Southern Oscillation Index

It'll be interesting to see how we'll go more generally with water supply and course conditioning.

Now the reason I say that is I just had to check on the Southern Oscillation Index before recording and it's still in a massive negative.

Now I have talked about this in the podcast previously on Walking the Fairways and with it being in a negative, we're officially in the El Nino climate pattern.

Now I'm personally I'm still expecting to see general rainfalls reduce based on this current situation.

I'm not expecting to see the tap turn off right that's not how it happens it doesn't often happen that way but from where I sit I'm expecting to see less broad rainfall over the next season or two even and I think this is the beginning of that trend that's my call.

The Southern Oscillation Index hasn't looked like this since the late 90s and the early 2000s when we had widespread droughts.

Now, I'm not saying to take my word for it.

What I'm merely doing, and I remember what it was like as a golf course superintendent, worrying about rain...

They decided to focus intensely on one incredibly specific, seemingly isolated planetary metric.

And that metric was the Southern Oscillation Index, or the SOI.

Now, we are going to unpack exactly what the SOI is, and we are going to look at the actual physics of the Earth.

So explain the giant bathtub to us.

Meanwhile, all the way across the Pacific Ocean in places like Tahiti, the cooler waters cause the air to descend, creating relatively higher atmospheric pressure.

Which brings us to the actual math of the index.

The Southern Oscillation Index, the SOI, is quite simply a mathematical subtraction.

A very basic equation, yes.

Well, it looks as though it's already one of the strongest El Nino events that we've seen on record.

When we're talking about El Nino and judging what it is, of course, we look at this thing called the Southern Oscillation Index.

And we look at this ratio.

And as I say, that ratio is at one of the more extremes we've seen in one of the most extremes we've seen in history.

The forecasters are particularly interested in a thing called the southern oscillation

The southern oscillation index wasn't a new idea, nor was it a particularly complicated one

The southern oscillation is a measure of the difference in atmospheric pressure between Tahiti and Darwin.

In other words, we take the pressure at Darwin away from the pressure at Tahiti and get this graph

It was more a, an interesting scientific phenomenon

This is John McBride, who at the time was a young researcher at the ANMRC.

He'd become fascinated by Neville Nicholls's work on the southern oscillation index and its relationship with other weather patterns

He was doing what I thought were sort of extraordinary papers, but everyone in Australia, even internationally, were kind of ignoring him because back then it was not accepted that you could do seasonal forecasts

But whether it comes to a drought or not is...

Remains to be seen so but you know you want to respect these big big oscillations in the Southern Oscillation Index and this one it's not as deep as I've seen sort of eased off in August the Southern Oscillation Index but the Temperatures up there in the Pacific are certainly much higher than they've ever been.

So, yeah, keep an eye on it.

Yeah, and I know that you keep a very close watching eye on it.

Um, that's something I'm really concerned about.

Some of the stuff that I've studied is, uh, related to the Southern Oscillation Index or El Niño-La Niña.

Okay.

With us coming into a super El Niño, we're gonna have a much wetter, I think the wettest, uh, winter is projected on record.

So for context, the World Meteorological Organization, the WMO, just confirmed last week an unprecedented nearly 100% likelihood that El Nino conditions will persist through Q1 of next year.

as the WMO noted exceptionally warm ocean conditions on the Pacific based on the Southern Oscillation Index, ESOI, which looks at the air pressure differentials in the South Pacific, as well as other key factors, such as sea surface temperature and weaker than average trade winds.

But an El Nino event will exert quite different climatic responses depending on the region, from droughts in the Western Pacific, Australia, Amazon Basin, and Southern Africa.

to a higher frequency and scale of storms and floods on the west coast of South America, as well as hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons in the Central Pacific.

...

in Australia, uh, for, uh, the senior maths curriculum, and one of the examples I found for normal distributions was the Southern Oscillation Index, which is-

Okay

... wonderful because, uh, the Bureau of Meteorology has...