Met Office & El Ninos
May 16, 2015
By Paul Homewood
The Met Office have a short, informative video on El Ninos. (Click on link).
Based on MEI, the current El Nino, which has started a year ago, is close to 2006 levels, but not as strong yet as the 2010 one.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
It is always worth remembering that El Ninos put a lot of energy into the atmosphere, much of which escapes into space. As such, they are in effect a cooling mechanism, a bit like taking the lid off a pan of boiling water.
24 Comments
Comments are closed.
Thanks for the video link, Paul. It was very helpful in understanding the event.
They are now claiming there will be a super duper el Nino and we will all roast to death early on before the next US election…HAHAHAHA.
And it will rain in California and all the cold waves (one has hit us again this week with yet another one arriving in two days!) will cease for ever and ever, amen.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/claims-that-heatwaves-will-increase-in-la-ignore-the-facts/#comment-43141
The Met Office, ‘el-ninny’ Olé
It’s true that the warmer SST is a cooling, as far as the oceans are concerned. But the short term effect is to warm the air temperatures, and that is what activists are hoping for in the run up to Paris COP.

The dynamic is self-reinforcing until negative feedbacks stop it, and who knows when that will happen?
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/dynamic-duo-the-ocean-air-partnership/
La Niña will happen, of course. And the Earth will stop warming and start cooling, all using the energy from the Sun. How green can you get?
I agree, but for warmists timing is everything. Paris really is their last chance before actual cooling undermines the cause.
If there was a super El Nino this year, wouldn’t it be an indication that Natural Cycles control the Climate and not the Carbon Dioxide Monster? And Warmists wouldn’t really want that….
Somehow the ocean never gets credited for causing changes in the climate.
Yes, it would be, not only an indication, but more evidence than we already have that completely natural forces drive the climate and dwarf any effect CO2 might have. However, scads of politicians and hordes of ordinary people have been conditioned over 25 years or so to believe that nothing, absolutely nothing, but CO2 determines temperature. Therefore, when told temperature is going up, they cannot help but think it’s because of CO2.
Thanks, Paul. Good video from the Met Office, I think they just made one mistake: Calling the ENSO effects temporary.
I think they are not; they are climatic in effect, leading to stepped long-term global temperature changes. This is natural climate change.
This I got from Bob Tisdale, whom I quote extensively in my climate pages.
Andres, yes that can cause steps in the global temperature, when there is a strong sun to drive those steps, like in the last half of last century.
The sun is now having a bit of a snooze. The effect of the 2010 El Nino was maybe a very small step, (cooling continued quickly afterwards so the step is a bit hard to identify)
The El Nino’s are often followed by La Nina temperature troughs as well, as a rebound , so to speak.
Because of the sleepy sun, I doubt that even if there is an El Nino now, it will cause anything more that a brief spike.
Agreed that the Met Office video is misleading in saying that the effects of EL Niño are temporary. See this Bib Tisdale graph, https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/04-so-atl-ind-west-pac-ssta.png
It shows that the global warming since 1980 has progressed by a series of sudden, natural El Niño warming steps rather than by steadily increasing warming at the rate of 0.2ºC per decade predicted by the UN IPCC’s man-made CO2 global warming theory. These steps were not temporary. They each had the effect of lifting the earth’s temperature to a new level of equilibrium.
This is a knockout debunking of the UN IPCC’s man-made CO2 global warming theory as it is physically impossible for atmospheric CO2 to cause such sudden step changes in sea surface temperatures.
“There is an approximately 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere summer 2015, and a greater than 80% chance it will last through 2015.”
“By early May 2015, weak to moderate El Niño conditions were reflected by above-average sea surface temperatures (SST) across the equatorial Pacific, and by the corroborating tropical atmospheric response. The latest weekly Niño indices were +1.2°C in the Niño-4 region, +1.0°C in the Niño-3.4 region, and +1.2°C and +2.3°C in the Niño-3 and Niño-1+2 regions, respectively.
From http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_disc_may2015/ensodisc.html
“El Ninos put a lot of energy into the atmosphere”
That energy comes from the ocean.
It is an ocean COOLING event. One of the Earth’s regulating methods.
Yes, but don’t forget the ‘window’. Not all of that IR energy goes into the atmosphere.
Any energy that goes in to the Atmosphere heads straight out to space at night.
As Andy says this is a cooling mechanism and with less solar energy means a colder Earth overall.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/equirectangular=-159.84,-0.23,512
Will the trade winds push eastwards?
Great hopes and expectations came with the MO’s GloSea 5 ‘seasonal prediction system’ when it came on stream 2 years ago.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/modelling-systems/unified-model/climate-models/glosea5
And for the first year or so results, 6 months out, were generally good, especially with ENSO forecast. However now it appears to have become more ‘reactive’ than ‘proactive’ with the most recent three weeks apparently having the greatest influence on the next 6 months?:-
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/gpc-outlooks/el-nino-la-nina
As always only time will tell, big SOI dip of late:-
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#tabs=SOI
If the following turns out to be correct then there maybe a change ‘blowing in the wind’? :-
http://earth.nullschool.net/#2015/05/21/0900Z/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/overlay=mean_sea_level_pressure/orthographic=-186.09,-0.99,497
PS. I wonder why the ‘sustained value’ threshold has changed to + or – 7? Been 8 for many years, but hey ho, on we go.
Thanks for the links, green sand, the SOI webpage is particularly useful, and those animations are awesome.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2016/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2016/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2016/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2016/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:2002/to:2016/trend
looking at the bottom graph, for the AMO, it makes sense that there is [somewhat ] less rainfall:
global cooling=> less evaporation=> less rain
not so?
The [cooling] trend of the PDO is scary
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2016/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2016/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2016/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2016/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/esrl-amo/from:2002/to:2016/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:2002/to:2016/trend
Can this be right?
Somebody ask Bob?
Bob Tisdale.