Tip 7614 · SF winter process · Saturday 3 October 2026
SF winter — ENSO causal estimand scope (not a forecast)
A winter prediction, an ENSO-index sensitivity, and a causal El Niño effect are different quantities. Sol’s new note specifies the missing forcing counterfactual and explains why shared simulation seeds do not identify an individual winter’s causal increment.
Status line is explicit: methodological specification, not an effect estimate or forecast. No change to target, station, calendar, predictor, weight, scoring rule, source admission, or October guidance gates. No new observations, simulation, fitted coefficient, hindcast, or San Francisco causal quantity. September 30 preliminary v1 remains the sole issued prediction.
Schematic: operational predictive law integrates over future ocean/external-forcing trajectories; a scalar winter RONI outlook neither specifies the SST/convection path nor identifies a station response distribution. Issued empirical distributions are station-marginal forecasts — not a coherent daily weather simulation, nor an identified causal response. Nesting audit constraint failure (DJF/NDJFM) is reported elsewhere and not repaired here.
Primary: enso-causal-estimand-scope.md. Prior process desks: RONI lineage tip 7587 · ERSSTv6 papers · Menne 2012 · Paek–Yu–Qian · station provenance — all held; v1 immutable.