NOAA ENSO August 2023 Update: Greater Than 95% Chance of El Niño This Winter – But What Does That Mean? It’s that time again! And by “that time,” I mean the El Niño forecast update, of course. The chance that El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (aka “ENSO”) climate pattern—will continue through the winter is greater than 95%, so let’s sharpen our pencils and get into the details of what that means for upcoming seasons. Related: […] Weather WeatherBrains | August 10, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA ENSO Blog: Has Climate Change Already Affected ENSO? For more than 30 years, climate researchers have been puzzling about how human-forced climate change affects the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the warm phase of which we refer to as El Niño and the cold phase as La Niña. There are two aspects to this question: Has climate change affected ENSO already? and How will climate change affect ENSO […] Weather WeatherBrains | July 30, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA May 2023 ENSO Update: El Niño Knocking on the Door The tropical Pacific sure knows how to get out of a rut! Just two months after declaring the demise of an almost interminable La Niña, above-average surface temperatures have reclaimed the tropical Pacific, and temperatures in the central-eastern Pacific are expected to continue to rise. Consequently, an El Niño Watch remains in place, with El Niño conditions likely to develop within the next […] Weather WeatherBrains | May 12, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA ENSO Blog: Why Making El Niño Forecasts in the Spring Is Especially Anxiety-Inducing Given the relatively high probabilities for El Niño in our team’s April 2023 ENSO update, I decided to team up with some of my scientific colleagues, Antonietta Capotondi (NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory and University of Colorado, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) and Aaron Levine (@afzlevine, University of Washington, Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies), to explain why […] Weather WeatherBrains | May 8, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA ENSO April Update: 62% Chance of El Niño Conditions for May–July Well, that was quick! Just two months ago I was writing about La Niña for what seemed like the 97th month in a row, and then by March La Niña had departed. Today we’re hoisting an El Niño Watch, meaning that conditions are favorable for the development of El Niño conditions within the next 6 months. In fact, there’s a […] Weather SnowBrains | April 13, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA ENSO Update February 2023: La Niña is Weakening – 85% Chance of Neutral Conditions Feb – Apr La Niña—the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern—weakened over the past month, and forecasters expect a transition to neutral conditions in the next couple of months. We’ll check in with the tropical Pacific to see how things are going before continuing the journey into understanding winter daily temperature variability that I started in December’s post. Current events […] Weather WeatherBrains | February 9, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA ENSO Update Jan 2023: 82% Chance La Niña Will End by Springtime Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean from mid-November 2022 through early January 2023 compared to the long-term average. East of the International Dateline (180˚), waters remained cooler than average, a sign of La Niña. Graphic by Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Lab. Description of historical baseline period. Hello from the 103rd Annual Meeting of the […] Weather WeatherBrains | January 17, 2023 0 Comments
NOAA ENSO December 2022 Update: La Niña Will Transition to Neutral in Jan-March As our regular readers will be very aware, La Niña has been rolling along in the tropical Pacific for many months, and our third La Niña winter in a row is underway. La Niña is the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (“ENSO” for short) climate pattern. The current forecast is for La Niña to continue into the winter, […] Weather WeatherBrains | December 9, 2022 0 Comments