Wednesday, December 10, 2014

El Niño is here?


An update on ENSO. The Japan Meteorological Agency has declared an El Niño, according to the Guardian. I haven't found it on their website, JamieB found it. Here is a link to the JMA announcement (archived for posterity). And according to Reuters:
Japan’s weather bureau said on Wednesday that an El Niño weather pattern, which can trigger drought in some parts of the world while causing flooding in others, had emerged during the summer for the first time in five years and was likely to continue into winter....
...The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) forecast last month that the possibility of an El Niño pattern forming this winter was higher than the 50% it had projected in its previous monthly prediction.
But on Wednesday it said that an El Niño had emerged between June and August, continuing into November.
“We can’t tell whether or not El Niño will continue until spring, but we can say that there is a higher chance of it continuing in the winter,” said Ikuo Yoshikawa, a JMA forecaster.
The Japanese weather bureau does not classify or predict the size of El Niño, he said.
Update - having read the JMA outlook of 10 December, the Reuters article at the Guardian seems more certain than JMA itself.

6 comments:

  1. The JMA's El Nino content is here:
    http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/elnino/

    ReplyDelete
  2. What is El Nino?
    The article is incorrect. El Nino is the warming of Central and East-central equatorial Pacific and not the Western Tropical Pacific as mentioned in the above article.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Having read the JMA item itself, it's very like the latest update from BOM. I doubt that a graphic would be very much different if JMA produced something like the tracker. I'd say, overall, that BOM is a bit more explicit. Look at the update in the sidebar. They're willing to say that even a fully developed El Nino will be weak to moderate.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If this is correct and the El Niño manifests to the point that 2015 can actually be called an "El Niño year", I'll stick my neck out and reiterate a previous prediction:

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/prediction-new-surface-temperature-record-2013.html#76790http://www.skepticalscience.com/prediction-new-surface-temperature-record-2013.html#76790

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'll make a prediction. If we have a big El Niño year, the denialist community will then tell us there's no global warming because of the El Niño. Yes, of course this flies in the face of their "global warming has stopped for 17 years" nonsense, but that won't even slow them down a little. And then once its done, global warming will be on a pause for tick, tick, tick...

    It may be soon time for them to jump up onto the next step.
    http://www.skepticalscience.com/going-down-the-up-escalator-part-1.html

    ReplyDelete

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