Updated El Niño Climatologies and Forecasts - Golden Gate Weather Services

Updated El Niño Climatologies and Forecasts

Updated El Niño Climatologies

With many of the May versions of the SST ONI forecasts beginning to show El Niño strengthening well into the strong category (see below) I have updated a number of El Niño climatologies to add a "very strong" category. Each of the previous categories (Weak, Moderate, Strong) spanned a half degree anomaly on the ONI and it seemed logical to add a category for the next step of greater than or equal to an ONI of +2.0. See El Niño and La Niña Years and Intensities (ONI).

This moved two years (1982-83 and 1997-98) from the strong category to "very strong" and an examination of these two years understandably shows the most definitive signature for rainfall for California. [The 1972-73 season fell just shy of the meeting the "very strong" criteria, but certainly exhibited a similar very wet California outcome.] See El Niño and La Niña Winter Historic Precipitation and Temperatures and Climatology of El Niño Events and California Precipitation.

Important Caveat: These are climatologies of past events and are made up of a broad range of events from a small sample that are averaged together. Consequently, like all averages, this type of data should not be used as a forecast! Or as your stock broker says "Past performance is no guarantee of future result."

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Updated El Niño Forecasts

The new mid-May plume of forecasts come out from IRI/CPC on Thursday (5/21) but many of the individual elements are already available and showing significant warming in future months across the eastern equatorial Pacific.
NOAA Ensemble Mean
ECMWF Nino Plumes
Australian BOM Nino3.4 Outlook

Jan Null, CCM
Golden Gate Weather Services
http://ggweather.com

Jan Null

Jan Null has been a meteorologist in the San Francisco Bay Area for 50 years and is frequently seen on television and heard on the radio when weather is in the news. Twenty-six years ago he founded a consulting firm, Golden Gate Weather Services, after a 24-year career with the National Weather Service. Mr. Null is a Bay Area native, having grown up in Oakland and lived in the East Bay until 2006 when he moved to Saratoga. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Atmospheric Science from UC Davis in 1974 and his Master’s from San Jose State in 1992. Jan joined the National Weather Service in 1974 at the Weather Service Forecast Office in Redwood City. He worked as an operational forecaster throughout his career, including 13 years as Lead Forecaster. During his tenure at the NWS he also served as Meteorologist-in-Charge at the Center Weather Service Unit at the FAA’s Air Traffic Control Center in Fremont. He also did extensive research into the relationship between El Niño, La Niña and California rainfall and throughout his career he was a frequent media spokesperson for the agency. Jan has also been an Adjunct Professor and Lecturer at San Francisco and San Jose State Universities where he taught one evening a week for nearly 30 years. In 1998, Jan founded Golden Gate Weather Services, a consulting firm that specializes in forensic meteorology. He frequently serves as an expert witness in litigation where the weather is a factor. This often involves reconstructing past weather events or as his wife refers to it: “CSI Weather”. Mr. Null is also an internationally recognized expert of the sad topic of the heatstroke deaths of children in vehicles. After the death of a child left a vehicle in San Jose in 2001 he did a comprehensive study of vehicle temperatures that was ultimately published in Pediatrics in 2005. Since that time he has spoken at numerous national conferences and worked with a wide variety of child safety advocacy groups and agencies to raise awareness about the dozens of children who die from hyperthermia in hot vehicles each year. This data continues to be updated at NOHeatstroke.org. In his spare time he is a serious amateur photographer, specializing in wildlife and landscapes. Jan is married to Susan Hollis, a lifelong Saratoga resident and Realtor. He has two adult children in the Bay Area and the world’s most adorable 9-year old granddaughter and 4-year grandson.

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