csnavywx

The recurring interesting question for me has been how far east the warm pool will make it. Max SSTs are now sitting at 170-140W, which puts it neatly and completely inside the 3.4 region (and only a few degrees off of as far east as it ever got in '97). Further movement towards the east will increasingly put max SSTs inside Nino 3 at the "expense" of 3.4. If it gets to say, 130W or 120W, cooling will enter 3.4 from the *west* and it may end up stalling 3.4 while still spiking Nino 3. TLDR: This event may get so east-based as to break the measurement benchmark and cause it to systematically understate the event.

Subsurface moving back up in response. Surface should follow over the next several days. 1997-98 did not reach this level until mid-Oct. Any forecast that has us close to 82/83 or 97/98 at this point isn't really viable without a significant increase in trades *now*.

We've tapped the brakes here on the subsurface (peaking in the short run around +10-11C) as the trades temporarily recovered a bit, but the recent very strong WWB plus a migration of the standing wave towards 160W over the next ~10d should put the pedal back to the metal. CFSv2 forecasts are just playing catch-up on fully integrating the effects of wind stress and should bottom out here in the next week or so before crawling back up.

No reason to think this train pauses before printing some 1.8-2.0 months.

Might be sooner. In a separate interview the author said it may start earlier with the sub-polar gyre and we're already hugging the upper end of the equiv. warming rates in the paper.

That "snap back" effect may be more pronounced than currently imagined: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-026-02730-w

Ironically, if the increase in Nino variance extends to CP Ninos (as some CMIP6 models suggest may happen soon), then we may see enhanced CP episodes in addition to EP episodes, which ofc will be far more effective for cold winter patterns here. Add in PV disruption via a shoaling Atlantic water into the Arctic (setting up an increasing amount of ridging) and that may also constructively interfere.

I'll add on a bit here and say that the Arctic is much warmer now than in these events (especially post-2007). Quality of source region air is not going to be the same. If 1877-78 and the Great Nino of 1788-93 had trouble getting it to work, I'm not sure the baseline expectation here should be much different. The sample size here for these extreme Ninos is tiny ofc, so it is unlikely we have sampled the extent of the distribution but if these events (and the 1600s Nino) are any indication, we should probably not discount how fat the right (warm) tail is here.

Someone needs to convince them to just start using the EC-AIFS alongside this. The initialization, bias and skill score improvements are too good not to.

This, ladies and gents, is what we call a dead cat bounce.

Interesting article that would solve part of the kill mechanism of the P-T. Too difficult to compare today. We have a better continental configuration with more evolved ecosystems, a somewhat smaller basin and ice sheets+lower albedo to work with, but a sun that's 2-3% brighter. The buffer is obviously better, even if the "hothouse" ceiling has fallen a lot since then due to luminosity increases.

A review by GPT of the literature on 1k-10kyr (Holocene) ENSO:

I've tried finding some ENSO reconstruction studies via proxies and can't find anything pointing to something this large. Still looking though. Prob safe to say 150y at this point. Might be realistically as long as 1kyr or something like that. A few recent papers have pointed towards increasing ENSO variance and amplitude with continued warming: Emergence of changing Central-Pacific and Eastern-Pacific El Niño-Southern Oscillation in a warming climate | Nature Communications (2022) And: Global climate mode resonance due to rapidly intensifying El Niño-Southern Oscillation | Nature Communications (2025) Strictly speaking, it is too early to say whether we are entering a phase of increased ENSO variability, much less resonance. The models here also use SSP5-85, which we are running under for emissions (but above for radiative forcing!). The takeaway, in my mind is to keep an open mind here about the *possibility* of a changing system. It's often common to see increased volatility as a state change approaches in non-linear systems like this (even if it's still decades away). The million dollar question, as @BlizzardWx points out, for this season is how far east the warm pool gets and how far east convection gets rooted into this winter. I think it may be as far east as 120W, given that we're already ahead of 1997 (which got to 140W). We're in such rarified air here, it's hard to tell.

Carbon+nitrogen causing greening is good and it works until it doesn't. Burned area including ag stubble and grasslands instead of being broken out into category is also a problem. When you're changing ambient conditions by several degrees over the typical lifetime of a hardwood tree or conifer tree, we should not be surprised when that plant and soil carbon stock becomes unstable vs. realized temps. People generally think of wildfires as the primary component of correcting a landscape towards its equilibrium state and that's certainly an important mechanism (especially if we're doing peat or old growth forest burning), but if anything, the true surprise has been how total ecosystem respiration (TER) has changed in hot-wet environments and how big of a carbon source those regions are.

Twitter feeds some of these folks to me too (I assume algorithmic engagement bait doing its thing), but yeah, agree that most of them are hobbyists. That said it's not totally hopeless if the forcing moves far enough east to sneak in some stuff late in the season. And we're kind of in a n=1 space if it comes to say, the warm pool making it to 120W (instead of 160-140W, heck it's *already* at 160).