make more probable that the observed climate change is due to the Sun. Not in the direct way the critics demand, while accounting TSI changes, but in a more subtle slower way by gently pushing the planet towards a state that favors a reduction in the energy loss by altering the Earth’s temperature gradient and reducing energy transport to the poles. The effect observed here over ENSO goes in that direction.
“…down to solar variation and greenhouse gases”
Javier, Dr Spencer offers as a third option natural chaotic internal variability. (in particular he’s talking about enso and its impact on cloud formation) In your estimation, is enso just an aspect of solar warming or can internal variability stand on its own?
Fonzie, my view is that natural chaotic internal variability can add to the noise, but given the huge inertia of the planet, it cannot be responsible for multicentennial variability, like the global warming for the past 300 years.
Javier, this is one of ellison’s graphs. His take on it is that, sure, internal variability cancels itself out, but only on millenial time scales. i also think that his interpretation is that this graph represents long term changes in enso. i just reread your initial comment about random walks not going very far. (somehow i managed to miss that the first go round… ☺️) What light could you shed on robert’s graph here. How much of the changes in rainfall, in your opinion, is due to the sun vs natural variability?
(thanx)…
Fonzie,
To me the graph looks like an upside down version of a temperature graph, suggesting that temperature and precipitation are correlated. In the case of that graph inversely correlated, but the sign of the correlation depends where you are looking. This observation is obviously not new.
Sometime ago I made an overlay of Ljundqvist 2016 hydroclimate reconstruction and his temperature reconstruction of 2010.
The correlation is obvious, but I was particularly interested in the deviations from the correlation and their possible causes.
My view of climate couldn’t be more different from Ellison’s. There is also a correlation between ENSO and temperature over the long term. Every paleo ENSO researcher agrees that there were no El Niño during the Holocene Optimum and it has been increasing in frequency as the Neoglaciation advanced.
In my view ENSO is a manifestation of the latitudinal temperature gradient and when too much energy has to be transported out of the tropics the system shorts out producing a burst of energy to the atmosphere.
So to me ENSO is the opposite of what people think. On the short term, warming produces more El Niño, not the opposite around, as the world has to deal with an excess of energy without changes in the gradient. On the long term, cooling produces more El Niño as more energy needs to be moved over a gradient that is becoming steeper.
The early 20th century warming was virtually indistinguishable from the late 20th century warming, separated by the mid-century cooling cycle.
Despite steadily rising CO2, Earth cooled dramatically for the first 32 years after WWII, until the Great PDO Flip of 1977.
HadCRU has intentionally warmed up that cooling, but couldn’t make it entirely disappear. At least not yet.
So it should be obvious that CO2 can’t be the main “forcing” behind whatever warming actually has been observed.
While I’m glad to see that people here are skeptical, this is only an interesting idea. Until there is a paper published with full details it is not yet a theory, so let’s keep an open mind.
Well, I’m a fellow who doesn’t believe much until I’ve run the numbers myself. So … I decided to run the numbers on El Ninos and sunspots. There are two indices in general use for El Ninos—the Multivariate Enso Index (MEI) used in the head post, and the NINO34 Index. They are very similar, with a correlation of 0.90 in the overlap period (1950 on). However, the MEI only goes back to 1950, while the NINO34 Index goes back to 1870. I’ll show both. First, here’s the MEI index used in the head post. Times of the sunspot minima are to the nearest month.
Upon a closer examination than is possible in the head post, it’s obvious that a number of the sunspot minima do NOT fall at the start of El Ninos. This is borne out by the NINO34 data, viz:
In all cases this shows the same result as the MEI data—some minima fall before El Ninos … some don’t.
It gets much worse. Here’s the earlier NINO34 data:
In the earlier data, none of the minima fall before El Ninos …
In short, I’d say that the idea that sunspot minima and El Ninos are correlated is simply not true.
w.
That’s all very good.
Two things:
No. It is the SOI index the one used, and linked. Not the MEI index.
Nowhere it is claimed by the authors than sunspots and El Niños are correlated. What they say is that the time of the disappearance of the solar magnetic activity bands, that falls somewhere between the solar minimum and the solar maximum, coincides with a shift from El Niño to La Niña.
Misrepresenting the authors’ claim to shot it down is a classical example of strawman argument. But thanks anyway.
Thanks, Javier. Curiously, it appears we’re both wrong. What the graph actually says, now that I’ve looked more closely, is that it is the ONI, the “Oceanic Nino Index”. I’ll look up the ONI data and post up that one. As you might imagine, however, all of the El Nino indices are highly correlated, so don’t anticipate surprises.
Next, you point out that the authors say “the time of the disappearance of the solar magnetic activity bands, that falls somewhere between the solar minimum and the solar maximum, coincides with a shift from El Niño to La Niña.”
True, and I was not disagreeing with that. We don’t have enough data to decide about that.
Instead, I was disagreeing with the significance of the graphic, the claim discussed in the comments that six of seven El Ninos were kinda sorta correlated with sunspots.
Best regards,
w.
OK, let’s look at it this way.
Let’s take the monthly sunspot dataset 6-month averaged and define the months belonging to a solar minimum as months with less than 25 ssn.
For each solar minimum we divide the period in half.
Now we take the same months corresponding to each half of each solar minimum from the ONI dataset and we average the ONI value (positive El Niño dominated, negative La Niña dominated).
The result is:
SC19-20 minimum
1st half: -0.63 (Niña)
2nd half: 1.17 (Niño)
SC20-21 minimum
1st half: -1.15 (Niña)
2nd half: 0.42 (Niño)
SC21-22 minimum
1st half: -0.57 (Niña)
2nd half: 0.72 (Niño)
SC22-23 minimum
1st half: -0.63 (Niña)
2nd half: 0.26 (Niño)
SC23-24 minimum
1st half: -0.49 (Niña)
2nd half: 0.05 (Niño)
We assume the pattern will repeat in the SC24-25 minimum where the 15 months so far are Niña dominated, and an El Niño is forecasted.
Assuming 50% chance for negative or positive value, the chances of this particular pattern (Niña-Niño) at a single minimum are 1/4 = 0.25 (25%). The chances over six consecutive minima are 1/4^6 = 2.4E^–4 (0.024%)
So the probability of this pattern resulting from chance is 1 in 4000.
I guess we can reject the null hypothesis. This is not what the authors have reported, but the probability that at the solar minimum a La Niña will turn into an El Niño is very high, and indicates ENSO is affected by solar activity.
Javier, here’s the correlation between the MEI, the NINO3.4 Index, and the ONI:
And here is the previous graphic, but this time with the ONI.
Indistinguishable from the others. Still no relationship between the sunspot minima and the El Nino phenomenon.
Regards,
w.
Your analysis is very shallow when you don’t want to find a relationship, Willis.
I have already showed that chance of the observed ENSO pattern at solar minima is 1 in 4000.
Javier, given that we have warmed with the warming cycle of the oceans, at 0.13 per decade since 1979, whilst Solar is getting quieter, would you agree that perhaps the lag time between the sun going quiet and global temperatures is greater than expected? Its my take the sun is putting a lot of energy into the oceans and that for the quiet solar to have an impact it will take a greater lag time, maybe half a century or so?
I think we are now on a cooling trend, this much is obvious due to the cooling AMO coming, to me the real test will be when the AMO goes warm again in the 2040s or thereabouts, I would expect then that perhaps that warming cycle may be cooler than what we have just seen in the last 25 years. Its an interesting discussion and thanks for your work.
Hi Anthony,
It is certainly possible.
What people tend to forget when discussing the effect of solar variability on global temperature is that it is only one of the factors affecting it. So even if it has an important effect on temperature it shouldn’t be expected that they co-variate.
What the paleo record supports is that long periods of below average solar activity are associated to cooling, and long periods of above average solar activity are associated with warming. What we have is that the 20th century has been characterized by above average solar activity, particularly the second half, when 6 out of 7 cycles were very active.
Going from very high activity to high activity as from SC21 to SC23 could have the same effect as going from very high to high positions in a gas stove knob. You still get warming. Why should you expect cooling. You have to go below a threshold to go from warming to cooling.
Actually that pic works out amazingly well.
Exactly . The question is, is the threshold now in place?
Maybe it already is.
Link the level of solar activity to Jetstream meridionality/global cloudiness across multiple solar cycles and there will be the answer.
Ignore cloud condensation nuclei, there are enough in any event so solar induced variations in cosmic rays have little additional effect.
What matters is the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles which is a consequence of ozone changes in the lower stratosphere and nothing at all to do with GHGs.
Variations in wavelengths and solar particles from the sun on the ozone creation / destruction process is what we should be looking at and the effect seems to be reversed above the poles as against that above the equator which is why the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles is a sensitive diagnostic indicator.
Salvatore’s ‘threshold’might well be useful. He has been clear that until recently that threshold has not been reached.
Javier is on the right lines but as yet has not fully adopted my ozone based hypothesis though he has come very close.
The distinguishing feature of my hypothesis is that the solar effect on the ozone creation /destruction process is reversed above 45km over the poles as as compared to that below 45km over the equator.
That is the only way to get more meridional jets when the sun is quiet and more zonal jets when the sun is active.
Nothing else works.