Source: Corey Davis, NC CLIMATE OFFICE, 11/13/18


Today, we kick off our seventh annual winter outlook series by looking at the state of the oceans and atmosphere entering the winter, along with how these features could affect our weather in the coming months.

El Niño
After last winter's La Niña event that saw cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, the ENSO phase has since reversed. Over the summer and fall, the waters have warmed across the Pacific, putting us on the verge of weak El Niño conditions entering the winter.

It's been a decidedly late-emerging El Niño this year, and we've only recently begun to see the typical atmospheric impacts such as a slackening of the easterly trade winds and negative outgoing longwave radiation anomalies, which is a sign that cloud cover and thunderstorm activity is building across that region and allowing less radiation to escape back to space.

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