The TLT rise is here

I've been waiting (along with a few other folks) for the Temperature of the Lower Troposphere (TLT) as calculated by Remote Sensing Systems (http://remss.com/) to start rising in response to the mega-El Niño that has taken over vast areas of the Pacific Ocean.

I've chronicled the remarkable parallelism of this year's event with the 1997-1998 El Niño in a series of posts:

Just in time for (you guessed it) Christmas

"Just in time for Christmas" October update

Holding pattern

It became very apparent, especially in the plot with the November data ("Holding Pattern") that the six-month lag time was pretty solid.  At least that's how it looked.  If it was solid, then December was crunch month.  For everything to be working the way it was expected to, given the amount of time it took for the El Niño heat to mix into the atmosphere globally for the 1997-1998 event, then the rise would have to clearly appear in December.

And guess what?

It did.

How much is it going to go up?  No way to know.  But looking at the progression of the 1997-1998 El Niño, the month following the clear start of the rise was a huge leap upwards.  And given how the event seems to be affecting the atmosphere and the weather (California is sucking up the rain and loving the snow), I think it's reasonable to expect similar for January 2016.

Here is the updated plot.  Because of the overlap of the sea surface temperature line (green) and the TLT line (purple), I increased the size of the monthly symbols for TLT a bit, and decreased the size of the symbols for SST.

Dang, I can't wait for the beginning of February.  This is EXCITING.