Credit:NOAA
If it happens, as ‘temperature anomalies are continuing to increase’, it will no doubt be used by some as a peg to hang ‘human-caused warming’ on, despite being a long-established natural occurrence. Politicising the weather is routine nowadays.
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El Niño conditions have developed, as the atmospheric response to the warmer-than-average tropical Pacific sea surface kicked in over the past month, says NOAA.
We expect El Niño to continue into the winter, and the odds of it becoming a strong event at its peak are pretty good, at 56%.
Chances of at least a moderate event are about 84%.
El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño-La Niña climate pattern—changes global atmospheric circulation in known ways, giving us an idea of potential upcoming weather and climate patterns.
A stronger El Niño means global temperature, rain, and other patterns are more likely to reflect the expected El Niño impacts [Talkshop comment – waffle].
I’ll get into some of the details of those impacts later in this post.
The circus is in town
El Niño conditions are present when we have met all the criteria of our decision tree.
The monthly Niño-3.4 index, which tracks the temperature of the surface of the tropical Pacific ocean, was 0.5 °Celsius (0.9 ˚Fahrenheit) above the long-term average (long-term = 1991–2020), according to the OISSTv2.1 monthly dataset. 0.5 °C is the threshold for El Niño, so… check!
The warm-up following our recent La Niña has been pretty remarkable. We even clocked in a 0.8°C value over the past week in the same dataset, so temperature anomalies are continuing to increase.
Continued here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
June 11, 2023 at 07:55AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
