![](\"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/68\/2022\/02\/fig44-stackbar-12.png\")
Figure from Webb and Magi 2022 (International Journal of Climatology<\/em>) showing the state of the tropical Pacific Nino3.4 region and the uncertainty, both of which we calculated using an ensemble of 32 input datasets.<\/p><\/div> Studying aspects of the Earth’s climate has been a topic I’ve long been interested in. I have a couple of quick-access points for the climatology of the SE USA<\/a> and the climatology of the USA as a whole<\/a>. But more importantly, many graduate students in my research group have worked on climate-related research topics as well. Without going into enormous details, I’ll instead list the titles of their MS Theses. Carolina Cardona’s MS Thesis title in 2024 was “Extending El Nino-Southern Oscillation Temperature and Precipitation Teleconnections back to 1850”; Allison Van Ormer’s MS Thesis title in 2023 was “Long-Term Changes in Seasonal Temperature Extremes Worldwide”; Andrew Robinson’s MS Thesis title in 2022 was “Using Downscaled Climate Model Output to Examine Climate Change in North Carolina” (and he finished his PhD in 2026 from UNC Chapel Hill, so that’s DR Robinson to us); and Wes Taylor is working on a climate themed MS Research Project as of Fall 2026.<\/p>\n I’ll hopefully add more highlights of graduate student research related to climate but for now, check out work by my Masters student Eric Webb work on the Oceanic Nino Index Eric Webb’s Webberweather<\/a>. Eric and I published part of his Masters Thesis (title “Reanalysis of the Extended Multivariate ENSO Index” in 2020) in a peer-reviewed paper titled “The Ensemble Oceanic Nino Index” in the International Journal of Climatology<\/em>. The Abstract to our paper is below but click this link to get to the paper itself.<\/a><\/p>\n Abstract<\/strong> for “The Ensemble Oceanic Nino Index”: We describe a new El Ni\u00f1o\u2013Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index that we call the Ensemble Oceanic Ni\u00f1o Index (Ensemble ONI). Ensemble ONI uses monthly sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the Ni\u00f1o3.4 region from 32 input SST datasets as the basis for the ensemble, and our new monthly ENSO index extends from the present back to the year 1850. We use the input datasets to quantify the uncertainty in the monthly index values. The uncertainty is calculated from datasets that are not completely independent from each other, but we use other estimates of uncertainty in SST, well-documented historical ENSO events, a detailed consideration of literature-based definitions of ENSO events, and proxy-based determinations of past ENSO events, to show that our uncertainty estimate from the ensemble of input datasets is comparable with other studies both in terms of average magnitude and the time-varying trend. Similar to past research, we find that ENSO events occur every 4\u20135\u2009years on average, and there have been six \u201cSuper\u201d El Ni\u00f1os (1877\u20131878, 1888\u20131889, 1972\u20131973, 1982\u20131983, 1997\u20131998, 2015\u20132016) that statistically rise above all other El Ni\u00f1os since 1850. Finally, the time span of our work shows that El Ni\u00f1o events were most intense at ends of both the 19th century and the 20th century, with a lull in the mid-1900s, corroborating previous instrumental, written, and proxy records.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Studying aspects of the Earth’s climate has been a topic I’ve long been interested in. I have a couple of quick-access points for the climatology of the SE USA and the climatology of the USA as a whole. But more importantly, many graduate students in my research group have worked on climate-related research topics as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":490,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2312","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P2kjqv-Bi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/490"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2312"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2708,"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2312\/revisions\/2708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/brian-magi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}