Leave a dish with fresh water in it out in your garden for the birds, and check it on really cold mornings to make sure it hasn’t turned to ice. It is not a good idea to encourage top-growth by applying a nitrogen fertilizer at this time – doing so will make the grass more susceptible to damage should another cold spell move in. This will always compromise the integrity of the scientists making predictions, but prediction in research will always drive the scientific method. A primary method of determining the ENSO state is by viewing the Walker Circulation, a pattern over the Equatorial Pacific. But there’s an issue here – we haven’t gone over how the positive AMO is identified, we have only established that it’s positive. This comes after a period from October 2018 through mid-March of this year, where anomalies were firmly in positive territory. The picture given by the Nino 3 region isn’t any more reassuring, with SSTAs falling into weakly-positive territory as of the most recent data reading.

On the right, sea level anomalies are shown for the most recent data available. To confirm the presence of a downwelling EKW, we would want to see positive sea level anomalies juxtaposed over the longitudes where the 20 degrees C depth is further below the surface than normal. Again, the ocean tries to get itself into balance, and a body of cooler than normal waters now flows from west to east along the Equatorial Pacific. Thus, the air travels east-to-west across the ocean and is transported to the top of the troposphere by way of convection. On the flip side, however, the ocean is now out of balance in another respect: suddenly in the central and eastern Pacific, there’s a body of warm water. It leads to that body of warmer than normal waters in the central and eastern Equatorial Pacific now, since it was transported from out west. If that sounds like an El Nino, you’re right: downwelling Equatorial Kelvin Waves are identified as both triggers and enhancements to El Nino events, since they transport a body of warmer than normal waters into the ENSO monitoring regions.

Beginning in late November, as the red line shows, a more-formidable upwelling Kelvin Wave traversed the Equatorial Pacific, briefly wiping out the positive water temperature anomalies that the previous two downwelling waves had delivered. 2. This is a small slice of the Pacific located between the Equator and the 10º South latitude line, extending from the far western tip of Peru to the 90º West longitude line. For Nino 4, however, the space is spread by longitude from 150º West to about 160º East, crossing the dateline in the process. · • Nino 3. This is a larger slice of the Equatorial Pacific which spans from 5º North to 5º South latitude lines, and from 90º West to 150º West longitude lines. · • Nino 3.4. This is the critical area to watch, and is typically viewed as the primary space with which to assess the state of the ENSO phenomenon. The ENSO phenomenon, in a nutshell, is a primary driver of seasonal (and, through other shorter-term oscillations, weekly or even daily) weather patterns by way of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the waters across the Equatorial Pacific. Seasonal forecasting is almost always based off of the state of the El Nino – Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short.

As you already know, I like to present to you a short list of Marketing Tactics, Tech Tools, Books and Podcasts. Since it affects weather patterns worldwide, it should not be a surprise that scientists have found the atmosphere to act in particular ways when an El Nino is present, and in particular ways when a La Nina is present. This air descending over the eastern Equatorial Pacific (called subsidence) makes for sunny skies and calm weather – after all, convection (rising air) can’t physically occur in an area of subsidence (sinking air). This motion of air being pushed together is called convergence, and when it occurs at the surface the air has nowhere to go but up, thus creating convection. When these sea surface temperatures are above normal by a magnitude of at least 0.5 degrees Celsius, we call it an ‘El Nino’ event. Thus, the bottomline for 2019 on Prediction 1, expect creative – yet reasonable underwriting standards to become apart of normal mortgage underwriting procedures.

I made mention of the literal ‘piling up’ of warm waters in the western Equatorial Pacific that signified the initial stages of a downwelling Kelvin Wave, and the Climate Prediction Center allows us to see this in action. This ‘wave’ of warmer-than-normal waters making its way eastward is an Equatorial Kelvin Wave, and in particular the movement of warm waters eastward is a downwelling EKW. Warm colors on the chart indicate that the 20 degree Celsius level is deeper down in the waters than normal, usually because the waters are warming (i.e. in an El Nino and/or downwelling EKW). Similarly, cooler colors indicate that the 20 degree C mark is closer to the surface than normal, brought about by a cooling of the subsurface (and surface) water temperatures (i.e. by way of La Nina and/or upwelling EKW). It’s convenient, then, that the air traveling west-to-east high up in the atmosphere starts to slow down when it reaches the eastern Equatorial Pacific, and actually begins to descend back to the surface. A prediction of which one of two candidates will win an election is likewise worthless because the chances of accidental success are high. In general, when a La Nina is present, the Walker Circulation will see surface winds moving east-to-west across the entire extent of the Equatorial Pacific, pushing the air up on itself roughly over Darwin, Australia.