Blogs

Happy New Year from the ENSO Blog! With the arrival of the new year and an ongoing strong El Niño, many folks are already asking us, why isn’t the current El Niño bringing the expected wetter/drier/warmer/cooler conditions over my house yet?!  First, we’ve already seen impacts consistent with El Niño across much of the globe and those impacts have been occurring for some time now. A quick look around the world indicates some very El Niño-like impacts over the past half year (footnote #1). Second, we’re two-thirds through January as of this writing, which means we’re barely past the midway point in the December-February season. We’ve basically just entered the January-March seaso…   Read article

Across the United States, many are experiencing the first big blast of Arctic air of 2024. Coats and gloves are emerging from the closets, and heaters are working overtime, with temperatures dropping more than 25 degrees below normal in some parts of the country. But the question on our minds…the ever-looming question everyone asks when the cold air spreads across the country … the question that motivated this blog: Is the stratospheric polar vortex playing a role in this cold snap? Read on to find out! Stratospheric shenanigans If we had to characterize the behavior of the stratospheric polar vortex over the last week, we’d say it’s acting…squirrely. Living up to the celebrity sta…   Read article

El Niño is very likely close to peak strength and is likely to continue for the next few months, while gradually weakening. Despite the expected weakening of El Niño’s tropical Pacific sea surface signature, impacts to global climate will continue for the next few months. Forecasters currently expect ENSO-neutral conditions (ENSO = El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the whole El Niño & La Niña system) by the April–June period. After that… you’ll have to read on to find out! A bird in hand Decades of observations have shown us that it’s typical for El Niño’s sea surface temperature anomaly (anomaly = difference from the long-term average) to peak around December or early January. In …   Read article

The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has released the final update to its 2023 Billion-dollar disaster report, confirming a historic year in the number of costly disasters and extremes throughout much of the country. There were 28 weather and climate disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2020, tallying a price tag of at least $92.9 billion. This total annual cost may rise by several billion when we’ve fully accounted for the costs of the December 16-18 East Coast storm and flooding event that impacted states from Florida to Maine. 2023 Highlights In 2023, the U.S. experienced 28 separate weather and climate disasters costing at least 1 bil…   Read article

When we last wrote two weeks ago, the forecasts suggested that the stratospheric polar vortex would continue to weaken and warm into January. Though there were a few days around the end of December where forecasts moved closer to predicting a full reversal of the west-to-east winds at 60 degrees North* that comprise a major “sudden stratospheric warming”, the ingredients did not fully come together. Instead, in the last few days there was a minor warming of the vortex. Temperatures in the mid-stratosphere (~19 miles above the surface) rose about 30 degC (55 deg F!) during the 6-day period between December 30 and January 5th, and the winds at 60 degrees North slowed considerably but did not r…   Read article