QBO

[xmetman]

A bit of news about the quasi-biennial oscillation [QBO] and this coming winter from the Guardian. Here are some of the comments to Kate Ravilious article:-

• So unexpectedly rain for winter! Whatever next?snow
  
• They can't forecast a few days ahead let alone an entire season. It's only just Autumn for crying out loud.
  
• So it might rain a lot over winter.Thank goodness we have experts available to warn us against this kind of unexpected risk.
  

[Trevor Harley]

I saw that, but to be fair thought the article was clear and comprehensible - assuming it was right.

And I concluded (perhaps falsely) that a very cold winter is less likely.

[Dick Lovett]

Interestingly the Met Office Contingency Planners forecast for Oct to Dec, just released, suggests that a blocking pattern is likely to develop after October with below average temperatures.

Dick Lovett

[xmetman]

I've never looked at the QBO very much in past years, but I'm just in the process of writing another application to download and graph the monthly values from NOAA, and I can already see that it did throw a bit of a wobbly in 2016.

[Richard Dixon]

On Monday, 26 September 2016 17:11:46 UTC+1, xmetman wrote:

I've never looked at the QBO very much in past years, but I'm just in the process of writing another application to download and graph the monthly values from NOAA, and I can already see that it did throw a bit of a wobbly in 2016.

Post-1948 data here Bruce in case you'd not seen (I suspect you have)

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/correlation/qbo.data

More fun and games with indices here:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/climateindices/list/

Will be interesting to see the combination of indices in the coming months and how they sit against other winters.

Richard 

[Richard Dixon]

On Monday, 26 September 2016 16:28:06 UTC+1, Dick Lovett wrote:

Interestingly the Met Office Contingency Planners forecast for Oct to Dec, just released, suggests that a blocking pattern is likely to develop after October with below average temperatures.

I was going to start a new thread about this but won''t given you've commented. I too was interested in the negative temperature anomaly of O-N-D where the O part was seemingly not cold. Or will early winter be blocked leading to cries of "If only it were January!" 

Richard

[xmetman]

Yes Richard, you guessed right!

I hadn't realised that this February is the first time since the cycle was spotted in the 1950's that its gone awry. Early autumn is always a good time to speculate what the coming winter will be like.

[Len Wood]

Thread about this started on USW on 9 Sep.
There was a bit of a discussion, before it got diverted somewhat into tidal forcing.

No harm in it continuing here.
There will always be some duplication between the newsgroups.

Being as the oscillation faltered for the first time since the record began (1948), it will be extremely interesting to see if it has any effect on our winter.

Len
Wembury

[Stephen Davenport]

On Monday, September 26, 2016 at 3:30:42 PM UTC-4, xmetman wrote:

Yes Richard, you guessed right!

I hadn't realised that this February is the first time since the cycle was spotted in the 1950's that its gone awry. Early autumn is always a good time to speculate what the coming winter will be like.

========

Hi, Bruce.

I made mention of this in the last post in your "Dire warning from a dire newspaper..." thread.

I'm still seeing some seasonal outlooks that are talking of an easterly autumn/winter QBO. I find that surprising to say the least.

Notwithstanding other drivers, westerly QBO tends to favour +NAO during winter but late autumn blocking is possible. Stronger La Nina than what is now expected could influence late autumn/early winter blocking possibilities.

Stephen 

Indianapolis IN

[xmetman]

Stephen

Looking at the figures up to August shouldn't the QBO have just been entering a negative phase but is still firmly positive because of what happened in February of this year?

Bruce.

[Stephen Davenport]

========

Yes, it "should"! : - )

I've gleaned these paragraphs from what I've posted elsewhere, so please forgive any repetition:

The QBO alternates between easterly/westerly phases on a semi-regular basis, on average every 26 months (usually between 22 and 30 months) – or at least it has all the time it’s been observed during the past 68 years. April 2016 saw it weakening to +0.6 at 30hPa and one would normally have expected May onwards to become negative but the positive phase strengthened again instead. The easterlies did not penetrate downwards right through the stratosphere, and the trend towards an easterly did not fully manifest.

So far there is no definitive explanation, although we cannot for certain say that the last six decades of more-or-less regular and predictable QBO are typical of the previous several hundred years or even millennia. One proposed explanation is anomalous transportation of momentum from the Northern Hemisphere but then one has to question what caused that. Maybe it’s related to the strong El Nino and/or increasing global warmth (which the article at this this link suggests) but it’s pretty speculative at the moment.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/09/07/science.aah4156 

Anyway, the upshot when it comes to climate predictability is that as long as it does not "misbehave" again then this winter will have a positive (westerly) QBO phase; but given that its behavior this year is unprecedented as far as we know then there might be a new paradigm and it cannot be guaranteed. It's one of many climate drivers under consideration among seasonal analogs and diagnostics. It becomes more significant if other influences are weak but must of course still be viewed in conjunction with those.

 

Monthly QBO values 2015-16:

 

Stephen

Indianapolis IN

[xmetman]

I have put together an article in my xmetman blog about the QBO and curious case of cycle 30 as I make it. Here are a couple of images from the application:-

[Alastair B. McDonald]

Bruce,
now you have plotted the QBO it looks very much to me that there may be (at least) two cycles slightly out of sync. What do you think?