Blogs

El Niño’s term is over, and La Niña is favored for the school year (79% chance for November–January). Our neutral summer break is well underway, so let’s pack our bags and hit the road. Summer school A quick primer for our newer visitors: El Niño and La Niña are opposite phases of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that changes global atmospheric circulation. El Niño’s signature is warmer-than-average surface water in the eastern and central tropical Pacific, while La Niña is cooler than average. Since they can be predicted many months in advance, and change global climate patterns in known ways, we can get an idea of potential upcoming temperature, rain, drough…   Read article

This is a guest post by Matthew Rosencrans, who is the lead hurricane season forecaster at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center. Spring has turned to summer, which means that allergies have mostly let go of their hold over our collective sinuses (apologies to those still suffering), sunscreen lathering is again a daily ritual, and many people grab their chairs and blankets and head to the beach. However, this is also when trouble can start brewing in the tropics, and so at this same time every year, forecasters across NOAA (1) turn their attention to the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season. Each May, NOAA issues their Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook for the number of tropical sto…   Read article

After a year of dominance, El Niño released its hold on the tropical Pacific in May 2024, according to NOAA’s latest update. El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), our planet’s single largest natural source of year-to-year variations in seasonal climate—has been disrupting climate in the tropics and beyond since May 2023, likely contributing to many months of record-high global ocean temperatures, extreme heat stress to coral reefs, drought in the Amazon and Central America, opposing wet and dry precipitation extremes in Africa, low ice cover on the Great Lakes, and record-setting atmospheric rivers on the U.S. West Coast.  (That’s an incomplete list! I’d …   Read article

It’s hard to believe that ten years ago a ragtag group of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) scientists teamed up with an impossibly patient and wise editor and data visualization team at Climate.gov to start this blog. And it’s even harder to fathom how popular the ENSO Blog has become; we've had 6.6 million lifetime page views and nearly half a million readers in the past year alone. So, thank you to all of our readers who have stuck with us as we delved into some amazingly complex and nerdy topics (and some amazingly awful puns) over the years. And what better way to celebrate ten years than to shamelessly steal a time-honored tradition in the TV sitcom world, the clip show! But inste…   Read article

El Niño weakened substantially over the past month, and we think a transition to neutral conditions is imminent. There’s a 69% chance that La Niña will develop by July–September (and nearly 50-50 odds by June-August). Let’s kick off the ENSO Blog’s tin anniversary with our 121st ENSO outlook update! Attention! First things first: our beloved editor, Rebecca Lindsey, has trained us all very well, including being sure to acquaint our newer readers with the fundamentals of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation climate pattern, or ENSO. ENSO has two opposite phases, La Niña and El Niño, which change the ocean and atmospheric circulation in the tropics. Those changes start in the Pacific Ocean a…   Read article