In a new post over at The Climate Brink I take an in-depth look at how "weird" the recent El Nino event was. Compared to prior strong events, global surface temperatures rose earlier and high temperatures have persisted for longer: www.theclimatebrink.... - ThreadSky

hausfath.bsky.social • 167 days ago

In a new post over at The Climate Brink I take an in-depth look at how "weird" the recent El Nino event was. Compared to prior strong events, global surface temperatures rose earlier and high temperatures have persisted for longer: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/how-unusual-is-current-post-el-nino

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hausfath.bsky.social•167 days ago

However, if we include more moderate El Nino events, there is one in 1958 that saw a spike in global temperatures 12 months after the event peaked that is not too far off from what we are seeing today:

hausfath.bsky.social•167 days ago

So what is the takeaway here? The weirdest aspect of the 2023/2024 El Niño event remains its early rise in global temperatures, occurring months before the peak of El Niño conditions. The persistence of high temperatures has been unusual, but the coming months will tell us just how unusual it is.

pmagn.bsky.social•164 days ago

Zeke, why is the devastation spread around the mean so variable & over different temps?

climateflavors.bsky.social•166 days ago

A detail that's interesting about this plot is that the range for, say, Sep is much smaller pre-El Niño than after. Is this tight spread a robust feature of El Niño ramp-ups?

The Sep 2023 anomaly isn't *crazy* unusual in context of the full variability conditional on Nino34 (see below).

climateflavors.bsky.social•166 days ago

Not saying there isn't something weird going on in 2023/24, btw. Just trying to understand what we can glean from single wiggles (though we have two such wiggles now with fall 2024 also being very warm).

hausfath.bsky.social•166 days ago

Good question; there does seem to be tighter uncertainty bounds pre-El Nino in the record since 1940, but the sample size is small enough that its hard to draw too firm a conclusion either way:

karelvc.bsky.social•167 days ago

Was early warming caused by El Nino at all?

Looking at regional patterns: missing Atlantic blue blob & strong Kuroshio extension stand out.

climate-analyst.bsky.social•166 days ago

I recall NINO 1+2 was very high during the early months of the temperature spike, also North Atlantic. If I had the time I would look at ocean mixed layer depth or a global trade index intensity index. It would be great to be able to remove this noise from forced response.

climate-analyst.bsky.social•166 days ago

*global trade winds index

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