Thursday, June 8, 2017

May global temperature unchanged from April

TempLS mesh was virtually unchanged , from 0.722°C to 0.725°C. This follows the smallish rise of 0.06°C in the NCEP/NCAR index, and larger rises in the satellite indices. The May temperature is still warm, in fact, not much less than May 2016 (0.763°C). But it puts 2017 to date now a little below the annual average for 2016.

The main interest is at the poles, where Antarctica was warm, and the Arctic rather cold, which may help retain the ice. There was a band of warmth running from Mongolia to Morocco, and cold in NW Russia.. Here is the map:







16 comments:

  1. As far as month-to-month variations are concerned, all interest is on ENSO (and perhaps volcanic activity on those occasional events).

    Climate scientists have long sought an equation that would capture the complex behavior of ENSO. Many candidates have popped up, including the nonlinear Cane-Zebiak model. With the delayed/Mathieu diffEq formulation forced by the Draconic and Anomalistic lunar cycles we have stumbled on sonething that actually works, and has been validated against 200+ years worth of proxy records
    http://contextearth.com/2017/05/01/the-enso-model-turns-into-a-metrology-tool/

    Not surprising that it has taken this long to uncover the pattern since the number of nonlinear formulations is essentially infinite -- while there are few signal processing techniques that will help isolate the pattern. Just consider Fourier analysis. You might guess that only two input sine waves should lead to a couple of spikes in the response spectrum. But no, what actually happens with a nonlinear diffEq is that it creates a rich spectrum with many peaks. Yet the delayed/Mathieu diffEq w/ the two input cycles does capture it:
    http://contextearth.com/2017/06/02/enso-and-fourier-analysis/

    It's really a simple model leading to a complex behavior. That's what climate scientists have been struggling to find for the longest time.

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  2. The tropics warmed during May while the arctic cooled. That may explain the relative warmth in the satellite measures. Per WxBell the tropics continue to warm and now have a larger positive temp anomaly than the global average, quite a change vs Jan-Apr when the tropics were much cooler than the global average. The satellites were also relatively cool in this period. Expect the satellites to continue relatively warm vs ST in June due to relative warmth in the tropics.

    Chubbs

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    1. Didn't realize this but Charles Darwin was one of the first to observe the huge variability in temperatures along the equator. This is a logical extension:
      http://contextearth.com/2017/06/08/strictly-biennial-cycles-in-enso/

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  3. Ugh. Look at this. Curry has posted vacuous predictions on her blog:
    https://judithcurry.com/2017/06/08/cfans-forecast-for-the-2017-atlantic-hurricane-season/
    The hypocrisy is boundless among the pseudoscientists. As long as we lack good geophysics models for large-scale climate behaviors, charlatans such as Curry will continue to have standing. They will continue to raise the Uncertainty Monster spectre by giving black marks to consensus climate science, while simultaneously raking in the money via consulting fees for junk forecasts.

    Have to do better to neutralize this dreck.

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  5. If one looks at the literature on ENSO and temperature variability, there are still a couple of schools of thought. The empirical school tries to qualitatively analyze ENSO cycles by monitoring wind bursts and other indicators against past behaviors to estimate occurrences of El Nino and La Nina. The theoretical school is still looking for more deterministic factors that controls the frequency of the cycles.

    I consider myself more in the latter category in the hope that we can eventually understand ENSO in a concise fashion. The fact that I am not a fan of cause-free wind-forcing doesn't place me alone, as there are still many others that are putting out alternative ideas:

    1. Here is a recent paper on analyzing El Nino events based on phase-locking to seasonal cycles
    http://file.scirp.org/Html/5-4700536_73503.htm

    2. Here's a slightly older one on ENSO Seasonal Synchronization theory.
    http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00525.1

    IMO, they are still way too complicated, and I think what I have is much more straightforward. For fans of scaling challenging routes, here is a light-hearted record of the path I have taken in modeling ENSO:
    http://contextearth.com/2017/06/08/scaling-el-nino/


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  6. whut,

    " The fact that I am not a fan of cause-free wind-forcing"

    Jees, it isnt cause free, its generated by the weather system in the tropical pacific ocean. And again, you always talking about thing that you not know about.

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  7. Christian said:
    "Jees, it isnt cause free, its generated by the weather system in the tropical pacific ocean. And again, you always talking about thing that you not know about."

    That is either a vacuous statement or pure circular reasoning. What you have written is that the weather system in the tropical Pacific ocean is caused by the weather system in the tropical Pacific ocean.




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  8. There is a paper that suggests the anomalous trade winds identified by Matt England's paper were caused by the heat that was stacked up on the equator off South America by the Atlantic "El Niño".

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    1. Which papers were that?

      I have the same problem with "teleconnections" that I have with wind causing El Nino. It's difficult to separate a proposed teleconnection effect such as an "Atlantic El Nino" influencing a Pacific El Nino from a common mode cause such as enhanced gravitational forcing at both locations simultaneously.

      It's just more of the same circular reasoning to claim that one regional climate behavior impacts another until one finds out what causes the initial fluctuation. This sounds pedantic until everyone considers that the majority of the AGW signal is being foisted on ONE common mode cause -- that of the external forcing caused by elevated levels of CO2. So, I am only using the same reasoning as the consensus, but being much more consistent in my overall rationale.


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    2. I agree. I would say the conditions they discussed are sort of present in the Atlantic right now. There are several studies like this one.

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    3. Yes, that is the same climate group @ U of Hawaii that is working on seasonal synchronization theory for ENSO. Basically they are looking for feedback mechanisms that work on the annual scale. It may be a feedback from one year to the next, which would result in a biennial modulation. That's essentially what I have in my model, but enhanced by a tidal effect, which emerges from the quantitative analysis.

      And it's entirely possible that the trade winds follow this same pattern, since atmospheric flow obeys Laplace's tidal equations just the same as the ocean.

      Christian would probably tell Laplace that he was "always talking about thing that you not know about" :)

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    4. The second one with MH England is more of the empirical side of ENSO analysis to contrast with the U of Hawaii view. I just don't think that England and co will make much progress comparing one measure with another until one of the measures shows a fundamental root cause.

      In contrast, at least the U of Hawaii group is trying some interesting stuff. For example, their use of Hilbert transforms was confusing to me at first until I remembered that Hilbert transforms were originally used for quadrature detection, which is a way to do frequency demodulation (ala transforming FM radio signals). As it turns out, if there is a biennial modulation mixed in with other frequencies such as long-period tidal cycles, then a Hilbert transform may root this out. I haven't been using Hilbert transforms, preferring instead to fit the waveforms directly. I think the bottom-line is that if this group keeps on digging they will end up finding the same patterns I am finding. IMO, right now they need to simplify.

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    5. Difficult to believe that behaviors such as ENSO and QBO are not related to external forcing. I can't think of one large scale cyclic behavior that can't be pinned to some other regular cycle. Even the cycles of sunspots are known to be intimately tied to the sun's rotation. So even though they haven't quite nailed the predictability of sunspots yet, they know it isn't some spontaneous oscillation as the purveyors of the wind-only mechanism for ENSO seem to think.

      Thus, much like sunspots, ENSO is likely sensitive to variations in the Earth's rotation speed. As the moon is known to cause cyclic variations in the speed, these same variations should be able to be picked up in an ENSO wave equation model. And what do we find but that the two most critical lunar periods, the Draconic 27.2122 days and Anomalistic 27.5545 days feed into a best-fit model to within 1 minute each.

      http://contextearth.com/2017/06/08/scaling-el-nino/

      Got a reply tweet from Andrew Dessler concerning this and he said "Climate is a physics problem, not a statistics one. Looking at correlations is interesting, but not sufficient. Must have physical basis."

      Some of these guys do not realize that science deals with this situation automatically. They should be able to eventually reject the lunar forcing by coming up with evidence that rejects it. It shouldn't be hard, as all they have to do is show that the ENSO cycles are incommensurate with the lunar cycles. And show how there is not enough energy supplied by the lunisolar cycles to move volumes of water in a reduced effective gravity environment. If they can't, however, then the lunar model will remain as a potential ENSO driver.


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