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NOAA advisory: Persistent El Niño may impact U.S. winter weather
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released an advisory yesterday that there is a 90 percent chance or higher that an El Niño will persist throughout the fall of 2015. They are also 85 percent confident it will continue throughout the 2015-2016 winter, influencing the U.S. weather. El Niños form when a “three-month average warming of at least 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9°F) in a specific area of the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean” occurs. Using satellite data, the El Niño event looks like a long, jagged ribbon of warm water spreading across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean (see Figure 1).
Side effects of a long-running El Niño event are “warmer and drier winters in the Northwest, northern Midwest, and upper Northeast United States” and “significantly wetter winters” for drought-stricken central and southern California. Other climate events associated with El Niño years are above-normal tropical cyclones forming east of the dateline, less-then-robust tropical Pacific fishing, and flooding along the coasts of northern Peru and Ecuador.
Source: http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/noaa-advisory-persistent-el-nino-may-impact-u-s-winter-weather.html
