Blogs

Three-bean salads are a blend of sweet-sour tastiness, implying all good things come in threes. Well, depending on your opinion of La Niña, maybe not all good things, as La Niña—the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern—reasserted itself in the tropical Pacific this past month with some of the strongest atmosphere-ocean coupling of our double-dip La Niñas so far (winters of 2020-21 and 2021-22). La Niña is now favored to continue into the Northern Hemisphere summer 2022, with nearly equal chances of ENSO-neutral or La Niña thereafter. Is a La Niña three-peat in the offing?  Three-dimensional Back up, La Niña strengthened in February? It did, despite the fa…   Read article

Guest co-author Dr. Kai-Chih Tseng is a postdoctoral research scientist at Princeton University and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory who is an expert on climate variability and prediction, including the study of atmospheric rivers. In the summer of 2022, Dr. Tseng will begin an assistant professor position in the Department of Atmospheric Science at National Taiwan University. This past December, a mind-boggling 18 feet of snowfall fell in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains! How does so much snow fall in one place in such a short period of time? One of the primary phenomena responsible for such extreme rain and snowfall, particularly in regions like the western U.S., is…   Read article

La Niña is likely to hang around through the spring, with a transition to neutral favored for the May–July period. Hop in, and we’ll cruise through some updates on current conditions and the recent past! On the road again The November–January average Oceanic Niño Index, that is, the three-month-average sea surface temperature anomaly in the Niño-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific, was -1.0 °C. Anomaly means the difference from the long-term average; long-term is currently 1991–2020. This marks our fifth three-month period in a row with an Oceanic Niño Index that exceeds the La Niña threshold of -0.5 °C. Passing this mile marker means this La Niña has persisted long enough to be awarded…   Read article

This is a guest blog by Tim Woollings , a professor of climate science in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford in the UK. Tim recently won the Louis J. Battan Award from the American Meteorological Society for his book “ Jet Stream : A Journey Through our Changing Climate.” The term jet stream is used increasingly in both weather forecasts and news reports of extreme events, from cold spells and flooding to heatwaves and droughts. But what is the jet stream, and why do we care about it so much? The jet stream is a fast, narrow current of air flowing from west to east that encircles the globe (not to be confused with the Gulf Stream which is instead an ocean c…   Read article

Last week, our team at NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) released the final update to its 2021 Billion-dollar disaster report (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions), confirming what much of the nation experienced throughout 2021: another year of frequent and costly extremes. The year came in second to 2020 in terms of number of disasters (20 versus 22) and third in total costs (behind 2017 and 2005), with a price tag of $145 billion. 2021 Highlights In 2021, the U.S. experienced 20 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, putting 2021 in second place for the most disasters in a calendar year, behind the record 22 separate billion-dollar events in 2020. &nbs…   Read article