El Nino

[Manney]

Climatologists are expecting a pattern shift from La Niña to El Niño in the months ahead.

How certain are climatologists? 70% sure that the El Niño shift has started atm. They expect to be at 80% sure of a pattern shift by late autumn… that’s when they’ll have enough data showing a swing in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific to rule out anomalies.

If the shift occurs, climatologists are saying that the impact on weather might look something like this…

Temperature:

Storm track activity:

Combined:

If El Niño follows historical patterns, New England will probably see the best snow in winter 2023/2024. VT, Quebec, N NYS could be awesome. Some of this might influence the eastern Great Lakes.

The PNW will be iffy… not a lot of precipitation that turns to snow at higher elevations. Same for ID. CO might be decent. CA could be snowier than average at higher elevations, wetter at lower elevations.

The lakes will be somewhere in the middle… cold and dry which can spawn lake affect snow. Maybe the lakes will see some spillover from N’or Easters if they’re big enough. The TX and CO lows might not be as influential because they’ll track south due to the dip in jet stream.

PA, VA will be wet. WV, Ohio might see some reasonable snow along the divide between wet and cold zones.

It is worth noting that El Niño and La Niña effects on regional climates are less certain than on effects on a global scale. Plus, these are early days in a pattern change. There are lots of ways that El Niño can play out in terms of intensity. But that’s what NOAA and a few others are saying atm. Remember that these are climatologists, which are more reliable… but less precise… than weather forecasters.

It’s a tough thing to call, given the variability in La Niña, El Niño.

Macro view:

Micro view:

[JohnSKepler]

Climatologists get it right about 50% of the time. About as good as fortune tellers.

[Manney]

Climatologists were talking about global warming in the early 70s. People disputed their views back then, even though they were based on thousands of years of data on atmospheric carbon. The climatologists were 100% right. Called it decades before most of us even knew what was happening.

They’ve been onto El Niño and La Niña for over 20 years… starting to really come to grips with the subtlety and screen out background noise.

Not like card readers in a circus tent. But we all choose what to believe in… even though we stand to be corrected decades later.

[Stephen]

Climatologists get it right about 50% of the time. About as good as fortune tellers.

@JohnSKepler, you may have said exactly what you meant, but just asking to clarify.
Do you mean “climatologists” or weather forecasters?
With one being long-term, and the other short-term.
Or, maybe you just meant anyone who is talking about weather in the future?

[JohnSKepler]

Climatologists. I've worked as one! By definition climatologists can't be over 50% right now. In fact, we can't know whether they are right or wrong right now because, by definition, climate is a long-term effect. They've only been saying the sky is falling for about 25 years, about 1/4 of the time needed to know anything. The reason so many people "don't believe" in global warming isn't because they are choosing to believe this-or-that, it's because they aren't seeing it in the world around them. I know that's an insane notion, using the world around you as a measuring rod for what you believe is real or not, but that's what people are doing. For instance, we just had the best winter ever, here in Utah. As far as we know, it really was the best winter ever. It wasn't predicted by climatologists. They also blew it on last year's hurricane predictions. But since it takes 100 years to know if they are right or wrong, we just can't know right now. I do know that people remember what you want them to remember. There's a lady I know who said, "It used to get down to minus-thirty here all the time." So, I went and checked the data. And... no, it did not.

As far as the climatologists calling it right in the 70's, I was alive in the 70's, and aware, and distinctly remember predictions of a coming ice age. I remembered it so well I researched it recently and, yes, that was their stance in the 70's. It wasn't until 1988 that James Hansen predicted doom from carbon through CO2, though the link between CO2 and climate is not as clear cut as you are making out. The mechanism where by a greenhouse is warm is NOT related an any way to the effect of a "greenhouse gas." And the data, as crazy-noisy as it is, shows there have been times in the past with both higher and lower CO2 than we have now and the temperature correlation is not straightforward at all.

But you do bring up an interesting point with ENSO (which climatologists can't say with any certainty when it will happen next or when it will flip, and it is only a few years out.) It is, in fact, the first-discovered free oscillation of the EOAS. It is first because it is short duration and large amplitude which is why it has been "known about" since at least the 1600's. Now, it's only been in the last few years that it has been understood and modeled*. This being true, what other, longer-term, lower-amplitude oscillations are out there? Global Thermohaline? Milankovitch forcing? We Just Don't Know. Oh, and the "background noise" you mention, it isn't like flicker noise with electronics. You talk about it as if it were flicker noise that needs to be filtered. There's no flicker noise here. It's natural variability. Why would you want to "screen out" natural variability.

We do all choose what to believe. Some of us choose whatever is said the most, it's called bandwagon and advertisers love using it. Others fall into the trap of confirmation bias; they believe what they want to believe. Others, recency bias; it just happened so it must be true. Many, many fall prey to peer pressure. But not many of us go get trained and get the facts, and I don't mean reading Scientific American. I didn't get a physics degree and a masters in atmospheric science to choose what to believe. I got them because I am curious. I didn't spend the last 35 years doing computer modeling to disprove climate models, but my experience has shown me that models are just that. Models. People are not suddenly discovering that there are an infinite number of genders and that its all fluid and indeterminate. They believe it because that's what they are being told and they are being pressured to agree. Same with global warming. The way people who disagree are treated should be evidence enough that it is a cult.

Weather changes fast. Climate changes slow. Neither is predictable or particularly-well understood but the desire to know what is actually happening ended in 1988. If you go get an atmospheric science degree today you won't be taught fluids, chemistry, and thermodynamics, you'll be taught global warming. Fooling people into believing that global warming is the end of our species has proven to be incredibly powerful both politically and economically. You can believe what you want to believe or you can learn and know. That's your choice.

Let's see how people react to this. Will they make honest scientific consideration or pull out their big guns? And how many of them even know what they're talking about? Let's discuss scaling and the vorticity equation.

[Stephen]

@JohnSKepler, do you think it is fair to say that “global warming / climate change” due to “greenhouse gases” may or may not be happening, but we don’t really know because we can’t know the future (and especially far enough into the future) to understand the interactions and outcomes?

Honest question.
I may have not said that precisely enough, but you probably get the idea.

Personally, I’m willing to consider both sides of the argument.
Unfortunately, being wrong on either side of the argument has negative consequences.

[Manney]

The first statement, that climatologists can’t be more than 50% right is incorrect. It assumes a binary choice and an utterly random selection process.

Look at the temperature data. La Niña effect on the oscillation was very strong up to January, then started to pull back sharply and quickly. But the typical pattern had already been set up in the jet stream, so the effects persisted to give you all that snow. This lag time is part of the noise that made the effects of the oscillation hard to discern… and gives ammo to the pundits who say “gotcha” when things don’t follow on a 1:1 basis.

There will always be competing theories… global cooling vs global warming… until the data piles up to create an irrefutable case. The movement isn’t all one way… it is entirely possible that other effects will move the debate in the other direction at some future point. The choice is whether to go with what you have or wait until the end of time until”something better” comes along.

The issue of noise is in the sampling, influenced by local weather effects. Despite all the debate about global warming, there are undoubtedly some areas (sub regions) that will see movement in the opposite direction because of weather patterns. If that is the sampling base, the evidence would suggest a second ice age.

The shift in climatology (and meteorology) is fuelled by new data sources. Decades ago, the only way to reliably collect SST was with a bathy. That was done by a few research vessels and a larger number of military assets… plying relatively constrained routes, exercise areas, and research areas. Today, most of the data is collected by space-based sensors… thousands of them from microsats to purpose built platforms… that can collect globally, do onboard processing, and send corrected measurements to data warehouses in object based language to be crunched by computers many times more capable than whatever IBM ran in the 70s and 80s.

The El Niño and La Niña debates are separate from global warming. The latter is politically charged. And if you want to see anything get fucked up in the world, throw in some politics.

So we’re not talking about global warming. The whole point of the thread is to highlight preliminary data suggesting that the oscillation is again shifting… as it has, off and on, for much longer than anyone alive could possibly remember. Let me put it another way: We’ve just gone through a prolonged La Niña event. What are the odds it will be even longer and not an El Niño? Pretty darned low… but nothing is certain, so we watch.

A hard, sharp shift in SST between now and autumn will most likely result in a different 2023/24 winter for some. If the shift lags, the effects may be softer in the winter than later in the year. This is the subtlety that is often overlooked… timing relative to seasonal shifts occurring because the earth wobbles and the angle of the sun changes.

It’s OK if ppl want to use the Farmers Almanac (either version), Tarot Cards, or what’s coming out the back end of Punxsutawney Phil as the basis to book a big family ski vaca next winter. Their money. But the smart play is to watch what happens in the next 2-3 months with sea surface temperatures before laying a juicy deposit on a lodge somewhere other than the “safe bets” in the West and NE.

Edit: nothing vs some unpronounceable typo

[fisheater]

Thank you @JohnSKepler

I know people are wringing hands over glacier melt in Greenland. I also know that there once was a subsistence farming community that died out as the weather became too cold to support farming. Could the melt happening today day be a similar occurrence?

As for climatologists being right about 50% of the time, anecdotally I would agree. Winters they predict a good snow year for me they are wrong. When they predict a bad snow year they are right. Over 60 years, and all my life I have always wished it snowed more!

[Manney]

The region is the Midwest. This means Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. 1/4 of the continental US.

It all averages out most of the time. So it’s not a .500 batting average because when a climatologist talks about an effect for the Midwest, they’re talking about the whole Midwest… not the place where you live.

[mca80]

I think you missed his joke.