Holding pattern

Well, when I wrote the post "Just in time for (you guessed it) Christmas", I didn't know what the future held for the effect of El Niño on the temperature of the lower troposphere.  All I could do was compare the progression of this year's event to the progression of the previous mega-El Niño of 1997-1998.

What I didn't realize when I first did this back in October was that the progress of the event would be so parallel to what happened in 1997-1998, even down to its month-to-month evolution.  But that's what appears to be happening.

So I've plotted up the November TLT temperature from Remote Sensing Systems, and I averaged the weekly Niño 3.4 temperatures from the NOAA CPC (because I couldn't find a monthly value yet).  I checked my averaging for the previous month, and it was very similar to the monthly value I'm using for October, but I'll check back on that.

What is astonishing (and worth checking) is the extremely high sea surface temperature in the Niño 3.4 region.  If you look back at 1997-1998, it's never been this high before.  EVER.  Before this month, the highest anomaly was the last week of November 1997, at 2.8.  Two weeks ago, it went up to 3.1.

All that heat has to go somewhere.  The tropical tropospheric temperature, according to Rockin' Roy Spencer, is the same as it was last month (which is to say, very warm).  So if the atmosphere behaves like the atmosphere is supposed to behave, over the next month the warmth should start to spread globally.   Particularly if this ongoing event wants to maintain parallelism with 1997-1998.

Here's the plot. So is the global TLT going to start its upward ascent just in time for Christmas?  Soon into the New Year, we'll find out.

(I just noticed something about my little plot below.  Both temperature axes should correctly be labeled as anomalies, not just temperatures.  So mentally add the word 'anomaly' after "Niño 3.4  SST" and "REMSS TLT" and we'll be fine.)