Month: January 2023

Atmospheric Science

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 3 Comments

I don’t immediately trust the research published by highly cited atmospheric scientists. By my count many of them seem more keen on presenting their personal views rather than advancing the field. Off the top of my head, Richard Lindzen, Murry Salby, Roy Spencer, Tim Dunkerton, Roger Pielke, Cliff Mass, Judith Curry are all highly cited but come across as political and/or religious zealots. One guy on the list, Dunkerton, is also a racist, who happened to make the Washington Post twice : “Physicist ousted from research post after sending offensive tweet to Hispanic meteorologist” and “Atmospheric scientist loses honor, membership over ethics violation“. Awful stuff and he hasn’t stopped spouting off on Twitter.

Granted that Dunkerton says dumb stuff on Twitter but his highly cited research is also off-base. That’s IMO only because recent papers by others in the field of atmospheric science do continue to cite his ideas as primary, if not authoritative. For example, from a recently published paper “The Gravity Wave Activity during Two Recent QBO Disruptions Revealed by U.S. High-Resolution Radiosonde Data”, citations 1 & 12 both refer to Dunkerton, and specifically to his belief that the QBO period is a property of the atmospheric medium itself

Straight-forward to debunk this Dunkerton theory since the length of the cycle directly above the QBO layer is semi-annual and thus not a property of the medium but of the semi-annual nodal forcing frequency. If we make the obvious connection to the other nodal forcing — that of the moon — then we find the QBO period is fixed to 28 months. I have been highlighting this connection to the authors of new QBO papers under community review, often with some subsequent feedback provided such as here: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2022-792-CC1 . Though not visible yet in the comments, I received some personal correspondence that showed that the authors under peer-review are taking the idea seriously and attempting to duplicate the calculations. They seem to be methodical in their approach, asking for clarification and further instructions where they couldn’t follow the formulation. They know about the GitHub software, so hopefully that will be of some help.

In contrast, Dunkerton also knows about my approach but responds in an inscrutable (if not condescending) way. Makes you wonder if scientists such as Dunkerton and Lindzen are bitter and taking out their frustrations via the media. Based on their doggedness, they may in fact be intentionally trying to impede progress in climate science by taking contrarian stances. In my experience, the top scientists in other research disciplines don’t act this way. YMMV

UPDATE 3/17/2023

More activity related to my review comment https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2022-792-CC1

As a review, this was after commenting earlier this year on a Copernicus open-science research article on atmospheric cycles and QBO (with proposed links to sunspots and ENSO) that was undergoing a review, making a suggestion to consider analyses I had presented and published 4 years ago and also prior to that.

Thought that was that and was happy to see that the authors indicated they would revise the manuscript and perhaps advance understanding. But then several days ago, the editor interceded and essentially demanded that the authors not cite my research work. Apparently, the authors were influenced by the editor’s instructions, as they immediately removed my cite and replaced it with a citation to a review article that the editor preferred. The discussion on the article was then closed with no way for me to rebut.

This was all after I spent several hours working with the primary author as they worked to replicate my analysis, sending emails back and forth several times. The editor claimed that my contribution was “a new idea that has not been published in a recognized journal and received peer review”. This is not the case as I said above: Google Scholar citations all ignored.

Also see this post I contributed to the Peak Oil Barrel blog : https://peakoilbarrel.com/predicting-stratospheric-winds/

Limits of Predictability?

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 3 Comments

A decade-old research article on modeling equatorial waves includes this introductory passage:

“Nonlinear aspects plays a major role in the understanding of fluid flows. The distinctive fact that in nonlinear problems cause and effect are not proportional opens up the possibility that a small variation in an input quantity causes a considerable change in the response of the system. Often this type of complication causes nonlinear problems to elude exact treatment. “

 https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JC007879

From my experience if it is relatively easy to generate a fit to data via a nonlinear model then it also may be easy to diverge from the fit with a small structural perturbation, or to come up with an alternative fit with a different set of parameters. This makes it difficult to establish an iron-clad cross-validation.

This doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying. Applying the dLOD calibration approach to an applied forcing, we can model ENSO via the NINO34 climate index across the available data range (in YELLOW) in the figure below (parameters here)

The lower right box is a modulo-2π reduction of the tidal forcing as an input to the sinusoidal LTE modulation, using the decline rate (per month) as the divisor. Why this works so well per month in contrast to per year (where an annual cycle would make sense) is not clear. It is also fascinating in that this is a form of amplitude aliasing analogous to the frequency aliasing that also applies a modulo-2π folding reduction to the tidal periods less than the Nyquist monthly sampling criteria. There may be a time-amplitude duality or Lagrangian particle-relabeling in operation that has at its central core the trivial solutions of Navier-Stokes or Euler differential equations when all segments of forcing are flat or have a linear slope. Trivial in the sense that when a forcing is flat or has a 1st-order slope, the 2nd derivatives due to divergence in the differential equations vanish (quasi-static). This means that only the discontinuities, which occur concurrently with the annual ENSO predictability barrier, need to be treated carefully (the modulo-2π folding could be a topological Berry phase jump?). Yet, if these transitions are enhanced by metastable interface instabilities as during thermocline turn-over then the differential equation conditions could be transiently relaxed via a vanishing density difference. Much happens during a turn-over, but it doesn’t last long, perhaps indicating a geometric phase. MV Berry also discusses phase changes in the context of amphidromic tidal singularities here.

Suffice to say that the topological properties of reduced dimension volumes and at interfaces remain mysterious. The main takeaway is that a working NINO34-fitted ENSO model is produced, and if not here then somewhere else a machine-learning algorithm will discover it.

The key next step is to apply the same tidal forcing to an AMO model, taking care not to change the tidal factors enough to produce a highly sensitive nonlinear response in the LTE model. So we retain an excluded interval from training (in YELLOW below) and only adjust the LTE parameters for the region surrounding this zone during the fitting process (parameters here).

The cross-validation agreement is breathtakingly good in the excluded (out-of-band) training interval. There is zero cross-correlation between the NINO34 and AMO time-series to begin with so that this is likely revealing the true emergent characteristics of a tidally forced mechanism.

As usual all the introductory work is covered in Mathematical Geoenergy

A community peer-review contributed to a recent QBO article is here and PDF here. The same question applies to QBO as ENSO or AMO: is it possible to predict future behavior? Is the QBO model less sensitive to input since the nonlinear aspect is weaker?

Added several weeks later: This monograph PDF available “Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics: Physical and Numerical Aspects”. Ignoring higher-order time derivatives is key to solving LTE.

Note the cite to Billy Kessler

Click to access esd-2020-74-RC1.pdf

Gerstner waves

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 2 Comments

An exact solution for equatorially trapped waves
Adrian Constantin, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 117, C05029, doi:10.1029/2012JC007879, 2012

Nonlinear aspects plays a major role in the understanding of fluid flows. The distinctive fact that in nonlinear problems cause and effect are not proportional opens up the possibility that a small variation in an input quantity causes a considerable change in the response of the system. Often this type of complication causes nonlinear problems to elude exact treatment. A good illustration of this feature is the fact that there is only one known explicit exact solution of the (nonlinear) governing equations for periodic two-dimensional traveling gravity water waves. This solution was first found in a homogeneous fluid by Gerstner

These are trochoidal waves

Even within the context of gravity waves explored in the references mentioned above, a vertical wall is not allowable. This drawback is of special relevance in a geophysical context since [cf. Fedorov and Brown, 2009] the Equator works like a natural boundary and equatorially trapped waves, eastward propagating and symmetric about the Equator, are known to exist. By the 1980s, the scientific community came to realize that these waves are one of the key factors in explaining the El Niño phenomenon (see also the discussion in Cushman-Roisin and Beckers [2011]).

modulo-2π and Berry phase