Ocean Climate Science | Science Matters

Ocean Climate Ripples

Posted on February 18, 2017 by Ron Clutz

Dr. Arnd Bernaerts is again active with edifying articles on how humans impact upon the oceans and thereby the climate. His recent post is Global Cooling 1940 – 1975 explained for climate change experts

I and others first approach Dr. Bernaerts’ theory relating naval warfare to climate change with a properly skeptical observation. The ocean is so vast, covering 71% of our planet’s surface and up to 11,000 meters deep, with such a storage of solar energy that it counteracts all forcings including human ones.

As an oceanographer, Bernaerts is well aware of that generalization, having named his website Oceans Govern Climate. But his understanding is much more particular and more clear to me in these recent presentations. His information is encyclopedic and his grasp of the details can be intimidating, but I think I get his main point.

When there is intense naval warfare concentrated in a small, shallow basin like the North Sea, the disturbance of the water structure and circulation is profound. The atmosphere responds, resulting in significant regional climate effects. Nearby basins and continents are impacted and eventually it ripples out across the globe.

The North Atlantic example is explained by Bernaerts Cooling of North Sea – 1939 (2_16) Some excerpts below.

Follow the Water

Water, among all solids and liquids, has the highest heat capacity except for liquid ammonia. If water within a water body remained stationary and did not move (which is what it does abundantly and often forcefully for a number of reasons), the uppermost water surface layer would, to a very high percentage, almost stop the transfer of any heat from a water body to the atmosphere.

However, temperature and salt are the biggest internal dynamic factors and they make the water move permanently. How much the ocean can transfer heat to the surface depends on how warm the surface water is relative to atmospheric air. Of no lesser importance is the question, as to how quickly and by what quantities cooled-down surface water is replaced by warmer water from sub-surface level. Wind, cyclones and hurricanes are atmospheric factors that quickly expose new water masses at the sea surface. Another ‘effective’ way to replace surface water is to stir the water body itself. Naval activities are doing just this.

War in the North Sea

Since the day the Second World War had started naval activities moved and turned the water in the North Sea at surface and lower levels at 5, 10, 20 or 30 metres or deeper on a scale that was possibly dozens of times higher than any comparable other external activity over a similar time period before. Presumably only World War One could be named in comparison.

The combatants arrived on the scene when the volume of heat from the sun had reached its annual peak. Impacts on temperatures and icing are listed in the last section: ‘Events’ (see below). The following circumstantial evidences help conclude with a high degree of certainty that the North Sea contributed to the arctic war winter of1939/40.

Climate Change in Response

On the basis of sea surface temperature record at Helgoland Station and subsequent air temperature, developments provide strong indication that the evaporation rate was high. This is confirmed by the following impacts observed:

More wind: As the rate of evaporation over the North Sea has not been measured and recorded, it seems there is little chance to prove that more vapour moved upwards during autumn 1939 than usual. It can be proved that the direction of the inflow of wind had changed from the usually most prevailing SW winds, to winds from the N to E, predominantly from the East. At Kew Observatory (London) general wind direction recorded was north-easterly only three times during 155 winter years; i.e. in 1814, 1841 and 1940[6]. This continental wind could have significantly contributed to the following phenomena of 1939: ‘The Western Front rain’.

More rain: One of the most immediate indicators of evaporation is the excessive rain in an area stretching from Southern England to Saxony, Silesia and Switzerland. Southern Baltic Sea together with Poland and Northern Germany were clearly separated from the generally wet weather conditions only three to four hundred kilometres further south. A demonstration of the dominant weather situation occurred in late October, when a rain section (supplied from Libya) south of the line Middle Germany, Hungary and Romania was completely separated from the rain section at Hamburg – Southern Baltic[7].

More cooling: Further, cooling observed from December 1939 onward can be linked to war activities in two ways. The most immediate effect, as has been explained (above), is the direct result from any excessive evaporation process. The second (at least for the establishment of global conditions in the first war winter) is the deprivation of the Northern atmosphere of its usual amount of water masses, circulating the globe as humidity.

Rippling Effects in Northern Europe and Beyond

Next to the Atlantic Gulf Current, the North Sea (Baltic Sea is discussed in the next chapter) plays a key role in determining the winter weather conditions in Northern Europe. The reason is simple. As long as these seas are warm, they help sustain the supremacy of maritime weather conditions. If their heat capacity turns negative, their feature turns ‘continental’, giving high air pressure bodies an easy opportunity to reign, i.e. to come with cold and dry air. Once that happens, access of warm Atlantic air is severely hampered or even prevented from moving eastwards freely.

The less moist air is circulating the globe south of the Arctic, the more easily cold polar air can travel south. A good piece of evidence is the record lack of rain in the USA from October – December 1939 followed by a colder than average January 1940, a long period of low water temperatures in the North Sea from October-March (see above) and the ‘sudden’ fall of air temperatures to record low in Northern Europe.

The graph above suggests that naval warfare is linked to rapid cooling. The climate system responds with negative feed backs to restore equilibrium. Following WWI, limited to the North Atlantic, the system overshot and the momentum continued upward into the 1930s. Following WWII, with both Pacific and Atlantic theaters, the climate feed backs show several peaks trying to offset the cooling, but the downward trend persisted until about 1975.

Summary

The Oceans Govern Climate. Man influences the ocean governor by means of an expanding fleet of motorized propeller-driven ships. Naval warfare in the two World Wars provide the most dramatic examples of the climate effects.

Neither I nor Dr. Bernaerts claim that shipping and naval activity are the only factors driving climate fluctuations. But it is disturbing that so much attention and money is spent on a bit player CO2, when a much more plausible human influence on climate is ignored and not investigated.

AMO: Atlantic Climate Pulse

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Ron Clutz

I was inspired by David Dilley’s weather forecasting based upon Atlantic water pulsing into the Arctic Ocean (see post: Global Weather Oscillations). So I went looking for that signal in the AMO dataset, our best long-term measure of sea surface temperature variations in the North Atlantic.

ATLANTIC MULTI-DECADAL OSCILLATION (AMO)

For this purpose, I downloaded the AMO Index from Kaplan SST v.2, the unaltered and untrended dataset. By definition, the data are monthly average SSTs interpolated to a 5×5 grid over the North Atlantic basically 0 to 70N.

For an overview the graph below presents a comparison between Annual, March and September averages from 1856 to 2016 inclusive.

We see about 4°C difference between the cold month of March, and warm September. The overall trend is slightly positive at 0.27°C per century, about 10% higher in September and 10% lower in March. It is also clear that monthly patterns resemble closely the annual pattern, so it is reasonable to look more closely into Annual variability.

The details of the Annual fluctuations in AMO reveal the pulse pattern suggested by Dilley.

We note firstly the classic pattern of temperature cycles seen in all datasets featuring quality-controlled unadjusted data. The low in 1913, high in 1944, low in 1975, and high in 1998. Also evident are the matching El Nino years 1998, 2009 and 2016, indicating that what happens in the Pacific does not stay in the Pacific.

Most interesting are the periodic peaking of AMO in the 8 to 10 year time frame. The arrows indicate the peaks, which as Dilley describes produce a greater influx of warm Atlantic water under the Arctic ice. And as we know from historical records and naval ice charts, Arctic ice extents were indeed low in the 1930s, high in the 1970s, low in the 1990s and on a plateau presently.

Conclusion

I am intrigued but do not yet subscribe to the Lunarsolar explanation for these pulses, but the AMO index does provide impressive indication of the North Atlantic role as a climate pacemaker. Oceans make up 71% of the planet surface, so SSTs directly drive global mean temperatures (GMT). But beyond the math, Atlantic pulses set up oscillations in the Arctic that impact the world.

In the background is a large scale actor, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) which is the Atlantic part of the global “conveyor belt” moving warm water from the equatorial oceans to the poles and back again. For more on this deep circulation pattern see Climate Pacemaker: The AMOC

The Ocean Climate Spin Zone

Posted on January 15, 2017 by Ron Clutz

This image shows the five major ocean gyres. It shows that gyres rotate in a clockwise direction in the Northern hemisphere and a counter-clockwise direction in the Southern hemisphere. The black square shows the approximate location of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the red circle shows the position of the Beaufort gyre in the Arctic Ocean.

Professional hydrologist Rob Ellison has for years been thinking and writing to connect the dots between the sun, ocean and climate. Recently he wrote this post at his excellent blog Terra et Aqua, An Earnest Discovery of Climate Causality (link in red)

Below I provide some excerpts from his discussion about an ocean mechanism which would be much better understood, were it not for the CO2 obsession sucking up most of the research funding.

Overview

It is hypothesized that upwelling in the Pacific Ocean is modulated by solar activity over periods of decades to millennia – with profound impacts on communities and ecosystems globally. The great resonant systems of the Pacific respond at variable periods – the tempo increased last century for instance – of La Niña and El Niño alternation. . .The mechanism proposed is a spinning up of the Pacific gyres as a result of colder and denser polar air. Low solar activity spins up the gyres producing more frequent La Niña (more equatorial upwelling) – and vice versa.

Pacific Oscillations Global Impact

The Pacific has a globally influential role in climate variability at scales of months to millennia. The variability in atmospheric temperature, rainfall and biology has its origin in the volume of cold water rising off California and in the equatorial Pacific. It is an ever changing anomaly.

The principle of atmospheric heating and cooling by ENSO is very simple. Cold, nutrient rich currents cascade through the deep oceans over a millennia or more. These turbulent currents don’t generally emerge through a sun warmed surface layer. By far the most significant deep ocean upwelling is in the eastern and central Pacific. Cold water in contact with the atmosphere absorbs heat and warms as the atmosphere cools. At times there is less upwelling and warm water spreads eastward across the Pacific – warming the atmosphere. It is simple enough to see in temperature data.

I have a preference for near global coverage and depth integrated satellite temperature records – it doesn’t miss energy in latent heat at the surface for one thing. 21st century instrumentation is much to be preferred going forward. Over the past century the 20 to 30 year influence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) anomaly can be seen in the surface records. Warming to the mid 1940’s, cooling to 1976, warming to 1998 and little change since. The PDO and ENSO are, moreover, in lockstep. A cooler PDO anomaly and more frequent and intense La Niña – and vice versa.

Pacific Gyres Spinning Up Climate Change

The atmospheric/ocean system of triggers and feedbacks varies – usually abruptly with triggers. The trigger for more upwelling I can only imagine is the great ocean gyres. Ocean gyres spin up on the surface through winds and planetary rotation. Pressure systems shift polar winds and storms into lower latitudes. High polar atmospheric pressures spin up the gyres pushing cold polar water into the Californian and Peruvian currents. Roiling cold water upwelling sets up wind and current feedback across the Pacific.

More polar cold water at the surface facilitates upwelling in critical regions. Trade winds spin up as a feedback and piles warm water against Australia and Indonesia. Sometimes the winds falter and warm water flows back eastward suppressing cold upwelling. The whole is a complex and dynamic system triggered by changes in atmospheric pressure zones in the north and south Pacific. Great movements of atmospheric mass driven by a marginal change in solar activity. A large reaction from a small jolt as expected with technically chaotic systems.

Tessa Vance and colleagues from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC found a proxy of eastern Pacific upwelling in an ice core at the Law Dome Antarctica. A higher salt content – from polar westerlies – is a proxy for solar activity. But also results in changes in the great Pacific gyres and the intensity of upwelling. More upwelling brings rain and cyclones to Indonesia and northern and eastern Australia, drought in the United States of and South America, cooler global temperatures and biological abundance. Less in El Niña conditions and we – in Australia – get drought. The absolute volume of rainfall is roughly constant but where it falls on the planet changes.

The record captures in high resolution the 20 to 30 year Pacific beat, the change in the ENSO tempo last century and has at least a resemblance to the solar signal over a 1000 years. But even with a millennial high El Niño anomaly last century – conditions have been far more extreme at other times in the past 12,000 years.

Conclusion

Will there be more La Niña over the next centuries? Can we expect more El Niño in a thousand years? Might we see great herds return to the Sahel? The future remains unpredictable. Still – a return to the mean scenario does suggest better odds on a cooler sun and a little more upwelling in the Pacific Ocean – a cooling influence on the atmosphere and the inevitable regional variabilities in rainfall.

Oceans Make Climate is a major theme at this blog, since I fortunately made the acquaintance of Dr. Arnd Bernaerts. Rob Ellison adds another important dimension with his consideration of the gyres.

Footnote:

Recently I noticed how sea surface temperatures drove the 2015-2016 global warming, as shown in the HadSST3 record:

Note that higher temps in 2015 and 2016 are first of all due to a sharp rise in Tropical SST, beginning in March 2015, peaking in January 2016, and steadily declining back to its beginning level. Secondly, the Northern Hemisphere added two bumps on the shoulders of Tropical warming, with peaks in August of each year. Finally, note that the global release of heat was not dramatic, due to the Southern Hemisphere offsetting the Northern one.

Much ado will be made of this warming, including claims of human causation, despite the obvious oceanic origin. Further, it is curious that CO2 functions as a warming agent so unevenly around the world, and that the Tropics drove this event, contradicting CO2 warming theory.

Anatomy of the Hottest Years Ever

Overview: Seafloor Eruptions and Ocean Warming

Posted on October 5, 2016 by Ron Clutz

Global heat flux of the Earth combining heat flux measurements on land and continental margins with a thermal model for the cooling of the oceanic lithosphere. The Earth loses energy as heat flows out through its surface. The total energy loss of the Earth has been estimated at 46 ± 2 TW, of which 14 TW comes through the continents and 32 TW comes from the seafloor. By Jean-Claude Mareschal

From the Unsettled Science File (h/t to Paul Homewood for posting on this subject recently)

Little attention is paid to geothermal heat fluxes warming the ocean from below, mostly because of limited observations and weak understanding about the timing and extent of eruptions.

The existence of heat rising through earth’s crust is evident to all, and the large majority of vents are under the ocean. Consider the image above, and notice at the top center is the small black island off the east coast of Greenland, right on top of the orange mid-ocean ridge. Iceland produces more than 50% of its electricity from geothermal, as well as heating numerous buildings from the same source.

In addition, farther up under the north pole, scientists discovered an eruption of intense seismic activity beginning in Gakkel Ridge in January of 1999 and continuing for seven months. That happens to be about the time Arctic ice extent took a nosedive, stabilizing after 2007.

Global Volcanism Project, East Gakkel Ridge at 85°E

Researchers have considered the importance of this source of energy into the climate system from various points of view. Some abysmal studies (pun intended) were motivated to look in the ocean depths for the missing heat not appearing in the surface temperature records since 1998. Some warming was found but the case was weak since the Argo records showed no passage of heat between upper and lower ocean strata. Of course no thought was given to the seafloor being the warming source. However, much more serious and extensive research has been done by marine geologists wanting to better understand the cooling of the earth itself.

There appear to be three major issues around heating of the ocean from below through the seafloor:

1. Is geothermal energy powerful enough to make a difference upon the vast ocean heat capacity?
2. If so, Is geothermal energy variable enough to create temperature differentials?
3. Most of the ocean floor is unexplored, so how much can we generalize from the few places we have studied?

1. Some researchers conclude that geothermal heating of the oceans can not be ignored as trivial.

J. G. Sclater et al (here)

The total heat loss of the earth is 1002 × 10^10 cal/s (42.0 × 10^12 W), of which 70% is through the deep oceans and marginal basins and 30% through the continents and continental shelves. The creation of lithosphere accounts for just under 90% of the heat lost through the oceans and hence about 60% of the worldwide heat loss. Convective processes, which include plate creation and orogeny on continents, dissipate two thirds of the heat lost by the earth. Conduction through the lithosphere is responsible for 20%, and the rest is lost by the radioactive decay of the continental and oceanic crust.

Maqueda et al. (here)

Without geothermal heat fluxes, the temperatures of the abyssal ocean would be up to 0.5 C lower than observed, deep stratification would be reinforced by about 25%, and the strength of the abyssal circulation would decrease by between 25% and 50%, substantially altering the ability of the deep ocean to transport and store not only heat but also carbon and other climatically important tracers (Adcroft et al., 2001, Hofmann and Morales Maqueda, 2009, Mashayek et al., 2013). It has been hypothesised that interactions between the ocean circulation and geothermal heating are responsible for abrupt climatic changes during the last glacial cycle (Adkins et al, 2005).

Matthias Hofmann et al. (here)

Geothermal heating of abyssal waters is rarely regarded as a signiﬁcant driver of the large-scale oceanic circulation. Numerical experiments with the Ocean General Circulation Model POTSMOM-1.0 suggest, however, that the impact of geothermal heat ﬂux on deep ocean circulation is not negligible. Geothermal heating contributes to an overall warming of bottom waters by about 0.4◦C, decreasing the stability of the water column and enhancing the formation rates of North Atlantic Deep Water and Antarctic Bottom Water by 1.5 Sv (10% ) and 3 Sv (33% ), respectively. Increased inﬂux of Antarctic Bottom Water leads to a radiocarbon enrichment of Paciﬁc Ocean waters, increasing ∆14C values in the deep North Paciﬁc from -269◦/◦◦when geothermal heatingis ignored in the model, to -242◦/◦◦when geothermal heating is included. A stronger and deeper Atlantic meridional overturning cell causes warming of the North Atlantic deep western boundary current by up to 1.5◦C

During the 2009 expedition, superheated molten lava, about 1,204ºC (2,200ºF) erupts, producing a bright flash as hot magma that is blown up into the water before settling back to the sea floor. Notice the front of the remotely operated vehicle (foreground, left). High resolution (Credit: Image courtesy of NSF and NOAA)

2. Seafloor eruptions are quite variable and unpredictable, and while localized, can influence ocean circulation patterns.

Jess F. Adkins et al. (here)

The solar energy flux of 200 W/m2 at the ocean’s surface (Peixoto and Oort, 1992) is much larger than the next largest potential source of energy to drive climate changes, geothermal heating at the ocean’s bottom (50–100 mW/m2 ) (Stein and Stein, 1992), but this smaller heat input might still play an important role in rapid climate changes.

It is clear that variations in the solar flux pace the timing of glacial cycles (Hays et al., 1976), but these Milankovitch time scales are too long to explain the decadal transitions found in the ice cores. Another, higher frequency, source of solar variability that would directly drive the observed climate shifts has yet to be demonstrated. Therefore, mechanisms to explain the abrupt shifts all require the climate system to store potential energy that can be catastrophically released during glacial times, but not during interglacials (Stocker and Johnsen, 2003).

At the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when the deep ocean was filled with salty water from the Southern Ocean, geothermal heating may have been an important source of this potential energy.

In modern ocean studies there is an increasing awareness of the effect of geothermal heating on the overturning circulation. As an alternative to solar forcing, Huang (1999) has recently pointed out that geothermal heat, while small in magnitude, can still be important for the modern overturning circulation because it warms the bottom of the ocean, not the top. Density gradients at the surface of the ocean are not able to drive a deep circulation without the additional input of mechanical energy to push isopycnals into the abyss (Wunsch and Ferrari, 2004). Heating from below, on the other hand, increases the buoyancy of the deepest waters and can lead to large scale overturning of the ocean without additional energy inputs. Several modern ocean general circulation models have explored the overturning circulation’s sensitivity to this geothermal input. In the MIT model a uniform heating of 50 mW/m2 at the ocean bottom leads to a 25% increase in AABW overturning strength and heats the Pacific by 0.5 1C (Adcroft et al., 2001; Scott et al., 2001). In the ORCA model, applying a more realistic bottom boundary condition that follows the spatial distribution of heat input from Stein and Stein (1992) gives similar results (Dutay et al., 2004). In both models, most of the geothermal heat radiates to the atmosphere in the Southern Ocean, as this is the area where most of the world’s abyssal isopycnals intersect the surface.

The area of the modern ocean is 350×10^6 km2 . The area of the Southern Ocean between 80–85S (the region around Antarctica) is 0.4×10^6 km2 . This factor of 1000 means that the focused geothermal heating of 50 mW/m2 is locally of the same order as the total heat exchange at high southern latitudes. The focusing effect of geothermal heating can cause this heat flux to be a significant fraction of the total heat loss in the crucial deep-water formation zones in the glacial Southern Ocean. This suggests that the geothermal heat is potentially relevant for determining the heat content of the abyssal waters.

3. The number of hydrothermally active seamounts is estimated to be somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000,000.

Andrew T. Fisher and C. Geoffrey Wheat (here)

Thus, most of the thermally important fluid exchange between the crust and ocean must occur where volcanic rocks are exposed at the seafloor; little fluid exchange on ridge flanks occurs through seafloor sediments overlying volcanic crustal rocks. Seamounts and other basement outcrops focus ridge-flank hydrothermal exchange between the crust and the ocean. We describe the driving forces responsible for hydrothermal flows on ridge flanks, and the impacts that these systems have on crustal heat loss, fluid composition, and subseafloor microbiology.

Earth’s geothermal heat output is about 44 TW, with most heat loss occurring through ocean basins (e.g., Sclater et al., 1980; Pollack et al., 1993). Seafloor hydrothermal heat output is on the order of 10 TW, ~ 25% of Earth’s total geothermal heat output, and ~ 30% of the oceanic lithospheric heat output (Figure 1A). Only a small fraction of this advective heat output occurs at high temperatures at mid-ocean ridges; the vast majority occurs at lower temperatures (generally 5–20°C) on ridge flanks, suggesting an associated fluid discharge of ~ 10^16 kg yr-1 (Figure 1B) (C. Stein et al., 1995; Mottl, 2003; Wheat et al., 2003). This low-temperature flow rivals the discharge of all rivers to the ocean (4 x 10^16 kg yr-1), and is about three orders of magnitude greater than the sum of high-temperature hydrothermal discharges at mid-ocean ridges (~ 10^13 kg yr-1).

Networks of seamounts permit rapid fluid circulation to bypass thick and relatively continuous sediment across much of the deep seafloor. Fluid recharges into the crust as oceanic bottom seawater, being relatively cold and dense. As the fluid penetrates more deeply into the crust, it warms and reacts with the surrounding basalt, and interacts with the overlying sediments through diffusive exchange across the sediment-basalt interface. Fluid can flow laterally for tens of kilometers through the oceanic crust, with the extent of heating and reaction dependent on the flow rate, crustal age, and other factors. Weaker circulation systems can result in significant local rock alteration and heat extraction, but are unlikely to have a large impact on lithospheric heat loss on a regional scale.

The number of hydrothermally active seamounts is estimated to be somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000,000 , based on mapping and seamount population estimates by Wessel (2001) and Hillier and Watts (2007), and the observation that, of the seamounts and outcrops that have been surveyed, a significant fraction appear to be hydrothermally active (Fisher et al., 2003a, 2003b; Hutnak et al., 2008; Villinger et al., 2002).

Monster mountain discovered lurking in depths of Pacific Ocean

Without seamounts and other basement outcrops, it would not be possible for ridge-flank hydrothermal circulation to mine a significant fraction of lithospheric heat once sediments become thick and continuous on a regional basis. Thus, ridge-flank hydrothermal activity would be very different on an Earth without seamounts

Analyses of satellite gravimetric and ship track data suggest that there could be as many as 1,000,000 seamounts having a radius of ≥ 3.5 km and height ≥ 2 km (Wessel, 2001), and perhaps 10^6 to 10^7 features > 100 m in height (Hillier and Watts, 2007). Given the ubiquity of these features on ridge flanks, it is surprising how little we know about which seamounts are hydrologically active—how many recharge and how many discharge.

The thermobaric capacitor has enough energy to overturn the water column, can be triggered by regular oceanic processes, and charges over a time scale that is relevant to the climate record.

Conclusion

This source of heat has been dismissed because it is poorly known, and because its eruptive events are unpredictable and can not therefore be represented in climate models. Despite geothermal eruptions having only localized effects, the impact on ocean circulations is significant.

John Reid (here)

Volcanic activity does not fit this neat picture. Volcanic behaviour is random, i.e. it is “stochastic” meaning “governed by the laws of probability”. For fluid dynamic modellers stochastic behaviour is the spectre at the feast. They do not want to deal with it because their models cannot handle it. We cannot predict the future behaviour of subaqueous volcanoes so we cannot predict future behaviour of the ocean-atmosphere system when this extra random forcing is included.

To some extent, chaos theory is called in as a substitute, but modellers are very reticent about describing and locating (in phase space) the strange attractors of chaos theory which supposedly give their models a stochastic character. They prefer to avoid stochastic descriptions of the real world in favour of the more precise but unrealistic determinism of the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics.

This explains the reluctance of oceanographers to acknowledge subaqueous volcanism as a forcing of ocean circulation. Unlike tidal forcing, wind stress and thermohaline forcing, volcanism constitutes a major, external, random forcing which cannot be generated from within the model. It has therefore been ignored.
But the science is advancing.

Maya Tolstoy (here)

Vast ranges of volcanoes hidden under the oceans are presumed by scientists to be the gentle giants of the planet, oozing lava at slow, steady rates along mid-ocean ridges. But a new study shows that they flare up on strikingly regular cycles, ranging from two weeks to 100,000 years—and, that they erupt almost exclusively during the first six months of each year. The pulses—apparently tied to short- and long-term changes in earth’s orbit, and to sea levels–may help trigger natural climate swings. Scientists have already speculated that volcanic cycles on land emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide might influence climate; but up to now there was no evidence from submarine volcanoes. The findings suggest that models of earth’s natural climate dynamics, and by extension human-influenced climate change, may have to be adjusted. The study appears this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters .

The idea that remote gravitational forces influence volcanism is mirrored by the short-term data, says Tolstoy. She says the seismic data suggest that today, undersea volcanoes pulse to life mainly during periods that come every two weeks. That is the schedule upon which combined gravity from the moon and sun cause ocean tides to reach their lowest points, thus subtly relieving pressure on volcanoes below. Seismic signals interpreted as eruptions followed fortnightly low tides at eight out of nine study sites. Furthermore, Tolstoy found that all known modern eruptions occur from January through June. January is the month when Earth is closest to the sun, July when it is farthest—a period similar to the squeezing/unsqueezing effect Tolstoy sees in longer-term cycles. “If you look at the present-day eruptions, volcanoes respond even to much smaller forces than the ones that might drive climate,” she said.

We are left with a philosophical conundrum:

If heat comes from the seafloor and no one is around to measure it, does it make the ocean warmer?

The classic form of this question was first posed by Bishop George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), one of the Top Ten Philosophical Questions:

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Updated by Steven Wright
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, do the other trees make fun of it?

A variation from my personal experience:
If a man says something and his wife is not around to hear it, is he still wrong?

Steven Wright (on the urban cooling effect)
I turned my air conditioner the other way around, and it got cold out. The weatherman said, ‘I don’t understand it. It was supposed to be 80 degrees out today.’ I said, ‘Oops … ‘

Reference:

A complete presentation of Plate Tectonics Theory of Climatology is by James Edward Kamis (here)

Ocean Trumps Global Warming

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Ron Clutz

Internal Climate Variability Trumps Global Warming (here) is a
great post by hydrologist Rob Ellison confirming how the Oceans Make Climate. He was intrigued by discovering that rivers in eastern Australia changed form – from low energy meandering to high energy braided forms and back – every few decades. For almost 30 years he looked for the source and import of this variability, and has found it in the ocean.

Turns out that it is a combination of conditions in the northern and central Pacific Ocean that is of immense significance. A 20 to 30 year change in the volume of frigid and nutrient rich water upwelling from the abysmal depths. A generally warmer or cooler sea surface in the northern Pacific and greater frequency and intensity of El Niño or La Niña respectively. This sets up changes in patterns of wind, currents and cloud that cause changes in rainfall, biology and temperature globally. In the cool pattern shown above – booming ecologies, drought in the Americas and Europe, rainfall in Australia, Indonesia, Africa, China and India and cooler global temperatures. The reverse in the warm phase. Warming to 1944, cooling to 1976, warming again to 1998 and – at the least – not warming since. It leads to a prediction that the La Niña currently emerging is likely to be large.

A Persistent Ocean Cycle

Changes in the Pacific Ocean state can be traced in sediment, ice cores, stalagmites and corals. A record covering the last 12,000 years was developed by Christopher Moy and colleagues from measurements of red sediment in a South American lake. More red sediment is associated with El Niño. The record shows periods of high and low El Niño activity alternating with a period of about 2,000 years. There was a shift from La Niña dominance to El Niño dominance 5000 years ago that is associated with the drying of the Sahel. There is a period around 3,500 years ago of high El Niño activity associated with the demise of the Minoan civilisation (Tsonis et al, 2010).

Tessa Vance and colleagues devised a 1000 year record from salt content in an Antarctic ice core. More salt is La Niña as a result of changing winds in the Southern Ocean. It revealed several interesting facts. The persistence of the 20 to 30 year pattern. A change in the period of oscillation between El Niño and La Niña states at the end of the 19th century. A 1000 year peak in El Niño frequency and intensity in the 20th century which resulted in uncharacteristically dry condition since 1920.

Conclusion

The whole post is worth reading and a solid contribution to our understanding. Ellison’s summary is pertinent, compelling and wise.

It is quite impossible to quantify natural and anthropogenic warming in the 20th century. The assumption that it was all anthropogenic is quite wrong. The early century warming was mostly natural – as was at least some of the late century warming. It seems quite likely that a natural cooling with declining solar activity – amplified through Pacific Ocean states – will counteract rather than add to future greenhouse gas warming. A return to the more common condition of La Niña dominance – and enhanced rainfall in northern and eastern Australia – seems more likely than not.

I predict – on the balance of probabilities – cooler conditions in this century. But I would still argue for returning carbon to agricultural soils, restoring ecosystems and research on and development of cheap and abundant energy supplies. The former to enhance productivity in a hungry world, increase soil water holding capacity, improve drought resilience, mitigate flooding and conserve biodiversity. We may in this way sequester all greenhouse gas emissions for 20 to 30 years. The latter as a basis for desperately needed economic growth. Climate change seems very much an unnecessary consideration and tales of climate doom – based on wrong science and unfortunate policy ambitions – a diversion from practical and measured development policy.

Australia’s River Systems ABC

Follow the Water–Arctic Ocean Flywheels

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Ron Clutz

The motto of oceanography should be: “It’s not that simple.”

Dallas Murphy wrote that in a book containing his reflections from numerous voyages with ocean scientists, entitled Follow the Water: Exploring the Sea to Discover Climate. The author goes on to say:

“One reason why the ocean has been left out of the climate-change discussion is that its internal mechanisms and its interactions with the atmosphere are stunningly complex. That the ocean has been left out has helped pitch the discussion toward unproductive, distracting extremes–either global warming is bunk or sea levels are about to rise twenty feet–and to frame the issue as a matter of opinion, like the place of prayer in public schools.”

He also quotes respected Oceanographer Carl Wunsch: “One of the reasons oceanography has a flavor all it’s own lies in the brute difficulty of observing the Ocean.”

A previous post on the Climate Water Wheel referred to the metaphor of the ocean serving as a thermal flywheel in our planetary climate due to the massive storage of solar energy in bodies of water. Another post provided some basics on the dynamics of sea ice.

Now, in keeping with the motto above, we shall see that indeed, it is not that simple when we look more closely inside the Arctic Ocean. For example, consider this map from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI):

“Follow the water: Cold, relatively fresh water from the Pacific Ocean enters the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. It is swept into the Beaufort Gyre and exits into the North Atlantic Ocean through three gateways (Fram, Davis, and Hudson Straits). Warmer, denser waters from the Atlantic penetrate the Arctic Ocean beneath colder water layers, which lie atop the warmer waters and act as a barrier preventing them from melting sea ice.

Once in the Arctic Ocean basin, the water is swept into a mammoth circular current—driven by strong winds—called the Beaufort Gyre (BG). Mighty Siberian and Canadian rivers also drain into the gyre to create a great reservoir of relatively fresh water. Winds trap this water in a clockwise flow, but periodically, the winds shift and the gyre weakens, allowing large volumes of fresh water to leak out. This is “the flywheel,” said WHOI physical oceanographer Andrey Proshutinksy, and when it turns off, fresh water flows toward the North Atlantic.

The water exits the Arctic Ocean via several “gateways.” It can flow through the Fram Strait, between northeast Greenland and Svalbard Island, and then branch around either side of Iceland. It can flow around the west side of Greenland through Baffin Bay and out Davis Strait. It may also flow through a maze of Canadian islands and out Hudson Strait.
These gateways are two-way: They also let in the warmer Atlantic waters that—if not for the halocline—could melt Arctic sea ice.”

http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/is-global-warming-changing-the-arctic

The BG Flywheel System

The research indicates that the complexity can be imagined as a series of flywheels, interacting and combining to moderate the short term effects of weather and changes in circulations of water and winds. Note that this conception shows the ocean flywheel as having four components or layers that operate in their own patterns while being interconnected.

And, as the flywheel system depicts, the ocean components are stratified by both temperature and salinity (saltiness). When sea ice forms, it releases salt into surface waters. These waters become denser and sink to form the Arctic halocline, a layer of cold water that acts as barrier between sea ice and deeper warmer water that could melt the ice. (Illustration by Jayne Doucette, WHOI)

Spitsbergen Triangle: Ground Zero for Climate Mysteries

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Ron Clutz

Credit to Dr. Bernaerts for his writings on this subject, excerpts of which appear below.

The Island Nexus for Ocean Currents

From the Dutch: spits – pointed, bergen – mountains

The largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway. Constituting the westernmost bulk of the archipelago, it borders the Arctic Ocean, the Norwegian Sea, and the Greenland Sea. Spitsbergen covers an area of 39,044 km2 (15,075 sq mi), making it the largest island in Norway and the 36th-largest in the world.

The fact is that the winter temperatures made a jump of more than eight degrees Celsius at the gate of the Arctic Basin, after 1918. Nowadays, one century later, the event is still regarded as “one of the most puzzling climate anomalies of the 20th century”.

Dr. Bernaerts:

The overriding aspect of the location is the sea; the sea around Spitsbergen, the sea between particularly the Norwegian, the Greenland, and the Barents Seas (Nordic Sea). The Norwegian Sea is a huge, 3000 metres deep basin. This huge water mass stores a great amount of energy, which can transfer warmth into the atmosphere for a long time. In contrast the Barents Sea, in the southeast of Spitsbergen has an average depth of just around 230 metres. In- and outflow are so high that the whole water body is completely renewed in less than 5 years. However, both sea areas are strongly influenced by the water masses coming from the South. The most important element is a separate branch of the North Atlantic Gulf Current, which brings very warm and very salty water into the Norwegian Sea and into the Spitsbergen region. Water temperature and degree of saltiness play a decisive role in the internal dynamics of the sea body. And what might be the role of the huge basin of the Arctic Ocean, 3000 meters depth and a size of about 15 million square kilometers?

The difference towards the other seas mentioned is tremendous. The Arctic Ocean used to be widely ice covered in the first half of the 20th Century, the other seas only partly on a seasonal basis. Only between the open sea and the atmosphere an intensive heat transfer is permanently taking place. Compact sea ice reduces this transfer about 90% and more, broken or floating ice may change the proportion marginally. In this respect an ice covered Arctic Ocean has not an oceanic but ‘continental’ impact on the climate.

The Arctic Ocean is permanently supplied with new water from the Gulf Current, which enters the sea close at the surface near Spitsbergen. This current is called the West Spitsbergen current. The arriving water is relatively warm (6 to 8°C) and salty (35.1 to 35.3%) and has a mean speed of ca. 30 cm/sec-1. The warm Atlantic water represents almost 90% of all water masses the Arctic receives. The other ~10% comes via the Bering Strait or rivers. Due to the fact that the warm Atlantic water reaches usually the edge of the Arctic Ocean at Spitsbergen in open water, the cooling process starts well before entering the Polar Sea.

A further highly significant climate aspect of global dimension is the water masses the Arctic releases back to oceans. Actually, the outflow occurs mainly via the Fram Strait between Northeast Greenland and Spitsbergen, and together with very cold water from the Norwegian Sea basin the deep water spreads below the permanent thermocline into the three oceans.

http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/pdf/chapter_2.pdf

The Spitsbergen Event 1918-1919

Beginning around 1850 the Little Ice Age ended and the climate began warming. Before that, at least since 1650 marked the first climatic minimum after a Medieval warm period, the Little Ice Age brought bitterly cold winters to many parts of the world, most thoroughly documented in the Northern Hemisphere in Europe and North America. The decreased solar activity and the increased volcanic activity are considered as causes. However, the temperature increase was remote and once again effected by the last major volcanic eruption of the Krakatoa in 1883. Up to the 1910s the warming of the world was modest.

Suddenly that changed. In the Arctic the temperatures literally exploded in winter 1918/19. The extraordinary event lasted from 1918 to 1939 is clearly demonstrated in the graph showing the ‘Arctic Annual Mean Temperature Anomalies 1880 – 2004’. But this extraordinary event has a number of facets, which could have been researched and explained. Meanwhile almost a full century has passed, and what do we know about this event today? Very little!

Studies considering the causation of the warming offer sketchy rather than well founded ideas. Here are a few examples:
• Natural variability is the most likely cause (Bengtsson, 2004);
• We theorize that the Arctic warming in the 1920s/1930s was due to natural fluctuations internal to the climate system (Johannessen, 2004).
• The low Arctic temperatures before 1920 had been caused by volcanic aerosol loading and solar radiation, but since 1920 increasing greenhouse gas concentration dominated the temperatures (Overpeck, 1997).
• The earlier warming shows large region-to-region, month-to-month, and year-to-year variability, which suggests that these composite temperature anomalies are due primarily to natural variability in weather systems (Overland, 2004).
• A combination of a global warming signal and fortuitous phasing of intrinsic climate patterns (Overland, 2008).

Arctic Regime Change

These explanations (and others such as CO2 or the AMOC) do not come to grips with how extreme and abrupt was this event. In the Spring of 1917, sea ice reached all the way to Spitsbergen, the only time in a century.

And the next year, temperatures rocketed upward, as shown by the weather station there:

A look at the SST history shows clearly an event as dramatic as a super El Nino causing a regime change. But this is the Atlantic, not the Pacific. Cooling followed, but temperatures stayed at a higher level than before.

Summary

The warming at Spitsbergen is one of the most outstanding climatic events since the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, in 1883. The dramatic warming at Spitsbergen may hold key aspects for understanding how climate ticks. The following elaboration intends to approach the matter from different angles, but on a straight line of thoughts, namely:

WHERE: the warming was caused and sustained by the northern part of the Nordic Sea in the sea area of West Spitsbergen the pass way of the Spitsbergen Current.
WHEN: The date of the commencement of warming can be established with high precision of few months, and which was definitely in place by January 1919.
WHY: the sudden and significant temperature deviation around the winter of 1918/19 was with considerable probability caused, at least partly, by a devastating naval war which took place around the British Isles, between 1914 and 1918.

There is much more evidence and analysis supporting Dr. Bernaerts’ conclusions here:

http://climate-ocean.com/arctic-book/index.html

Conclusion: Unless your theory of climate change can make sense of the Spitsbergen Event, then it cannot inspire confidence. You may not be entirely convinced by Dr. Bernaerts’ explanation, but he at least has one–nobody else has even tried.

Evidence is Mounting: Oceans Make Climate

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Ron Clutz

Update May 28, 2015, with additional detail from Dr. McCarthy

Update May 29, 2015, with additional context from Bob Tisdale

The RAPID moorings being deployed. Credit: National Oceanography Centre

A new study, by scientists from the University of Southampton and National Oceanography Centre (NOC), implies that the global climate is on the verge of broad-scale change that could last for a number of decades. This new climatic phase could be half a degree cooler.

The change to the new set of climatic conditions is associated with a cooling of the Atlantic, and is likely to bring drier summers in Britain and Ireland, accelerated sea-level rise along the northeast coast of the United States, and drought in the developing countries of the Sahel region. Since this new climatic phase could be half a degree cooler, it may well offer a brief reprise from the rise of global temperatures, as well as resulting in fewer hurricanes hitting the United States.

The study, published in Nature, proves that ocean circulation is the link between weather and decadal scale climatic change. It is based on observational evidence of the link between ocean circulation and the decadal variability of sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean.

Lead author Dr Gerard McCarthy, from the NOC, said: “Sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic vary between warm and cold over time-scales of many decades. These variations have been shown to influence temperature, rainfall, drought and even the frequency of hurricanes in many regions of the world. This decadal variability, called the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), is a notable feature of the Atlantic Ocean and the climate of the regions it influences.”

The strength of ocean currents has been measured by a network of sensors, called the RAPID array, which have been collecting data on the flow rate of the Atlantic meridonal overturning circulation (AMOC) for a decade.

Dr David Smeed, from the NOC and lead scientist of the RAPID project, adds: “The observations of AMOC from the RAPID array, over the past ten years, show that it is declining. As a result, we expect the AMO is moving to a negative phase, which will result in cooler surface waters. This is consistent with observations of temperature in the North Atlantic.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150527133932.htm

Some additional detail from Dr. McCarthy:

Results from the RAPID array

Gerard McCarthy, David Smeed, Darren Rayner, Eleanor Frajka-Williams, Aurélie Duchez, Bill Johns, Molly Baringer, Chris Meinen, Adam Blaker, Stuart Cunningham and Harry Bryden

“The RAPID/MOCHA/WBTS mooring array at 26ºN in the Atlantic has been delivering twice daily estimates of the strength of the AMOC since 2004. A unique array, the observations have revolutionised our understanding of the variability of the AMOC on sub-annual, seasonal and, most recently, interannual timescales. An update to the AMOC timeseries has recently been produced. As well as extending the data, the timeseries to October 2012 contains several improvements to the calculation.

A dramatic low in the AMOC was observed in winter 2009/10, where the AMOC declined by 30%. This has been shown to have resulted in a sustained reduction in heat content of the North Atlantic. The 2009/10 dip in AMOC strength was followed by a second dramatic low in 2010/11. Historical analogues of double minima in successive winters have been identified in NEMO runs where they are associated with extreme negative values of the Arctic oscillation and have been linked with ocean re-emergence. Interestingly, there is also a link with surface air temperatures and, consequently, European wintertime conditions.

The latest update of the AMOC time series to October 2012 shows a continuing trend in the circulation at 26ºN switching from an overturning to a gyre circulation. This leads to weakened southward transport of lower North Atlantic Deep Water, the strength of which from 2004-2012 is weaker than in historical measurements. The IPCC report in 2007 reported that the AMOC was ‘very likely’ to weaken in the 21st century. Maintaining the sustained observations of the RAPID array is key to observing this climate metric.”

Rapid Project Webpage is here: http://www.rapid.ac.uk/rapidmoc/

Figure 1:Ten-day (colours) and three month low-pass (black) timeseries of Florida Straits transport (blue), Ekman transport (black), upper mid-ocean transport (magenta), and overturning transport (red) for the period 2nd April 2004 to mid- March 2014. Florida Straits transport is based on electromagnetic cable measurements; Ekman transport is based on ERA winds. The upper mid-ocean transport, based on the RAPID time series, is the vertical integral of the transport per unit depth down to the deepest northward velocity (~1100 m) on each day. Overturning transport is then the sum of the Florida Straits, Ekman, and upper mid-ocean transports and represents the maximum northward transport of upper-layer waters on each day. Positive transports correspond to northward flow.

Additional info here: http://www.livescience.com/50998-jet-stream-controls-atlantic-climate-cycles.html

Footnote:

Getting a reprieve from the dangers of global warming would be good news, but these facts were not well received by everyone last month at a conference in Vienna, as tweeted by Dr. McCarthy:

Hostile reception for RAPID in Vienna #egu15 #rapidmoc pic.twitter.com/lIqkFSOvKD

— Gerard McCarthy (@ger_the_sea) April 13, 2015

Bob Tisdale provides additional context on the AMO and on this paper, as well as critiques of some other papers here: https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/new-paper-confirms-the-drivers-of-and-processes-behind-the-atlantic-multidecadal-oscillation/

For more on this topic see:

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/empirical-evidence-oceans-make-climate/

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/climate-pacemaker-the-amoc/

Climate on Ice: Ocean-Ice Dynamics

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Ron Clutz

Update May 30, 2015 Longer term context by E.M. Smith added below

Sea ice is not simple. Some Background is in order.

When white men started to explore the north of America, they first encountered the Crees. Hudson Bay posts were established to trade goods for pelts, especially the beavers used for making those top hats worn by every gentleman of the day.

The Crees told the whites that further on toward the Arctic Circle there were others they called “eskimos”. The Cree word means “eaters of raw meat” and it is derogatory. The Inuit (as they call themselves) were found to have dozens of words for snow, a necessary vocabulary for surviving in the Arctic world.

A recent lexicon of sea ice terminology in Nunavik (Appendix A of the collective work Siku: Knowing our Ice, 2008) comprises no fewer than 93 different words. These include general appellations such as siku, but also terms as specialized as qautsaulittuq, ice that breaks after its strength has been tested with a harpoon; kiviniq, a depression in shore ice caused by the weight of the water that passed over and accumulated on its surface during the tide; or iniruvik, ice that cracked because of tide changes and that the cold weather refroze.

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuit-words-for-snow-and-ice/

With such complexity of ice conditions, we must recognize that any general understanding of ocean-ice dynamics will not be descriptive of all micro-scale effects on local or regional circumstances.

Short Term Sea Ice Freezing and Melting Cycle

Alarmists only mention positive feedbacks from ice melting, so one is left to wonder why there is any Arctic ice left so many years since the Little Ice Age ended around 1850. Actually there are both positive and negative feedbacks, with one or the other dominating at different times and places.

Of course, the basic cycle is the seasonality of sunless winters and sunlit summers.

Remember that ice grows because of a transfer of heat from the relatively warm ocean to the cold air above. Also remember that ice insulates the ocean from the atmosphere and inhibits this heat transfer. The amount of insulation depends on the thickness of the ice; thicker ice allows less heat transfer. If the ice becomes thick enough that no heat from the ocean can be conducted through the ice, then ice stops growing. This is called the thermodynamic equilibrium thickness. It may take several years of growth and melt for ice to reach the equilibrium thickness. In the Arctic, the thermodynamic equilibrium thickness of sea ice is approximately 3 meters (9 feet). However, dynamics can yield sea ice thicknesses of 10 meters (30 feet) or more. Equilibrium thickness of sea ice is much lower in Antarctica, typically ranging from 1 to 2 meters (3 to 6 feet).

Snow has an even higher albedo than sea ice, and so thick sea ice covered with snow reflects as much as 90 percent of the incoming solar radiation. This serves to insulate the sea ice, maintaining cold temperatures and delaying ice melt in the summer. After the snow does begin to melt, and because shallow melt ponds have an albedo of approximately 0.2 to 0.4, the surface albedo drops to about 0.75. As melt ponds grow and deepen, the surface albedo can drop to 0.15. As a result, melt ponds are associated with higher energy absorption and a more rapid ice melt.

https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/growth_melt_cycle.html

The short-term dynamics of sea ice freezing and melting can be summarized in this diagram from Dr. Judith Curry:

Dr. Curry has written extensively on sea ice, and an introduction to her sources is here:

http://judithcurry.com/2014/10/15/new-presentations-on-sea-ice/

Decadal Variability in Sea Ice Extent

Medium term sea ice variations are well described by Lawrence A. Mysak and Silvia A. Venegas of the Centre for Climate and Global Change Research and Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic
Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Abstract: A combined complex empirical orthogonal function analysis of 40 years of annual sea ice concentration (SIC) and winter sea level pressure (SLP) data reveals the existence of an approximately 10-year climate cycle in the Arctic and subarctic.

“Starting at the top of the loop in Figure 4, we propose that large SIC (Sea Ice Concentration) positive anomalies are created in the Greenland Sea by a combination of anomalous northerly winds and a relatively small northward transport of warm air (sensible heat) [Higuchi et al., 1991] associated with a negative NAO pattern. The relationship between severe sea ice conditions in the Greenland Sea and a weak atmospheric circulation (negative NAO) was previously noticed by Power and Mysak [1992]. Over the Barents Sea, on the other hand, the formation of the large positive SIC anomalies may be mainly due to weaker-than-normal advection of warm water by the northward branch of the North Atlantic Current when the NAO index is negative (R. R. Dickson, pets.comm., 1998).”

“These SIC anomalies are then advected into the Labrador Sea by the local mean ocean circulation over a 3-4 year period. When the southern part of the Greenland Sea thus becomes relatively ice free (as implied by the minus sign at the upper-right corner of the loop), strong heating of the atmosphere during winter occurs, which is hypothesized to cause the Icelandic Low to deepen at that time (hence the plus sign on the right-hand side of the loop). This may help change the polarity of the NAO. When the NAO index is positive (deep Icelandic Low), the wind anomalies create positive SIC anomalies in the Beaufort Sea (see bottom of the loop), which are then slowly advected out of the Arctic via the Beaufort Gyre and Transpolar Drift Stream over a 3-4 year period (see lower-left corner and left-hand side of loop).”

“As a consequence, the Greenland Sea becomes extensively ice covered, which suddenly cuts off the heat flux to the atmosphere during winter and hence is likely to cause the Icelandic Low to weaken at that time, which may contribute to changing the NAO polarity. This brings us back to the beginning of the cycle (top of Figure 4) after about 10 years.”

Click to access paper_ice_Mysak1998.pdf

Multi-Decadal Sea Ice Dynamics

In a 2005 publication Mysak presents additional empirical evidence for these ocean-ice mechanisms:

“In this paper we have shown that an intermediate complexity climate model consisting of a 3-D ocean component, a state-of-the-art sea-ice model (with elastic-viscous-plastic rheology) and an atmospheric energy-moisture balance model can successfully simulate a large number of observed changes in the Arctic Ocean and sea-ice cover during the past half-century.”

“Morison et al. (1998) found an increase in both the temperature and salinity at depths of 200–300 m in the eastern Arctic. . .This increase in salinity is also supported by the work of Steele and Boyd (1998) who found that the winter mixed layer in the Eurasian Basin had higher salinity values in the early 1990s compared with the 40-year record of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) Joint US-Russian Arctic Atlas. Morison et al. (1998) argue that the increase in salinity represents a westward advance into the Arctic of the front between the waters of the eastern and western Arctic. The aforementioned temperature and salinity changes support the hypothesis that the warm and salty Atlantic water penetrated further into the central Arctic Basin during the 1990s, and thus has pushed the front between Atlantic derived and Pacific derived waters westward.”

Click to access Mysak_et_al_2005.pdf

Summary: Sea Ice Impacts Climate Strongly, this century and beyond.

“Sea ice is a key player in the climate system, affecting local, and to some degree remote regions, via its albedo effect. Sea ice also strongly reduces air-sea heat and moisture fluxes (Ruddiman and McIntyre 1981; Gildor and Tziperman 2000), and thus may cause the air overlying it to be cooler and drier compare to air overlying ice-free ocean (Chiang and Bitz 2005). A significant part (*33 %) of the precipitation over the northern hemisphere (NH) ice sheets is believed to have originated locally from the Norwegian, Greenland and the Arctic seas (Charles et al. 1994;Colleoni et al. 2011). Lastly, sea ice affects the location of the storm track and therefore indirectly also the patterns of precipitation (e.g. Laine et al. 2009; Li and Battisti 2008).”

“Its effect on the hydrological cycle makes sea ice a potentially significant player in the temperature-precipitation feedback (Le-Treut and Ghil 1983), according to which increase in temperature intensifies the hydrological cycle and thus the snow accumulation over ice sheets. This feedback is an important part of the sea-ice switch mechanism for glacial cycles, for example Gildor and Tziperman (2000). Indeed, proxy records show drastic increase in accumulation rate during interstadial periods (Cuffey and Clow 1997; Alley et al. 1993; Lorius et al. 1979), when the sea-ice retreats from its maximal extent.”

The largest ice cap in the Eurasian Arctic – Austfonna in Svalbard – is 150 miles long with a thousand waterfalls in the summer

“We find that in a cold, glacial climate snowfall rate over the ice sheets is reduced as a result of increasing sea-ice extent (compare LGM and PDSI experiments). An increased sea-ice extent cools the climate even more, the precipitation belt is pushed southward and the hydrological cycle weakens.

We find that the albedo feedback of an extended sea-ice cover in an LGM-like climate only weakly affects the reduction of snowfall rate.

indicating that the insulating feedback is responsible for a large part of the suppression of precipitation by sea ice. It follows that the hydrological cycle is more sensitive to the insulating effect of sea ice than to its albedo. There are two reasons to the larger contribution of the insulating effect to the temperature-precipitation feedback. First, the overall cooling of the insulating effect is about twice than that of the albedo. This by itself is expected to lead to a more significant change in precipitation. In addition, the insulation effect not only reduce air-sea heat flux, it also directly prevents evaporation from ice-covered regions, which are a major source of precipitation over the NH ice sheets (Charles et al. 1994).

Click to access tziperman_sea.pdf

Conclusion: It’s the Ice and the Water

Regardless of the uncertainties in the underlying principal mechanisms of the sea ice-AMO-AMOC linkages, it is clear that multidecadal sea-ice variability is directly or indirectly related to natural fluctuations in the North Atlantic. This study provides strong, long-term evidence to support modeling results that have suggested linkages between Arctic sea ice and Atlantic multidecadal variability [Holland et al., 2001; Jungclaus et al., 2005; Mahajan et al., 2011].

Here we present observational evidence for pervasive and persistent multidecadal sea ice variability, based on time-frequency analysis of a comprehensive set of several long historical and paleoproxy sea ice records from multiple regions. Moreover, through explicit comparisons with instrumental and proxy records, we demonstrate covariability with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

Click to access Gildor-Ashkenazy-Tziperman-Lev-2014.pdf

Update May 30,2015 From E.M. Smith and Salvatore Del Prete

I think I can take a crack as answering some of the questions and pointing at a likely structure for some of the other bits.

Why is it whenever the climate changes the climate does not stray indefinitely from it’s mean in either a positive or negative direction? Why or rather what ALWAYS brings the climate back toward it’s mean value ? Why does the climate never go in the same direction once it heads in that direction?

IMHO the answer is that there is a hysteresis from water that limits the excursions. On one end, freezing tends to cut down heat dumping as frozen ice does not radiate as much heat to space. On the other end, tropical storm formation limits heat in the equatorial oceans as you get more water evaporation / rise / precipitation cycles and more radiation to space from the tropopause / stratosphere. So we don’t get ‘brought back to the mean’, but rather switch from an ice ball (most of the time) to a warm & wet (10% of the time). This switching is the Malankovitch cycle, and it is driven by changes in the orbital roundness, precession of the equinox, and changes of tilt of the planet (that are not really changes of tilt, they are changes in position relative to the celestial equator.

Much more here:

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/salvatore-del-prete-thesis/

Dynamic Duo: The Ocean-Air Partnership

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Ron Clutz

Update May 19, 2015 text added at end.

Earlier I wrote an essay about our living on a water world. Then an essay described the role of oceans as a climate flywheel, storing massive amounts of solar energy and thereby stabilizing fluctuations in temperature and climate. A recent post about oceans making global temperature changes drew some comments about downplaying the role of the atmosphere in climate change. So I want to clarify some things.

The Dynamic Duo

Climate change is a coupled ocean-air dynamic, stimulated by ocean heat transfers into the air, and involving the two fluids (air and water) feeding off each other.

To maintain an approximate steady state climate the ocean and atmosphere must move excess heat from the tropics to the heat deficit polar regions. Additionally the ocean and atmosphere must move freshwater to balance regions with excess dryness with those of excess rainfall. The movement of freshwater in its vapor, liquid and solid state is referred to as the hydrological cycle.

In low latitudes the ocean moves more heat poleward than does the atmosphere, but at higher latitudes the atmosphere becomes the big carrier. The wind driven ocean circulation moves heat mainly on the horizontal plane. For example, in the North Atlantic, warm surface water move northward within the Gulf Stream on the western side of the ocean, to be balanced by cold surface water moving southward within the Canary Current on the eastern side of the ocean. The thermohaline circulation moves heat mainly in the vertical plane. For example, North Atlantic Deep Water with a temperature of about 2°C flows towards the south in the depth range 2000 to 4000 meters to be balanced by warmer water (greater than 4°C) flowing northward within the upper 1000 meters.

The ocean role in climate would be zero if there were an impervious lid over the ocean, but there is not, across the sea surface pass heat, water, momentum, gases and other materials. The wind exerts a stress on the sea surface that induces the Ekman transport and wind driven circulation.

http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_atm.html

A lot of factors affect heat transfers from oceans to atmosphere, but the main ones are advection (heat in water flowing horizontally), mixing (vertical upwelling and downwelling of warmer and colder waters) and surface evaporation (latent heat rising with water vapor converted from liquid). The latter is greatly affected by wind which adds to the complexity of the process. For this essay, I will leave on the side the issue of sea ice dynamics, including the latent heat released in its freezing.

Ocean-atmosphere Interactions

The ocean can warm or cool the air in a number of different ways. For example, when the air is at a lower temperature than seawater, the ocean transfers heat to the lower atmosphere, which becomes less dense as the heat causes molecules in the air to move farther apart. As a result, a low-pressure air mass forms over that part of the ocean. (Conversely, cool or cold waters lead to the formation of high-pressure air masses as air molecules move closer together.) Because air always flows from areas of higher pressure to those of lower pressure, winds are diverted toward the low-pressure area.

Among winds that are affected by such pressure changes are the jet streams, bands of fast-moving, high-altitude air currents. Jet streams supply energy to developing storms at lower altitudes and then influence their movement. In this way, the ocean alters the direction of storm tracks. Some storms even reverse direction as the result of ocean-influenced air-pressure changes.

The ocean’s currents make it possible for these weather effects to be widely distributed. Some currents carry warm water from tropical and subtropical regions toward the poles, while other currents move cool water in the opposite direction. The Gulf Stream is a current that transports warm water across the North Atlantic Ocean from Florida toward Europe. Before reaching Europe, the Gulf Stream breaks up into several other currents, one of which flows to the British Isles and Norway. The heat carried in this current warms the winds that blow over these regions, helping to keep winters there from becoming bitterly cold.

In this way, the ocean’s circulation compensates somewhat for the sun’s unequal heating of the Earth, in which the tropics receive more energy from the sun than the poles. Were it not for the moderating effects of ocean currents on air temperatures, the tropics would be much hotter than they are and the polar regions even colder.

Besides transferring heat to the atmosphere, the ocean also adds water to the air through evaporation. When the sun’s heat causes surface water to evaporate, warm water vapor rises into the atmosphere. As the water vapor rises higher, it cools into tiny water droplets and ice crystals, which collect together to form large clouds. The clouds soon return their moisture to the surface as rain, snow, sleet, or hail. Most evaporation occurs in the warm waters of the tropics and subtropics, providing moisture for tropical storms.

Virtually all rain comes from the evaporation of seawater. Though this may seem surprising, it makes sense when one considers that about 97 percent of all water on Earth is in the ocean. The Earth’s water cycle, or hydrologic cycle, consists largely of the never-ending circulation of water from the ocean to the atmosphere and then back to the ocean.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/how-the-ocean-affects-climate-info1.htm

Oceanic Oscillations

World_map

Most widely known is the El Nino Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Many other naturally occurring ocean-atmosphere oscillations in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans have been recognized and named. Some of them have much more of an impact on climate and weather patterns in the U.S. and elsewhere than ENSO. As during ENSO, in many of these ocean and atmosphere interact as a coupled system, with ocean conditions influencing the atmosphere and atmospheric conditions influencing the ocean. However, not all exert as strong an influence on global weather patterns, and some are even less regular than ENSO.

Many oscillations are under study:

Antarctic Oscillation (AAO), also referred to as the Southern Annular Mode (SAM).

Arctic Oscillation (AO)

The AO and the North Atlantic Oscillation (see below) are collectively referred to as the Northern Annular Mode (NAM).

Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)

Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)

Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO)

North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)

North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO)

North Pacific Oscillation (NPO)

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

Pacific-North American (PNA) Pattern

http://www.whoi.edu/main/topic/el-nino-other-oscillations

Each of these patterns has its distinctive qualities, ranging from phases lasting a month or so to multi-decadal phases. Some fundamental features can be seen in all of them:

The diagram shows the vertical structure of the ocean surface boundary layer (OSBL) and the processes that deepen. The three sources of turbulence are: wind, buoyancy and waves.

The bulk of the OSBL can be termed the mixed layer, where the temperature and salinity are approximately uniform with depth, and which is often capped below, at the mixed layer depth, by a sharp pycnocline, which extends deeper into the ocean. Three sources of turbulence, namely wind, buoyancy and waves, drive turbulence in this mixed layer, which then deepens the OSBL. Hence a quantitative understanding of these turbulent processes in the OSBL is likely to be the key to understanding the shallow biases in mixed layer depth.

Deepening of the OSBL implies an increase in potential energy, and hence requires an energy source, such as turbulent kinetic energy (TKE).

Belcher, S. E., et al. (2012), A global perspective on Langmuir turbulence in the ocean surface boundary
layer, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L18605, doi:10.1029/2012GL052932.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL052932/full

The Madden-Julian Oscillation is one of the simpler oscillations to understand, partly because of its short 30-60 day cycle.

Even so, you can see there is a lot going on, and a lot of variables affecting both strength and timing. But the same dynamic plays out in all the oscillations, including ENSO.

First, the atmosphere responds to the ocean: the atmospheric fluctuations manifested as the Southern Oscillation are mostly an atmospheric response to the changed lower boundary conditions associated with El Nino SST fluctuations.

Second, the ocean responds to the atmosphere: the oceanic fluctuations manifested as El Nino seem to be an oceanic response to the changed wind stress distribution associated with the Southern Oscillation.

Third, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomenon arises spontaneously as an oscillation of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system.

Once the El Nino event is fully developed, negative feedbacks begin to dominate the Bjerknes positive feedback, lowering the SST and bringing the event to its end after several months.

Schematic of the feedback inherent in the Pacific Ocean-atmosphere interaction. This has become known as the Bjerknes feedback.

When ocean and atmospheric conditions in one part of the world change as a result of ENSO or any other oscillation, the effects are often felt around the world. The rearrangement of atmospheric pressure, which governs wind patterns, and sea-surface temperature, which affects both atmospheric pressure and precipitation patterns, can drastically rearrange regional weather patterns, occasionally with devastating results.

Because it affects ocean circulation and weather, an El Niño or La Niña event can potentially lead to economic hardships and disaster. The potential is made worse when these combine with another, often overlooked environmental problem. For example, overfishing combined with the cessation of upwelling during an El Niño event in 1972 led to the collapse of the Peruvian anchovy fishery.

Extreme climate events are often associated with positive and negative ENSO events. Severe storms and flooding have been known to ravage areas of South America and Africa, while intense droughts and fires have occurred in Australia and Indonesia during El Niño events.

http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/occasionally-asked-questions.html

Summary

The picture that emerges from this analysis is that the wind-driven meridional overturning circulation in the upper Pacific Ocean has been slowing down since the 1970s. This slowdown can account for the recent anomalous surface warming in the tropical Pacific, as the supply of cold pycnocline water originating at higher latitudes to feed equatorial upwelling has decreased. The Southern Hemisphere is responsible for about half of the observed decrease in equatorward pycnocline transport. Thus, perspectives on decadal variability limited to the Northern Hemisphere alone are incomplete. The fact that few studies have considered a role for the Southern Hemisphere ocean is presumably a consequence of limited data availability rather than a lack of decadal signal in the southern tropics and Subtropics.

The oceanic and atmospheric processes that we have described work together so as to reinforce each other, similar to the positive feedbacks that occur during ENSO events. For example, weaker easterly trade winds in the equatorial Pacific would result in reduced Ekman and geostrophic meridional transports, reduced equatorial upwelling, and warmer equatorial sea surface temperatures. Warmer surface temperatures in turn would alter patterns of deep atmospheric convection so as to favour weaker trade winds. If the system is to oscillate on decadal timescales, then delayed negative feedback mechanisms, one candidate for which involves planetary scale ocean waves, must also be important.

Similarities in the spatial structures of the PDO and ENSO (both, for example, have phases that are characterized by warm tropics and a cool central North Pacific, and vice versa) have raised questions about the possible interaction between interannual- and decadal timescale phenomena in the Pacific. In particular, since 1976±77 there have been fewer La Nina events, and more frequent, stronger, and longer-lasting El Nino events.

Whether this recent change in the character of the ENSO cycle is a consequence or a cause of underlying decadal-timescale variability is unknown. It could be that the decadal changes in circulation described here operate independently from those that affect the ENSO cycle. If so, they would modify the background state on which ENSO develops, and thereby precondition interannual fluctuations to preferred modes of
behaviour. Alternatively, the observed decadal changes may simply be the low-frequency residual of random or chaotic fluctuations in tropical ocean±atmosphere interactions that give rise to the ENSO cycle itself. In either case, a complete understanding of climate variability spanning interannual to decadal timescales in the Pacific basin will need to account for the slowly varying meridional overturning circulation between the tropics and subtropics.

Click to access mcphaden+zhang_nature_2002.pdf

Conclusion

Ocean oscillations are profoundly uncertain, not only because each one is erratic in the timing and strength of phase changes, but also because they have interactive effects upon each other. And with time cycles differing from 1-2 months to 30-60 years the complexity of movements is enormous.

Even today, after many years of study by highly intelligent people, the factors are murky enough that coupled ocean-atmospheric models still lack skill to forecast the patterns. And so, in 2015, we find advocates for reducing use of fossil fuels hoping and praying for a warm water blob in the Northern Pacific to intensify or endure so that the average global temperature will trend higher than last year.

Of course, the satellite records have 1998 as the warmest year by a wide margin. And why was that year so warm? It was a super El Nino. This is Oceans making climate, no mistake about it.

Update May 19, 2015

Dr. William Gray adds the longer term context to these oscillations in his 2012 paper:

“The global surface warming of about 0.7°C that has been experienced over the last 150 years and the multi-decadal up-and-down global temperature changes of 0.3-0.4°C that have been observed over this period are hypothesized to be driven by a combination of multi-century and multi-decadal ocean circulation changes. These ocean changes are due to naturally occurring upper ocean salinity variations. Changes in CO2 play little role in these salinity driven ocean climate forcings. “

Many ocean-climate dynamics are explained in Dr. Gray’s paper:

http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf

Included are excellent diagrams and charts, such as these:

The Dynamic Duo: Ocean and Air

Oceans make climate is by partnering with the atmosphere. It’s a match made in heaven: Ocean is dense, powerful, slow and constrained; Atmosphere is thin, light, fast and free. Ocean has solar heat locked in its Abyss, Atmosphere is open to the cold of space. Together they take on the mission of spreading energy far and wide from the equator to the poles, and into space, the final frontier.

Here’s how it goes. Working together as companion fluids, and feeding off each other, they make winds, waves, weather and climate.

But make no mistake: Ocean is Batman, Atmosphere is Robin; Ocean is Captain Kirk, Atmosphere is Spock; Ocean the dog, Atmosphere the tail.

As for the villainous CO2, that does not rise to the level of Joker or Penguin; CO2 is probably best cast as the Riddler:

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