Showing posts with label el nino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label el nino. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
Hurricane Patricia, More Pacific Storms, and 4 Other Signs of El Niño
By Warren Cornwall
National Geographic
Even before Hurricane Patricia lashed into Mexico this weekend, the central Pacific Ocean had already been flogged by a record number of tropical storms. Give some credit to El Niño.
As this year’s strong El Niño raises ocean temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, it appears to be following a classic pattern of acting both as a match that helps ignite tropical storms and as gasoline that makes them grow stronger.
El Niño is one phase in a years-long back-and-forth in Pacific Ocean temperatures and winds near the equator. Low-altitude trade winds that typically blow to the west weaken or reverse course during an El Niño.
And warm water that would usually shift toward Asia instead builds up in the eastern and central Pacific. When a tropical thunderstorm hits, the unusually warm water can set off a cascading series of events that generates and sustains the swirling vortex of a full-blown hurricane.
Changes in Pacific wind patterns tied to El Niño—particularly the weakening of winds blowing from the west high in the atmosphere—also set the stage for bigger storms by reducing wind shear, says Phil Klotzbach, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist who studies tropical storms. Wind shear occurs when air currents at a lower altitude blow in a different direction from winds higher in the atmosphere, which can destabilize and weaken a hurricane.
Read the rest here.
National Geographic
Even before Hurricane Patricia lashed into Mexico this weekend, the central Pacific Ocean had already been flogged by a record number of tropical storms. Give some credit to El Niño.
As this year’s strong El Niño raises ocean temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, it appears to be following a classic pattern of acting both as a match that helps ignite tropical storms and as gasoline that makes them grow stronger.
El Niño is one phase in a years-long back-and-forth in Pacific Ocean temperatures and winds near the equator. Low-altitude trade winds that typically blow to the west weaken or reverse course during an El Niño.
And warm water that would usually shift toward Asia instead builds up in the eastern and central Pacific. When a tropical thunderstorm hits, the unusually warm water can set off a cascading series of events that generates and sustains the swirling vortex of a full-blown hurricane.
Changes in Pacific wind patterns tied to El Niño—particularly the weakening of winds blowing from the west high in the atmosphere—also set the stage for bigger storms by reducing wind shear, says Phil Klotzbach, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist who studies tropical storms. Wind shear occurs when air currents at a lower altitude blow in a different direction from winds higher in the atmosphere, which can destabilize and weaken a hurricane.
Read the rest here.
Friday, October 23, 2015
El Nino Effect: Monster Category 5 Hurricane to Hit Mexico
With maximum sustained winds near 200 mph (325 kph), Hurricane Patricia is the strongest storm ever recorded in the eastern Pacific or in the Atlantic, says Dave Roberts, a hurricane specialist at the U.S. National Hurricane Center.
“This is an extremely dangerous, potentially catastrophic hurricane,” center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen said.
Feltgen said Patricia also poses problems for Texas. Forecast models indicate that after the storm breaks up over land, remnants of its tropical moisture will likely combine with and contribute to heavy rainfall that is already soaking Texas independently of the hurricane, he said.
“It’s only going to make a bad situation worse,” he said.
From CNN:
Those on that Latin American country's west coast are no stranger to tropical storms, of course. But Patricia is special, in part because of the global, regular weather phenomenon known as El Niño.
Among other effects, El Niño has contributed to ocean waters off Mexico being 2 to 3 degrees warmer than usual.
"That warm water from El Niño probably just pushed this slightly over the edge to be the strongest storm on record," CNN's [Chad] Myers said.
-RW
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