Blogs

The POLAR VORTEX is coming!!!!!  That’s the ALL CAPS message these days in various news articles thanks due to the sudden stratospheric warming that occurred on January 5, 2021. We’re going to take a deeper look at the polar vortex and possible interactions with our ongoing La Niña. But, to recap previous articles on this blog: — The Polar Vortex doesn’t just appear randomly. The polar vortexes (more than one!) are a regular feature in the atmosphere, spinning away around the poles in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. — There is the stratospheric polar vortex, which is located in the layer that is 5-30 miles above Earth’s surface and only ap…   Read article

There’s a 95% chance that La Niña will continue through the winter and a 55% chance the tropical Pacific will transition to neutral conditions by the spring. After that, the picture is less clear. Certainly less clear than the waters of the tropical Pacific... Tahiti Speaking of, let’s take the temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean. The December 2020 average sea surface temperature in our primary monitoring region, Niño 3.4, was 1.2° Celsius (2.16˚ Fahrenheit) cooler than the long-term (1986-2015) average, according to the ERSSTv5 dataset. This is comfortably within the La Niña boundary of more than 0.5°C cooler than average. The cooler-than-average wedge of La Niña is clear in …   Read article

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has released the final 2020 update to its Billion-dollar disaster report (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions), officially confirming what communities across the nation experienced first-hand: 2020 was a historic year of extremes. There were 22 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States, shattering the previous annual record of 16 events, which occurred in 2017 and 2011. The billion-dollar events of 2020 included a record 7 disasters linked to tropical cyclones, 13 to severe storms, 1 to drought, and 1 to wildfires. The 22 events cost the nation a combined $95 billion in damages.  Adding the 20…   Read article

Here at the ENSO Blog we’ve explored the effects of El Niño and La Niña on Australia, South America, Africa, India, and the northern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Our posts about North American impacts are too many to list—check out the index page to see some of those. We’ve even visited the Arctic! Today, we’ll add the fifth-largest continent, a vast, ice-covered disc at the bottom of the world, surrounded by a roaring ocean. Keep going south until you’re going north Antarctica is about as close to being on another planet as you can get while still on Earth. Its 5.5 million square miles have been covered in ice for 35 million years, the average summer (December–February) temperature at…   Read article

La Niña continued to gain strength in November as we approach the normal peak for these events in the Northern Hemisphere winter—usually November–January. Forecasters estimate at least a 95% chance that La Niña will last through the winter, with a potential transition to ENSO-Neutral during spring 2021 (~50% chance). La Niña sticks out like a sore thumb when taking a gander at a map of sea surface temperature anomalies (the difference from the long-term average) over the Pacific Ocean. The Niño3.4 region of the tropical Pacific (the area we look at for determining ENSO status) was much cooler than the La Niña threshold of -0.5°C, at -1.4°C below average for November according to the ERSST…   Read article