Super El Niño Next Winter?
Recently a weather outlook has been making the rounds. The Washington Post meteorologists caught wind of a professor positing about the potential for a super El Niño this coming winter, possibly the strongest in 140 years. They’ve written stories about it in March and April. For the record, the meteorologists at the Capital Weather Gang as well as the professor they reference are top notch, and I’m not writing this blog to disagree with them. I just wanted to add a few additional facts. El Niño, as most of you probably know, is a warming of the ocean in the Pacific along the equator. I won’t bore you with how this affects our weather in the Northwest. But 9 times out of 10, El Niño brings mild winters to our area. So how is El Niño measured? A rectangular area in the Pacific is chosen and named Nino 3.4, which is the light blue area on the map below (image from the ECMWF webpage). Computer climate models predict ocean temperatures. Those temperatures...