Latest La Niña Stories

University of California, San Diego For much of Asia, the pace of life is tuned to rhythms of monsoons. The summer rainy season is especially important for securing the water and food supplies for more than a billion people. Its variations can mean the difference between drought and flood. Now a Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego-led study reports on a crucial connection that could drastically improve the ability of forecasters to reliably predict the monsoon a few months...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A mild winter followed by a long, sweltering summer with widespread drought made 2012 the warmest year on record for the continental United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Tuesday. The average annual U.S. temperature rose to 55.32 degrees Fahrenheit last year, one degree warmer than the previous record set in 1998 and 3.2 degrees warmer than the 20th century average, the federal...

Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The year is shaping up to be a warm one. A report released by the World Meteorological Association (WMO), the provisional annual statement on the state of the global climate, highlights a warming trend experienced during the first 10 months of 2102. The organization finds that despite La Niña occurring early in the year temperatures were the ninth warmest annually since records began in 1850. La Niña is an ocean-atmosphere...

University of Hawaii ‑ SOEST The Walker circulation determines much of the tropical Indo-Pacific climate and has a global impact as seen in the floods and droughts spawned by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Meteorological observations over the last 60 years show this atmospheric circulation has slowed: the trade winds have weakened and rainfall has shifted eastward toward the central Pacific. The immediate cause of this slowdown has puzzled climate scientists. They could not...