H/T to Jo Nova for her blog article Looks like solar activity can change the Pacific ocean…Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The most powerful and enigmatic forces on our weather are the Pacific El Nino and La Nina phenomena which cause floods and droughts on opposite sides of the Pacific. Unfortunately, climate modelers can’t predict them much more than three to five months ahead, which tells us there’s some big driver they are missing. But a new paper from Chinese researchers suggests that a large blob of water in the North Eastern Pacific is responding to something in solar cycles.

This vast slab has the catchy name of The North Pacific eastern subtropical mode water (NPESTMW). It sits about 100m below the surface and grows and shrinks as the solar cycles rise and fall. It appears to be a very important blob. A different paper last year found that changes in the NPESTMW volume led the El Nino events by about 9 months.(Liu, 2025)

Remarkably, they found in the 1991–2022 record, seven of eight
large drops in this water volume were followed by El Niño,
while eight of nine large increases were followed by La Niña.

If they are right, it would confirm what skeptics have been saying for years — that climate modelers need to pay a lot more attention to solar cycles in their big models and that one day we might even learn to predict El Ninos (by crikey) a whole year ahead. Finally, the experts might be able to tell us if next summer really will be a barbecue summer, and the farmers might get a bit more warning on whether to plant seed early or sell off the cattle.

Awkwardly for 4,000 UN climate experts, the more solar factors we add to the climate models, the smaller the role is for CO2. (It’s even more awkward for nations that spent a trillion dollars on climate control before we understood the climate.)

The mechanism

The researchers suggest (see the top image) that it’s the solar UV which probably creates this effect on the oceans from the top down. High energy UV rays hit the oxygen molecules in the stratosphere and split them into ozone. Ozone then absorbs more UV and warms up that part of the atmosphere. This changes the jet streams and winds below. And winds close to the ocean can take energy or heat out of the water as it evaporates, but they also stir it up (or not). Peak solar activity seems to suppress the orderly settling of the NPESTMW blob. Once the blob forms and sinks to 100m to 300m down, surprisingly it is very stable and carries the temperature, salinity and other chemistry for a long time. This is what is called “the ocean memory” in the paper’s title.

After solar activity peaks, for the next year or two in every cycle, the formation of the NPESTMW block is suppressed. This may be due to cyclonic wind stress anomalies that drive upwelling. However, at the solar minima the winds change creating the opposite downwelling effect and the water flows into the blob.

Complicating everything, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) acts like a gate. During warm phases of the AMO, it amplifies the solar cycle effect on the NE Pacific, which is why after looking at eight decades of data, the effect has been strongest since 1990.

The Paper is Solar-Cycle Modulation of Subsurface Ocean Memory via the North Pacific Eastern Subtropical Mode Water by J. Wang et al.

Plain Language Summary

The Sun’s energy output follows an approximately 11-year cycle of stronger and weaker activity. Although this variation is small, it can nonetheless produce detectable effects on Earth’s climate. Here, we show that the solar-cycle consistently modulates the volume of a subsurface water mass in the North Pacific Ocean: the North Pacific Eastern Subtropical Mode Water, which forms at the ocean surface in winter and sinks, transferring heat and carbon to the deep ocean and influencing climate variability on timescales of years to decades. We find that during periods of high solar activity, anomalous cyclonic circulation over the formation region weakens surface winds and reduces ocean heat loss, suppressing winter mixed layer deepening and mode water formation, while the associated upwelling inhibits the sinking of this water mass; the opposite occurs during low solar activity. However, the strength of this solar influence is not constant over time: it is further amplified by a long-term natural climate fluctuation in the Atlantic Ocean, helping explain why the Sun’s imprint on climate has been particularly pronounced since the 1990s. These findings reveal a new mechanism through which the Sun may influence climate predictability via the ocean’s subsurface memory.

Figure 5

Schematic diagram illustrating the pathway from enhanced solar irradiance to reduced NPESTMW formation during solar-active periods. Enhanced solar forcing induces negative SLP anomalies over the North Pacific through “top-down” stratospheric-tropospheric coupling, producing anomalous cyclonic circulation and reduced air-sea heat loss. These atmospheric changes suppress winter mixed layer depth, preventing the water mass from penetrating enough to ventilate the thermocline and form mode water. Additionally, cyclonic wind-induced upwelling anomaly opposes downward subduction (shading schematic), further hindering NPESTMW formation and ventilation. Critically, this solar-driven pathway is strongly modulated by the AMO phase: during positive AMO phases, stronger atmosphere-ocean coupling and enhanced mixed layer sensitivity to atmospheric forcing amplify the solar-NPESTMW relationship, whereas during negative AMO phases, weaker coupling and sensitivity damp this signal, rendering the solar imprint less detectable.

Solar Cycle Progression September 15, 2026

Footnote: Oceans Oviously Drive Global Warming

Going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4.  This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C.  Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C.  Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate.  On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, then dropping well below its peak.