Has the AMO Peaked? May-Oct says No and Nov-Apr says Yes.

Has the AMO Peaked and started its drop towards negative?  The answer is yes for winter months and no for summer months.

Maybe thats why winter Arctic Ice is doing fine and summer Arctic Ice is not doing fine.

I have included a graph for the AMO for all years that we have data, and then the AMO broken down for each individual month.

The blue boxes in the graphs contain 5 years averages, the blue line underneath is the 5 year period. Red values = above 0 and blue values = below 0.

The All Years AMO has dropped a little over the last 5 years compared to the previous 5 years, but the value is still higher than the 1950 peak of the AMO (but not as high as the short peak around 1878).

It is also interesting that the 1950 peak was in the middle of a 35-40 year period above zero and the current peak is only 15 years long. The AMO may still have decades left above zero, but the winter months look like it was a shorter peak.

May to October 5 year values are still higher than the previous peak around 1950.

November to April have dropped and are now lower than the previous peak around 1950.

Click on any graph to make it bigger.

Amazing Graph of AMO vs Arctic Sea Ice vs Antarctic Sea Ice

Update: In an earlier version the legend on the graph had blue labeled as Antarctic even though it was Arctic. The body of the post had it right (thanks Tom,Hugh,Tom,Anthony,Mike and Sundance for noticing ).

I decided to graph the AMO vs Arctic Sea Ice Extent vs Antarctic Sea Ice Extent. AMO data comes from NOAA, Sea Ice data comes from NSIDC.

The green is the AMO – Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. The red is Antarctic Sea Ice Extent. The blue is the Arctic Sea Ice Extent.

The dashed lines are the liner trends for each.

There are three amazing things:

1) The AMO trend is identical to the Antarctic trend even though the AMO is the sea surface trend of the North Atlantic Ocean! The trend are so close it is hard to see the AMO and Antarctic trends as separate items.

2) The Arctic trend is almost a mirror image of the Antarctic trend.

3) The cross over point is around 1997 which is when the AMO went officially positive (it sometimes goes opposite to the main trend for a few months)

The AMO is cyclic and will return to negative soon enough and this graph implies that sea ice trends will just reverse in a few years.

Click on the graph for a larger size.