this winter will tell us something
Sep. 7th, 2015 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljgeoffUnless you live under a rock, you know that there's an unusually strong El Niño
What this El Niño will tell us is how much trouble we're going to be in the near future due to loss of arctic ice. If we have a normal El Niño, it will erode the ridiculously resilient ridge, California will get its rain and the rest of the US will have a mild winter. If we have a 1997-like El Niño, weather will be weird all over, but a known weird. We'll all just buckle down and a lot of scientists will breathe a sigh of relief.
But. If the low level of arctic ice so screws will the jet stream that the El Niño effects are distorted, well, there will be a flurry of new papers, the denialists will continue to deny, and the people of the world will wring their hands. In any case, as atmospheric and environmental research scientist Judah Cohen wrote, “I really do think that this could be a very interesting winter and could be very informative on the interplay of tropical vs. Arctic forcing."
What this El Niño will tell us is how much trouble we're going to be in the near future due to loss of arctic ice. If we have a normal El Niño, it will erode the ridiculously resilient ridge, California will get its rain and the rest of the US will have a mild winter. If we have a 1997-like El Niño, weather will be weird all over, but a known weird. We'll all just buckle down and a lot of scientists will breathe a sigh of relief.
But. If the low level of arctic ice so screws will the jet stream that the El Niño effects are distorted, well, there will be a flurry of new papers, the denialists will continue to deny, and the people of the world will wring their hands. In any case, as atmospheric and environmental research scientist Judah Cohen wrote, “I really do think that this could be a very interesting winter and could be very informative on the interplay of tropical vs. Arctic forcing."