Just in time for (you guessed it) Christmas

If you didn't know, the El Niño phenomenon was named after the Christ child - supposedly because if there were rains on the dry coast of Peru in December around Christmas, the fishermen knew it was going to be a poor year.  Hence "the child" or "the boy" -- El Niño.

Well, I've been tracking the progression of this El Niño, waiting for it to affect the lower tropospheric temperature of the Earth.  This is the last bastion of the deniers who claim that the world hasn't warmed since, well, basically the last big El Niño of 1997-1998.  And that's what I'm going to compare it to.  As I will show and you will see, there are remarkable similarities between 1997-1998's event and what's happening now.  And one notable difference.

So, here's what I did.  I got the temperatures of the lower troposphere (TLT) from http://www.remss.com/, and I got the Niño 3.4 sea surface temperatures from NOAA.   Niño 3.4 is a region in the central Pacific along the Equator.    I got both the temperatures for 1997-1998 and now.   I made a plot with Excel, and then I added one more line.

Here's the first plot.

What this plot shows is the Niño 3.4 SST in red for the 1997-1998 event, the Niño 3.4 SST SST in green for what's happening now, and the TLT for 1997-1998 in blue.  Note that there are two vertical axes on this plot: the left is the SST, and the right is the TLT.    What this shows (confirming what I've read) is that the TLT lags the SST by several months.   It doesn't start rising when the SSTs rise -- in fact, it started to go up in 1997-1998 when the SST had plateaued before starting to decline.  As you can see with the green data, the SST is still going up for this event (even though the area of warmer temperature is bigger than in 1997-1998).

So, what's happening with the TLT now?  I added that data for the second plot:

The TLT for this year is in purple.  It's following a remarkably parallel track to 1997-1998.  And I use the word 'parallel' appropriately.  Because the TLT now is about 0.2 deg C higher than it was in 1997-1998.  That's the notable difference between now and then.  And that's also the effect of global warming, despite what deniers say.  So if the SST keeps rising to at or near the peak of 1997-1998, and the TLT shows a similar increase, it could be expected that the peak will be about 0.2 deg C higher than the heights of 1997-1998.   There's no guarantee, and it will be interesting to see how high it gets.

But as to when -- well, I would expect based on the 1997-1998 event to see a nice jump upward in December -- just in time for Christmas.

One question though - is there any evidence or data indicating that the warm SSTs of this event are already heating up the atmosphere?

Well, yes there is.  And it comes from a perhaps surprising source - Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama - Huntsville, who happens to be a climate change denier, but who's also enough of a scientist to be forced to admit what the data is actually showing, even if he doesn't think it's significant in the long term.


Satellites report high tropical air temperatures

Quoted:

Tropical air temperatures remained high in September due to the ongoing El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event, according to data released by the University of Huntsville in Alabama (UAH).

Satellite data shows that the temperature anomaly - the variance to the long-term average - for the tropical lower troposphere in September was +0.55oC. This makes September 2015 the warmest September reported in the tropics since satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature began in 1979, according to UAH."

So it's coming.  Oceans first, atmosphere next.  Time will tell.