Blogs

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

By now, you’ve probably heard that July was the warmest month on record for the planet’s surface. We live in a warming world and with that comes a surge in global-scale temperature. In my office, though, we often remind each other that nobody was harmed by “global average temperature.” It’s an important indicator of change, to be sure, but the consequences of a warming world show up locally. One such consequence came to light in July, the warmest month of Earth’s recent history: an anthrax outbreak in western Siberia. The outbreak was traced, at least preliminarily, to a reindeer carcass that had thawed after being frozen for several decades. I won’t pretend to know all the details or …   Read article

It’s August already, El Niño is long gone, and we’re still stuck in neutral. Is La Niña on the way? And is anything interesting going on in the tropical Pacific? Currently, forecasters think there’s a slightly better than 50% chance of La Niña developing in August–October and then a 55-60% chance during the winter. Right now, it looks like if La Niña does manage to form and last the five consecutive, overlapping seasons necessary to qualify as an ENSO event, it’s likely to be a weak one. Let’s start by checking in with current conditions. During July, sea surface temperature in the Nino3.4 region of the tropical Pacific was -0.21°C (-0.38°F) below average, according to ERSSTv4, the dat…   Read article