Come back to weather command. I made me freeze.
I'm Stephen Morgan. Bob Van Dilla.
If you had to choose a dominating
ocean pattern, what are you more in favor of?
La Nina. La Nina for
sand,
I guess. El Nino for hurricanes?
He said yes. Yeah, you want him cheered across.
You don't want major hurricanes coming,
but then you get California rain in El Nino years.
Yeah, pick your poison. I guess.
Neutral.
Neutral, right. But that's the point,
really. Weather is globally connected.
You get a huge piece of breaking down atmospheric relations
right there in the middle of climate cycles.
And so places are things like El Nino really drive
how the pattern works out.
El Nino, you remember, is defined by the warmer water.
The temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean and El Nino
then can
affect and impact the atmosphere,
and it has for months.
When you look at California's floods,
the drenching rain that came over the Gulf Coast,
the unseasonably warm northern tier,
all of those can be tied back to the El
Nino pattern or the warm ocean.
El Nino is at least partially responsible for the weather
where you are.
I mean, if you think about how it's connected and
what it's impacted are,
you can really draw the line back.
But this is going to come to an end folks.
The cascading effects are going to roll right into our
spring weather and we will have some transition.
Noah's new outlook released this morning predicts the end of
El Nino by June.
Now you look at this and that's a little bit
earlier than we're inspecting,
anticipating. We thought maybe we'd have until late in the
summer or maybe even early fall.
We were hoping maybe that was our wish casting for
it.
But now we've got a lot of signs and a
lot of evidence that this is going to come to
a quicker conclusion.
That's the the confidence they issue these updated discussions every
month.
A 73% chance that we would see it in,
in spring. That is El Nino becoming neutral.
Now that's up to 79%
and they, I think it's new with this discussion.
They've issued a La Nina watch for the summer.
So that watch is an indication that in six months
we could see La Nina become the dominant
teleconnection or climate force in from the Pacific.
I've been watching the sea surface temperatures just off the
coast of Peru take a bigger dip in the last
couple of weeks,
which means starting to get a little bit cooler,
which is a trend that El Nino starting to weaken
just a little bit.
But then we go to neutral,
right, for a couple months and then like Steven just
said,
probably El La Nina headed up our way.
The interesting point you make there Bob is that we're
going to go into a cooling phase with La Nina,
but yet you will hear headlines about the the global
sea surface temperatures because for the 10th month in a
row we've had record setting global sea surface temperatures.
But when we start to talk about La Nina,
we are really defining a particular part of the ocean
that shows the cooling and it starts to make a
transition that becomes what we use as a trending tool.
That being said, I'll put the
label that you what's the label that they put on
to warn people.
Disclaimer, disclaimer that we need for this is that we
had El Nino last year
and last year with El Nino we still had a
monster
performance in hurricane season. So La Nina is typically more
of a hurricane driver,
right? But the ocean temperatures dominated and overruled what El
Nino trend
and I think and Bob as you had mentioned with
La Nina,
if we look to what's going to occur during hurricane
season that's lower shear in the Atlantic basin.
So you get that and and it really it doesn't
help or hurt these the sea surface temperatures.
I guess when you have some
at least weaker winds at the surface,
you might be able to to get that surface heating
over the Atlantic basin.
But, but as far as it can is concerned,
when we look at La Nina,
it's because the shear is lower and not so much
the sea surface temperatures.
You add both and then that's when confidence can be
high.
For an active season, there's no question you want high
pressure sitting directly overhead of your surface low,
right. So it's got somewhere to build up.
When you have that El Nino,
you've got the winds that are just jetting out there,
mid and upper levels of the atmosphere.
These thunderstorms try to form around the Hurricane Center.
They get shot right off because of the wind that's
out there.
That's El Nino. You introduce a La Nina like we
had and like Steven just talked about,
we are going to see high pressure which means a
better environment for hurricane formation.
Last year there was some,
there was some doubt with El Nino because of the
warm ocean water.
We thought, which one is going to be more,
more prolific? Which one's going to drive?
This year we have a lot of confidence with La
Nina plus the ocean temperature,
depth of warmth is so deep right now that the
change of the likelihood of the cooling to occur in
especially in the Atlantic,
but it's true for the Pacific as well would be
very difficult to occur.
I do I want to bring up a point because
I came across the paper it was from 2016.
So it's it's it's older,
but it it talked about these teleconnections and how we
transition from an El Nino to a La Nina a
lot of times that occurs in in the spring.
And and one note that that was made when it
when we talk about El Nino perhaps persisting into April,
May and June, right, you'd said Amy that it's probably
not really going to become La Nina till this till
the summer.
There is an increased risk for severe weather across a
good chunk of the country.
But notably in the month of February in Florida which
I think is so strange and odd but we look
back
it is and and talking to Chris Scragg he's one
of our meteorologist behind the scenes
in Florida. Back in 1998 we were coming out of
a strong a super El Nino.
Florida had their deadliest tornado outbreak that month.
February 22nd, 98. Yeah. February 22nd.
That's a very prolific storm that I think,
I believe it's still the deadliest storm,
42 lives. But the crazy part is remember what's happened
for us so far this year in January and February.
That's why I said how weird because January we had
the historic
EF3EF3 and we. Yes. And so that's
that's an interesting connection. And and this outbreak,
this notable one that was on the
22nd, 23rd back in 1998,
it was in Central Florida and there were three at
the time F threes and and it occurred overnight and
and it was just it was one storm and it's
not that you can make one connection but researchers looked
at that event and also other events and highlight if
if we have El Nino kind of lag into April,
May and June, perhaps we see that Gulf Coast severe
weather threat.
When the recipe is right and you've seen a little
bit of evidence of that that recipe could continue to
have the ingredients and you'd have the patterns that you
need for for that to happen.
So being said, if it falls far quicker the tornado
bell goes up to the Ohio Valley.
So we'll see what happens,
where it goes, how quickly El Nino falls apart.