The 2017 ‘Global Warming Reality Check’: Experts Now Forecasting La Niña Conditions!

Schneefan at wobleibtdieerderwaermung.de here does a good job summarizing weather and climate trends. His latest focuses on the ENSO, which is a powerful Pacific driver of global weather.

Earlier this year a number of experts projected that another El Niño would appear later this year, and thus keep global temperatures elevated and thus end the pause in global warming we’ve seen since the century began.

For example, the May ECMWF ENSO projection saw powerful El Niño conditions brewing for this coming fall, with an anomaly of up to +3.0° K!

Source: ECMWF ENSO FORECAST.

But already in April other forecasters started revising their projections downwards as nature started to show she had other plans in mind. Today it strongly appears La Niña conditions are going to emerge after all.

The result? The “Al Gore effect”.

Expect the cooling we’ve seen over the past one and half years to continue even through 2018.

Figure 1: Global lower troposphere temperature (1500 m) anomalies have been cooling since the El Niño peaked in early 2016. Source: www.woodfortrees.org/graph/trend.

The mid-August 2017 CFSv2 prognoses for the equatorial Pacific 3.4 zone surface temperature projections now indicate La Niña conditions by October:

Click to enlarge. Source: www.cpc.ncep.noaa.html. 

To know what’s behind the latest development, we look at the ocean heat content anomalies of the upper 300 m of the ocean in the equatorial Pacific. The following chart shows a return to the negative range at the end of July 2017.

Source: www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/MJO/enso.shtml

The following chart shows what’s going on just below the ocean surface:

Source: 4-month sequence of Pacific Ocean Equatorial Temperature anomaly cross sections

Clear to see is the cold emerging La Niña mass under ocean surface in August 2017. That spells generally cooler global conditions for the months ahead.

Global warming “reality check” of 2017

With Arctic ice mass growing and the Antarctic showing cold surface anomalies, Schneefan calls the recent development: “The Global Warming“ Reality Check”!

Once again we see that experts are a long way from understanding what the system is doing, and thus make forecasts dealing with the climate totally fraught with uncertainty. We can only look forward to late fall.

Read more at No Tricks Zone