Weather excitement is everywhere but the Inland Northwest
It has been hard to write about local weather this season. With the lack of local storms, snow, drought, fires, floods and dangerous wind-chills, Mother Nature hasn’t given me a whole lot to work with.
It’s almost like we’re in a protective bubble, however, as much of the rest of the country has been dealing with destructive and dangerous weather over the past couple of months. There have been mud slides and flooding in Southern California, while record snowfalls in Arizona stranded Flagstaff National Weather Service employees at their office for hours before they could dig their way out. Parts of New England have been measuring snowfall in feet, while Florida deals with both flooding and red flag warnings – all in the same week! Just this past week, the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport set a record 24-hour snowfall with just over 14 inches; and both Oklahoma and Kansas have been hit with a parade of snowstorms and ice storms, which have closed schools, caused widespread power outages; and resulted in numerous traffic-related fatalities due to treacherous road conditions.
Of course no one storm could be blamed solely on El Niño, but it is likely that El Niño has influenced the pattern of storms, and dictated which parts of the country saw more action and which parts got to sit back as spectators.
The El Niño episodes are merely periods of exceptionally warm sea-surface temperatures across the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. As the sea and the air interact, changes in ocean temperatures affect air currents, which have a direct impact on the location and formation of large-scale storm systems across the globe.
Interesting to note is just how this sea-surface temperature data is acquired. One method is the use of an array of moored buoys maintained across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, once deployed, it is difficult to guarantee that all sensors are always working reliably and properly calibrated. Most recently, more reliable and widespread sea surface temperature information has been gathered by satellites. In the same way infrared satellites can give us pictures of the clouds in the sky by measuring the heat radiated by the clouds, satellites can measure the heat radiated by the surface of the ocean water. This method has its own drawbacks: It cannot make these measurements through a cloud layer. It also measures a slightly different slice of the ocean surface than the in situ methods (such as with the buoys), and for that reason the data cannot be directly compared to that taken by the buoys.
Overall, the sea-surface temperature data acquired can give us a pretty good picture of what is going on across a large expanse of ocean. The latest data as of early February showed continued El Niño conditions, which are expected to persist, though weakening, through spring. A return to what’s called ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation) neutral conditions is forecast into summer.