“One of the earth’s most regular climate cycles is disrupted” issued recently by the UK Met office
Plus all these recent papers:
Newman, P. A., L. Coy, S. Pawson, and L. R. Lait (2016), The anomalous change in the QBO in 2015–2016, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, 8791–8797, doi:10.1002/2016GL070373.
Dunkerton, T. J. (2016), The Quasi-Biennial Oscillation of 2015-16: Hiccup or Death Spiral?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, doi:10.1002/2016GL070921.
An unexpected disruption of the atmospheric quasi-biennial oscillation, Scott M. Osprey, Neal Butchart, Jeff R. Knight, Adam A. Scaife, Kevin Hamilton, James A. Anstey, Verena Schenzinger, Chunxi Zhang, Science, 08 Sep 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.aah4156
Do strong warm ENSO events control the phase of the stratospheric QBO?, Geophysical Research Letters, Sep 2016, Bo Christiansen, Shuting Yang, Marianne S. Madsen, DOI: 10.1002/2016GL070751
At RealClimate.org someone named Nemesis asked:
What might the implications of a disrupted QBO be? Any idea?
Concerning the QBO disruption that Nemesis mentions above. Does anybody really understand the QBO to begin with? The original theory was developed by the contrarian Richard Lindzen and it really is a limited model if you dig into it. For example, he never could derive the rather obvious period (28 months) of the QBO.
Years ago (circa 1998) the observation was about the “continuing difficulties in obtaining a realistic QBO” yet you continue to find references to “obtaining realistic QBOs”
Get a solid theory for QBO in place and only then can you start to reason about anomalies and disruptions that occur. IMO shouldn’t make assertions regarding the source of the latest disruption unless we can agree on the nominal QBO behavior.
GeoEnergy Math 
Blimey, Paul, that was a quick response to my post, especially for 1:30 in the morning. So, was there a real “disruption”, or is it all deterministic – maybe a phase reversal?
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Bill, I had it ready to go as I saw your comment.
The disruption may be just a temporary forcing stimulus. This will provoke a transient response in the DiffEq model, which will then eventually die off.
I like to use this example. A local hurricane will temporarily impact the tidal displacement. You can see that in the middle of the trace below. On both sides of this, the tidal model is still in phase and so the stimulus was transient.
Watch what happens in a few years. If the QBO is still on a 28 month alignment, that means that the external stimulus, likely the lunar tidal force, is providing the boundary synchronization.
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