How the 'Super El Niño' could affect our weather

Welcome back. I'm meteorologist Cody Matz taking over for Rob here for a few minutes on Fox 9 all day. I wanted to talk more about El Nino. It is all over every social media site everywhere. It's the super El Nino. It sounds ridiculous, but it's a real thing. And we're going to talk to some experts, one particular expert. So I am an atmospheric scientist. I'm a meteorologist. That is short-term weather. Long-term weather is climatology. And so we're going to talk to climatologists right now via Zoom. This is Kenny Blumenfeld, the senior climatologist at Minnesota DNR. Good morning. Good to see you. Good to see you too. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So we are going to discuss all the things having to refer to El Nino. But let's start with the basics because I get a lot of questions on this, like what's the difference between weather and climate? Why are there climatologists? Why are there meteorologists? Why can't any of you get the forecast right? It's all the things. So let's dive into this. Climatology. What is that? As a climatologist, what do you do with the DNR? So our job is to really counteract or counterbalance the meteorologists because we look at what happened. So people might tell you that you're only right half the time. Because we talk about what happened, we're always right. No, really, climatology, honestly, you described it well. It's long-term analysis of weather patterns. So rather than looking at what happens tomorrow or next week, we're kind of thinking about all of the kind of combined picture of what precipitation looks like in August or what weather is typically like at a certain time of year. And that's based on you have to have more than one day. Obviously, you have to have a lot of days to make that kind of analysis. So we use years and years and years of data. And we look at things like temperature precipitation. We look at snowfall. We look at weather patterns too. What's on the weather maps? Were you under the influence of high or low pressure? Was the prevailing wind direction more from the south at a particular time, which might make us more prone to having warm and humid air in the region as opposed to having the wind coming from the north, which would make us more prone to cold air. So we look at all of that stuff. And then we compile statistics. We make our own maps. We make lots of graphs. And we try and help people understand, you know, what's a reasonable high temperature for this time of year? What's a reasonable low temperature for this time of year? Also, you know, when you have something like El Nino, what are the weather conditions typically like? So that's kind of in a nutshell what we do. And we look at things like long-term trends and try and help people make sense of all of this. Because climate is actually made of weather. So you can't have climate without weather. And so it is easy to confuse the two. But one's kind of more immediate, and that would be weather. And the other is kind of a longer term, bigger picture. That would be climate. And we appreciate you as meteorologists and here at Fox9 because we use your climatology essentially every day to kind of give us the average picture. And then moving forward, we can kind of base that on, are we going to be above average? Are we below average? Do we get snow in August? Do we get heat waves in December? It's all that stuff. So when it comes to the prediction method, so to speak, you can look at all of that stuff and kind of figure out what's abnormal and what isn't. When it refers to El Nino, there are obviously a lot of jokes. I mean, it's been on SNL for 30, 40, 50 years, a lot of jokes in there. But it is a real climate thing, and it's something that does change and impact our weather. So why don't we dive into what exactly is El Nino? What is the basis of that? Yeah, sure. And it's an absolutely legitimate question. And I think it's good for those of us who are in atmospheric science to kind of remind ourselves, El Nino is not, it's not a storm. It's not rain or snow. It's just the result of a pattern that emerges in the Pacific Ocean. And it's a name for that particular pattern. And so, you know, first thing we have to kind of familiarize ourselves with the globe, right? And the Pacific Ocean, that's the really big one. Yeah, I'm actually gonna put up a graphic. So if we can get up the first graphic, because I wanted to at least refer to this. So these are sea surface temperatures. I'm assuming you know what you're looking at. This was actually taken a couple days ago compared to average. Keep talking. Yeah, wonderful. So this is a great graphic, because everyone can see coming right off the coast of South America, there's like this kind of red and dark red and black kind of finger pointed westward. That represents unusually warm or unusually high water temperatures that's in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. That's essentially what El Nino is. You have this kind of change in the circulation patterns in the oceans, and that changes the rate at which really cold water is transported up to the surface. So even though it's at the equator, there's unusually cool water typically resides there. But when that circulation pattern changes or slows down in particular, then there's more time for that water at the surface right off the coast of South America to get to kind of bake in the equatorial sun and it gets warmer and warmer. And this also then changes the speed at which that water heads westward towards the Western Pacific. So what El Nino is, is a warming of the water in that exact region. And that fundamentally changes the speed that the winds blow from in that part of the world, they actually blow from the east towards the west. And by changing the speed of the winds, it also changes the currents, it slows the currents down. And so instead of having water kind of almost racing westward, where it gets really warm in the Western Pacific, because it's moving more slowly, and because it's already starting out a bit warmer, it doesn't take very long for it to get warm enough where you start producing thunderstorms and heavy rain in parts of the Eastern Pacific that don't usually have that kind of weather. And because it's right in the middle of the world, and because it's where the sun is the strongest, this has a profound effect, major impact on weather patterns, not just in that area, but into the North and South America, even into the Atlantic Ocean and parts of Europe. That's kind of my follow-up question is, a lot of people think like, okay, great, ocean waters in the Central Pacific that's 10,000 miles from here are warmer than average. Why do we care? It really does have an impact on everybody. Yeah, I think, I mean, it's a great question. And I think one of the things that I often have to remind myself too, because I look at weather maps just like you, and I think we've all been trained to look at North America or to look at the United States, where, you know, the weather systems enter on the left side of the screen and they exit on the right side of the screen. Going left to right. Right, and you don't necessarily think about where they are and what they're accessing before they get to us. And I think it's easy for viewers and the general public to maybe miss the fact that even the weather systems that affect us here in Minnesota, they have traveled across the oceans. They've often traveled around the world multiple times made, you know, and just kind of been transformed as they interact with different areas of warm and cold air, warm or cool water. They change shapes and directions, but it's this big kind of fluid constantly moving system. So then when you put a big disturbance of lots of extra heat right in the middle of that, kind of right in the most important part of that, it really does have big downstream impacts. So now we imagine, you know, I know your viewers have seen you use maps showing cold fronts and warm fronts and low pressure systems. And well, now our weather systems are drawing from air masses when there's El Nino that have much more warm water and warm air available way to the south. And that changes the way that the air flows into those low pressure systems. It can change where the jet stream is. And we actually end up seeing, I mean, I know we're making it sound really confusing, but there's actually, there tends to be with El Nino because just from that image you showed, that's a pretty standard look, that kind of big spike of warm water on the Pacific Ocean equator region near South America, that tends to produce kind of dependable weather patterns where the jet stream splits into two. And so rather than having the wintertime jet stream tracking right over the center of North America, where we get hammered by a bunch of winter storms, you end up having one stream that ends up way to the north and we end up with kind of mild air. And then another stream way to our south near the Mexico kind of U.S. border where it tends to get very wet and kind of inclement. And we're left in the middle where we tend to have, it doesn't always happen, but we tend to have warm winters during that time with kind of inconsistent precipitation and hard to access some of the cold air. Yeah, I actually have a couple of graphics, not yet, but I want to show those a little later. I want to focus on a couple other things before we get there. Director Leo, if you could put that map we just had up again, I wanted to show folks who exactly what I'm talking about. So we have El Nino, that's one what we call global oscillation or basically an ocean current that can be warmer than average or colder than average, but also look at the rest of that map. And this isn't the only thing, El Nino is not the only thing that directly affects our weather through the winter or summer or any time of year. There's a lot of warm water on that map. There's a lot of warmth in the Western Pacific. There's a lot of warmth in the North Atlantic and the Arctic. So in terms of forecasting this, in terms of forecasting our winter, you say stuff like, hey, with El Nino and maybe with a strong El Nino, we tend to have certain things, but it's not always the case. Is this the reason why? Because there's so many other factors at play. Yeah, you got it. I mean, I think that that map you showed, there's an equal anomaly. That's what we call these kind of areas of really warm or even really cold water. But like you said, that map shows a lot of warm water. There's that one farther north sticking from left to right out of Asia. That one doesn't necessarily have a name, right? I mean, so the one we call El Nino emerges in the same general area every few years, every few to several years, and it is shaped roughly the same and it just varies in its intensity from one episode to the next. So that's why it has a name and it has kind of a dependable response. That area of really warm water relative to what's normal near Japan and Korea and coming out of the Asian continent, that doesn't necessarily have a name and hasn't been identified to kind of repeat itself in the same way that El Nino and its counterpart, La Nina, do. But it's absolutely gonna have an influence on the weather. And because it's not as dependable, we don't really know what it's gonna do, correct? That is correct. Which will hurt in terms of forecast accuracy for long-term stuff. Hey, Kenny, I love this conversation. Stick around. We gotta take a quick break. We're gonna be back with the senior climatologist from Minnesota DNR right after this. 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 in 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 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, 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, 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 get, 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 is 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, 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 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 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 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 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 that 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 snow storms 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.