With spring's arrival comes thoughts of severe weather and tornadoes. Except this year, tornadoes in March were well below normal, with little happening until the last week of the month.
Uncommon atmospheric circumstances spawned a pair of tropical cyclones in the western Pacific—one on either side the equator, at nearly the same longitude, at nearly the same time. Why are twin cyclones more common during El Niño?
The extreme atmospheric pressure pattern that favored record-breaking snow totals across parts of the U.S. East left Alaskans asking, “Where’s winter?”
Government officials have already announced a potential water rationing program as well as expected blackouts to conserve electricity in case rains do not pick up. If they don’t, Brazil is almost certainly facing its driest back-to-back rainy seasons in at least 35 years.
A stalled atmospheric set-up has made Boston and surrounding areas in the Northeast the most popular truck stop for storms travelling the atmospheric highway known as the jet stream. And stop they have, like a caravan of tractor-trailers idling in a rest stop parking lot.
Millions of people in southern Africa depend on monsoon rains that begin around November and last until March or April. If the monsoon is erratic, millions of people can suffer. So far in 2014-2015, the monsoon in southeastern Africa has been anything but normal.
Devastating floods across Malaysia and Thailand in late December and mid-January bear the hallmarks of an enhanced MJO climate pattern superimposed on the seasonal monsoon.
During the second half of December and the beginning of January, places from Sri Lanka to northwest Australia experienced exceptionally heavy rains, flash floods, and landslides.
As California's wet season began in December 2014, it seemed the atmosphere had finally remembered how to rain on the West Coast. Does this mean we can finally stop talking about the drought?
