Tag Archives: El Nino

The buzz in my neighborhood, now that the Halloween candy stockpiles have lost their sparkle, is the coming winter weather. Houston is full of people just like me who are northern transplants down here who miss the snow and the cold, but are happy that — for the most part — a winter on the Gulf Coast is tame and fairly mild. Still, the possibility of snow sets this town in an uproar almost as much as the possibility of the Texans going to the Super Bowl. Could it be possible, because of last weekend’s early and record-breaking snowfall, North America has been primed for an unusually cold and snowy winter?

It’s cloudy and unusually cold in Houston at this writing. Not exactly the stuff of La Niña, yet eastern Pacific waters are cooler than normal allowing western Pacific waters to be warmer than normal which, in turn, allows abundant precipitation across Equatorial waters of the western Pacific. Translation? Classic La Niña.

It’s officially fall in the Northern Hemisphere, but the extreme heat we experienced this summer, not only in the U.S. but around the world, has put coral reefs at risk. The heat puts a lot of stress on the corals causing some of them to shed their color which indicates they’re going into survival mode. [...]

The demand for electricity in Vietnam has increased nearly 22 percent in the first few months of 2010. As demand goes up with the economic expansion, the water levels in reservoirs used for hydropower production have gone down due to ongoing drought across Vietnam since late last year. The government now says the country may [...]

As a young meteorologist stationed at Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida, I’m familiar with the tropical weather of the region. Morning funnel clouds just off the coast were nearly as common as the sound of jet turbines spooling up at the first hint of daylight. Viewed from the control tower, distant waterspouts were [...]

Spring is officially here, but the warmer weather isn’t exactly good news for the maple syrup season in New England. Daytime highs have been right around normal if not above normal for this time of year. However, it’s the overnight lows that haven’t cooled down as much. This hurts maple syrup production because the maple [...]

On the heels of Monday’s YWB post about the deteriorating conditions of the ice roads in Canada, comes this: the Lake Winnipesaukee, NH "Ice Out" is a record-breaker, occurring four days prior to the previous record of March 28th, 1921. Last year’s Ice Out was April 12. What’s going on? I’ll bet you thought New [...]

At the risk of making YourWeatherBlog begin to sound like YourElNiñoBlog, I wanted to tie the two main weather features of the coming couple of months into one sentence: El Niño will likely enhance the spring severe weather season with more frequent storms, stronger storms and more tornadoes. Tornadoes can generate wind speeds of 250mph [...]

If you’ve ever been to San Francisco, chances are you’ve been to Fisherman’s Wharf and stopped off at Pier 39 to check out one of the city’s most famous tourist attractions, the sea lions. Hundreds of sea lions call Pier 39 home, but since last fall the population has decreased dramatically. Sea lions are migratory [...]

The famous Ifugao Rice Terraces in the Philippines and El Niño are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, but it’s been happening lately. Actually, you can link El Niño to lots of things that are affected by the unusually warm waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean off the coasts of South and Central America — [...]