Climatology
NASA studying 2015 El Nino event as never before
Throughout this winter, NASA will share the
latest scientific insights and imagery updates
related to El Niño.
For instance, scientists are learning how El
Niño affects the year-to-year variability for fire
seasons in the western United States, Amazon
and Indonesia. El Niño may also affect the yearly
variability of the ground-level pollutant ozone
that severely affects human health. Researchers
will be keenly focused on how the current El
Niño will affect the drought in California.
This visualization shows side by side comparisons of Pacific Ocean sea surface height anomalies
of what is presently happening in 2015 with the Pacific Ocean signal during the famous 1997
El Niño. These 1997 and 2015 El Niño animations were made from data collected by the
TOPEX/Poseidon (1997) and the OSTM/Jason-2 (2015) satellites.Credit: NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory
E
very two to seven years, an unusually warm pool
of water -- sometimes two to three degrees Celsius
higher than normal develops across the eastern tropical
Pacific Ocean to create a natural short-term climate
change event. This warm condition, known as El Niño,
affects the local aquatic environment, but also spurs
extreme weather patterns around the world, from flooding
in California to droughts in Australia. This winter, the
2015-16 El Niño event will be better observed from space
than any previous El Niño.
This year’s El Niño is already strong and appears likely
to equal the event of 1997-98, the strongest El Niño
on record, accordi