Where is El Niño? How is this year different from 2012 when El Niño was predicted, but never arrived?
The chance of an El Nino has dropped to about 65%. What led to this change in the forecast?
How do changes in the equatorial Pacific Ocean impact places much farther away? The answer for the tropics, at least, lies in changes to the equator-wide atmospheric circulation called the Walker Circulation.
Why hasn't El Niño been declared yet? The answer might lie in the gradients of sea surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific Ocean.
It's not all about ENSO: other important climate patterns impact the United States during the Northern Hemisphere winter season, too.
Sea surface temperatures are up. So why haven't forecasters declared El Niño conditions?
One of ENSO’s most important influences is to the Indian Monsoon—the large-scale circulation pattern that brings the Indian subcontinent the vast majority of its yearly rainfall. And while La Niñas tend to increase monsoon rainfall, the monsoon’s relationship with El Niño can be a little more complicated.
The Signal and the Noise is often mentioned in reference to ENSO forecasting and not just in reference to Nate Silver’s bestselling book. In fact, understanding what is signal and what is noise is critical to interpreting predictions from models and climate science in general.
We’d like our forecasts—both weather and climate—to be simple and certain. Because of the fluid and chaotic nature of the ocean and atmosphere, however, forecasts are never about certainty: they’re about probability.
How does El Niño affect U.S. winter temperature and precipitation?