El Niño is still sticking around, and I am sure that it is the cause of the strange weather we had yesterday. Never mind that it is spring. Never mind that I live in the Southern United States where it rarely snows. Never mind that the temperature was above freezing yesterday. It was snowing! It was too warm for it to stick, but it was a surreal sight. Personally, I blame El Niño.

The climate pattern known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or “ENSO” for short, is the biggest cause of large-scale climate variability in the tropics. During an El Niño episode, the central and eastern Pacific Ocean are warmer than normal. The above-normal sea surface temperatures are maintained by gentle but giant waves of warm water that slosh across the Pacific from Indonesia toward South America.

This series of globes shows the eastward progression of one of these deep Kelvin waves in February 2010. The globes show sea surface height anomalies, which means places where the water surface is higher (red) or lower (blue) than average. A higher-than-average sea surface height at a given location indicates that there is a deeper-than-normal layer of warm water. Lower-than-average sea surface height indicates a shallower layer of warm water. The globes are based on 10 days of data centered on January 15, January 30, and February 15.

via Kelvin Wave Renews El Niño : Image of the Day.

Tags