Blogs

As of August, NOAA and IRI forecasters are predicting this El Niño will peak in the late fall/early winter with 3-month-average sea surface temperatures in the Niño3.4 region near or exceeding 2.0°C (3.6°F) above normal. If this forecast comes true, it will place the 2015 event among the strongest El Niños in the (admittedly short) 1950-2015 historical record. What would this mean for expected impacts in the United States? But first, this status update! Sea surface temperature anomalies (departures from the long-term average) increased in much of the equatorial Pacific during July. The July average in the Niño3.4 region was +1.2°C above normal according to the ERSST monitoring datasets…   Read article

The State of the Climate is a rather huge report―in the neighborhood of 270 pages―that updates the status of major climate variables and recaps regional climate conditions around the world every year. The report just celebrated its silver anniversary: 25 years of annual publications. The first report was written by 29 scientists from 3 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union. Impressively, six of those scientists just celebrated their 25th anniversary of working on this report. This year, more than 400 authors and editors from 58 countries joined those original six to help bring together the State of the Climate in 2014. We release each year’s rep…   Read article

El Niño continued to build during June, despite some shorter-term fluctuations in the climate system (here’s looking at you, MJO). CPC/IRI forecasters are still very confident that this event will persist through the winter, and they continue to favor a strong event, with the three-month average sea surface temperature in the Niño3.4 region expected to peak at more than 1.5°C above normal. Nearly all the computer models are in agreement, and the atmosphere and ocean continued to behave in a very El Niño-like manner. So what is there to talk about this month? Well, a few interesting things happened over the past few weeks. First, a quick rundown of where we find ourselves in the beginni…   Read article

“El Niño is Strong!” “No, it’s Moderate!” “But the [insert your favorite ENSO indicator here] is the largest it’s been since the El Niño of 1997-98!” We are now nearing 1.5 degrees Celsius in the Niño-3.4 index for a 7-day or weekly average. Among the post-college age crowd who can remember it (yes, this officially means you’re old), the level of warmth in sea surface temperatures this time of year harkens back to 1997-98 El Niño, which ended up becoming a record strength event.   Are these weekly numbers impressive? Yes. But when a weekly value hits 1.5°C is El Niño instantly considered strong? I’d argue no. While a short-term (daily or weekly) number might be striking, i…   Read article

In the monitoring branch, our temperature analyses garner a lot of attention. We are asked big questions such as: What was the warmest year on record? How fast are global temperatures changing? These are important questions that we work to answer, but our regional-scale data and services also have immense benefits. Someone smarter than me once said, “No one ever died under a global temperature time series.” This is a great way to say that we can report on global average temperatures all we want, but it is the local impacts of change and variability that matter for the average person. At the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), we work tirelessly to translate our treasure…   Read article