Is El Niño to blame for the big Southern storm?

Credit: NASA climatekids

The official view of US experts on the current status of El Niño will be delivered on Thursday.

Heavy rain in California and piles of snow in the Southeast may be signs another El Niño weather phenomenon is upon us, says CBS News.
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Heavy rain and mudslides in California, flooding in Texas, and up to 2 feet of snow in North Carolina — all these recent weather events are symptoms of the infamous climate phenomena called El Niño.

For months now we have been on the verge of an official El Niño, but so far the climate community has not pulled the El Niño trigger.

Officially there is an “El Niño Watch,” but an El Niño Alert may be issued any day, indicating the phenomena has officially begun.

The El Niño phenomenon is, by definition, a periodic warming of the waters in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean. When this happens vast amounts of heat is released into the atmosphere. This heat disrupts normal weather steering patterns, which can have big consequences to global and regional weather.

El Niño expert Tony Barnston from the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society at Columbia University says some El Niño criteria are still missing. “Although the sea surface temperatures are clearly at El Niño levels, the atmosphere is just not yet participating much.”

In other words, right now the ocean criterion is met, but the atmosphere has yet to respond in the way it should.

Continued here.