Weather repetitions and climate fitness

Happy New Year from the ENSO Blog! With the arrival of the new year and an ongoing strong El Niño, many folks are already asking us, why isn’t the current El Niño bringing the expected wetter/drier/warmer/cooler conditions over my house yet?!

• First, we’ve already seen impacts consistent with El Niño across much of the globe and those impacts have been occurring for some time now. A quick look around the world indicates some very El Niño-like impacts over the past half year (footnote #1).
• Second, we’re two-thirds through January as of this writing, which means we’re barely past the midway point in the December-February season. We’ve basically just entered the January-March season when the U.S. El Niño impacts are most widespread (El Niño’s sea surface temperature typically peaks a couple of months earlier, but there’s a lag). It’s just too soon to say much because, as we’ve discussed, ENSO is a seasonal climate phenomenon and primarily impacts seasonal climate averages. That’s right—ideally, we wait three whole months (footnote #2) to look back and examine a given winter’s consistency with the historical El Niño impacts (footnote #3).

With that said, we totally understand the curiosity about whether El Niño impacts are being felt or if factors other than El Niño will wind up dominating this winter. I will admit to staring at the near-term weather forecasts a bit too often over the past couple weeks (hooray for mid-Atlantic snow!).

But I have to remind myself that weather and climate are two very different things. It’s not easy! After all, our lived experience from day to day, what we see and feel, is the weather. It’s a bit harder to “feel” the climate, which is the average of weather over different spans of time (footnote #4). I don’t generally go on a stroll in the morning and think to myself, “I better bring a raincoat because today’s 1-month average sure feels wet.”

But those averages are the climate! And so, to understand the climate, we have to examine longer time periods. If this is still a bit confusing, I’m going to try out an analogy. And if it is lousy, you can immediately close your browser window and we will forget this ever happened.

Hit the gym

In honor of the New Year, many of us make resolutions to improve ourselves over the coming year. A popular one is to become fitter, by eating more balanced meals and exercising. I’m in this category and in early January, I bought one of those 1-month reduced-price gym memberships because this is THE YEAR I will become fit enough to do a pull-up (footnote #5).

So, what does my New Year’s fitness resolution have to do with weather vs. climate? Well, let’s take a look at the animation below. What you are seeing here is an animation of daily-average weather (precipitation and pressure changes) from the 1st of December 2023 through the 20th of January 2024 (footnote #6).

Daily pressure patterns (highs in brown, lows in purple) and precipitation (grayscale) in Northern Hemisphere winter to date (2023-24). There's a lot of motion in this movie; lots of variability from day to day. That's the weather. Video by NOAA Climate.gov, adapted from original by Michelle L' Heureux.

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