Weather_West discussion of El Niño

It seems almost sacrilegious to discuss an El Niño when we are still digging out from the winter from hell, but I want to point out Dr. Daniel Swain’s work and blog as well as weekly virtual office hours on you tube. Dr Swain is a professor at UCLA. I have been following him since he was a PhD candidate. He is not an alarmist. He is measured and careful in his predictions and discussions and can explain complex climatology and meteorology in terms a lay person can understand. I always feel as if I were auditing a college class when I watch him. His usual virtual office hour is Monday at 9 am. If it is a very dynamic week for weather, he will add a second day later in the week. He will take questions that you type into the comment box. You can follow him on twitter at @Weather_West. On you tube, just search for Daniel Swain.

Today’s blog post addressed the upcoming El Niño.

Notice that hot spot off the coast of Peru? He has been discussing this for a couple weeks. Today he wrote this:

“El Niño is now rapidly developing in the tropical Pacific Ocean, with remarkable and even record-breaking ocean surface temperature anomalies now emerging near the coast of South America (Peru). Additionally, the *entire* subsurface of the tropical Pacific from essentially the International Dateline eastward to South American is now much warmer than average–suggesting that there is a whole lot of anomalously warm water getting ready to surface during the next round of westerly wind burst activity (which, right on cue, is expected to ramp up during May). There is much chatter in the oceanographic and climatological communities at the moment regarding the amount of heat that has likely been sequestered in the subsurface ocean by a rare consecutive “Triple Dip” (three year-long) La Niña event against the backdrop of a warming climate–which mostly relates to the elevated possibility of a strong (or very strong) El Niño event this year. In other words: it’s not just that there’s a high likelihood of El Niño conditions of some magnitude this year (which there is), but there’s also a moderate but growing likelihood of a remarkably strong event later in 2023.” (https://weatherwest.com/archives/26039)