NOT SO GREEN | Elements of Surprise

[CO2isPlantFood]

Sea surface temperatures and winds are closely coupled – meaning that they strongly influence each other, said Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park, Maryland, who was not involved in the new study. According to L’Heureux, certain winds are predictable to a certain degree, but there are still elements of surprise.

“The wildcard in all of this – the reason this is very probabilistic and we can’t say anything with certainty – is that some part of the winds are essentially random,” L’Heureux said. “We can predict them five to seven days out, but that’s not going to give you much advance information on the growth of ENSO.”

These random wind elements are a major limitation to predicting El Niño events, she said. “There’s a chance that the winds could turn off in the summertime, and that’s what happened in 2014.”

FULL ARTICLE

Climatologist and oceanographer Prof Dr Fredolin Tangang of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia said this year’s El Nino was even more extreme than the severe phenomena experienced in 1982/82 and 1997/98.

“There is no conclusive evidence that the occurrence of El Nino (frequency and intensity) is influenced by climate change,” said Tangang, who had served from 2008 to 2015 as vice-chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations agency.

ARTICLE

For historical purposes, periods of below and above normal SSTs are colored in blue and red when the threshold is met for a minimum of 5 consecutive overlapping seasons. The ONI is one measure of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and other indices can confirm whether features consistent with a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon accompanied these periods.

“INCONVENIENT DATA”

AS GRAPHED

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[JTB]

I respect that Plant Food provides a link to the full article from which he or she cherry picks select bits. That way it’s possible to have a more helpful context for comments such as Dr. Tangang who cites an IPPC conclusion for climate change contributing to more typhoons. While acknowledging a lack of conclusive evidence at present for climate change influencing El Nino, he concedes that such a relationship may exist.

“He said that unlike typhoons, which the IPCC concluded would increase in intensity as global warming intensified, El Nino occurrences did not switch in frequency or intensity due to climate change.
“El Nino is a naturally occurring phenomenon, which is part of the inter-annual variability associated with oscillation of the atmosphere-ocean interaction in the Pacific Ocean that occurs in a two- to seven-year cycle.
“This system oscillates and it can be either in El Nino, La Nina or normal phases,” he said.
However, he did not discount that global warming could change the El Nino effect on the climate in a particular region.”

Mmmm, I wonder, just wonder if the warm water that retarded the winds expected to produce an El Nino in 2014 might have been related to climate change? I guess we’ll have to wait for data gathering and analysis to confirm or refute that notion. Until then, there is no conclusive evidence either way. Meanwhile, the people in Fiji and the Philippines are hoping they don’t get hit with yet another monster typhoon.

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