ENSO Blog

“How will climate change influence ENSO?” is one of the most common questions that we get on the ENSO Blog. While it makes sense folks want to know about the future changes in El Niño and La Niña—are they becoming more/less frequent? stronger? weaker? (1)—there is an even more basic question for future climate change that scientists are pondering: How will trends in sea surface temperatures change across the equatorial Pacific Ocean? It is very likely that the equatorial Pacific Ocean is going to warm up somewhere, but where exactly the strongest warming occurs is an important question. In particular, scientists want to know more about the geographic pattern of trends (2). By modifyin…   Read article

Find your favorites! Here's an index of ENSO blog posts grouped a bit differently than what you get from the Climate.gov search function or what a simple listing page produces. The categories are simply the main ways that the ENSO blogging team tends to remember and talk about previous posts. Please keep in mind that everything about this index list is manual, from remembering/finding articles to include to the alphabetization of the guest authors section. I will almost certainly have missed some posts or made other mistakes. If you see a problem, feel free to point it out in the comments. I update this page a few times per year, so it will eventually get corrected.     …   Read article

Hello from the 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society! Your trusty ENSO correspondent is writing to you from Denver, CO this January. (ENSO = El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the entire El Niño/La Niña system.) Today I have an overview of current conditions and the forecast, before getting back to the question I posed last month—how does ENSO affect daily temperatures during the winter? Let’s get to it, as there’s a lot of ground to cover this month! Current events The sea surface in the tropical Pacific has been cooler than the long-term average (1991–2020, currently) since mid-2020, and it remains so. However, we did see some weakening of this pattern over the past …   Read article

This is a guest post by Breanna Zavadoff and Marybeth Arcodia. Dr. Zavadoff is an Assistant Scientist at the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. Her current research focuses on U.S. West Coast atmospheric rivers as well as subseasonal Madden-Julian Oscillation predictability. Dr. Arcodia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Colorado State University working in the Barnes Group. Her current research explores sources of climate predictability from subseasonal to decadal timescales using explainable artificial intelligence techniques. She also writes for the Seasoned Chaos blog, a subseasonal to seasonal forecasting blog for scientists and non-scientists ali…   Read article

As our regular readers will be very aware, La Niña has been rolling along in the tropical Pacific for many months, and our third La Niña winter in a row is under way. La Niña is the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (“ENSO” for short) climate pattern. The current forecast is for La Niña to continue into the winter, with 50-50 chances for La Niña and neutral in the January–March average. Conditions in the tropical Pacific ocean-atmosphere system have been consistent with La Niña for long enough that, in November, one of our frequent readers commented—accurately—that they might as well have just re-read the October post! However, while La Niña seems stuck in a rut right now, th…   Read article