Tuesday, December 01, 2009

UKMO agrees with me

They don't have a great record with their recent annual temperature forecasts, but it's still encouraging to see another set of experts endorsing my prediction, after Jim Hansen did at the start of the year and Gavin Schmidt did more recently.

ENSO continues to grow stronger and the forecasts are getting slightly more confident.

11 comments:

skanky said...

It's interesting that the UKMO model ENSO forecast (from the NOAA link) is the one that forecasts the El Nino conditions to end soonest (of the non-statistical models).

However, isn't that report based on a DePreSys forecast? The fact that it's out to 2019 suggests it is. That's different to the annual prediction isn't it?

NB the level of ignorance in the comments to that article is rather impressive.

Steve Bloom said...

The second link needs fixing.

crandles said...

>"ENSO continues to grow stronger and the forecasts are getting slightly more confident."

I thought we had had four weeks with Niño 3.4 at 1.7ºC and the "expected to strengthen and" had been dropped leaving just the "last through at least the Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-10". Or is that the summary you didn't want to see?

James Annan said...

Steve, link fixed - thanks.

Chris,

I was really meaning over the longer time scale. I happen to have a selection of the old pdfs of the "Weekly ENSO Evolution, Status, and Prediction Presentation" and it is clear that over a period of months, they keep pushing the forecast out further into 2010 maintaining at least a moderate El Nino. Given the ~6 month(ish) lag to temperatures, maintaining El Nino out to the middle of the year is important for the annual mean temperature.

Eg the 31 Aug report says:

"a majority of the models indicate at least a moderate strength El Niño (greater than +1.0°C) during November-December-January 2009-10."

The latest 30 Nov report says:

"a majority indicate at least a moderate strength El Niño (greater than +1.0°C) through December-January-February 2009-10." and also:
"A majority of ENSO models indicate El Niño will continue through March-April-May 2010."

skanky,

I didn't see that - where is the link, please? Personally I think it's early days to trust these forecasts beyond a few months, and DePreSys is yet to prove itself.

skanky said...

Which bit?

The Independent article says:

"A new forecast for the decade from 2009 onwards suggests that "at least half" of the years up to 2019 will be hotter than the hottest year so far, which was 1998. And it indicates that the first of the years to break the current record will actually be 2010."

Which I'm guessing is DePreSys, but I haven't found a PR or similar yet, to confirm or deny.

The model runs are in the weekly presentation (via your "forecast" link), page 27 at:

http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

James Annan said...

Ah - I was conflating "the UKMO model ENSO forecast" and "that report" in your first comment! It looks from the report that they are indeed using DePreSys for the one-year forecast.

skanky said...

Sorry yes, I could have made that a bit more clear. It seemed obvious to me what I meant, but then it would.

crandles said...

Well I suppose you already have Hansen so Nasa isn't really a great addition:

"The US space agency Nasa suggests that a new global temperature record will be set "in the next one or two years". "

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8400905.stm

James Annan said...

Thanks, but I suspect it is just a re-tread of recent comments rather than anything new (NASA = GISS = Gavin).

crandles said...

If you are counting how many are agreeing with you, it is only fair that there should also be a count of the number disagreeing.

See ENSO comments on pages 18 through 22. Klotzbach1 and Gray "think that the persistence of warm ENSO conditions through next year’s hurricane season are quite unlikely"

http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2009/dec2009/dec2009.pdf

not that there is any connection being made to likelyhood of record temperature.

James Annan said...

Oh, I don't think anyone was ever predicting a strong El Nino to last right through to next autumn. [Note neither they, nor anyone else, are predicting a dive into a strong La Nina either, merely a decay of the positive anomaly.] That analysis is just a reprise of existing ENSO forecasts and their influence on hurricanes.