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Introduction
Many web resources are available for understanding El Niño and La
Niña. Here I give a brief introduction with some suggestions for
navigation through the online sites.
What is El Niño?
El Niño is a somewhat unusual behavior
(Figure 1) of the
ocean circulation in the tropical Pacific Ocean that leads to changes in
weather patterns in that region and, through this ocean-atmosphere
linkage, affects weather worldwide
(Figure 2).
For an overview on El Niño, go to the
El Niño homepage of the
Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
What is La Niña?
A closely related phenomenon in this same region is La Niña. The
PMEL site also has a good description of La Nina
.
Visualization
Animated visualizations
of El Niño provide a 3-dimensional perspective of the changes in
temperature of the ocean surface and subsurface over the lifetime of the El
Niño and La Niña events.
Global Impacts of El Nino
An overview of global
impacts of El Nino
show that many extreme weather events worldwide can be traced to El
Nino conditions.
Predictions of future El Ninos
Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate
Prediction (IRI) provides additional information on
El Niño and provides a summary
listing of current El Nino forecasts
Current measurements of El Niño
For the latest measurements showing the presence or absence of an El
Niño go to
PMEL's
current information page.
Summary
There is a wealth of online materials relating to El Nino, but if you
start with just the pages indicated above, you will gain a good overview
of the topic. From these pages you will be able to follow your curiosity
in a number of directions.
Be sure to watch the PMEL (TAO) animation that shows the deployment of the measurement network and data retrieval
