Wednesday Top of the Scroll: The vision of El Niño as producer of historic California storms may be outdated
… For Californians’ collective mind, [El Nino] the weather phenomenon, defined by an eastward-moving, warmer-than-normal sea surface along the equatorial Pacific, is shaped by those traumatic, potent winters with record precipitation. But as some earth scientists see a bit of 1983 or 1998 in the coming winter’s strong El Niño, they may be neglecting a new reality: A stormy, wet El Niño of that vintage hasn’t struck California this century. University of California, Irvine, earth system science professor Jin-Yi Yu, whose doubts about a predicted “Godzilla El Niño” in 2015-16 were confirmed, sees the phenomenon permanently changed.
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