El Nino and La Nina
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After a wet week in north Georgia and Alabama, many people are eager to get back to drier conditions. The rain has been centered on Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas; by comparison, if you live in the Florida peninsula you have been almost completely dry and might appreciate some moisture. In Athens GA we are…
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NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information published a new article this week on the historical comparisons between the current strong El Niño and previous ones. You can read it at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/dyk/elnino-2015-2016. The article displays the difference between each of the historical El Niño years so you can see the year to year variation in where…
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The Atacama Desert in Chile, normally one of the driest places on Earth, was recently photographed covered by millions of pink mallows. Heavy rains in March provided some areas with up to seven years’ worth of rain in 12 hours. You can see pictures and read a description here. While the story does not say…
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Deke Arndt of the National Centers for Environment Information posted another informative (and funny) blog on first snow dates in NOAA’s Climate.gov blog, Beyond the Data. You can read it at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/first-dates. In the Southeast, it is difficult to do good scientific studies of snowfall because the data are not very complete. Snow does not fall…
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Here in the Southeast we often think about the impacts of El Niño as being something that primarily affects us. However, El Niño is actually a global phenomenon that impacts crops around the world. Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a good write-up of the some of the impacts on agricultural commodities like coffee and cocoa beans that…
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What do we expect this coming winter now that the strong El Niño is here? Mike Halpert of NOAA discusses the likely conditions across the US in the Climate.gov blog post here and shows the variation of previous El Niño winters from strong to weak years. Even in the strong years, there is still quite…
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In recent climate news all of the attention has been on the upcoming winter and what to expect from El Niño. Most predictions show that we should start the growing season with plenty of soil moisture, and perhaps so much that field work is delayed in spring. But many farmers are also wondering what the…