Tuesday, March 01, 2011

SST anomaly last 8 months

The 2010-2011 La Nina is slowly fading, but it's still there. The sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly remains in the negative territory for the Equatorial Pacific region.

I will show below the SST anomaly (or "deviation from average temperature") for end-February 2011, end-December, end-October, and end-August 2010, or a two-months gap of the globe's oceans and seas (Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, etc.). Blue (light to dark blue) color means "colder than average" and the corresponding temperature in Celsius are shown. Yellow to reddish means "warmer than average". Source of the 4 graphs below is http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/anomnight.current.gif, various periods. Click on these graphs to see their larger images.

August 26, 2010. La Nina started sometime around June 2010, but the oceans in the northern hemisphere (Arctic, north Pacific and north Atlantic) were a lot warmer than average then. Equatorial Pacific and the southern hemisphere (south Pacific, south Atlantic, Antarctica) already showed wide area that was "colder than average." The intensity of cooling was very evident in the equator in the middle of Pacific Ocean.

October 28, 2010. Cold sea surface water has already invaded the north Pacific, Bering Sea and southern part of the Arctic. The western coasts of Canada and US mainland were about 2 C colder than normal. North Atlantic was still relatively warmer than normal but pockets of cold sea surface were evident in the US east coast.

Warmer than normal sea water appeared in east Asia and northern Australia. But equatorial Pacific, south Atlantic and Antactica remained colder than normal, some areas were up to 3 C colder.

December 30, 2010. A wide area of eastern Pacific, from north America to the equatorial to south America, had around 1.0 to 2.5 C colder than normal. Even the Gulf of Mexico and the south-eastern parts of the US experienced a wide area of cold sea surface water.

Yellow to reddish color, about 0.5 to 2 C warmer than normal, water appeared somewhere between colder water. This is because as La Nina persists, warmer than normal water is pushed downwards and resurface somewhere. The seas in south and middle east Asia also showed waters about 0.5 to 1 C colder than normal.

February 28, 2011. La Nina is showing a fading pattern in the eastern Pacific although northern and equatorial Pacific remained colder than normal. South and south-east Asia and northern Australia showed significant cooling.

The waters to the north-east part of the Philippines also showed many pockets of cold water. Perhaps they explain why the Philippines has experienced thick clouds (at least during daytime) almost everyday since last week until today.

Most or the majority of forecasts of Nino region 3.4 (central, equatorial Pacific) show that La Nina will persist until November this year and beyond. If that happens, this will be one of the longest La Nina to occur since many decades ago.

And that will be continued bad news for the peddlers of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) drama.

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