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Strong El Niños have recently been observed from 1997 into 1998 and from 2015 into 2016. The increased chance for El Niño comes after La Niña conditions were present for nearly three straight ...
El Niño occurs when trade winds — the permanent east-to-west winds that blow near the Equator — weaken, allowing the Pacific Ocean’s warmer waters to push back east toward the United States ...
El Niño patterns generally affect winters more than summers in the U.S. According to NOAA, a typical El Niño winter would produce a warmer, dryer winter season for most states in the mid ...
The relationship between El Niño and California rainfall has been described as "fragile", as only the "persistent El Niño" leads to consistently higher rainfall in the state, while the other flavors of ENSO have mixed effects at best. [14] Historically, El Niño was not understood to affect U.S. weather patterns until Christensen et al. (1981 ...
El Niño is a natural climate event caused by the Southern Oscillation, popularly known as El Niño or also in meteorological circles as El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO, [6] through which global warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean results in the development of unusually warm waters between the coast of South America and the ...
After a year of dominance, El Niño's wrath has come to end — but it's climate-churning counterpart, La Niña, is hot on its heels and could signal a return to dryness for California.
Originally, the term El Niño applied to an annual weak warm ocean current that ran southwards along the coast of Peru and Ecuador at about Christmas time. [16] However, over time the term has evolved and now refers to the warm and negative phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
While the U.S. is experiencing an El Niño weather pattern, Kansas could be transitioning to a neutral weather pattern, Darmofal said, which could mean a more active tornado season.