From	Michael E. Mann	Date	Wed, 04 Apr 2001 14:10:07 -0400
To	Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn
CC	Michael E. Mann, ray bradley
Subject	problem
Phil et al, There is a problem w/ figure 4 (and discussion thereof) in your paper to appear in Science. Unfortunately, I didn't catch this until I re-read the paper just now. You haven't shown the right Mann et al NINO3 reconstruction. Are you sure you have used the *cold-season* NINO3 reconstruction, as discussed (and available) in the Mann et al Earth Interactions paper, and not the annual mean reconstruction!! http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/ei_reconsb.html I don't believe that has the trend that the series you show does. That NINO3 series agrees closely (r=0.63) w/ the Stahle et al series (once the sign has been flipped on that series, and the off-by-one-year date convention is taken into account), far closer than what you have shown. I'm pretty sure you've used the wrong series. Moreover, it is inappropriate to refer (as you do) the Nino3 reconstruction as an SOI reconstruction, no matter whether it has been renormalized, sign-switched, etc. There are fundamennal differences between the low-frequency behavior of NINO3 and SOI, (consider for example the 20th century!) and they aren't dynamically equivalent! To say there is a "long-term trend" in our "SOI reconstruction" is extremely misleading. There is a long-term trend in our *NINO3* reconstruciton. Only Stahle produced an SOI reconstruction, and it is only meaningful to correlate the two at annual timescales where they should similarly reflect largely interannual ENSO variability. Moreover, I don't think this is true (or as true) of our colld-season NINO3 series, which is the right one to use. Hopefully, you still have a chance to change this in the galleys, etc. Thanks in advance for your attention to this, mike _______________________________________________________________________ Professor Michael E. Mann Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 _______________________________________________________________________ e-mail: mann@virginia.edu Phone: (804) 924-7770 FAX: (804) 982-2137 http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml