This sinking, compressing and drying air fosters high pressure in the eastern Pacific. I believe there is some correlation of this normal wet pattern to the summer monsoons you are hear about in India and points east into southeast Asia.Īn atmospheric flow pattern sets up where air rises in the west, condenses and rains, while remaining air diverges to the east high up in the atmosphere, which reaches the eastern Pacific, and sinks towards sea level. Warm air is buoyant and can hold more moisture than cooler air, and so it rises, produces thunderstorms, and it rains out over this region. The ocean water in the western Pacific basin is normally very warm, and this warm water releases water vapor into the air above it. Correspondingly, this results in drier weather in the eastern Pacific, and wetter weather in the western Pacific. The neutral phase between El Nino and La Nina is an atmospheric/oceanic configuration whereby higher pressures exist in the eastern equatorial Pacific near Ecuador in South America, and lower pressures exist in the western equatorial Pacific near Australia and Polynesia. The first has to do with atmospheric air pressure at the sea’s surface (that’s the “Southern Oscillation” piece), and the other has to do with the SSTs, or sea surface temperatures (that’s the “El Nino/La Nina” piece).īefore we get into what El Nino and La Nina are, it would be prudent to describe what the “normal” pattern is when it comes to sea surface temperatures, and sea level air pressures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

It’s a bit confusing, but essentially there are two main components that form the ENSO teleconnection – one is atmospheric, and the other oceanic. ENSO stands for “El Nino Southern Oscillation”.

Teleconnections are large scale dipole weather patterns (“dipole” means two extremes or ends of a spectrum). Now it appears we are heading into a La Nina event, which is a reversal of a teleconnection called “ENSO”. It is officially tied for first for the strongest El Nino on record (146 years and counting). All we heard about last year was El Nino, El Nino, El Nino.

Enso pittsfield ma