We're entering a pretty strong El Niño | Hacker News Reader

We're entering a pretty strong El Niño

arstechnica.com

104 pointsLinuxBender33 comments

This is interesting but largely a rephrasing of this original source: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/us-winter-outlook-wetter-s...

If anyone is interested in these seasonal forecasts, all major meteorological institutes upload theirs to https://www.wmolc.org, with new predictions coming out every month.

You can get technical ENSO specific forecasts here:

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/l...

Which you can find from here which has a bunch of other information:

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/ens...

Which you can find from the forecast tab from the main landing page for ENSO on the NOAA PSL site:

https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/

When they say "above average" temperature, does that mean anything from +0.0001 C to +20 C? Is this derived from some underlying prediction distribution of actual temperatures, or is the prediction exclusively binary?

About 0.2 degrees C.

Your second question is reminiscent of Baldrick asking how the war started. Do you mean "above what average?" The average of the last few years.

> About 0.2 degrees C.

Is that a mean? a median? is that the mean predicted value among predicted values that lie above the average, or is that the overall mean prediction which happens to lie above average? Who's Baldrick?

> Do you mean "above what average?" The average of the last few years.

That's a good question but it's a different question. I assumed there's some well-defined baseline average in use here. My question was about what the predicted deviations from that average.

Baldrick is a character in the British comic-history TV series Blackadder. If you don't know about Blackadder, then I'm not going to tell you anything more, except that you're lucky to have them all to watch for the first time.

Global Warming will kick in in two more years.

They perform several model runs with slightly different configurations and then compare the predictions to a reference period, currently 1991-2020. When they say "above average", most model runs fell in the upper tercile of the reference period and the probability is derived from the fraction.

Thanks, is there a summary of this methodology somewhere? Some established climate forecasting textbook? A good literature review?

This is basically a rewrite of the captions for the NWS (National Weather Service) Bay Area video that was released over the weekend. These look like the slides from their presentation. If you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth here is the youtube video from the meteorologist who put the deck together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpWW4YWY1i4

The big takeaway from the video (not covered in this summary) is that most of the rain will be coming end of January/February

Warmer than average and drier than average here in Michigan - looks like I get to wait for at least one more year of battery and brushless tech improvements before buying that snowblower I've been looking for. Not sure how that stacks up against the several decades of reduction in average snowfall we've been trending, but it definitely won't bring us back to normal.

I don't mind spending less time shoveling, but it's bummer news for the ski pass I just bought...

Careful. They said warmer, and drier.

The one thing you get with warmer weather is when you do get snow, you tend to get more of it. This may be a very good time to be getting your snowblower!

El Nino is only one small puzzle-piece: El Niño is a part of the broader El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern, which includes the oceanic component (El Niño/La Niña) and the atmospheric component (Southern Oscillation). The interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere is crucial for the initiation and maintenance of El Niño events.

I wonder if the acronym was inspired by Ensō the japanese caligraphy of a zen circle.

That's a fun coincidence, but I'd be surprised...It's a little odd the "E" is in there at all, we wouldn't normally use the "T" from "The" in an acronym.

I suppose El Niño is a proper noun, and without "The" it would just be "Boy".

Right, it's become a stock phrase in English. For English acronyms, we'd say them with "the" but leave it out of the acronym itself - FBI, The Federal Bureau of Investigation; NATO, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, etc.

California flooding...Did Farmer's insurance exit the flood insurance business in CA just in time? We will see.

Looks like more landslides for California.

No one is looking at the bright side: Chicago is likely to have a warm winter.

I was just thinking the same thing but to be honest, I kinda miss the amounts of snow we used to get back in the day. That might be my Midwestern Stockholm syndrome flaring up.

It won't be very bright. Warm winters = lots of cloud cover. It's those really frigid days when you need sunglasses to go outside.

The real question, however, is whether El Niño reduces the odds of a February/March polar vortex in Chicago. I think that it does - a little. The overall odds are still probably > 35%

Seasonal forecasts have zero skill. Even with ENSO being our strongest seasonal signal the areas labeled as above average can easily end up below average and vice versa

Warming trend or not, we got our first solid snow this morning. Closer to noon now and still well below freezing. Winter came a couple weeks earlier than expected.

Thanks for the American weather report I suppose?

I do understand but I don’t think La Nina makes any sense. El Nino, the event occurs around christmas. El Nino is the child, the one born on Christmas. Who is La Nina? What is opposite of the child, Pontius Pilot, Santa Maria, Buddha? Maybe the second coming will be Christina and it will all fall into place.

Warm is opposite of Cold and Boy used to be seen as opposite of Girl.

It would probably not be named as such in current times as gender has some baggage these days.

> It would probably not be named as such in current times as gender has some baggage these days

Language has always been fluid: from your example of language from simpler times: 'girl' comes from Middle English gerle/girle/gyrle which meant a young person of any gender

The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño[1] and El Viejo, meaning "the old man."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ni%C3%B1a

From the excellent The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C Mann:

Andean peoples had long known that every few years the coastal climate shifted dramatically, with warm downpours inundating the cold, dry coast. Because the rains usually began around Christmas, Peruvians referred to them as El Niño, a Spanish nickname for the Christ Child. In 1891 three Peruvians—an engineer, a geographer, and a naturalist—separately figured out how El Niños worked. During these times, the Humboldt Current abruptly weakens, allowing warm equatorial water to surge close to the coast; the warm water heats up the normally cold coastal air, which allows it to hold more moisture than usual, which, in turn, causes heavy rainfall on the desert shore. . . . a climatic system that extended across much of the Pacific and influenced the weather as far north as Canada. But the worst effects occurred in coastal Peru, where floods washed away railroads, wiped out farms, and destroyed power stations, blacking out cities. Thousands of “dead guano birds” were incidental damage. El Niño, Murphy said, “brings sickness and death to the population of the Humboldt Current.”

https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-...

The whole cringe around the name of the thing is enough to know it’s probably not real in any practical sense

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