Blogs

For about 20 years, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI; formerly known as the National Climatic Data Center) has released a monthly Global Climate Report. The report can be described as Earth’s health assessment, where we as climatologists look into Earth’s "vitals" and place them into context by explaining what happened and how the recent vitals compare with older records. The current vital signs addressed in the report are temperature and precipitation. Climatologists don’t make house calls, but we do provide answers about why keeping track of Earth’s vitals is so important. Here’s a quick Q&A. Why is it important to have a monthly global climate report?…   Read article

The air is starting to feel crisp, the leaves are changing, and the aroma of pumpkin spice lattes are filling your favorite coffee shops.  This can only mean one thing – it’s time for my annual post on NOAA’s expectations for the upcoming winter!  And once again, one of the key players is found in the tropical Pacific.  In contrast with the last two years, when we were looking at potential La Niña development, this year we’re waiting to see if El Niño will arrive in time to impact winter.  Without further ado, let’s take a look at NOAA’s 2018-19 Winter Temperature and Precipitation Outlook and see how ENSO has affected this forecast. As usual: Outlooks are probabilisti…   Read article

ENSO-neutral conditions still reign as of the beginning of the month, but we’re starting to see some clearer signs of the development of El Niño. Forecasters estimate that El Niño conditions will develop in the next few months, and there’s a 70-75% chance El Niño will be present through the winter.  Most computer models are currently predicting a weak El Niño event. Goblins and ghouls Over the past several weeks, surface temperature anomalies (difference from the long-term average) have gradually increased across much of the tropical Pacific. All four of the Niño-monitoring-region temperatures are now above average. The temperature in the Niño3.4 region (our primary me…   Read article

At the ENSO blog we’ve spoken previously of the latest research into human-caused climate change and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). So you might be thinking, “Why another article? Didn’t you cover everything already?” Well, first of all, new science comes out all the time and, second, this time instead of looking at ENSO itself, we are going to talk about climate change’s influence on ENSO’s impacts far away from the tropical Pacific Ocean. Specifically, we are going to look at provocative recent research that suggests that while we may not know exactly how ENSO itself will change in the future, ENSO’s impacts on temperature and wildfire probability in places like North America are …   Read article

We live in a warming world. And we often characterize that warming through metrics of temperature. But that’s only a sliver of the story. Another sliver, and perhaps a more consequential one, of the story is the connected increase in atmospheric moisture. Recent months have brought us—yet again—real-world examples of what these increases in moisture can bring. To say it’s been a wet year in the mid-Atlantic is an understatement. Through August, that is to say, before Florence, we were already working on the wettest year on record, or close to it, in much of the region. Once Florence’s rains are factored into the end-of-September analyses, we’ll see much more dark green in the So…   Read article