Understanding El Niño: From Ocean Temperatures to Global Weather Reconfiguration

“The Almino phenomenon is an ocean atmosphere. It's kind of part of what's called the Almino Southern oscillation, which is essentially a relationship between the tropical Pacific and the overlying tropical atmosphere, and it has a tendency to be in what we call a neutral state, which is kind of average conditions where you have these easterly trade winds. So these are winds that are blowing from east to west across the tropics. So long the equator, and what they're doing is they're dragging surface water, surface water that's been warm because it's in the tropics. The sun is just shining there all year round, and so that water heats up and then the winds kind of drag that surface water and create a literally a pile such that the sea altitude is higher in the West Pacific than in the East Pacific. And that pile of warm water is something we call the West Pacific warm Pool. And so it just sits there, parked by Indonesia and Australia, and then every once in a while, those trade winds weaken and break down, and that pile of warm water that actually penetrates quite deep into the western Tropical Pacific. That pile of warm water just spreads itself out over the vast expanse that is the Tropical Pacific. And so that's actually how we measure ELMOS. We're measuring it as a function of sea surface temperature anomaly. So how much warmer than average our ocean temperatures at the surface, you know, at this time in this location.”

“And so when an alnino occurs, what it is doing it is essentially the tropics are the heat engine of global weather and climate, and it's a complete reconfiguration such that so much more of our global atmosphere is exposed to that heat energy from the ocean that would have otherwise been buried in the western tropical Pacific. Does that make sense?”