After heating up the eastern Pacific Ocean for about a year, El Niño finally died out in May 2024.
After heating up the eastern Pacific Ocean for about a year, El Niño finally died out in May 2024. The natural climate phenomenon contributed to many months of record-high ocean temperatures, precipitation extremes in Africa, low ice cover on the Great Lakes, and severe drought in the Amazon and Central America. As of July 2024, the eastern Pacific was in a neutral phase, but the reprieve may be short-lived.
In tropical latitudes of the eastern Pacific, the ocean’s surface cools and warms cyclically in response to the strength of the trade winds—a phenomenon known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In turn, the changing ocean disrupts atmospheric circulation in ways that intensify rainfall in some regions and bring drought to others.
In May 2023, easterly trade winds weakened and warm water from the western Pacific moved toward the western coast of the Americas, signs that an El Niño had begun, after three consecutive years of La Niña conditions. El Niño continued to strengthen into December 2023 and then faded by mid-May 2024.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
Image: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023) processed by the European Space Agency and further processed by Josh Willis, Severin Fournier, and Kevin Marlis/NASA/JPL-Caltech.
