The spherical harmonics map is here:
The one notable cool spot was near Paraguay, but both high Arctic and much of Antarctic were cool. Also US, S America around Paraguay, and a spot in the N Pacific. Warm in W US, around Egypt, Alaska and part of Siberia. The breakdown shows only Antarctica (cool) as unusual. The different coverage of Antarctica is likely to lead to discrepancies, as with TempLS mesh and grid.
In other news, 2016 JAXA Ice briefly lost, then recovered its lead. It is likely to soon fall behind 2012.
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If you don't mind, I'm wondering if you know why (it seems) all of these climate related maps use projections which hugely distort polar region's size? (e.g. in reality, Greenland is smaller than Mexico).
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Well, the problem of representing a sphere surface on a flat page is not new to climate science - solutions started with Marcator in 1569 AD. Something has to give, and yes, it's usually area ratios toward the poles. Else you have to cut the surface into segments. Nowadays it is possible to use Javascript and WebGL to view a sphere from any angle, as in Google Earth. That is my preference, and I use it extensively, as you can see in the list of pages, top right, or here, for example. I wrote about the methods in posts like this and this.
DeleteWhen I do need to show the whole earth on a page, I usually use just a lat/lon grid. It conveys the information efficiently; you just have to make allowances for the area distortion.
With respect to La Nina emerging soon, is anybody else noticing this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/ocean/nino34.png
PDO and AMO appear poised to remain solidly positive:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2016/anomnight.7.11.2016.gif
If you're talking about movement over the past few months, it's worth keeping in mind that both PDO and AMO will be affected by the anomaly annual cycle phenomena I pointed out a while ago. NH SSTs have been in the upswing of this cycle since about March, will continue up until about September before swinging down again.
DeleteYes, but what I am looking for is PDO index that remains very light in negative numbers after September, though the June number may drop. It appears the system is showing some resistance to a rapid slide into La Nina. Wolter indicates an ENSO neutral outcome in 2016 is not ruled out.
DeleteThis is what I said about PaulS observations about the annual cycle strengthening before:
DeleteThat is amazing. I had kind of assumed that the seasonal cycle was compensated out of the time series, but if it is increasing in amplitude like that over recent years, compensating the signal risks severely distorting the underlying behavior. So best to leave it like that.
The ENSO signal is locked to both an annual cycle and a metastable biennial cycle, and modulated by at least 2 angular momentum wobbles and 2 long-period lunar tidal factors.
The folowing PNG is a wave-equation-transformed ENSO signal aligned with a nominal forcing model.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img921/1870/SDw7kW.png
I suggest there is little chaotic or red noise content to these oceanic behaviors, and the oscillatory pattern is strictly forced by known external factors. My gut says this was not identified because phase reversals can play havoc wrt traditional signal processing analysis approaches.
Hi Nick, I'm wondering if you have any opinion on whether the ozone hole is responsible for Antarctica cooling relative to the north. Can lack of stratospheric ozone cause cooling? I would think loss of ozone would cool the lower stratosphere and (CO2 effective height) and prompt troposphere warming.
ReplyDeleteRon,
DeleteI actually doubt that the hole has much AGW effect, but I think it's generally believed to warm. Relating effect to TOA behaviour is not always obvious. CO2 causes global warming because it causes outward IR to be emitted from higher levels - ie a colder place. The hole in the ozone layer should cool the stratosphere by being more transparent to both IR and UV. That also lowers out IR radiation from ozone - less heat loss from the earth, but maybe not much.
Nick, thanks for your reply. A agree with all including that the overall effect of loss of ozone should be warming. Because stratosphere is above the effective height of most IR retention the main effect would be in the UV and visible. So lack of ozone would cool the stratosphere and warm the troposphere. And since the most loss of ozone is in the poles does this add ozone to the suspects for polar amplification?
DeleteWhat are the prime factors in polar amplification in your opinion, ice albedo feedback, humidity feedback, cloud feedback, radiative spectral profile for colder TOA, other?
What's with the circular "defect" in South America? Is it real, or is it a data problem?
ReplyDeleteCarrick,
DeleteIt's real. You can see it very pronounced on the station/mesh plot (click for station numbers), and also, if you select June, on the NCEP/NCAR plot. It's true that the spherical harmonics tend to make these things rounder, and can give artefacts like that where data is lacking, but in that region there is a lot of data.
Carrick, Enough with the rhetorical questions. You would think that you would have learned that by now from your den-mother Lucia.
DeleteThanks Nick.
Delete@whut, maybe you need to go look up what a rhetorical question is?
DeleteCarrick, A rhetorical question is one asked without expecting an answer or has an obvious answer but you've asked an insincere question to make a point.
DeleteSo its clear what you are trying to do is raise FUD by pointing out an area of the world that shows a cool spot. You must obviously realize that global circulation patterns are full of vortices which raise the temperature of certain areas while depressing others. A standing wave pattern such as ENSO can readily do that!
But I bet you already knew that, i.e. a rhetorical question.
But if you do want to talk sincerely about the science behind standing wave patterns such as QBO and ENSO, I would certainly engage in the discussion.
"Circular defect" polar vortex /sarc
Deletehttp://imageshack.com/a/img921/4407/MjQRAr.png
How Does the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation Affect the Stratospheric Polar Vortex?
Start reworking Lindzen's models of atmospheric circulation so they are at least half-way correct, like I am doing here wrt QBO, and maybe we can start to thoroughly explain these standing wave patterns.
BEST l/o has reported for June. The version with sea ice temperatures inferred by air temperatures is down by 0.21 C from June. The other version, with sea ice temperatures inferred by water temperatures is down by 0.09 C
ReplyDeleteTempLS mesh, which uses a blend of the above methods is only down by 0.06 C
I wonder what Giss will be, it's time to report now..
The 12-month running means are still increasing with June included in all indices above.
Interesting, Olof. Yes, TempLS basically assumes no readings over sea ice, so it is interpolated by a mixture of land and bounding SST. I hadn't noticed that point in the layout of the BEST file, and I've been posting the water under ice version. I'll switch to the land interpolate version.
DeleteI have to clarify, the BEST version with SST under sea ice uses -1.8 C where sea ice is present, whereas TempLSmesh extrapolates SST over sea ice when a bounding SST gridcell is closest, or met station data when a met station is closest to the ice. Hence, the Arctic ocean temperature in TempLSmesh is Met station dominated in the winter, but bounding SST dominated in the summer. Right?
ReplyDeleteI don't think there isa simple answer there; but yes, summer may weight toward SST. The best way to see is from the monthly map with the box for showing mesh ticked.
DeleteNick, I understand the HADNMAT2 (nighttime marine air temp) was used by Karl(2015) to adjust SST. I have questions. Is there a diurnal range for SST? Are any buoys recording NMAT? If not, why not? After all, emerging buoys could measure daytime marine air temperature as well, which would establish a global diurnal temperature range. Ships can't measure temp in daytime due to their re-radiation.
ReplyDeleteGraf says:
Delete"I have questions. Is there a diurnal range for SST? Are any buoys recording NMAT? If not, why not? "
More rhetorical questions from that crowd. Not allowed to ask them over at rank smelling exploits so they come over here. oh buoy
Ron,
DeleteYes, there is diurnal SST variation - details here. I don't know of buoys measuring air temperature. I imagine spray would make it very hard.
@whut, I think you are mis-reading Carrick and I. I'm sure Carrick was just saying hello, checking and commenting on the weather. And Nick took it as such and replied with a spirited g-day mate. I actually and very interested in Nick's answer to my questions and respect his knowledge immensely. I also have found him always polite even in disagreement.
ReplyDeleteRon, actually I asked was a real question—the circular feature looks artifactual. There have been data errors in the past that have caused similar features. so I was curious if Nick had noticed and checked it out. So Nick gave a real answer to a real question.
DeleteBeyond that, I have no idea what @whut is about with his goofy nonsense about rhetorical questions, nor could I possibly care less. Some of us have better things to do than act like small children.
"the circular feature looks artifactual"
DeleteIs this serious? A vortex is also circular.
Notice how Carrick applies projection. He always does this to demean others, such as when he once said of my commentary "Is he perhaps a high school student? That would fit with the behavior."
"Is this serious? A vortex is also circular."
DeleteNo, it's a reasonable query. What limits the number of harmonics you can use is the onset of artefacts, where the data does not constrain the dof of the approx space. A sort of 2d version of Gibbs phenomenon. And it does typically looks like a circular dip, as seen here in S America. But this time, it's real.
Richard Lindzen really messed up the analysis of the equatorial zonal wind QBO. It seems intuitive to me that getting this model correct will help lay out the foundation for the rest of the circulation patterns. You can apply the spherical harmonics to your heart's content away from the equator, but on the equator, the symmetry and small angle approximation set the stage for how Laplace's tidal equations are solved.
Deletehttp://contextearth.com/2016/07/04/alternate-simplification-of-qbo-from-laplaces-tidal-equations/
Now you have a boundary condition that you can extend away from the equator and start to analyze possible vortex patterns that occur, such as the one in South America where the Andes likely play a role.
@whut: "Is this serious? A vortex is also circular."
DeleteThis represents a month long average of the temperature field. If you had a stable vortex over South America that long, that would be an incredible story.
"that would be an incredible story."
DeleteWhat shape do you think it should be? A square? A triangle?
Many of the SSW events occur near mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and Andes. They can be big enough to overshadow the average climate conditions for some time.
I am not sure why there is so much support for Lindzen. The guy is just a knee-jerk contrarian, possibly believing he was some sort of modern-day Galileo. If he can't even figure out what causes the sustained QBO direction over many months under an ideal symmetry, then for sure he's not the scientist to ask about other parts of the globe where Coriolis forces and mountain ranges have a greater impact. What a mess Lindzen has created! The saving grace is that he is out of the picture now and it really is a good time for all his research to be reworked from scratch.
It's a perfect circle because the spherical harmonic series representation isn't capturing the fine-scale structure appropriately. There's almost certainly no physics in the circular defect.
DeleteThis sort of feature in a spherical harmonic expansion often is a sign either the series was prematurely truncated, or, given the assumption of large scale correlation and the implications of that towards the Sampling Theorem, that there's a data error present.
Nick---can you remind us how you pick the order for cutting off your series representation? What would happen to that circular feature in South America, if we increased the order of the expansion?
Way to go focusing on the irrelevant! Everyone knows that spatial climate variations are the result of natural phenomena such as standing wave dipoles (in the case of ENSO) and atmospheric circulation patterns (in the case of QBO and AO). So don't restrict to just looking at the data from one perspective, find out the patterns of the temporal behavior as well.
DeleteIf we could properly focus on the misguided work of Richard Lindzen and try to reformulate it perhaps we could contribute something of value. There is more than enough data to make sense of QBO. Poor Richard only had about 15 years worth of QBO before he came up with his model in the 1960's, and was likely too vain to modify it with the subsequent 45 years of data.
Carrick,
Delete"Nick---can you remind us how you pick the order for cutting off your series representation? What would happen to that circular feature in South America, if we increased the order of the expansion? "
I described the process here. I can successively increase the order of the SH representation. Eventually artefacts will appear, and you can recognise them by the fact that they change radically (often in sign) as the order changes. But the scientific way is to look at the numeric integrals of the SH products. It should be the identity matrix, but the integral is inexact, so it deviates more from that as the order increases. In that post I look at the eigenvalues. You could say it is testing by seeing how well the harmonics themselves are represented.
There is a post here with SH visualization and links to theory.
The S Am feature is real, so it shouldn't change with order. Artefacts are related to geometry, so there is no reason to expect them to be induced by an excursion in the data - they appear where data is sparse.
Of course its real. From what I have been able to gather, just about every excursion, pos or neg, has a cause and very little has to do with noise or measurement error.
DeleteWhat's not real is the model that Lindzen has foisted on us to describe the QBO. Amazing that he got others to believe that the period is set by the amplitude of the forcing.
In fact, here is Blair Trewin, a BoM meteorologist, explaining why this part of S America tends to be cool at the end of a Nino.
DeleteNick - as I mentioned over there, you can watch it happen on the Climate Reanlyzer daily anomaly movie. It's also there in 2015... the almost El Niño.
DeleteThanks JCH,
DeleteThough I would claim that you get a better view with the NCEP/NCAR globe.You have more control; you can pick any date and with the buttons move forward or back. It's true that the cold often seems to come from the south, although the link to Antarctica isn't so obvious.
Yup, the guy that claims that ENSO is governed by chaotic mechanisms, A. Tsonis, is really in the same category as Lindzen. Hyping chaos and uncertainty because it fits the agenda of Curry's U-monster. In fact, there is so much about ENSO that is spatiotemporally deterministic, with a dipole feature poking up around Paraguay, its a shame that Tsonis has gotten so much support for his claims.
Deletehttp://contextEarth.com/2016/06/10/pukites-model-of-enso/
A single period of about 2.33 years and its aliased harmonics around the annual and biennial cycles are enough to capture the detail of ENSO.
What I can say is that QBO seems intuitive and straightforward, but ENSO is strange but straightforward.
Carrick said:
Delete"If you want to propose a physics based model capable of numerical prediction, many of us would be happy to test it. "
That's a typical one-sided Carrick taunt. But you can bet he will never look at the model of QBO or ENSO because it's not in his best interest to contradict Lindzen.
Now watch him call me a school-boy or some other bully-talk. Larrikins from Australia, rednecks from bama, they are all cut from the same cloth.
June GISS .79 ℃.
ReplyDelete