Talk:Madden–Julian oscillation

Simple English please
I don't consider myself a dumb guy. I am college graduate, a Mensa member, who teaches US history at a university here. My verbal SAT score was somewhere around 700 if memory serves. But I don't understand the first sentences. What does "(MJO) is an equatorial traveling pattern of anomalous rainfall" mean? What does "equatorial traveling pattern" and "anomalous rainfall" mean? I came to Wikipedia to find out, in basic layman's terms, what MJO means. Could we re-write this into simple, 7th grade, newspaper level English? For instance, could we say "MJO is a shifting pattern of rainfall along the equator where one area gets more rain then another for part of the period (or year or whatever) and then it switches and the second area gets more rain then the first"? Other phrases to simplify might be "enhanced and suppressed tropical rainfall". (How is rainfall suppressed? Do they send in the police to beat up the raindrops? :) )  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bruce Hall (talk • contribs) 05:39, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

You will enjoy the chase if you go after a book about:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Irving_P._Krick

Good luck Weatherlawyer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.23.66.170 (talk) 12:47, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

- I agree. I've studied a lot of climatology, and I can almost follow the text of this page if I concentrate really hard, but it's really 'inside baseball' that will leave most readers cross-eyed. But at least the original author had a strong grasp of the workings of the MJO - hat tip for that. We just need to do some translating.Birdbrainscan (talk) 16:21, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm trying to help out here. Some basic information was previously missing from this article, and some passages have been reworded into simpler English. Thegreatdr (talk) 23:44, 6 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Even better, it wasn't even correct :-). That is just the *manifestation* of the MJO William M. Connolley (talk) 08:59, 12 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've now added what it actually is. That doesn't help the technicality problems, though William M. Connolley (talk) 10:13, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Putting an emdash in the URL was dumb. Sadsaque (talk) 03:41, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

I know this thread is 12 years old, but Wikipedia articles do not need to be written at a 7th grade reading level. Nor do they have to consist entirely of laymen's terms. A moderate amount of technical jargon is appropriate for regular Wikipedia.

The Simple English Wikipedia was created in 2003 (before this talk page was started) and would be an appropriate place to create a simple English version of this page. I would love to see some content expansion in the Simple English Wikipedia. Since you are (were?) a US history professor (TA?), maybe you'll consider expanding the history section of Simple English Wikipedia, as the regular Wikipedia history pages can be a bit difficult to follow as well.

Alternatively, there are many climate resources which are specifically geared towards younger and/or novice audiences. A quick Google search will return results for both children and the general public.

I have no background in climate science, but I had minimal trouble understanding the general idea of this page. I did have to Google the word "anomalous". In doing so, I discovered that anomalous rainfall is a specific phenomenon in climate science/meteorology. I was originally going to edit in a more common word. But I chose to do an embedded link instead, in case readers would like to learn about anomalous rainfall as well.

Finally, I am not a Mensa member (I actually have no idea what my IQ is). But I find it hard to believe that a person whose IQ is in the 98th percentile would have trouble understanding what "enhanced and suppressed rainfall" means. A person with such a high IQ (and SAT verbal score) should have had minimal trouble using logic to figure out what this page is saying. It's okay that you didn't really understand this page, your area of expertise lies elsewhere, you didn't have to lie to us. Caitlin.swartz (talk) 04:29, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Of course, I should note that the page has been simplified a bit since 2007, though not to 7th grade reading level/Simple English. This might explain why I had minimal trouble understanding. Caitlin.swartz (talk) 04:30, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Are there Non US Effects of MJO?
Most of this article relates to effects of MJO on North America. Does MJO only apply to North Pacific/North America? Or are there similar events elsewhere on the globe?203.97.52.178 (talk) 02:15, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
 * The information within the article was quite scattered. There was non-North America information within the article, but it just wasn't well organized.  See if the current format is better organized and more easily addresses the non-North America influences/effects of the MJO.  Thegreatdr (talk) 23:45, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree, there is too much emphasis on North America for what is a global system. Too much of Wikipedia displays this North American bias, its becoming tedious 115.69.32.103 (talk) 03:10, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

The North American bias likely arises from the fact that Wikipedia began in the US. So many of the long-standing articles were originally written by US editors.

People tend to focus on their own country, which is why we see other articles with country/region bias as Wikipedia editing increases in popularity around the world. People just know more about their own region.

You guys can help eliminate this problem by starting talk pages like this one and adding the tag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Globalize

Even better, you can update the content to be more global (assuming you have reasonable knowledge on the topic). Caitlin.swartz (talk) 04:45, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

What is the latitude in the Hovmöller diagram?
The caption of the Hovmöller diagram does not give the latitude. (Is it 5°S - 5°N?) Could this information be added? --Roland 01:30, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Probably centered about the equator. I've (oceanographer) always called these things longitude-time plots.203.219.222.249 (talk) 23:37, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

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Discrimination tests?
Has the MJO (or "thirty-sixty oscillation") been subject to a statistical discrimination test? Given the max period is only 60d, it would only require 1200d of data to determine the 95% confidence levels of spectral power. For a quasi-stationary real signal the lower 95% of the signal needs to be well above the upper 95% outside of the frequency band. If non-linearity or aperiodicity is involved, the signal will be invisible to any statistical analysis (due to wide-band frequency modulation). There is no proof that the ocean is involved in the oscillation, although it obviously drives the broader scale Walker and Hadley cells. SSTs show the top few microns, and that may well show only effect rather than cause. Gill has derived the nature of atmospheric eddies, in his book, and they involve an eastwards propagation with simple linear oscillations of a matter of weeks. Seems to fit the MJO well.203.219.222.249 (talk) 23:52, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Is 'local effects' the right way to describe influence of MJO in tropics as a whole?
Not sure can consider influence on monsoons as 'local', maybe section title could be changed to 'MJO effects in tropics'. Nzadi (talk) 20:52, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Incomplete sentence
The 2nd to last sentence in "Generation of MJO-like structure by geostrophic adjustment in the lower troposphere" seems to be incomplete. Munchyhunch (talk) 18:19, 3 September 2023 (UTC)