Community Blogs

Plants need light to grow. They also require nutrients. For tiny marine plants, called phytoplankton, those nutrients are often brought up from the ocean’s cold, deep waters to the surface by mixing. But this normal circulation gets disrupted during El Niño years, when huge masses of warm water—equivalent to about half of the volume of the Mediterranean Sea—slosh east across the Pacific Ocean towards South America. The change can have fatal consequences for phytoplankton in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Here is the full story with associated images and video!

Check out the latest and greatest images, from NASA, associated with the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event. These images that you will see show sea surface height anomalies with the seasonal cycle (the effects of summer, fall, winter, and spring) removed. The differences between what we see and what is normal for different times and regions are called anomalies, or residuals. When oceanographers and climatologists view these "anomalies" they can identify unusual patterns and can tell us how heat is being stored in the ocean to influence future planetary climate events. Each ...

US La Nina forecast: Snowy winter on tap for East; Dry weather to alleviate flood woes in South Central! Check this out!

10. El Niño Student Campaign Refresher and Update -  Wednesday, September 21st, 2016 8:00 pm EDT (12:00 am September 22nd UTC) In this hour-long webinar, participants will get a refresher on this campaign, and will hear from several GLOBE teachers who have been involved with their classes from the start of the campaign. We will discuss the need for ongoing data collection and share the current state of the ENSO cycle.  We will have a NASA scientist discuss the current state of the ENSO cycle and what it might mean for weather conditions for the remainder of this campaign. ...