The current La Niña event fits into a larger climate pattern that has been going on for nearly two decades.
Though air and sea temperatures worldwide have been quite warm in 2020, the eastern and central Pacific Ocean recently grew milder with the return of La Niña, the cooler sister to El Niño. La Niña brings cool water up from the depths of the eastern tropical Pacific, a pattern that energizes easterly trade winds and pushes warm surface waters back toward Asia and Australia. With this see-sawing of the heat and moisture supply across the Pacific, global atmospheric circulation and jet streams shift.
During La Niña events, weather patterns typically grow warmer and drier across the southern United States and northern Mexico, noted Josh Willis, a climate scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Cooler and stormier conditions often set in across the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the U.S. Clouds and rainfall become more sporadic over the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, which can lead to dry conditions in Brazil, Argentina, and other parts of South America. In the western Pacific, rainfall can increase dramatically over Indonesia and Australia. La Niña also can coincide with active Atlantic hurricane seasons, as it did this year.
Continue reading at NASA Earth Observatory
Image via NASA Earth Observatory
