Many of us have been wondering when El Niño will peak. In NOAA’s Monday weekly update we find:
A majority of the models indicate that the current El Niño episode is near or at its peak (e.g. December-January-February).
That means the peak might be near So, it’s time to bet quatloos on the Niño 3.4 Average SST for DJF. If you’re rooting for a sustained El Nino, bet high; if you’re rooting for a stall bet low. If you are just trying to get it right, use your favorite method.
When betting, it helps to know what you are trying to match.
NOAA will eventually publish their official value for the Dec., Jan. Feb. SST, but they are a little slow for betting. For quatloo-betting purposes, I came up with a substitute based on their more quickly published data. NOAA publishes ” Weekly SST data starts week centered Wednesdays”. (More metrics here.)
Based on this, I compute the three month averages weighting weeks by the number of days contained in the nominal three month period. (So, for example, week centered on Dec. 2 contains 5 days in December. It counts as 5/7th of a week. The week centered on March 3 contains 1 day in February, so it counts as 1/7th of a week. Weeks in between count as 7/7ths of a week. I take the weighted sum of weeks and divide by the sum of weeks. You can read more details here.)
To win the qualtoos, you must try to get match the value I will compute based on the algorithm described above.
Now, feel free to enter your bets below:
[sockulator(../musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/UAHBets3.php?Metric=El Nino?Units=C?cutOffMonth=2?cutOffDay=15?cutOffYear=2010?DateMetric=February, 2009? )sockulator]
(Europeans, please use dots ‘.’ not commas ‘,’ to indicate decimal places. MySQL gets really upset if you use commas.)
With luck, I’ll get some Tony’s coupons around the time the winners are decreed and I can send coupons for “whatever” to whoever comes closest.
OT
Lucia, does UAH use ch4 or ch5 for it’s monthly temperature reports?
DG–
UAH uses neither channel 4 nor channel 5 AMSU for the monthly temperature reports. They don’t even use the AMSU satellite because it drifts. They use an instrument on the AQUA satellite. However, the AMSU data is available daily. My understanding is channel 5 most closely tracks the lower troposphere. So, I show that. But it’s for information only. It can help guide your guessing, but the standard deviation of differences between the values roy reports and the AMSU average exceeds ±0.1C. So, last month’s UAH value can be almost as useful as the instantaneous readings from this different, but related, instrument.
Unless NINO3.4 SST anomalies take an unusual swing up again, they peaked about three weeks ago. Can I place a bet on that?
http://i49.tinypic.com/dfdpjb.png
The graph is from this post, which also includes a link to the BOM ENSO wrap-up webpage:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2010/01/mid-january-2010-sst-anomaly-update.html
Regards
Bob–
I’m not putting a bet on the actual maximum during a period. So, no, you can’t bet on that. But you can bet on the upcoming 3 month time period. If you think the max was reached, you will naturally bet for the temperaures to drop!
Thanks Lucia,
DOH, that’s right. Didn’t Roy Spencer say he was going to convert the website to AQUA sometime last year?
DG–
I think Roy is plans to post daily info from Aqua at some point. I don’t know when that will happen.
Here is the weekly ENSO report. Page 5 shows that we are clearly headed down already.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
Problem is that the effects of where we where will be felt for another 3 or 4 months.
Tilo-
I’m in Chicago. Feb & March being anomalously warm is not something I mind so much. I’ve been browsing seed catalogs and I’m longing to get my seeds started!
Lucia:
I”’ve been browsing seed catalogs and I’m longing to get my seeds started!”
I’m in Denver, and in a warm year I can get snowdrops by the end of Feb., crocuses by mid March. Don’t know about this year. The weather has put a real crimp into my bicycling.
I’m in Vancouver and the crocuses and snow drops are already well up, tulips not too far behind, El Nino has had its usual warm winter effect on us here, one of my strawberry plants is still alive and green. Not looking good for the olympics though, not much snow on the local mountains.