Periodically, these surface winds weaken, which allow that piled-up warm water out in the western Equatorial Pacific to flow back to the east as the ocean tries to even itself out. Putting all the pieces together into one yields a graphic like the one above, showing weekly SST anomalies over the Equatorial Pacific. Let’s now view SST anomalies by each region described above. Offline Use: after updating the data, use the app offline to view the forecast without internet. To construct the wheels, you can search over the internet for pick 4 wheels and you can get started in no time as you already have the powerful method of plugging in the right numbers into the wheel. A primary method of determining the ENSO state is by viewing the Walker Circulation, a pattern over the Equatorial Pacific. 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. Fire-spread was measured on 121 grass fires in a 2500 ha experimental site in the Northern Territory, Australia.

The Caribbean desert island Bonaire has a 24/7 site access where you can upgrade your diving skills and venture into night diving to have an even better experience. You can probably guess what happens then – a lot of convection right over Tahiti, where the surface winds collide and create surface convergence. 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. Thus, the air travels east-to-west across the ocean and is transported to the top of the troposphere by way of convection. So, the air from the convection over Tahiti spreads out both to the east and the west. Remember how I said that air high up in the troposphere, transported there from the surface by convection, had to spread out because it could no longer rise and had no room to immediately sink?

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. From time to time, these ‘waves’ form in the far western Equatorial Pacific as surface winds, which usually blow from east to west over these waters, literally pile up water in the western Equatorial Pacific. The concern over the stability of the El Nino is not assuaged when looking at water temperature anomalies below the surface, from the top of the water all the way down to 450 meters below. 2 region (bottom panel), sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) have turned decidedly below-normal within the last month or so. At best, an argument could be made that below-normal sea surface temperature anomalies south of Japan favor a stormier-than-normal winter ahead for East Asia, and thereby favor a stormier-than-normal winter in the United States as well. Indeed, the latest value sets a fresh 10-month low for sea surface temperature anomalies in that region, indicating that at the very least the ongoing El Nino has very much come off the boil. Just as the Dark Ages yielded the Renaissance (indeed, the Renaissance could not have occurred without the Dark Ages), so too might terrible disaster lead to a time of great change, prosperity, art, science, wisdom, imagination, and spiritual renewal.

Her last prediction, a major blackout would occur and New York would become dark in August, has been fulfilled. Many have spent the last four months trying to figure out exactly how good both of these sides are. 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. This is not a good sign for the sustainability of the ongoing El Nino, and stands as a caution flag for the other three regions that the El Nino is on a rather-shaky foundation. This is a troubling development for the state of the El Nino. As I just mentioned, the atmosphere is also a channel by which the ENSO phenomenon shows what state it is in. The chart above shows the anomalous depth of the 20 degree Celsius line along the Equatorial Pacific between 2 degrees N and 2 degrees S latitude.

Looking at the anomaly panel shows why the El Nino seems to have been dissipating. It spreads out in all directions, not just to the east like the La Nina panel might lead you to believe. Now we’ve got surface winds in the eastern Pacific going to the west, and surface winds in the western Pacific going to the east. 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. To be sure, this is not a literal wave like a tsunami, but a slow-moving, expansive wave in its own right. Granted, this accumulation of water is not on a significant scale, but it is detectable on a scale of centimeters. That’s a pretty big change – what happened? Perhaps the largest change is in an El Nino Walker Circulation.