Authors
Catherine Smith (NOAA/PSL,CIRES), Don Hooper (NOAA/PSL,CIRES), Chia-Wei Hsu (NOAA/PSL,CIRES), Gilbert P. Compo (NOAA/PSL,CIRES), Michael Alexander (NOAA/PSL), Matthew Newman (NOAA/PSL)

Abstract

El Niño and La Niña are often associated with consistent climate anomalies throughout the globe. However, these climate anomalies may not be exactly the same from event to event due to differences in the tropical sea surface temperature (SST) pattern, basic atmospheric/oceanic state over the globe, and "random" climate variability. The web page https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/difference allows users to select maps and related plots that illustrate how similar and different the atmosphere/ocean can be during El Niño and La Niña events over recent decades. Monthly, seasonal, and in some cases, water years are available to select. Currently there are 2 types of products to choose from. First, for either El Niño or La Niña, there are plots of a variable for each event, an average of the variable over all events, and a standard deviation of the event anomalies. The second type of product is a summary plot that shows the average El Niño and La Niña anomaly and a plot of how many events are the same sign as the average for each type (e.g. consistency among events) . Atmospheric variables are taken from the ERA5 reanalysis and ocean variables from the ORAS5 reanalysis. There are other miscellaneous variables available including OLR and tidal data. The website is set up to be easily expandable to include additional regions, variables and plot types. In addition to monthly and seasonal anomaly plots, we are adding products that examine other time-scales and types. For example, we provide plots of the number of daily extremes of some variables during a month/season during ENSO events.