Blogs

We talk a lot about El Niño and La Niña at the ENSO blog, but there are other phenomena that garner interest among scientists, even if they do not have the same brand recognition as El Niño. So while we wait for a potential La Niña (forecaster checks watch), this blog post will take us on a first date with a sea surface temperature (SST) pattern in the North Pacific Ocean called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or the PDO. (Tony already provided our meet cute with the PDO.) First identified in the late 1990s (Mantua 1997), the PDO is the most significant year-round pattern in monthly SSTs across the North Pacific. Similar to ENSO, the PDO has two states – warm and cold – and involves vario…   Read article

By now, you’ve probably heard that July was the warmest month on record for the planet’s surface. We live in a warming world and with that comes a surge in global-scale temperature. In my office, though, we often remind each other that nobody was harmed by “global average temperature.” It’s an important indicator of change, to be sure, but the consequences of a warming world show up locally. One such consequence came to light in July, the warmest month of Earth’s recent history: an anthrax outbreak in western Siberia. The outbreak was traced, at least preliminarily, to a reindeer carcass that had thawed after being frozen for several decades. I won’t pretend to know all the details or …   Read article

It’s August already, El Niño is long gone, and we’re still stuck in neutral. Is La Niña on the way? And is anything interesting going on in the tropical Pacific? Currently, forecasters think there’s a slightly better than 50% chance of La Niña developing in August–October and then a 55-60% chance during the winter. Right now, it looks like if La Niña does manage to form and last the five consecutive, overlapping seasons necessary to qualify as an ENSO event, it’s likely to be a weak one. Let’s start by checking in with current conditions. During July, sea surface temperature in the Nino3.4 region of the tropical Pacific was -0.21°C (-0.38°F) below average, according to ERSSTv4, the dat…   Read article

This is a guest post from Simon Wang, Utah Climate Center/Dept. Plants, Soils & Climate, Utah State University. Simon specializes in climate dynamics, prediction, and their extremes.  This past winter, most water agencies across California were counting on the strong El Niño to produce surplus water, helping to increase groundwater and make up for what’s been pumped out due to the severe drought.  Unfortunately, precipitation during the winter of 2015-16 was barely above the long-term average in the state, despite stormy weather in the northern part of California.    Recent patterns in groundwater The drought was somewhat alleviated in Northern Californi…   Read article

It might seem strange to be talking about Northern Hemisphere Snow cover during the heat of summer, but July 1st was “Snow New Year”: the end of the 2015-16 meteorological snow year and the start of the 2016-17 “snow year.”  As most people do at the start of a new year, we’re reflecting on events from the past year to understand where we have been and where we might be going. In this Beyond the Data blog post, we will dig deeper into the Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent during the 2015-16 snow season and explore change in snow cover over time. History of snow mapping To understand Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent, it helps to examine its history. Thanks to the hard work …   Read article