QBO

Controlled Experiments

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 2 Comments

Sorry to have to point this out, but it’s not my fault that geophysicists and climatologists can’t perform controlled experiments to test out various hypotheses. It’s not their fault either. It’s all nature’s decision to make gravitational forces so weak and planetary objects so massive to prevent anyone from scaling the effect to laboratory size to enable a carefully controlled experiment. One can always create roughly-equivalent emulations, such as a magnetic field experiment (described in the previous blog post) and validate a hypothesized behavior as a controlled lab experiment. Yet, I suspect that this would not get sufficient buy-in, as it’s not considered the actual real thing.

And that’s the dilemma. By the same token that analog emulators will not be trusted by geophysicists and climatologists, so too scientists from other disciplines will remain skeptical of untestable claims made by earth scientists. If nothing definitive comes out of a thought experiment that can’t be reproduced by others in a lab, they remain suspicious, as per their education and training.

It should therefore work both ways. As featured in the previous blog post, the model of the Chandler wobble forced by lunar torque needs to be treated fairly — either clearly debunked or considered as an alternative to the hazy consensus. ChatGPT remains open about the model, not the least bit swayed by colleagues or tribal bias. As the value of the Chandler wobble predicted by the lunar nodal model (432.7 days) is so close to the cited value of 433 days, as a bottom-line it should be difficult to ignore.

There are other indicators in the observational data to further substantiate this, see Chandler Wobble Forcing. It also makes sense in the context of the annual wobble.

As it stands, the lack of an experiment means a more equal footing for the alternatives, as they are all under equal amounts of suspicion.

Same goes for QBO. No controlled experiment is possible to test out the consensus QBO models, despite the fact that the Plumb and McEwan experiment is claimed to do just that. Sorry, but that experiment is not even close to the topology of a rotating sphere with a radial gravitational force operating on a gas. It also never predicted the QBO period. In contrast, the value of the QBO predicted by the lunar nodal model (28.4 months) is also too close to the cited value of 28 to 29 months to ignore. This also makes sense in the context of the semi-annual oscillation (SAO) located above the QBO .

Both the Chandler wobble and the QBO have the symmetry of a global wavenumber=0 phenomena so therefore only nodal cycles allowed — both for lunar and solar.

Next to ENSO. As with LOD modeling, this is not wavenumber=0 symmetry, as it must correspond to the longitude of a specific region. No controlled experiment is possible to test out the currently accepted models, premised as being triggered by wind shifts (an iffy cause vs. effect in any case). The mean value of the ENSO predicted by the tidal LOD-caibrated model (3.80 years modulated by 18.6 years) is too close to the cited value of 3.8 years with ~200 years of paleo and direct measurement to ignore.

Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments, 721–728.
doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-4411-3_172 

In BLUE below is the LOD-calibrated tidal forcing, with linear amplification

In BLUE again below is a non-linear modulation of the tidal forcing according to the Laplace’s Tidal Equation solution, and trained on an early historical interval. This is something that a neural network should be able to do, as it excels at fitting to non-linear mappings that have a simple (i.e. low complexity) encoding — in this case it may be able to construct a Taylor series expansion of a sinusoidal modulating function.

The neural network’s ability to accurately represent a behavior is explained as a simplicity bias — a confounding aspect of machine learning tools such as ChatGPT and neural networks. The YouTube video below explains the counter-intuitive notion of how a NN with a deep set of possibilities tends to find the simplest solution and doing this without over-fitting the final mapping.

So that deep neural networks are claimed to have a built-in Occam’s Razor propensity, finding the most parsimonious input-output mappings when applied to training data. This is spot on with what I am doing with the LTE mapping, but bypassing the NN with a nonlinear sinusoidal modulation optimally fit on training data by a random search function.

I am tempted to try a NN on the ENSO training set as an experiment and see what it finds.

April 2, 2023

“I am tempted to try a NN on the ENSO training set as an experiment and see what it finds.”

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/

Moonfall and glacially slow geophysics advances

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / Leave a comment

This blog is late to the game in commenting on the physics of the Hollywood film Moonfall — but does that really matter? Geophysics research and glacially slow progress seem synonymous at this point. In social media, unless one jumps on the event of the day within an hour, it’s considered forgotten. However, difficult problems aren’t unraveled quickly, and that’s what he have when we consider the Moon’s influence on the Earth’s geophysics. Yes, tides are easy to understand, but any other impact of the Moon is considered warily, perhaps over the course of decades, not as part of the daily news & entertainment cycle.

what if the Moon was closer?

My premise: The movie Moonfall is a more pure climate-science-fiction film than Don’t Look Up. Discuss.

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The Tragedy of QBO

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / Leave a comment

Trying to understand QBO may lead to madness, if the plights of Richard Lindzen (Macbeth) and Timothy Dunkerton (Hamlet) are any indication. It was first Lindzen — the primary theorist behind QBO — in his quest for scientific notoriety that led to lofty pretentiousness and eventually bad blood with his colleagues. Now it’s the Lindzen-acolyte Dunketon’s turn, avenging his “uncle” with troubling behavior

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/02/06/dunkerton-offensive-tweet-nwra-ams/

The behavior of QBO is yet to be explained, but it may be simpler than imagined by Lindzen and Dunkerton

Understanding is Lacking

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 2 Comments

Regarding the gravity waves concentrically emanating from the Tonga explosion

“It’s really unique. We have never seen anything like this in the data before,” says Lars Hoffmann, an atmospheric scientist at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00127-1

and

“That’s what’s really puzzling us,” says Corwin Wright, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath, UK. “It must have something to do with the physics of what’s going on, but we don’t know what yet.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00127-1
Hunga-Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai Eruption as seen by AIRS.

The discovery was prompted by a tweet sent to Wright on 15 January from Scott Osprey, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who asked: “Wow, I wonder how big the atmospheric gravity waves are from this eruption?!” Osprey says that the eruption might have been unique in causing these waves because it happened very quickly relative to other eruptions. “This event seems to have been over in minutes, but it was explosive and it’s that impulse that is likely to kick off some strong gravity waves,” he says. The eruption might have lasted moments, but the impacts could be long-lasting. Gravity waves can interfere with a cyclical reversal of wind direction in the tropics, Osprey says, and this could affect weather patterns as far away as Europe. “We’ll be looking very carefully at how that evolves,” he says.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00127-1

This (“cyclical reversal of wind direction in the tropics”) is referring to the QBO, and we will see if it has an impact in the coming months. Hint: the QBO from the last post is essentially modeling gravity waves arising from the tidal forcing as driving the cycle. Also, watch the LOD.

Perhaps the lacking is in applying this simple scientific law: for every action there is a reaction. Always start from that, and also consider: an object that is in motion, tends to stay in motion. Is the lack of observed Coriolis effects to first-order part of why the scientists are mystified? Given the variation of this force with latitude, the concentric rings perhaps were expected to be distorted according to spherical harmonics.

Cross-Validation of Geophysics Behaviors

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 4 Comments

The fit to the ENSO model looks like this

(click on any image to expand)

The forcing spectrum like this, with the aliased draconic (27.212d) factor circled:

For QBO, we remove all the lunar factors except for the draconic, as this is the only declination factor with the same spherical group symmetry as the semi-annual solar declination.

And after modifying the annual (ENSO spring-barrier) impulse into a semi-annual impulse with equal and opposite excursions, the resultant model matches well (to first order) the QBO time series.

Although the alignment isn’t perfect, there are indications in the structure that the fit has a deeper significance. For example, note how many of the shoulders in the structure align, as highlighted below in yellow

The peaks and valleys do wander about a bit and might be a result of the sensitivity to the semi-annual impulse and the fact that this is only a monthly resolution. The chart below is a detailed fit of the QBO using data with a much finer daily resolution. As you can see, slight changes in the seasonal timing of the semi-annual pulse are needed to individually align the 70 and 30 hBar QBO time-series data.

This will require further work, especially in considering recently reported perturbations in the QBO periodicity, but it is telling that a shared draconic forcing of the ENSO and QBO models suggests an important cross-validation of the underlying causal mechanism.

Detailed analysis also shows LTE modulation

Another potential geophysical cross-validation …

The underlying forcing of the ENSO model shows both an 18-year Saros cycle (which is an eclipse alignment cycle of all the tidal periods), along with a 6-year anomalistic/draconic interference cycle. This modulation of the main anomalistic cycle appears in both the underlying daily and monthly profile, shown below before applying an annual impulse. The 6-year is clearly evident as it aligns with the x-axis grid 1880, 1886, 1892, 1898, etc.

Daily profile above, monthly next, both reveal Saros cycle

The bottom inset shows that a similar 6-year cycle consistently appears in length-of-day (LOD) analyses, this particular trace from a recent paper: [ Leonid Zotov et al 2020 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 1705 012002 ].

from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1705/1/012002/pdf

The 6-year cycle in the LOD is not aligned as strictly as the tidal model and it tends to wander, but it seems a more plausible and parsimonious explanation of the modulation than for example in this paper (where the 6-year LOD cycle is “similarly detected in the variations of C22 and S22, the degree-2 order-2 Stokes coefficients of the Earth’s gravitational field”).

Cross-validation confidence improves as the number of mutually agreeing alignments increase. Given the fact that controlled experiments are impossible to perform, this category of analyses is the best way to validate the geophysical models.

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Nonlinear long-period tidal forcing with application to ENSO, QBO, and Chandler wobble

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 6 Comments
SupplementaryDocument-egu-2021Download
Model fitting process for ENSO

Back to EGU abstract and presentation

Addendum: After this presentation was submitted, a ground-breaking paper by a group at the University of Paris came on-line. Their paper, “On the Shoulders of Laplace” covers much the same ground as the EGU presentation linked above.

Their main thesis is that Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1799 correctly theorized that the wobble in the Earth’s rotation is due to the moon and sun, described in the treatise “Traité de Mécanique Céleste (Treatise of Celestial Mechanics)“.

Excerpts from the paper “On the shoulders of Laplace”

Moreover Lopes et al claim that this celestial gravitational forcing carries over to controlling cyclic climate indices, following Laplace’s mathematical formulation (now known as Laplace’s Tidal Equations) for describing oceanic tides.

Excerpt from the paper “On the shoulders of Laplace”

This view also aligns with the way we model climate indices such as ENSO and QBO via a solution to Laplace’s Tidal Equations, as described in the linked EGU presentation above.

QBO Aliased Harmonics

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 2 Comments

In Chapter 12, we described the model of QBO generated by modulating the draconic (or nodal) lunar forcing with a hemispherical annual impulse that reinforces that effect. This generates the following predicted frequency response peaks:

From section 11.1.1 Harmonics

The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th peaks listed (at 2.423, 1.423, and 0.423) are readily observed in the power spectra of the QBO time-series. When the spectra are averaged over each of the time series, the precisely matched peaks emerge more cleanly above the red noise envelope — see the bottom panel in the figure below (click to expand).

Power spectra of QBO time-series — the average is calculated by normalizing the peaks at 0.423/year.
Each set of peaks is separated by a 1/year interval.

The inset shows what these harmonics provide — essentially the jagged stairstep structure of the semi-annual impulse lag integrated against the draconic modulation.

It is important to note that these harmonics are not the traditional harmonics of a high-Q resonance behavior, where the higher orders are integral multiples of the fundamental frequency — in this case at 0.423 cycles/year. Instead, these are clear substantiation of a forcing response that maintains the frequency spectrum of an input stimulus, thus excluding the possibility that the QBO behavior is a natural resonance phenomena. At best, there may be a 2nd-order response that may selectively amplify parts of the frequency spectrum.

See my latest submission to the ESD Ideas issue : ESDD – ESD Ideas: Long-period tidal forcing in geophysics – application to ENSO, QBO, and Chandler wobble (copernicus.org)

ESD Ideas article for review

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 1 Comment

Get a Copernicus login and comment for peer-review

The simple idea is that tidal forces play a bigger role in geophysical behaviors than previously thought, and thus helping to explain phenomena that have frustrated scientists for decades.

The idea is simple but the non-linear math (see figure above for ENSO) requires cracking to discover the underlying patterns.

The rationale for the ESD Ideas section in the EGU Earth System Dynamics journal is to get discussion going on innovative and novel ideas. So even though this model is worked out comprehensively in Mathematical Geoenergy, it hasn’t gotten much publicity.

Complexity vs Simplicity in Geophysics

/ Paul Pukite (@whut) / 8 Comments

In our book Mathematical GeoEnergy, several geophysical processes are modeled — from conventional tides to ENSO. Each model fits the data applying a concise physics-derived algorithm — the key being the algorithm’s conciseness but not necessarily subjective intuitiveness.

I’ve followed Gell-Mann’s work on complexity over the years and so will try applying his qualitative effective complexity approach to characterize the simplicity of the geophysics models described in the book and on this blog.

from Deacon_Information_Complexity_Depth.pdf

Here’s a breakdown from least complex to most complex

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