Posted on 08/28/2010 10:42:19 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
From the Jet Propulsion Lab:
NASA/NOAA Study Finds El Niños are Growing Stronger
Deviations from normal sea surface temperatures (left) and sea surface heights (right) at the peak of the 2009-2010 central Pacific El Niño, as measured by NOAA polar orbiting satellites and NASA's Jason-1 spacecraft, respectively. The warmest temperatures and highest sea levels were located in the central equatorial Pacific. Image credit: NASA/JPL-NOAA - Click for a larger image
A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Niños and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting.
Lead author Tong Lee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Michael McPhaden of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, measured changes in El Niño intensity since 1982. They analyzed NOAA satellite observations of sea surface temperature, checked against and blended with directly-measured ocean temperature data. The strength of each El Niño was gauged by how much its sea surface temperatures deviated from the average. They found the intensity of El Niños in the central Pacific has nearly doubled, with the most intense event occurring in 2009-10.
The scientists say the stronger El Niños help explain a steady rise in central Pacific sea surface temperatures observed over the past few decades in previous studies-a trend attributed by some to the effects of global warming. While Lee and McPhaden observed a rise in sea surface temperatures during El Niño years, no significant temperature increases were seen in years when ocean conditions were neutral, or when El Niño’s cool water counterpart, La Niña, was present.
“Our study concludes the long-term warming trend seen in the central Pacific is primarily due to more intense El Niños, rather than a general rise of background temperatures,” said Lee.
“These results suggest climate change may already be affecting El Niño by shifting the center of action from the eastern to the central Pacific,” said McPhaden. “El Niño’s impact on global weather patterns is different if ocean warming occurs primarily in the central Pacific, instead of the eastern Pacific.
“If the trend we observe continues,” McPhaden added, “it could throw a monkey wrench into long-range weather forecasting, which is largely based on our understanding of El Niños from the latter half of the 20th century.”
El Niño, Spanish for “the little boy,” is the oceanic component of a climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which appears in the tropical Pacific Ocean on average every three to five years. The most dominant year-to-year fluctuating pattern in Earth’s climate system, El Niños have a powerful impact on the ocean and atmosphere, as well as important socioeconomic consequences. They can influence global weather patterns and the occurrence and frequency of hurricanes, droughts and floods; and can even raise or lower global temperatures by as much as 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.4 degrees Fahrenheit).
During a “classic” El Niño episode, the normally strong easterly trade winds in the tropical eastern Pacific weaken. That weakening suppresses the normal upward movement of cold subsurface waters and allows warm surface water from the central Pacific to shift toward the Americas. In these situations, unusually warm surface water occupies much of the tropical Pacific, with the maximum ocean warming remaining in the eastern-equatorial Pacific.
Since the early 1990s, however, scientists have noted a new type of El Niño that has been occurring with greater frequency. Known variously as “central-Pacific El Niño,” “warm-pool El Niño,” “dateline El Niño” or “El Niño Modoki” (Japanese for “similar but different”), the maximum ocean warming from such El Niños is found in the central-equatorial, rather than eastern, Pacific. Such central Pacific El Niño events were observed in 1991-92, 1994-95, 2002-03, 2004-05 and 2009-10. A recent study found many climate models predict such events will become much more frequent under projected global warming scenarios.
Lee said further research is needed to evaluate the impacts of these increasingly intense El Niños and determine why these changes are occurring. “It is important to know if the increasing intensity and frequency of these central Pacific El Niños are due to natural variations in climate or to climate change caused by human-produced greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
Results of the study were published recently in Geophysical Research Letters.
Your veggies secretly talking to mine? We’re up in the SF Bay Area on the peninsula. Got my FIRST ripe red pepper this week — almost September! Planted them in April, for crying out loud. Had one 100 degree day this week, then the high today is going to be 68. Almost time to light the fireplace.
Global Warming another world con.....hey, guys it has been debunked.....
Yeah, let's drag those models out again, dust them off, and use them to interpret the data. But wait, those models were built on massaged data to begin with, and they can't even predict past conditions. But, hey, anything to continue the grant money.
And so do I. What I see this as, is nature doing what nature does. It’s cyclical and natural. It’s not something to write articles about with titles, “El Nino type: Worse Than We Thought”
I’d suggest something like, “El Nino Changes Are of Interest to Scientists, Could Portend Interesting Weather Cycles in Near Future”
About five to seven years ago, we couldn’t get a weather forecast without the Meteorologist explaining that El Nino or El Nino were responsible. After a while, it was a given. We didn’t need to be hit over the head with it for another five years.
It’s just annoying.
We survived before we knew there was an El Nino and El Nina. Somehow I think we’re going to pull through after the discovery too.
That’s not aimed at you BTW.
Take care bud.
I would say that the observations of El Nino and La Nina have not occurred over a sufficient period of time to even begin to predict their behavior. Nor do I believe that all the factors affecting their behavior have been revealed yet. To observe that the center of El Nino has shifted and then to conclude that it is occurring because the concentration of atmospheric CO2 increased from ~250 parts per million to ~330 parts per million is ludicrous.
Instead of automatically assuming that everything I observe is a result of “global warming”, I would be asking questions (aka formulating hypotheses). For example, the ground under Yellowstone has been bulging over the past few years, for unknown reasons. For the ground there to bulge, the ground somewhere else must be sinking. Could that shift in the Earth’s internal distribution of mass be responsible for the shift of the center of El Nino? We don’t know. Sloppy science isn’t going to tell us, either.
In closing: It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.
So somebody got grant money to study the output of climate models created by others who got grant money. Interesting. Since they have been shoving these model results under our nose for about a decade now I would love to see a real study of the accuracy of these models to date.
...many climate models predict such events will become much more frequent under projected global warming scenarios.
Of course they do, I'm pretty sure that you can take any observation and then go back and find several warming models that predict it. Being a warmist is painless and easy, all observations support your theory and you never have to own up to your past errors.
Just like the boy who cried wolf.
“unexpected!!!!!!!
We’re all doomed “
I wish I was a woman or a child so I could be affected mostest.
“Hey, I’ve got a pimple. Let’s all obsess over it.”
Its Let’s abcess over it.
Heehee
You know that they way you can speed up the ripening process with tomatoes and peppers is to put up a green house around them.
Reflected Sunlight Shines On IPCC Deceptions And Gross Inadequacies ( Global Warming is a SCAM)
By Dr. Tim Ball....he is retired so he likely got no research money.
NOAA must have been using the satellites that were showing Great Lakes at 650 degrees.
My reaction at this point; yeah, yeah, whatever. Just don’t tell me that I am going to have to pay/reduce my freedom/change my lifestyle to make it “better”.
...or blame it on President Bush
later
This is off topic, but seeing as how warm the thin veneer of sea water is in relation to deeper and much colder water (re: your charts), makes me think about the sub sailors who venture forth in those cold depths. Without running what ever kind of heaters they have, it looks like it would get mighty cold down there!
Conversely, in the Pacific war, when our old WW2 subs went deep, they probably had a welcome reprieve from the hot steamy weather on top.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.