Dr. Dillon Amaya

to the eastern equatorial Pacific in a part of the world where you don't typically get a lot of rain.

And in the atmosphere, rain is energy.

It creates a lot of heat and a lot of energy that has to go somewhere.

And that creates ripples that create atmospheric waves that propagate all over the world.

And that can push around the jet stream around places like North America.

And that can shift where storms are starting to make landfall on places like the U.S.

West Coast.

Typically, we think of El Nino driving wetter than normal conditions in places like the American Southwest, so places like Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and even to some extent in the Southeast, places like Florida and Georgia.

And we also tend to think that El Ninos drive drier conditions in the Pacific Northwest.

And this is all typically during the wettest part of the year for places like the American Southwest during boreal winter, so sort of November, December, January.

Ultimately, there's sort of a wholesale shift in the jet stream, and that could affect weather for as far north as New York.

Yeah, El Nino was a global phenomenon.

In the climate system, you know, on these sort of seasonal to year-to-year timescales, El Nino is king.

It will redistribute rainfall all over the world.

I tend to think about these impacts in the United States, but we also see impacts in places like Australia, South America, the Sahel region of Africa.

Yeah, no place will be left untouched by a really strong El Nino event.

La Niña, you can think of as just the polar opposite of El Niño.

It's a colder-than-normal condition in the equatorial Pacific, and typically its impacts on the global climate are opposite.

So again, I'll return to that southwest U.S.

example.