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El Nino not till next year

THURSDAY MARCH 06, 2014

In NZ, classic El Nino winter patterns are more anticyclones for the Tasman Sea and ridges of high pressure over central New Zealand. These result in more frequent southerlies over the North Island, with westerlies and southwesterlies over the South Island which makes winter sunnier and more settled with less wind than usual over the country.

 

Spring El Nino for us sees more frequent depressions tracking to our south and east with anticyclones often centred over the north Tasman and eastern Australia, producing stronger and more frequent southwesterlies over New Zealand. A summer El Nino in NZ is typified by more depressions in the far south, and anticyclones centred just north of the country. Stronger westerlies prevail over the country, especially in the east.

 

But all that is unlikely to occur this year. The coming winter should be cloudy in the south rather than sunny, with much low pressure over central NZ. Spring may deliver more frequent and stronger northwesterlies than usual. Summer anticyclones will probably be too far south for El Nino. By the end of this year, there will be not much change from the neutral year currently in progress. Some commentators are even pointing to wet La Nina signs, as drought relief has been coming to parts of Australia and with more rain to come to Queensland in March and May.

 

For El Nino enthusiasts, July 2015 onwards ticks the above boxes. It won’t prevent media speculation about El Nino due by the middle of 2014, as most Australian meteorologists, NIWA and parrot NZ weather agencies have been doing. To put it bluntly, I think they will be out by a year.  My reasons follow.

 

El Ninos are usually about 4-5 years apart and herald anew each quarter of the moon’s declination cycle. Coming up, minimum declination (18deg latitude north and south) begins late in 2015. The last minimum declination was early 1997, year of the last biggest El Nino. Because the midpoint declination (23 deg latitude north and south) is in 2020, we might expect the following El Nino to occur then.

 

Further, an El Nino year often follows the year of Solar Minimum. As the current peaks of Sunspot Cycle #24 will persist until the middle of this year, sunspot decline may not be noticeable until November, with #24 perhaps not completely declined until 2020. A solar decline also correlates with El Nino, which again suggests no El Nino before 2015.

 

El Nino was originally only called-off on at the end of a given year. The word “El Nino” was coined in the 1980s and before that we simply talked about oceanic oscillation, called variously the Humboldt Current, Southern or Pacific Oscillation or just the cycle of strong/ weak Trade Winds, which were the easterlies along the equatorial band (now called La Nina). El Nino does not cause weather, it only describes it in hindsight.

 

The real event is the SST (Sea Surface Temperatures) oscillation, which describes the reversal of oceanic currents. Weaker currents change the rate of subsurface temperature mixing, which effects changes in SSTs. Near the equator slower currents create higher SSTs and more high pressure systems. Pressure systems develop winds, which feed back to cool SSTs. Higher pressures always flow to lower pressures.

 

Alarmism in the media sells newspapers and raises ratings. When every weather event is now blown up as record-breaking rather than cyclic, we may see tabloid headlines such as “Climate experts say the Mother of all El Ninos may be just around the corner!”   What begins as a suggestion or slip of a meteorologist’s tongue at a press conference may be suddenly on everybody’s lips causing confidence in the rural sector to wane and a futures price wobble to adversely affect the economy.

 

It is the result of a little learning being a dangerous thing, Longrange weather is a ‘weighting’ of planets and knowing which cycle we are in and where in that cycle, such that we can extrapolate to peaks and troughs and decide from our equivalent position in the past where we go to from here. Longrange weather announcements made without a reliable system are as irresponsible as if your doctor says you may develop cancer this year, with no reason given except guesswork, but which may suddenly affect everything you are planning and causing unnecessary extra expense.

 

The amount of precipitation received recently in the northern hemisphere is thought to be the Pluto Return. Pluto has a cycle of 248 years and the UK floods were a 250-year record. Pluto, now called a dwarf planet was only ‘discovered’ by Western astronomers in the 1930s, but it was one of the 9 planets known and named by Hindi astrologers of old. This Return was compounded by highest tides of the year caused by closer perigees alternating with larger apogees. Apsidal faster moons always bring more atmospheric turbulence and stronger winds result.

 

Summarising, the next El Ninos may be from mid July 2015 until into 2016, and then sometime around 2020. The latter coincides with an expected Australian drought beginning in 2019, the result of 60 years ahead from 1958-68 which was Australia's longest drought. 60 years is the Jupiter-Saturn return. The El Ninos in that period were 1957-58 and 1965-66 which were also at or near to the peak years of sunspot cycles #19 and #20.

 

We are currently in a Solar Maximum and coming up to Minimum lunar declination. Closer moons July through September will bring stronger wind systems around equinoxes, the September equinox coinciding with lunar equinox and new moon, although tides will not be as high then as at the start of both this February and March.

Northland may not receive monthly above average rain again until July.

 

It is not uncommon for physics to start off with a wrong premise and from that construct a wrong theory, leading itself deeper into the mire until a point is reached where there are more questions than answers. Rather than start again the science then becomes self-preserving because of the accumulated investment. Global warming is one, oil scarcity is another, and most of weather science is a third. It is the latter that is in sore need of revision.

It is odd how meteorological literature still pretends the moon is not there. The one symbol of eastern culture for thousands of years, the origin of calendars and festivals and of counting systems and later on, higher mathematics, somehow finds itself in exile when it comes to current western science. At the same time western meteorologists confess a complete bafflement of weather systems, preferring to call them random and chaotic rather than examine whether or not any cycles of the moon can be correlated to any oceanic oscillations or repeating nature of severe events.

One correlation they have either missed or successfully kept secret is the lunar declination cycle of 18.613-years, and the observed fact that each quarter cycle averagely matches the timing of an El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) period. Part of the fragmentation of western sciences has entailed the separation of air, sea and land. There is no university department that joins any two, let alone the three. The result has been that known cycles in one are not transferred to any of the others, despite the logic of interconnection and observable interface. In a logical world whatever is joined is inevitably going to be part of a joined system.

To say that ocean currents cause surface winds would be nothing short of high treason in marine oceanographic science which argues that surface winds cause currents. How that transfers to the deep is not explained. Neither is it pointed out that we do know strength of currents determines the extent of temperature mixing between hot and colder ocean layers, and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) rise when oceanic mixing slows. For example the warm waters of your spa will be felt to cool as people start to move around. And yet we place most meteorological technology in the air rather than the water.

To prove that winds may be caused by currents and waves beneath them and not viceversa one can ask a yachtie if he/she has ever witnessed a big blow before the turn of the tide - after which the air goes calm on the turn. If they tell you yes, then there are only two possibilities; either the current influences the wind or the wind causes a change in the water. We have no known mechanism for the air to be somehow causing the turn of the tide, so that leaves that the current changes the air. Sit in the bath and move the air above the water with a fan. Does some underwater current immediately begin to move the water around your toes beneath the surface? Now conversely gently move your foot beneath the surface and watch how a candle flickers beside the bath. What conclusion can you then come to?

Remembering the moon's influence in tidal and therefore oceanic factors, and further remembering that rain comes from the sea and most falls back into it, making world weather a huge function of the ocean, we might consider that it may be to a certain extent the moon influencing oceanic mixing, by varying the strengths of the currents. This would mean the moon might have a hand in bringing about the world's wind systems, and not the Atmospheric Heat Engine doing it, which was the theory that we learned about in school.

The atmospheric heat engine states that heat rises at the equator and allows cooler air to come in from the poles, creating a massive heat engine effect that drives all world temperatures and wind systems. http://atlantic.evsc.virginia.edu/~bph/AW_Book_Spring_96/AW_Book_10.html  

The atmospheric heat engine theory is flawed and is too simplistic. The ocean feeds air currents but not the air temperatures, which come from the sun.  The moon is the reason for the changing of temperatures – it is not the atmospheric heat engine doing this. If an atmospheric heat engine worked minus the moon then under ideal conditions the weather should be exactly the same on any given day of the year. After all, the earth's rotation is constant, as is its orbit around the sun. In general the sun pours the same amount of heat into the atmosphere each day, so the atmospheric "engine" should respond by giving the same results year by year, season by season, month by month and day by solar-calendar day. Frosts would be on same nights, same amounts of cloud will form each day, seasons would never be early or late and anticyclones will always be at same intensity and same latitudes for the same period of time of year. We know this is not true. Something else is changing things.

The lunar-induced atmospheric tide is why ice is where the Arctic and Antarctic are. Both sun and moon never venture more than 23 and 28 degrees respectively north and south of the equator. This is why the atmosphere is only 3-4 miles high at the poles but about 15 miles high at the equator. It means where there is no moon and sun overhead in the sky stretching the atmosphere upwards the cold of space comes to ground level very quickly, freezing everything in sight. There will always be cold bits at the top and bottom of the globe and a hot bit in the middle. The poles will always be iced up no matter what global warmers claim. Carbon dioxide makes no difference to the height of the air. The Arctic and Antarctic are the results of weather, when weather is a function of the air tide, and not a storehouse of weather as most meteorologists promoting the atmospheric heat engine theory would like us to believe.

The high pressures of an anticyclone have been explained by stating that cooling air from the tropics becomes heavier when descending over the temperate zones, thus giving the higher pressures. But what of low pressures? If descending air raises air pressure then rising warm air should give low pressures. But low pressures are usually associated with depressions that mostly begin in the cold latitudes where the air is already heavier. The literature is strangely silent on this anomaly and never questions what causes low pressures, nor has there been any explanation as to why pressures change anyway, for the atmosphere is supposed to be a constant and with the same barometric pressures day in and day out.

The current-mixing is observable and recordable and well documented as the regular oscillations that give rise to El Nino/La Nina. Every approx 4.5-years ocean currents slow down with the build-up of sea level in the west. To restore levels the ocean flows the other way just like the sloshing backwards and forwards of a dish. We now call this the El Nino, and we say it causes westerlies. But El Nino doesn't cause anything. It is just the name given to the observed effect

We can ignore the moon if we want, but ignoring it raises more questions. How could a huge celestial body between a third and a quarter the size of Earth, and only 10 earth circumferences from us not have any effect on the earth and everything on the earth, including the land beneath the sea (Land or Earth Tide), the sea and the air? How could all these three layers not be interconnected - considering they completely and perfectly interface over 73% of the surface of the planet? And how could it be that only one could get away with having a tide, but not the other two, when all three are intermeshed? 

What meteorology/climatology has overlooked is the declination cycle of the moon, which, due to the tilt of the earth, monthly shifts great volumes of water between hemispheres and monthly changes barometric pressures. With water relocation comes variation in currents, depending on the speed of the moon relative to the earth and orographical factors. From that derive wind systems. Unless we forget the atmospheric heat engine (which does not factor the moon) and replace it with something that includes the lunar declination cycle we are stuck with having to ignore the moon which is impossible because we know it is there. We would also have to ignore its declination cycle which has been measured and monitored for centuries by all stone circles such as Stonehenge, and we would have to deny that the moon affects ocean tides and currents.

That is a lot of denying, just to protect outmoded theories. If we start out with the preface that the moon may influence El Nino/La Nina then all else can fit into place. Skeptics often throw in the “mass” argument, in which the moon is only about 1/80 the mass of the earth and so supposedly cannot affect anything using gravitation. This is an attempt to dismiss anything lunar. But it has not been proven that the moon’s mass causes the tilt of the earth, and yet it is the tilt responsible for the lunar declination cycle. Neither does the moon’s mass cause the ocean tide, which rides atop the Land Tide, which in turn comes about due to geomagnetic stress within the earth caused by the daily transiting moon through Earth’s electromagnetic field.

Cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons are caused by the equinoxes, when the atmosphere undergoes a twisting action through the plane of the ecliptic due to the increase in speed of the sun relative to the orbit of the earth in both March and September. Furthermore, in spring and autumn the full and new moons, therefore the kingtides, are when the moon rises at or near the equator, representing the midpoint of yet another pendulum, the sun on the equator being the first. As both sun and moon are both moving faster relative to earth, the midpoint of a pendulum being the point in the swing period of greatest velocity, so is atmospheric disturbance magnified. 

The chestnut atmospheric heat engine theory does not explain how cyclones come about at certain times of the year and not others. We used to hear about “equinox gales” but this is seldom heard these days when the emphasis is on the influence on weather of mankind through emissions. And even in the theory of the atmospheric heat engine it has been recognised that the sun has some bearing on weather systems. So why not also the moon?.


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