How does the Pacific Ocean affect temperature?

How does the Pacific Ocean affect temperature?

Ocean waters along California’s coast are warming. The oceans absorb and store large amounts of heat and play a central role in climate by transporting stored-up heat and exchanging it with the atmosphere. About 90 percent of the Earth’s increased heat energy over the last 50 years has accumulated in the oceans.

What do we call the weather pattern that affects the Pacific Coast?

The Short Answer: El Niño is a weather pattern that occurs in the Pacific Ocean. During this time, unusual winds cause warm surface water from the equator to move east, toward Central and South America.

What changes occur in the Pacific Ocean during El Nino?

An El Niño condition occurs when surface water in the equatorial Pacific becomes warmer than average and east winds blow weaker than normal. The opposite condition is called La Niña. During this phase of ENSO, the water is cooler than normal and the east winds are stronger. El Niños typically occur every 3 to 5 years.

What causes La Niña and El Nino?

El Niño and La Niña result from interaction between the surface of the ocean and the atmosphere in the tropical Pacific. In turn, changes in the atmosphere impact the ocean temperatures and currents. The system oscillates between warm (El Niño) to neutral or cold (La Niña) conditions on average every 3-4 years.

What effect does the water temperature of the Pacific ocean have on California weather?

Ocean waters along California’s coast are warming. California’s coastal water temperatures are rising. The oceans absorb and store large amounts of heat and play a central role in climate by transporting stored-up heat and exchanging it with the atmosphere.

What changes from normal conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean in terms of winds and distribution of ocean temperatures occur during El Niño years?

During an El Niño event, the surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean become significantly warmer than usual. It also reduces the upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich waters from the deep—shutting down or reversing ocean currents along the equator and along the west coast of South and Central America.

Which condition happens during La Nina phenomenon?

La Niña is a weather phenomena characterized by unusually cold ocean temperature in the Equatorial Pacific which causes increased numbers of tropical storms in the Pacific Ocean. Disease related to contaminated water due to flooding, such as acute gastroenteritis, typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A.

Why is the Pacific Ocean broiled by the Sun?

The Pacific Ocean is broiled by the sun, whatever the season. Because the Earth tilts on its axis, the northern parts of the Pacific are broiled in the northern summer, the southern parts in the southern summer.

How does the Sun change the weather around the world?

When intense sunshine radiates down onto solid earth, the rocks become very hot, very quickly. Because of the physics of solids, they release this heat equally fast and return it to the atmosphere, retaining very little. To a wanderer in some hot deserts, a rock at nighttime can be blessedly cool.

Why is the Pacific Ocean the deepest ocean?

Another, less well-known pattern of ocean movement known as thermohaline circulation can also shift this heat downward into the depths of the sea. Since the Pacific is by far the deepest ocean, as well as the broadest and longest, the amount of heat it can absorb and circulate within itself is almost beyond imagination.

What happens to the surface winds during El Nino?

The low-level surface winds, which normally blow from east to west along the equator (“easterly winds”), instead weaken or, in some cases, start blowing the other direction (from west to east or “westerly winds”). El Niño recurs irregularly, from two years to a decade, and no two events are exactly alike.