ENSO Blog

Will we or won’t we see La Niña emerge this year?  Does it even matter?  Shoot, if one of the strongest El Niño episodes in history didn’t deliver much drought relief to California last winter, what are the chances for significant improvement this year?  I’ll attempt to answer these and other questions here in my 5th blog post. If you'd rather watch a video recap of the winter outlook, we have that, too. This blog is brought to you by the letter p, for “probability” So what might influence our climate this winter?  As you know from the ENSO blog, there is a link between the fall and winter conditions across the tropical Pacific and the average winter climate in …   Read article

What a difference a month can make! Since my last post, the tropical Pacific has changed gears, and now forecasters think there’s a 70% chance that La Niña conditions will develop this fall. However, any La Niña that develops is likely to be weak, and forecasters aren’t quite as confident that La Niña conditions will persist long enough to be considered a full-blown episode, giving it a 55% chance through the winter. Ch-ch-ch-changes When I wrote last month, the tropical Pacific wasn’t giving us much evidence that the atmosphere was responding to the slightly cooler-than-average ocean surface, and most of the computer models were predicting that sea surface temperatures would head back…   Read article

I’m back with yet another GIF animation because I think I’ve developed a mild addiction to them [Editor’s note: that’s a classic denial by a serious addict]. Words mean one thing, but movies, well, they can reveal a lot. In this case, we wanted to show you every single North American multi-model ensemble forecast for ENSO over the past year and a half. This does not include every model that forecasters consider when developing their consensus outlook, but it includes a lot of them.    This particular animation displays once-a-month data of sea surface temperature departures averaged in the Niño-3.4 region in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which is one key location to monitor ENSO…   Read article

Since the demise of the big 2015-16 El Niño in April, the tropical Pacific has been loitering around in neutral… and now forecasters think it’s likely to stay that way through the winter. For now, we’re taking down the La Niña Watch, since it no longer looks favorable for La Niña conditions to develop within the next six months. What happened? Over the last few months, sea surface temperature anomalies (the departure from the long-term average) in the Niño3.4 region have become more negative, which was expected.  Currently, the sea surface temperature in the Nino3.4 region is about -0.5° below the long-term average, according to the ERSSTv4 data.   This is the La Niña …   Read article

We talk a lot about El Niño and La Niña at the ENSO blog, but there are other phenomena that garner interest among scientists, even if they do not have the same brand recognition as El Niño. So while we wait for a potential La Niña (forecaster checks watch), this blog post will take us on a first date with a sea surface temperature (SST) pattern in the North Pacific Ocean called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or the PDO. (Tony already provided our meet cute with the PDO.) First identified in the late 1990s (Mantua 1997), the PDO is the most significant year-round pattern in monthly SSTs across the North Pacific. Similar to ENSO, the PDO has two states – warm and cold – and involves vario…   Read article