Anyone who follows how variations in climate and how they affect the weather we observe in any year know that El Nino and La Nina, collectively known as ENSO or El Nino Southern Oscillation, is one of the biggest drivers of yearly climate in the Southeast. For the past three years we have had La Nina conditions, a rare “triple dip” that has only occurred a few times in the last century. Now we are in the opposite phase, El Nino, which affects us here in different ways, including our current wet conditions over a lot of the Southeast. If you would like to dive deeper into how the “triple-dip” La Nina affected conditions here and how it may have affected the long-term climate trend in the Southeast toward a warmer temperature, you might be interested in this NOAA article from earlier in November that discusses how our classical understanding of how ENSO affects us here in the Southeast is being upended by the rising temperatures.
