Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations

I’ll be adding the Pacific Ocean (60S-65N, 120E-80W) sea surface temperature anomalies to my monthly updates. See Figure 1 for the area covered by those coordinates. Why add the Pacific Ocean? It covers about 45% of the surface area of the global oceans and about 33% of the surface area of the globe (land+oceans combined). Or, to look at it another way, the Pacific Ocean covers more of the globe than the continental land masses combined. The Pacific stretches almost halfway around the globe at the equator, which is one of the reasons why El Niño and La Niña events are so important to global climate. When an El Niño releases a massive volume of naturally created warm water from below the surface of the western tropical Pacific and spreads it across the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific, precipitation and surface temperatures react globally—responding to the all of…

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