El Niño: What it is, how it affects our weather

Welcome back. I'm meteorologist Cody Matz. You're watching Fox 9 all day. We're talking to Kenny Blumenfeld, the senior climatologist in Minnesota DNR, all about the Super El Nino, what El Nino is, what climatology is, how it's different from weather and meteorology. It's not, but it is. Let's continue the conversation. So we've kind of learned about El Nino, what it is, the sea surface temperatures, the water temperatures of the ocean are real warm right now. That's essentially El Nino, especially across the Eastern Pacific Ocean, has long-ranging impacts. So my follow-up question is, we have this El Nino thing and La Nina, which is the opposite. It's predictable for the most part. Why is it there? That's also a great question. So you ever watch the ocean? Even at Lake Superior, you can do this. You go to a big enough body of water and you can watch the waves come in and they come in on kind of a dependable rhythm. And you'll notice, especially at the ocean, you'll see big waves, but they're not all the same size, right? There's this kind of rhythmic pattern that brings the waves to you. And a lot of times the energy kind of builds up with one wave and it dissipates. And then the next few waves aren't that big and it takes a while to restore. I mean, on a much grander scale, this is what's happening across the oceans. And it's easy, just like we talked about how we can forget that the weather systems don't just enter from the left and exit to the right. I think it's also important to remember that what happens to us meteorologically isn't just a simple weather system moving over us. It's this whole coordination in the three dimensional atmosphere or all the air. And that's actually wrapped around our globe, which is also spinning and has different amounts of heat as you go from land to ocean. It's hard to picture because you can't physically see it. I mean, unless there's a cloud there. Right. And the ocean is at least that complex too. So we all see waves on the ocean and we see the waves hitting the shore and you see waves and seas on the top of the, on the very surface of the ocean. And it's hard to remember that there's moving water miles beneath the surface. When you get into the deep ocean, there are these currents, they're larger than rivers that are transporting water around the ocean from low latitudes to high latitudes and across, you know, all the way across that huge expanse of water. And they're not just moving at one level. They're going from the bottom up to the top. They're tracking from the top and then sinking down. They're making these, just imagine the, you know, the largest pretzels you can imagine all kind of curling and twisted and not nearly as delicious, very salty. And, yeah. And I think that, and so one of the reasons we have some of these oscillations that you described, they're also sometimes called teleconnections, but these is because you have an irregularity that sets in as the, as the water, you know, goes through these different cycles and the air is, and I'm sorry, the earth is turning. There's interactions between the movement of the earth and the movement of the water and the movement and the way that that affects the winds and the weather and the climate above it. And that all affects global circulation patterns. So you get this. It's a lot of push and pull, right? Yeah. I mean, you almost have to imagine like a, you know, just, you have to imagine that the whole thing is in motion. So don't just try and think about it as a static image, but just picture the water at all levels in constant motion. It's almost impossible to imagine, but, and sometimes it's going to be moving faster in one area. And that's going to just like with traffic, it's going to cause bottlenecks in other areas where there's not enough capacity to deal with that water. So it's going to slow down. And so for reasons that have to do with that kind of complexity, every three to seven years on average, you get the water coming, you know, and it's really taking quite a journey. It's coming up from the tip of South America. So way down near Tierra del Fuego, it's riding up the Western coast and it's at extreme depth. It's sometimes 15, 20,000 feet deep, because there's a big trench right off the Western coast. And it eventually kind of makes its way because of the slope of the ocean floor, it makes its way to the surface. And sometimes that process of bringing that water from the depths to the surface is faster. And sometimes it's slower. And when it's in that slower phase, which seems to happen every, you know, again, three to seven years on average, you end up having more heat that then builds up near the surface and you end up with those El Nino conditions. And this year expected, or at least current predictions show that it could be some of the strongest we've actually ever seen, especially when you look at, you know, recent years, the last 40, 50, 60, 70 years. And so you talked about before the break, kind of what we often experience, or maybe it's a little more common in terms of what weather we get specifically. So I went back to NOAA and I wanted to show this graphic. So Leo, I believe you have this up. So this is average temperatures for the cool season. So this is October to March. So this includes part of fall, part of spring, but kind of our cool months. And you can kind of see it as a whole nationwide, these individual years. It's a little hard to see exactly what years, but these, all of these are considered strong El Nino years. So you go back, bottom right-hand corner of your screen is a composite. So it's all of them pushed together, but then you have 2015, 2016 was extremely warm. It's the kind of the weird red color and the maroon color very much stands out on that graphic. And then a lot of the other years, you did have some cool spots. You had some warm spots, but if you look in Minnesota, it's, it can kind of do a little bit of everything. I mean, we tend to be a little warmer, but it doesn't necessarily the case. That's correct, right? That is correct. And, and some of that various variation is because of, you know, all the other things going on globally that we were talking about before different ocean currents, different weather patterns, also different phases that have differing levels of difficulty in terms of predictability, like Arctic oscillation, which is one that happens high above the North pole and, and has its kind of positive negative phases, but things that happen in the Atlantic ocean. So that's one of the sources for all those variations. And then the big one though, is the intensity of the El Nino. I don't know if it's possible to bring those maps back up. We can put that graphic back up, Leo, for me. We'll get it in a second. We also have a precipitation one we're going to get to. So we're about 90 seconds away. So we'll show this one real quick. Yeah. So the dark red one that you talked about from 2015-16, that was an extremely strong kind of super El Nino event. And we do see that the, from moderate up to strong and very strong El Ninos or super El Ninos, those tend to have a more dependable relationship with warm winters here in Minnesota. The weaker ones is where you see some of those colder conditions sneaking in. Okay. That makes sense. Hey, Leo, move on to the next graphic. So we want to talk about precipitation because the most questions I get is, okay, we're going to have a snowy winter. And again, this shows the same year. So that 2015-2016 timeframe kind of bottom right-hand corner, sort of, but it shows we were actually a little wetter than average, which means we probably saw rain in some cases versus snow. I remember that season well. We got a lot of rain as opposed to snow. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's kind of common in these stronger El Nino winters. We'll often get precipitation that's not that far off of normal, but less snow frequently. And this is, we got to be careful because we've had some doozy snowstorms during big El Nino winters. The 1991-92 winter was a super El Nino. And we all know what happened that year. I mean, we couldn't get through this without talking about the Halloween blizzard. I know. It's almost like the Halloween blizzard lobby. They just kick in and all of a sudden we're talking about it. But that, in fact, and it's really not just that storm. I mean, everyone has heard and are probably sick of hearing about the Halloween blizzard, but also that November, even after the blizzard, it just continued to be extremely snowy. And we end up, that's in the Twin Cities area and in several other stations in Minnesota, that November of 1991 is the snowiest month of any month on record. And it was a super El Nino. And that was a super El Nino. But then the rest of the winter was pretty dull. It ended up being mild with a lot of fog and a lot of days above near or above freezing, which started eating into the snowpack. I'm going to refer to this every time someone asks why we can't get the forecasting right. Predicting the future is hard, even when you kind of know some stuff. Kenny, thank you very much. We're out of time. We appreciate it. This is Kenny Blumenfeld, the senior climatologist with the Minnesota DNR. I'd love to have more of these conversations as we get through the fall and into the winter season. Thank you very much. Good to talk to you. Yeah, happy to talk to you. Thanks. Is coming right back here in a couple.