El Nino and La Nina
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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…
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Dr. Jeff Masters’ blog in WeatherUnderground this week discusses what may be the most costly disaster on Earth this year, but one that has escaped notice in most of the United States. Here is what he has to say: “Earth’s most expensive weather-related disaster of 2015–and the most expensive disaster in Indonesia’s history–is underway in…
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The latest NOAA ENSO blog shows some statistics on how El Niño affects the number of rainy days in winter. From previous discussion on this blog, we know that many parts of the Southeast get more rain than normal in El Niño winters, but this shows that the number of rainy days also increases, as…