There will be no El Nino (or La Nina for that matter) in 2018 and there hasn't been either since 2009-2010 (El Nino) and 2010-2011 (La Nina.)
There is no such thing as ENSO-Neutral, as I have been saying for years.
Regarding ENSO, I will remind everyone again what El Nino and La Nina truly is:
These ENSO events are solar-planetary forced and occur every 10-11 years. The last ENSO, which I forecasted, was a El Nino in mid-2009 that was followed by a La Nina in 2010-11.
Think of ENSO as climate change in action. You are seeing what amounts to a large scale variability in the circulatory system, and when you take out ENSO you are removing a climate mechanism where the thermal/kinetic exchange to equilibrium is achieved.
ENSO is externally forced through the polar annular modes/AAM, and ENSO is climate change in action. What confounds the computer modellers about ENSO's cycle is that the thermodynamic response to perturbation is not linear.
ENSO responds to fluctuations by the external forcing from the Sun.
Understand at the dynamics of ENSO and what forces it.
ENSO is forced by the Sun externally because the strength of the trade winds, that's Walker Cell dynamics, and the AAM integral come before ENSO SST variation.
Now, the atmosphere is the less energetic body, so by definition there has to be an 'external' perturbation present.
Evidence of such Solar forcing exists and the relationship is significant:
Corotating coronal holes of the Sun induce fluctuations of the solar wind speed in the vicinity of the Earth. These fluctuations of solar wind speed are closely correlated with geomagnetic activity and the resultant geophysical climate and weather effects on Earth. It is basic to Astrometeorology. That is what I do.
Now, solar wind speeds have been observed and monitored by orbiting Earth satellites since the mid-1960s. The long-term series of solar wind speed clearly reveals enhanced amplitudes at the solar rotation period of 27.3 days and at its harmonics 13.6 and 9.1 days.
The amplitude series are modulated by a quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) that has a period of 1.75a (that's 21 months) as bispectral analysis reveals.
A 1.75a QBO component is also present in the equatorial, zonal wind of the stratosphere at 30 hPa, in addition to the well-known QBO component at the period 2.4a (at 29 months.)
The solar wind QBO influences the stratospheric QBO, the global electric circuit, and cloud cover by modulation of ionospheric electric fields, cosmic ray flux and particle precipitation.
And the series of solar wind speed fluctuations are bandpass-filtered at the period 1.75a. The filtered series provide the amplitude of the solar wind QBO as function of time.
The maxima of the solar wind QBO series correlate with those of the ENSO Index. Analysis confirms that the solar wind QBO helps to trigger ENSO activity.
The solar forcing of ENSO is done by changes in meridional flux through the NAM/SAM and that ties directly right back into planetary wave action.
In volume 36, issue 17, of the September 2009 Geophysical Research Letters, Rodrigo Caballero and Bruce T. Anderson state that:
"Stationary planetary waves are excited in the mid-latitudes, propagate equatorward and are absorbed in the subtropics. The impact these waves have on the tropical climate has yet to be fully unraveled.
"Previous work has shown that interannual variability of zonal-mean stationary eddy stress is well correlated with interannual variability in Hadley cell strength. A separate line of research has shown that changes in midlatitude planetary waves local to the Pacific strongly affect ENSO variability.
"Here, we show that the two phenomena are in fact closely connected. Interannual variability of wave activity flux impinging on the subtropical central Pacific affects the local Hadley cell. The associated changes in subtropical subsidence affect the surface pressure field and wind stresses, which in turn affect ENSO.
"As a result, a winter with an anomalously weak Hadley cell tends to be followed a year later by an El Niño event."
Moreover, there is a link from the Pacific Meridional Mode to ENSO, as Ping Chang and Link Ji from Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas wrote in late 2008:
"The occurrence of a boreal spring phenomenon referred to as the Pacific Meridional Model (MM) is shown to be intimately linked to the development of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in a long simulation of a coupled model.
The MM, characterized by an anomalous north–south SST gradient and anomalous surface circulation in the northeasterly trade regime with maximum variance in boreal spring, is shown to be inherent to thermodynamic ocean–atmosphere coupling in the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) latitude, and the MM existence is independent of ENSO.
"The thermodynamic coupling enhances the persistence of the anomalous winds in the deep tropics, forcing energetic equatorially trapped oceanic waves to occur in the central western Pacific, which in turn initiate an ENSO event. The majority of ENSO events in both nature and the coupled model are preceded by MM events."
Now, the reasons why NOAA/NWS and every other conventional climate center on Earth, along with climatologists and their computer models cannot forecast ENSO is that their computer models are shit.
ENSO is an *astronomically-caused* climate event. And clearly the algorithms in their overblown and error-filled computer models are not programmed to understand ENSO. That is why they cannot forecast it and every single year they come out with forecasts on ENSO and they fail. They did it last time when I forecasted the 2009-2011 ENSO three years in advance, from 2006.
Rather, what conventional modellers do is that they take an initial condition and then they apply their own perturbation theories to attempt to get a future projection - and those projections are always wrong, wrong, wrong.
In truth, in the real world of climate, ENSO is NOT an internally driven or a chaotic phenomenon.
ENSO is a solar and planetary magnetically-driven event that forces upper stratospheric U-flow/QBO and you can witness the results and impact on the N/S annular modes.
Reports from the CFS project on the 2011 La Nina that I forecasted fell to -4C because those expensive computer models are founded on absolutely useless methods on the given boundary conditions that they use to project from.
It means that they are essentially using a system dynamic that *drives* the system state, rather than the other way around. They have it ass backwards.
For instance, if you subtract ENSO, then you also have to subtract the poleward migration of Hadley cells/expansion of the Ferrel cells seen since solar year 1976.
Now, once you do that, you will lose the 3-4 percent decrease that's observed in tropical cloud cover. Therefore, you lose essentially all of the warming that has occurred since the 1970s and that relates to about 3.5W/m^2 of loss since 1982.
NOAA/NWS and every other climate forecast center do not successfully produce accurate seasonal forecasts.
Again, that's because their models are only programmed to the general governing equations that are put into them.
For years now, with all that money they've wasted, the computer climate modeling world is a total disaster and they have to know it after busting every season, every year, year in and year out.
Again, there will be no ENSO until earliest 2019-2020. We will see signatures by mid-2019 when things really begin to get interesting, but by 2021-2022 there will a full blown La Nina, the first under this new climate of global cooling.
