[This material justifies a statement in the post “Predict weather from ENSO?”]

[Note added:
This post relating ENSO to Manilla temperature is matched by similar posts relating ENSO to Manilla rainfall and to Manilla humidity (dew point). Manilla climate peaks and troughs generally happen before the related ENSO peaks and troughs, not after them.]

Smoothed daily maximum temperature anomalies for 140 months at Manilla, NSW are compared with NINO3.4 region Sea Surface Temperature anomalies. They match very closely, especially at peaks and troughs of the Southern Oscillation. The first graph is a log of the data as described in the notes below.
The match can be improved, as in the second graph, by making two adjustments. The reference periods for the anomalies are not the same. In any case it is pure coincidence that the temperature values are so close. I have chosen to add 0.2 degrees to the Manilla figures. At several of the major peaks and troughs the Manilla temperature leads the Sea Surface temperature by one month. I have chosen to lag all the Manilla temperatures by one month.
The third graph quantifies the remaining discrepancies. For most of this short record, the adjusted, one-month lagged Manilla smoothed daily maximum temperatures agreed with ENSO3.4 Sea Surface Temperatures within a margin of 0.5 degrees. Periods when the discrepancy was greater are noted on the graph.
At first (Sep-99 to Nov-00: 15 months) Manilla temperatures were in phase with the Southern Oscillation but one degree warmer.
For a time (Dec-00 to Dec-01: 13 months) there was no agreement.
From Jan-02 to Jun-03 (18 months) temperatures agreed.
From Jul-03 to May-06 (35 months) there was again no agreement.
In the long period (59 months) from Jun-06 to the end of the record in Apr-11, temperatures agreed except for one interruption: Manilla temperature lagged by three months at the La Nina trough of Feb-08, causing a discrepancy of minus one degrees.
In the 140-month record, Manilla temperatures faithfully followed Sea Surface temperatures in 77 months (55%), and were in phase in another 15 months (11%). Times when there were large discrepancies were generally times when the Southern Oscillation was near-neutral.

Notes
1. High frequency noise is reduced in the case of the Manilla monthly data by a gaussian smoothing function of half-width six months.
2. On advice, I represent the El Nino – Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) by the NINO3.4 area anomalies from the OISSTv2 data set.
My enquiries about the best data to use are in this “weatherzone”  thread.
The ensemble of sea surface temperatures does not have much high-frequency noise. There is some, however, and I have used the same smoothing as used in the (formerly authoritative) Oceanic Nino Index (ONI), that is, a running mean of each three monthly values.

This was posted originally in a “weatherzone” forum, with the date 25 October 2011. It is posted here with the nominal date 28 October 2011, and made “sticky” on 27 May 2014.