New ENSO Update=No El Nino for rest of 2005

[cycloneye]

http://iri.columbia.edu/climate/ENSO/cu ... nical.html

For those who may be wondering what is going on that suddenly the season has been more slow after the very active July dont blame it to el nino as it is still sleeping and will not be in the equatorial pacific for the rest of 2005 and the first 3 months of 2006.Other factors besides the ENSO one are the cause for the atlantic basin to be not as active as in the first 2 months.

[WeatherEmperor]

Good. I never thought those tiny little warms spots in the EPAC showed any sign of an El Nino forming.

<RICKY>

[cycloneye]

Good. I never thought those tiny little warms spots in the EPAC showed any sign of an El Nino forming.

<RICKY>

There are fluctuations of more warm and more cool waters but overall the pacific is not in the criteria of having el nino even in a weak stage despite some little warm pockets scattered.

[Jim Hughes]

Good. I never thought those tiny little warms spots in the EPAC showed any sign of an El Nino forming.

<RICKY>

There are fluctuations of more warm and more cool waters but overall the pacific is not in the criteria of having el nino even in a weak stage despite some little warm pockets scattered.

Your right nobody should have thought that an El Nino was evolving based on a few warm spots in the EPAC. But on the flip side we may have to redefine what constitutes and El Nino if this season ends up being a bust compared to what the outlooks were calling for.

I mentioned a couple of days ago in a thread how the US meteorological and climatology community tend to only look at the SST's in regards to whether one is present or not. Some seem to even get confused about which area to monitor. It is the 3.4 region not 1+2 region. The 3.4 region has actually been cooling the past 4-6 weeks not warming.

OTOH the Australian community seems to place as much emphasis on the SOI as the SST's. Now I realize that certain statistical analysis show that Australia is influenced by these changes but so do parts of the USA also.

The March 2005 30 & 90 averages slightly exceeded the 2002-2003 event and I believe the February (Off of Memory) MEI was rated 9th out of 54 or 56. (Climatolgical History)

Now it was quite obvious last winter that the atmosphere in the Pacific was behaving like an EL Nino was either in place or developing. It wasn't just the extreme southern California rains either. The patterns in the Gulf Of Alaska also showed strong signs and the patterns in the WPAC/Austrailia also showed signs.

Unfavorable things like the SAL are just one of the things that Gray himself wrote about years ago in reference to the El Nino. So I would not disregard that this past winter/spring was totally irrelevant.


Jim

[Steve]

Those warm spots were considerably warmer yesterday on the SSTA charts. It almost looked like most of the Equatorial Pacific was slightly above average. There has been a recent burst of westerlies with the strongly negative SOI we saw between late July into the first week or so of August. I think those negative anomalies are the result of that burst.

https://www.fnmoc.navy.mil/products/NCO ... nomaly.gif

[Jim Hughes]

Those warm spots were considerably warmer yesterday on the SSTA charts. It almost looked like most of the Equatorial Pacific was slightly above average. There has been a recent burst of westerlies with the strongly negative SOI we saw between late July into the first week or so of August. I think those negative anomalies are the result of that burst.

https://www.fnmoc.navy.mil/products/NCO ... nomaly.gif

Those SOI numbers were not even close to being strong enough to change anything. Nor were they persistent enough at that level.

The SST's lag the SOI and we are actually seeing the results of the early July positve SOI trend not it's late negative trend. The subsurface had been warming..it gets released...warming occurs up top.


http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/a ... xzteq.html

BTW you can see the hard SST numbers through August 3rd right here. I know they are two weeks behind but they are more reliable than a graph. Could they have gone up considerably ? I guess so but I doubt it was all that much. I know what was below.


http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/wksst.for



Jim

[Steve]

>>Those SOI numbers were not even close to being strong enough to change anything. Nor were they persistent enough at that level.

Then it's coincidental because I almost alway see a few warm spots emerging a week or two after the SOI gets into the negative teens and lower. The last run was for about a 2 week period starting 7/27 that averaged about -11.5. I realize that's not an abyss considering what we saw in January and February, but it's not insignificant either. Long term ENSO numbers, as your data shows, is essentially neutral to slightly El Nino. That would correlate to a neutral to slightly negative SOI. But if you say that there's a longer lead time, I'll buy it since I can't refute it. I always thought the longer lead time was for the warm bursts to get over to the S.A. coast and not so much in the western and central Pacific zones.

>>The SST's lag the SOI and we are actually seeing the results of the early July positve SOI trend not it's late negative trend. The subsurface had been warming..it gets released...warming occurs up top.

Yeah but if you run the 2nd graphical loop you posted, the August 6th/7th has the warmest water profile which immediately followed the last run of negative teens. So are you saying the lag time for the WPAC zones to show the warm anomalies is 2 1/2 months? That can't be right, can it?

Steve

[Jim Hughes]

>>

Then it's coincidental because I almost alway see a few warm spots emerging a week or two after the SOI gets into the negative teens and lower. The last run was for about a 2 week period starting 7/27 that averaged about -11.5.
Steve

It may be coincidental but I am not exactly sure which areas of the Pacific that you are seeing this immediate warming. There is no doubt that a strong SOI/burst of westerlies, could enhance the surface anomalies in some EPAC areas.

I would consider this last string of negative readings , where we saw all daily values exceed -10.0 , which lasted nine days , (-13.9 avg) was probably only moderate. I corrected myself in a prior thread a couple of weeks back in reference to it's strength with someone else. I had used the term moderate to strong.

I also like to consider what the pressures are as much as what the deviation is. Today's daily value is a -9.10 and yet the pressure at Tahiti is one of only a handful the past year in which it was 1016 mb. Darwin is also quite high...seasonal of course.

The longer lead time effects are better for the EPAC /1+2 region. This is where you will see the clearest lag time with the subsurface waters after the SOI beomes positive. A strong positive burst now would bring up some cooler waters. Probably the coolest in some time for this region...if it occurred.

Past example....Strong SOI shift in May 98' when La Nina started to develop. Warmer anomalies in subsurface.

May 1st 30/90 day averages -22.30/-23.80. Both were in weakening stages. The daily SOI values started to become more positive from May 5th on. The 30 day average on May 31st had now gone positive.. +.80 (90 day -16.20)

So we saw a strong moving SOI trend towards positive during May 98'. If you look at the SST hard numbers that I showed above you can see that a warming trend occurred in the 1+2 area into the third week of May after the strong negative readings had started to subside. (+.6 from 5/6-5/20)

The rest of the Pacific was cooling. The 1+2 area eventually followed this pattern after all the subsurface warming had been released. Now all of this depends upon what's below and what variables are occurring prior to these SOI swings but you can have an idea of what lies ahead.

As far as long lead times. I have seen people quote a reference paper regarding a 4-5 month SST lag with the SOI in the equatorial Pacfic. I have never read the paper though.

I am not sure about the WPAC's surface anomalies. Now you can see a subsurface warming occurring, like now, and this can happen quite frequently when a subsurface cooling occurs to it's east...like now

This warmer water will most likely makes it's way eastward within the next 6-12 weeks depending upon the upcoming variables. So one could speculate that the subsurface waters in the EPAC will either be slightly above average come late October/ early November or neutral at worst if it ends up mixing with colder waters.

This would help if someone wanted to know what type of anomalies were going to be present off of the SA coast during late fall.


Jim

[Steve]

Thanks for the reply and information. I was talking more about the pockets of warm in the WPAC and Central-WPAC.

Steve

[Derek Ortt]

https://www.fnmoc.navy.mil/products/NCO ... nomaly.gif

well, I would not bet the house on no el nino, considering the abysmal record of everything not called CLIPER for ENSO prediction