Where this comes from is rather far from the stuff I usually post here, but still post about regularly enough that it ought to have its own label. Weather and in particular watching hurricanes and tropical storms progress in the Atlantic basin. I've been following this - to at least a conversational level - for around 45 years. I've kept an eye on things like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO); the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO); the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (as best I can) not for the full 45 years but more of those as the years went by.
It turns out there's a big one I wasn't aware of: the Atlantic Niño, referred to as El Niño's little brother. Much like "big bro'," the Atlantic Niño is close to the equator, except it's between South America and Africa rather than the SW pacific area near Papua New Guinea extending to the west coast of South America.
Like El Niño, Atlantic Niño is characterized by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial basin and weaker-than-average trade winds throughout the east-central equatorial Atlantic.
However, there are some important differences between the two. For instance, as has been discussed in this blog, El Niño usually builds up slowly during northern summer before reaching maximum strength in late fall or winter, bringing a wide range of climate impacts throughout much of the planet. Atlantic Niño, in contrast, tends to peak in summer when ENSO is usually inactive, is usually shorter in duration, is overall much weaker than ENSO, and has more modest and local climate impacts. For example, Atlantic Niño often disrupts the West African summer monsoon, leading to reduced rainfall in the Sahel region, and is linked to increased frequency of flooding in northeastern South America and the West African sub-Sahel countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea.
A key phrase there is “Atlantic Niño, in contrast, tends to peak in summer when ENSO is usually inactive ...” Back in May, when I posted about the forecast for this coming hurricane season, the ENSO state was predicted to turn into a fairly active La Niña. So far, that hasn't materialized; this is the ENSO state snapshot from today, August 25th from Watts Up With That.
That sure looks to me like ENSO is inactive. It has been sliding slowly in the direction of La Niña but has taken since late May to get to (pretty much) zero from a little less than 0.5.
Much like El Niño has an opposite phase of the oscillation - a sister if you will - La Niña, Atlantic Niño has an opposite phase called Atlantic Niña that tends to produce cooler waters toward the east (African) end of the path.
I learned about this Atlantic oscillation through a source I hardly ever use anymore, The Weather Channel. Four years ago when we "cut the cord" (dropped cable) and went over to streaming services, we lost TWC, and after a couple of years and different streaming services, we went to one that includes them, but not exactly. If you have cable and watch them you know TWC has the "weather on the 8s" that includes things like your local radar, local data and forecast. That information is provided by the cable company so the channel we get just shows the weather in some selected cities around the country.
In an effort to avoid the 24/7 coverage of the DNC convention, I stumbled into
TWC talking about the tropical update and the host talked about the Atlantic
Niño, although he didn't use that exact phrase (or it just didn't register with me).
He said the waters off the coast of Africa were cooler than usual because of
this and that might be contributing to conditions not being as favorable as
expected for storm formation.
An overview of an average year's conditions, not this year's. Image credit to the NOAA page. Their caption follows.
(top) The sea surface temperature (shaded contours), 10-meter wind (vectors), and (bottom) rainfall departures from average in June – August during an average Atlantic Niño. The gray dots in the bottom panel indicate that the rainfall departures are statistically significant (5% significance level), indicating a high degree of confidence that the rainfall departures are associated with Atlantic Niño. Climate.gov figure adapted from Vallès‐Casanova et al. (2020).
As we approach the peak of the season, September 10th, development is more
likely, and the next two months should be more active than the season until
now. Unfortunately, while I can find deep resources related to the ENSO, I
haven't yet found anyone showing the Atlantic Niño oscillation state.
Something that no weatherguesser is talking about is the end of the 'warming and confused weather period' caused by the Honga Tonga underwater mega-volcano.
ReplyDeleteBack when it happened a few weather prognosticators theorized that the turmoil caused by that much water vapor being blasted into the upper atmosphere would last about two years. It would affect the overall cooling cycle by disrupting the overall cooling by two years.
The eruption was in January 2022. It's now been two years.
Daily Timewaster is showing snow on various mountains in the Sierras and Rockies at winter levels. During the summer.
This Atlantic Hurricane season, weatherguessed to be a horrid one, so far has been flaccid, and as noted by you, SiG, the ocean temperatures off of Africa are cooling.
Hmmm... It's been two years... Hmmm... Things cooling down and slowing down... Hmmm.....
I meant to say, "Something that no weatherguesser, THAT I KNOW..."
DeleteMy wife watches a world earthquakes page regularly as she opens her browser and I saw that Tonga had a Magnitude 6.9 quake yesterday. Turns out it wasn't that volcano again, thank God, and both far enough offshore and underwater to not be a disaster - but it sure had me looking.
DeleteThings like that Hunga Tonga volcano throwing 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere underscore just how little these climate models really mean. It's bad enough that by 2100 AD, their uncertainties are many times the predicted rise, so that it could be much warmer or much colder than the predictions, but then throw in things that aren't even included in those models. The models predicting a few degrees of warming have an uncertainty of 40 degrees. Then one volcano throws the predictions in the toilet. And there's a lot of volcanoes that could do it.
The weatherguessers can't predict the weather 4 hours from now, yet they're able to actively predict the weather 10 and 100 years from now.
DeleteAmazing.
I've talked to an actual meteorologist and she didn't know, even after 4 years of college, about the early medieval warming period or the mini-ice age in the 1600s or the French cool down in the 1780's caused by Icelandic volcanoes.
But "It's going to be the worst Hurricane season EVER" and "Sea Levels are going to rise 10 feet in 10 years" and and and.
Yeah, no.
My forehead (sinuses and a bad case of shingles) gives me 24 hour notice of bad weatherfronts. My wife's busted up body tells us between 24 and 48 hours of weatherchanges.
And both of us are subject to hibernation during really bad weather. We'll get tired and almost impossible to stay awake.
All of these are far more accurate than what the weatherguessers can do.
Beans, a friend of mine who is a meteorologist believed back in the spring that this was going to be a significant hurricane season based on the trend of indicators and gave our Amateur Radio club a presentation about the predictions. He was an AF Meteorologist (retired), a NASA Meteorologist (retired, 90 or so launches including later Shuttle launches), a meteorologist for the Red Cross and now does a YouTube channel. Also, he doesn't subscribe to anthropogenic "climate change" and does know about those other climate happenings. Meteorologists do their best with the information available.
DeleteI think every forecast I saw was for it to be a more active season, largely because of the higher sea surface temperatures. It's an easy lead to go after.
DeleteOne of the reasons I pay attention to WeatherBELL Analytics and Joe Bastardi is that he has an interesting way of forecasting the season by sort of applying that saying we see these days, "history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes" except he talks about the large scale weather picture of the world. He'll look at the big semi-permanent weather features, conclude it resembles the start of the season in some year he has records for and then bases his predictions on how that year went.
He also comes across as very sane on climate change and other nonsense.
I read and re-read your article (and links) today. As a dentist, I feel like the art critic who was caught saying, "I know nothing about art, but I know what I like."
ReplyDeleteI watched NYS weather (upstate and city) for fifty some-odd years when the best you could get for prediction was the tiny map in the NYT. Then I moved out to the Portland area (when it was still livable) and found myself in an entirely different atmosphere (I do beg your pardon, I really do).
Now I reside in Florida with my weather controlled by "what happens in Africa, doesn't stay in Africa". I noticed (or perhaps I missed it) that no one discusses those counter-clockwise currents of hot air (djinn?) that pick up and throw very fine particulate sand/dirt into the upper atmosphere stream flowing westward and leaving the continent between the Cape Verde Islands and the Canaries, arising from that very large circle centered on Reggane, Algeria encompassing the desert of seven countries.
Does this cloud (which is visibile on satellite) block the sun's rays thereby cooling the area beneath and/or absorb infra-red increasing the temperture of the local air mass bringing it ever higher into the troposphere and acting as nidi for water droplets?
As usual with weather, "it depends." or "Yes and no." The Saharan dust is pretty much an annual thing, and most of the time, all they talk about is prettier sunsets. I have heard them talk about it causing some cooling and possibly keeping storms from forming. I don't think I've heard talk of the dust being something causing clouds to form.
DeleteSince I thought I'd written on some of this before and found it.
IMO, the fundamental issue is that no models that I know of really handle clouds with any accuracy. Way too complex for the model writers. On cloudy days, they can make it cooler on the ground. On cloudy nights, they can make it warmer.
@ Beans
ReplyDeleteweatherguessers≆stock market predictors