What is the difference between weather and climate? It is quite complicated and quite frankly arbitrary and I personally do not like the NOAA definition of climate but this blog post sheds a little light on the subject.
It was posted in late January and it contains three short YouTubes you can watch that show how averaging turns weather into climate. It is not as precise as I would like but it at least starts the conversation. The post was written by Michelle L’Heureux
As many of the ENSO Bloggers do from time to time they intertwine the science with personal experience which may help in understanding the concept.
The official NOAA definition of Climate is the average over the last three completed decades so currently that is 1991 -2020. I do not like that definition because it does not reflect the influence of long cycles such as the AMO and PDO but I can not think of a better definition.
You can read the Blog Post with the comments HERE But I have reproduced most of the post in this article with some of my comments so click “Read More” to read my article.
I read a Climate.Gov blog post attributed to the Climate.Gov Staff. You can access it HERE. I spent maybe four hours researching the topic separate from the time it takes to publish this article. I know some chemistry both from college and my work in the mining industry but this was intense. There is a paper written about this topic which you can pay to access HERE. I rarely write about things where the reader can not access the full article without paying for it but I am making an exception today for five reasons:
Climate.gov thought it was important to talk about this when they could not provide the underlying article to their readers. However, I was able to access and include the Abstract in this article.
The hydroxyl radical plays a part in cleaning the atmosphere of pollutants including Greenhouse Gases.
If you search “Hydroxyl” you will find a lot of literature on this topic.
This dinosaur, your author, was intrigued with what is Hydroxyl and why the symbol was OH and not HO.
I am interested in Weather Modification to increase precipitation and I thought I needed to know about this.
When articles discuss “normal” or “climatology”, what does it mean? Right now it means what the weather was like on average from 1991 through 2020. To me, this is pretty arbitrary and faulty in many respects but that is how NOAA does it. At the end of every decade, the definition is updated with the most recent decade of data added and the most distant decade removed. If there was no long-term trend or long-period cycles this definition would be fine but there is a trend most noticeable in temperature and there are long cycles like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. If these cycles last approximately 60 years a 30-year average IMO is not a good approach but quite frankly I have not thought of a better way.
In this Climate.Gov article, (which you can access HERE), we are just looking at precipitation. We are not looking at anomalies but the actual values. We start with Precipitation over the 30-year period that defines “Normal” or “Climatology”. Outlooks issues by NOAA often will be in terms of the predicted deviation from the below when precipitation is being considered.
If you are planning to move, the above information may help you decide where you want to live.
In the body of the article and some will have to click the “read more” button to access it, we take the above and show it by month so that there are twelve maps. There is one for each month averaged over the period 1991 – 2020. We are entering into 2024 so there is some time before the climatology will be updated. That update has a big impact on the historical outlook maps to the extent they are revised to show anomalies based on the new normal or climatology.
First I have to describe what ENSO is. It is going to be a short definition of a very complex topic.
There appears to be a pattern that some incorrectly call a fixed cycle (rather than more of an oscillation) where sometimes the warmest water along the Equator in the Pacific Ocean is found to the west (officially the IndoPacific Warm Pool) and sometimes it is found to the east (leading to the name El Niño). When it is to the west we call that a potential La Nina. When it is to the East we call that a potential El Nino. And when it is not clearly to the west or the east we call it ENSO Neutral.
I am not in this article going to explain why the warm water is sometimes to the east or why it is sometimes to the east. It is very complicated.
Why is it important?
Generally speaking, warmer water evaporates more easily than cooler water. Where ocean water evaporates, clouds form. This rising of moisture to form clouds creates a circulation pattern called the Walker Circulation with rising air forming clouds and due to circulation patterns in other places there is precipitation and the air sinks.
Through other mechanisms that I will not describe in this article, the precipitation also spreads north and south of the Equator to impact weather patterns in the mid-latitudes all around the world.
What is the problem?
One problem is that the rising and subsiding process does not always materialize or match where we detect the warmer than normal water and the cooler than normal water. If it does not materialize, the changing distribution of the warmer and cooler water has little or no impact on the atmosphere and hence on weather. Thus the potential El Nino or La Nina does not become a true El Nino or La Nina. If it does materialize but not where we predict it would, that creates a El Nino or La Nina with different impacts than usual.
How to measure the process.
This is described in this article which is really a two-year-old ENSO Blog Post. I have included it in its entirety other than comments made to the article.
Short Abstract
The traditional way of measuring the distribution of warm and cool water is to do measurements in certain areas in the Eastern Pacific and consider the surface temperature relative to history. If the temperature of the surface area in the selected area is equal to or more than 0.5C above normal, it is potentially an El Nino. If it is -0.5C or cooler it is potentially a La Nina.
Where is the problem?
The potential problem is that ocean surface temperatures are warming. So is the threshold of 0.5C above or below normal as meaningful as it has been in the past?
What is the solution?
The traditional solution has been to revise the definition of normal periodically.
What is this ENSO Blog Post about?
Is the traditional approach adequate or would recalculating the temperature anomaly to consider the overall level of ocean warming or the ocean warming nearby improve the ability of the formula to predict weather that is more consistent with the assessment of El Nino and La Nina periods? This means using what is called a Relative Oceanic ENSO Index instead of the Regular Oceanic ENSO Index.
I will now let the ENSO Blog Post explain this. I do not think the described method has been implemented or at least not officially. One reason for that might be that it is an improvement but does not fully address the complications that warming oceans cause to our ability to measure and anticipate the impacts of the ENSO process; a process which may gradually change dramatically. This is the start of a much more complicated discussion but it is a good start.
This comes to me via an email from NOAA. I have included the entire email in this article.
There is a process called Arctic Amplification (AA) where excess heat is moved towards the poles north and south. This may be what we see happening here. There is an annual report called the Arctic Report Card and what was sent to me and what I have published here is providing information on and an introduction to that larger report.
Warmest Arctic summer on record is evidence of accelerating climate change New chapters in 2023 Arctic Report Card show the promise of Indigenous knowledge to strengthen resilience ContactMonica Allen, monica.allen@noaa.gov, 202-379-6693Theo Stein, theo.stein@noaa.gov, 303-819-7409December 12, 2023
Much of the information in this article comes from the monthly email I receive from John Bateman. He does public outreach for NOAA and in particular NCEI. I could find the same information and more on the NCEI website but John produces a good summary so I use it or most of it. I also sometimes add additional information from NCEI or other NOAA websites. John Bateman sends me two emails. One on the World situation and one for the U.S. One of the things I like to add to what John Bateman sends me is the state ranking maps. These maps show how temperature and precipitation for each state rank relative to the 129 years of what is considered to be the most reliable data we have.
This article is about November 2023 in the U.S.
This trend analysis comes from Climate at a Glance also from NCEI
This is the U.S. November temperature trend. This past November was by no means a record but it was above the trend line. It was a relief in a way as some recent months have been much above trend and record breakers so the factors that were causing that may have been short-term but in any event did not show up this November. I will compare this to the world trend in a future article.
Now I will present the information provided by John Bateman with one additional graphic also from NCEI plus the state ranking maps.
I used to report on Reservoir Levels. I think it is time to do that again. The article this evening is a first attempt at doing this.
It contains a lot of information. I will be republishing this article periodically and adding and improving to it. What I am providing today has images that should update automatically. But I also have provided links to those images and additional information.
At this point, it is far from perfect but a start. It is particularly important because in many cases the water in reservoirs comes from last year’s precipitation. So with uncertainty as to how this El Nino winter will evolve, we need to monitor the amount of water we have in storage.
You can read this post on the ENSO Blog HERE but you might find it convenient to read it here.
It is a great article and very worthwhile reading.
I have not added any comments to it in the body of this article. Any comments I have are here in the lede.
A. I question some of the graphics. re the La Nina part of the graphic since -1 is not stronger than -2
B. I was shocked at how poor the performance of the models is. I think how much of a coat our animals grow may be a better predictor.
It is an excellent article, you should read it.
Perhaps I should publish my analysis tool which I used to do. But I would have to update it and that is a lot like work. I think I have the information to do the analysis now
Please click below to read the full article and the comments to the article that show up as footnotes.
I am just providing a report from NCA5. I am providing the full report but you can access it HERE and then there will be live links that you can click on for additional information. There is a lot more in that report than these 10 Maps but they feature these 10 Maps as sort of a summary of the key points in that report. I have added some comments to each map to perhaps help interpret these 10 Maps but I have not read the full report so I may not understand enough to fully interpret them. But I will do my best. It appears to me that this set of 10 maps is intended to entice people to read the chapter or chapters where the material is presented in more depth.
Droughts occur everywhere in the world. In this article, we discuss the ongoing drought in the Central Amazon. The discussion is based on a Climate.gov Post.
I have provided almost the entire Climate.Gov Post but you can access the Post HERE.
