Common forcing for ocean indices

In Mathematical Geoenergy, Chapter 12, a biennially-impulsed lunar forcing is suggested as a mechanism to drive ENSO. The current thinking is that this lunar forcing should be common across all the oceanic indices, including AMO for the Atlantic, IOD for the Indian, and PDO for the non-equatorial north Pacific. The global temperature extreme of the last year had too many simultaneous concurrences among the indices for this not to be taken seriously.

NINO34

PDO

AMO

IOD – East

IOD-West

Each one of these uses a nearly identical annual-impulsed tidal forcing (shown as the middle green panel in each), with a 5-year window providing a cross-validation interval. So many possibilities are available with cross-validation since the tidal factors are essentially invariantly fixed over all the climate indices.

The approach follows 3 steps as shown below

The first step is to generate the long-period tidal forcing. I go into an explanation of the tidal factors selected in a Real Climate comment here.

Then apply the lagged response of an annual impulse, in this case alternating in sign every other year, which generates the middle panel in the flow chart schematic (and the middle panel in the indexed models above).

Finally, the Laplace’s Tidal Equation (LTE) modulation is applied, with the lower right corner inset showing the variation among indices. This is where the variability occurs — the best approach is to pick a slow fundamental modulation and generate only integer harmonics of this fundamental. So, what happens is that different harmonics are emphasized depending on the oceanic index chosen, corresponding to the waveguide structure of the ocean basin and what standing waves are maximally resonant or amplified.

Note that for a dipole behavior such as ENSO, the LTE modulation will be mirror-inverses for the maximally extreme locations, in this case Darwin and Tahiti

A machine learning application is free to scrape the following GIST GitHub site for model fitting artifacts.

https://gist.github.com/pukpr/3a3566b601a54da2724df9c29159ce16

Another analysis that involved a recursively cycled fit between AMO and PDO. It switched fitting AMO for 2.5 minutes and then PDO for 2.5 minutes, cycling 50 times. This created a common forcing with an optimally shared fit, forcing baselined to PDO.

PDO

AMO

NINO34

IOD-East

IOD-West

Darwin

Tahiti

The table above shows the LTE modulation factors for Darwin and Tahiti model fits. The highlighted blocks show the phase of the modulation, which should have a difference of π radians for a perfect dipole and higher harmonics associated with it. (The K0 wavenumber = 0 has no phase, but just a sign). Of the modes that are shared 1, 45, 23, 36, 18, 39, 44, the average phase is 3.09, close to π (and K0 switches sign).

1.23-(-1.72) = 2.95 
1.47-(-2.05) = 3.52
-2.89-(0.166) = -3.056 
-0.367-(-2.58) = 2.213 
1.59-(-2.175) = 3.765 
0.27 - (-2.84) = 3.11 
-1.87 -1.14 = -3.01 

Average (2.95+3.52+3.056+2.213+3.765+3.11+3.01)/7 = 3.0891

Contrast to the IOD East/West dipole. Only the K0 (wavenumber=0) shows a reversal in sign. The LTE modulation terms are within 1 radian of each other, indicating much less of a dipole behavior on those terms. It’s possible that these sites don’t span a true dipole, either by its nature or from siting of the measurements.

Cross-validating a large interval span on PDO

using CC

using DTW metric, which pulls out more of the annual/semi-annual signal

adding a 3rd harmonic

Complement of the fitting interval, note the spectral composition maintains the same harmonics, indicating that the structure mapped to is stationary in the sense that the tidal pattern is not changing and the LTE modulation is largely fixed.

This is the resolved tidal forcing, finer than the annual impulse sampling used on the models above.

Below can see the primary 27.5545 lunar anomalistic cycle, mixed with the draconic 27.2122/13.606 cycle to create the 6/3 year modulation and the 206 day perigee-syzygy cycle (or 412 full cycle, as 206 includes antipodal full moon or new moon orientation).

(click on any image to magnify)

Fundy-mental (continued)

I’m looking at side-band variants of the lunisolar orbital forcing because that’s where the data is empirically taking us. I had originally proposed solving Laplace’s Tidal Equations (LTE) using a novel analytical derivation published several years ago (see Mathematical Geoenergy, Wiley/AG, 2019). The takeaway from the math results — given that LTEs form the primitive basis of the GCM-specific shallow-water approximation to oceanic fluid dynamics — was that my solution involved a specific type of non-linear modulation or amplification of the input tidal. However, this isn’t the typical diurnal/semi-diurnal tidal forcing, but because of the slower inertial response of the ocean volume, the targeted tidal cycles are the longer period monthly and annual. Moreover, as very few climate scientists are proficient at signal processing and all the details of aliasing and side-bands, this is an aspect that has remained hidden (again thank Richard Lindzen for opening the book on tidal influences and then slamming it shut for decades).

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Dynamic Time Warping

Useful to note that the majority of the posts written for this blog are in support of the mathematical analysis formulated in Mathematical Geoenergy (Wiley/AGU, 2018). As both new data becomes available and new techniques for model fitting & parameter estimation — aka inverse modeling (predominantly from the machine learning community) — are suggested, an iterative process of validation, fueled by the latest advancements, ensures that the GeoEnergyMath models remain robust and accurately reflective of the underlying observed behaviors. This of course should be done in conjunction with submitting significant findings to the research literature pipeline. However, as publication is pricey, my goal is to make the cross-validation so obvious that I can get an invitation for a review paper — with submission costs waived. Perhaps this post will be the deal-maker — certainly not the deal-breaker, but you can be the judge.

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Annual vs Semi-annual

ENSO models best with alternating sign semi-annual pulses. Operating on the Mf tidal factor this generates a tight forcing with average period 3.8 years.

AMO models best with an annual pulse. Because of the Mt tidal factor the forcing slowly wanders with a period of ~120 years.

PDO models best with an annual pulse but fast decay. Because of the Mt tidal factor the forcing would wander like AMO, but instead it makes biased excursions.

To summarize, the models of ENSO, AMO, and PDO depend on the specific forcing character while keeping the LOD tidal calibration fixed. ENSO likely requires this alternating semi-annual because it is aligned along the equator and so alternates with northern and southern nodal swings. AMO and PDO may require an annual impulse because it’s essentially a northern hemisphere behavior. Why the decay is faster for PDO, or what exactly sets the decay rate after an integrating impulse, is not clear. Perhaps the larger the inertial push the slower the response.

The Big 10 Climate Indices

The above diagram courtesy of Karnauskus

These correspond to the geographically defined climate indices

Overall I’m confident with the status of the published analysis of Laplace’s Tidal Equations in Mathematical Geoenergy, as I can model each of these climate indices with precisely the same (save one ***) tidal forcing, all calibrated by LOD. The following Threads allow interested people to contribute thoughts

  1. ENSO – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuWS8MFu8Jc
  2. AMO – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/Cuh4krjJTLN
  3. PDO – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/Cuu0VCypIi5
  4. QBO – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuiKQ5tsXCQ
  5. SOI (Darwin & Tahiti) – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/Cuu2IkBJh55 => MJO
  6. IOD (East & West) – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/Cuu9PYvJAG2
  7. PNA – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuvAVR7JN7R
  8. AO – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuvEz37JPFV
  9. SAM – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuvLZ2CMt1X
  10. NAO – https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuvNnwns2la

(*** The odd-one out is QBO, which is a global longitudinally-invariant behavior, which means that only a couple of tidal factors are important.)

Is the utility of this LTE modeling a groundbreaking achievement? => https://www.threads.net/@paulpukite/post/CuvNnwns2la

Gist Evaluation

The Gist site on GitHub allows you to comment on posts very easily. For example, images of charts can be pasted in the discussion area. Also snippets of code can be added and updated, which is useful for neural net evaluation. The following is a link to an initial Gist area for evaluating LTE models.


Comparison of LTE models applying slight variations of tidal forcing but larger allowance of basin tidal modulation

AMO

NINO4

IOD-East

IOD-West

PDO

Comparison of forcing

image

image image

image

view raw CTFACI.md hosted with ❤ by GitHub

PDO is even, ENSO is odd

As the quality of the tidally-forced ENSO model improves, it’s instructive to evaluate its common-mode mechanism against other oceanic indices. So this is a re-evaluation of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), in the context of non-autonomous solutions such as generated via LTE modulation. In particular, in this note we will clearly delineate the subtle distinction that arises when comparing ENSO and PDO. As background, it’s been frequently observed and reported that the PDO shows a resemblance to ENSO (a correlation coefficient between 0.5 and 0.6), but also demonstrates a longer multiyear behavior than the 3-7 year fluctuating period of ENSO, hence the decadal modifier.

ENSO Model
PDO Model — identical forcing to ENSO (cross-validated in upper panel)

A hypothesis based on LTE modulation is that decadal behavior arises from the shallowest modulation mode, and one that corresponds to even symmetry (i.e. cos not sin). So for a model that was originally fit to an ENSO time-series, it is anticipated that the modulation trending to a more even symmetry will reveal less rapid fluctuations — or in other words for an even f(x) = f(-x) symmetry there will be less difference between positive and negative excursions for a well-balanced symmetric input time-series. This should then exaggerate longer term fluctuations, such as in PDO. And for odd f(x) = -f(-x) symmetry it will exaggerate shorter term fluctuations leading to more spikiness, such as in ENSO.

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The PDO

In Chapter 12 of the book, the math model behind the equatorial Pacific ocean dipole known as the ENSO (El Nino /Southern Oscillation) was presented.  Largely distinct to that, the climate index referred to as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) occurs in the northern Pacific. As with modeling the AMO, understanding the dynamics of the PDO helps cross-validate the LTE theory for dipoles such as ENSO, as reported at the 2018 Fall Meeting of the AGU (poster). Again, if we can apply an identical forcing for PDO as for AMO and ENSO, then we can further cross-validate the LTE model. So by reusing that same forcing for an independent climate index such as PDO, we essentially remove a large number of degrees of freedom from the model and thus defend against claims of over-fitting.

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