Dr. Dillon Amaya

During El Niño, we would tend to get wet conditions.

During La Niña, we'd expect dry conditions.

Yeah, it's again a great, really, really good research question.

I think typically we get really strong El Ninos like this when we get sort of a critical mass of subsurface ocean heat content in places like the western equatorial Pacific.

You get a lot of buildup of warm water over the years.

And then once those winds relax along the equatorial Pacific, that water sloshes back all at once and can lead to these really massive and sustained events.

Typically, a stronger El Nino will just mean a stronger signal.

So really, the climate system is a distribution.

I think that's the most important thing to understand.

You know, you can get drier than normal conditions.

You can get wetter than normal conditions.

And that's all in part driven by random noise in the climate and weather system.

What El Nino does is it pushes that distribution towards weather.

you know, drier or wetter, depending on where you're at.

So take LA, for example, take Los Angeles, for example.

Right.

During El Nino, you push that distribution towards wetter conditions.

That doesn't mean that drier conditions aren't possible, but during a particularly strong El Nino, that push is, you know, it's much stronger, right?

You're really going to shift that distribution towards wetter conditions, makes it more likely.

I mean, I think there's going to be both positive and negative impacts for big, big, strong El Ninos like this.