Talk:Pacific decadal oscillation

PDO cool phase
This article appears to attribute the 40-70's global cooling to a PDO cool phase, which is distinctly dodgy. Sources please. William M. Connolley 22:41, 20 December 2005 (UTC).

Redirect to self
"Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation" appears to link to a separate article, but that article is actually a redirect page that links back to this one.

Extremely confusing
At one point in the article we see "(inter)Decadal Pacific Oscillation", as though they are the same, then the assertion that IPO is similar but different (affecting the Southern hemisphere), then a note that it's all different from the QDO, without further definition or explanation of what QDO might be. ???? -- Craig Goodrich 206.39.12.241 (talk) 14:39, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I also found all that confusing too, five years later. This subject has been in the news recently so at least the lead of this article could do with being a bit more accessible to non-experts (like me). Qwfp (talk) 09:34, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

El Nino link
I feel it is important to link this page with the El Nino one, as the two phenomena are similar in form if not on timescale.Yabti (talk) 17:41, 30 March 2008 (UTC)


 * They're similar in form? What two locations are involved in the PDO shift, where is the PDO water bulge, and where are the PDO thunderstorms?  -- SEWilco (talk) 18:11, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Reconstructed PDO
Is it just me, or does the Reconstructed PDO graph completely fail to show any 20-40 year patterns from before 1900? The 1900-2000 graphs look fairly convincing at first glance, but one warm period followed by one cool period followed by another warm period doesn't necessarily indicate a long term pattern. It could just as well be that the cool period was an anomaly that wasn't common before and should not be expected after. This article seems to be more certain of itself than its sources are.

 This article states "the PDO can last a great deal longer, 20 to 70 years, unlike El Nino or La Nina that typically persist less than 18 months." 20-70 years? And also "Recently, unusual atmospheric conditions, not consistent with the PDO or other phenomenon, have been observed in the North Pacific, leading some scientists to believe the ocean's full fury is still being underestimated, as it might possess another "climate-controller" in its arsenal."

The references don't seem to link to any very recent articles on the PDO neither. The one above was the most recent at 2004, 5 years behind us. Is there anyone who knows more about this topic than I do who can shed some light on whether the scientific community is as certain about the PDO and its mechanisms as this article seems to be? --Sckchui (talk) 03:07, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Origin
A new article, but has a fairly decent review of the origin of the PDO. Since I imagine this article has few people watching it, this message serves mostly as a reminder to myself to actually write a section on hypotheses for the PDO. -Atmoz (talk) 04:22, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

What are units on graph ordinates?
I just came across the term "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" in the commentary of Elizabeth Kolbert in the April 12, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. I'd never heard of term, and was happy to find this entry at Wikipedia. I'm puzzled by the graphs however, as the ordinates aren't labeled. Are they records of temperature or pressure? What are the units of measurement? I went to some of the links on this page but (in my hurried review of them) could not figure out the units for the ordinates on similar graphs there either.Fagiolonero (talk) 05:54, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Relation to global warming
There's a link to climate change in the intro. Does the PDO have any effect on global warming? Roy Spencer (scientist) says it does.

Can anyone help me add his viewpoint on this matter? Do I have to cite the peer-reviewed science directly, or can I just quote Spencer's web site (at first)? --Uncle Ed (talk) 12:43, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

After looking through Google Scholar for a few minutes, the verdict on this one doesn't seem to be completely up. However, the tendency seems to be leaning towards saying that these oscillations, when accounted for, may actually make up for some of the "pause" that was seen for about a decade. So, if anything, when this is accounted for it may make the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming stronger. Specifically,

"Competition between a modest positive peak in the AMO and a substantially negative-trending PMO are seen to produce a slowdown or “false pause” in warming of the past decade."

Also,

"since much of the PDO represents the oceanic response to atmospheric forcing, care should be taken when using the PDO as a ‘‘forcing function’’ of nonoceanic responses without a convincing argument for the physical forcing mechanism. For example, claiming that PDO drives contemporaneous changes in rainfall over western North America may be more simply explained by both variables (PDO and rainfall) being driven by a common forcing function, such as diverse ENSO events and the internal variability of the midlatitude atmosphere."

Which sounds to me like this may be able to be used in overarching climate models in a general sense, but it's not well enough understood to drill down into individual components of models which help make up regional models that explain and verify bigger models. I.e. it can be used to explain things, but isn't yet perfectly modeled beyond just that.

Input from someone with more experience/knowledge would be appreciated, I'm just an engineering student with a hobby. BenPMueller (talk) 22:02, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

PDO Index?
The article mentions a "PDO Index", and shows graphs of it, but does not appear to define it.--Srleffler (talk) 12:53, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Hypololically speaking..
So "the prevailing hypothesis is that the PDO is caused by a "reddening" (link to Brownian motion) of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) combined with stochastic atmospheric forcing"?

I really have to chuckle at this. Let's write it in plain English. The prevailing hypothesis is that the PDO is caused by "reddening", aka brownian motion, aka "random walk noise", in the ENSO, and "stochastic", aka random, atmospheric influences. Why don't they use even plainer English and just say "We don't yet have a clue"? ;o) 78.144.72.141 (talk) 20:42, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

North Pacific Gyre Circulation
The equation appearing in this section appears to be incorrect. $${\partial h\over\partial t} -c{\partial h\over\partial t} = \frac{-\nabla \times \vec{\tau}}{\rho_0f_0}$$

The dimensional units on the right-hand side of the equation are length/unit time/unit time, i.e., dimensions of acceleration.

The dimensional units on the left-hand side of the equation are length/unit time and length/unit time/unit time, respectively.

This suggests that the first partial differential term should be written as the second partial derivative with respect to time.

e.g., $${\partial ^2 h\over\partial t^2} -c{\partial h\over\partial t} = \frac{-\nabla \times \vec{\tau}}{\rho_0f_0}$$

External links modified (January 2018)
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