Yale Climate Connections

The subtle yet insidious ways climate change affects mental health

Autor não encontrado — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

The stress of climate change is taking a toll on mental health across the world – and not just among those who have survived disasters.

Even as extreme weather hits more frequently, the signals people have always relied on to track the seasons seem to be spinning out of control. And scientists and public health researchers are seeing growing evidence of the cost to mental health.

In a review of 57 studies published in the journal Nature Mental Health, researchers linked slow-moving environmental changes, such as drought and changes to the seasons, with depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. Study participants described recurring feelings of worry, grief, and frustration, often tied to concerns about their families, communities, and the future.

“Slow, ongoing environmental changes are related to negative emotions, as well as depression and anxiety symptoms, generalized psychological distress, and suicidality,” said Sarah Lowe, an associate professor of public health at the Yale School of Public Health and a co-author of the study.

Gradual environmental shifts don’t make headlines the way that major disasters do, but they still affect people like 70-year-old Saibi Takavade from Shirdhon village in western India. For most of her life, Takavade could tell the time of year by observing the weather. But in recent years, she’s felt stressed as summers grow longer and harsher, rains come late or all at once, and seasons no longer follow a familiar routine.

“I feel drained the entire day and find it difficult to sleep at night,” Takavade said.

Researchers say experiences like Takavade’s reflect a broader pattern. Climate stress doesn’t always arrive as a single traumatic event but can build gradually over time.

The role of chronic stress

When people seek help in moments of emotional distress, researchers have found that climate change is already part of what they are struggling to make sense of.

In the United States, some people link their anxiety and distress to climate change, according to a 2025 analysis of crisis text conversations published in the Journal of Climate Change and Health. The text messages reflected a range of emotional responses, from worry to severe anxiety or even despair about the future, a sense of helplessness, and questions about the kind of world that lies ahead for them and future generations.

Physical and mental effects compound one another, the authors of the 2025 study found.

“Direct exposures, such as extreme heat, storms, or air pollution, can affect the body’s stress response systems and disrupt sleep and physiological regulation,” explained Jennifer Runkle, an environmental epidemiologist at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies at North Carolina State University and the study’s lead author.

Repeated exposure to climate-related stressors can activate chronic stress responses in the body.

“Over time, prolonged stress can influence hormones, inflammation, and neurological pathways associated with anxiety and depression,” she added.

Even people not directly affected by disasters can find it hard to deal with changing environmental patterns such as seasons, rainfall, and temperature cycles.

“When these patterns begin to shift or feel unpredictable, it can create a sense of instability and loss of control or feelings of diminished control over the future,” Runkle said.

For some people, that loss of predictability is deeply personal.

Rukmini Yadav, 67, a farmer in India, links her feelings of constant stress to changes in the seasons. Like most farmers, “I could easily predict when the season would change” – until a few years ago, she said. “Now, I am unable to relate to any of the seasons.”

Younger populations aren’t immune to the problems, either. In a review of studies focused on young people in climate-vulnerable low- and middle-income countries, researchers found that gradual shifts like changing rainfall patterns and prolonged dry spells can affect mental health in myriad ways beyond immediate exposure: destabilizing livelihoods, housing, and access to basic resources. The accumulating pressures compound stress and emotional distress.

“Decreased reliability in seasonal cues would lead to a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about the short- and longer-term future, as well as a decline in perceived control over one’s future and livelihood, and possibly even feelings of hopelessness,” said Lowe, who was not involved in the study of young people.

Ways to cope

Although the psychological burden of climate uncertainty can be significant, researchers say certain strategies can make a meaningful difference.

“Social support was one of the most important: simply having someone to acknowledge their fears and concerns helped people feel less alone,” Runkle said.

Other coping strategies include creative activities, spending time in nature, and seeking out information on constructive ways to deal with climate change. Some people have connected with youth climate networks or gotten involved in organizing efforts.

“People felt better when conversations shifted from helplessness toward agency and connection with others,” Runkle said.

One consistent finding, Lowe said, is that “those who are more directly exposed tend to fare the worst emotionally.”

That means reducing that exposure is central to protecting mental health. This includes ensuring access to basic needs, such as cooling during extreme heat, clean water during drought, and safe shelter during floods.

And when acute events do occur, Lowe added, the response should extend beyond immediate relief. Psychological first aid should be a standard part of post-disaster care.

Melting ice led to a tsunami in Greenland. It could happen again.

Autor não encontrado — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Transcript:

In 2023, a tsunami wave taller than the Statue of Liberty crashed back and forth in a Greenland fjord – a narrow inlet carved between steep mountain slopes.

Kristian Svennevig of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland says the tsunami was triggered by a massive landslide that sent more than 800 million cubic feet of rock plunging into the water.

Svennevig: “You put something into the water very fast, and it displaces the water and creates a wave.”

He says this sort of event is growing more likely as the climate warms.

The Arctic’s frozen ground – or permafrost – is thawing, which can destabilize mountain slopes. And glaciers, which help buttress eroding mountainsides, are getting thinner and weaker.

Aerial photos show that a glacier at the site of the Greenland landslide had been thinning for decades.

This event occurred in a remote area. But Svennevig says in some parts of Greenland, Alaska, and beyond, communities are at risk from landslide-induced tsunamis.

Svennevig: “We know the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the globe, and we know that that warming will continue. So it’s … indeed an emerging hazard but also one that will accelerate in the future.”

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media

Seasonal patterns that farmers trusted for generations have suddenly turned unpredictable

Autor não encontrado — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Farmers in Jambhali, a village of 5,000 in western India, have long turned to 80-year-old Satgonda Patil for advice on when to plant or harvest their crops. For more than six decades, his deep knowledge and uncanny instincts helped him and his neighbors succeed and avoid weather-related losses.

That started to change about five years ago. Rains arrived late, then early. Summers stretched on longer, and pests appeared at unfamiliar times. Financial losses soon followed.

In October 2025, Patil grew cauliflower on his 1.5-acre field, but he couldn’t harvest the crop. It wilted as a result of a soilborne fungal disease favored by warmer temperatures. A month later, Patil tried growing cabbage, but pests arrived early and spread quickly. He spent over 50,000 Indian rupees ($527) on pesticides but couldn’t save the crop.

The problem, Patil said, is no longer just one bad season.

“As temperatures are increasing every year, so are the pest attacks,” he explained. “No matter how much I spray, these pests just don’t go away.”

Patil has lots of company around the world.

Climate change has disrupted steady seasonal patterns that generations of farmers have relied upon. They have scrambled to adapt by adopting new irrigation techniques, changing crops, or adjusting the timing of planting. Still, losses are mounting. One study projects that adaptations can alleviate only about 23% of projected global crop losses by 2050 and 34% by the end of the century.

For every 1°C rise in global temperatures, food production is expected to fall enough to reduce the average available food supply by about 120 calories per person per day, roughly 4.4% of recommended calorie consumption. Today, global agriculture produces more than enough food, but this supply is unevenly distributed because of income inequality, price volatility, and gaps in access and infrastructure, leaving many undernourished.

Even modest declines in production could worsen food insecurity. Although the Paris Agreement aims to limit warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, current policy trajectories put the world on track for warming well above 2°C this century, levels at which these losses would grow significantly.

Warming oceans scramble rainfall patterns

Climate change is altering the patterns that once made seasons predictable. One study published in the journal Nature Communications found that the links between ocean temperatures and rainfall are shifting, making seasonal forecasts less reliable in some regions.

Unlike land and air, which respond quickly to daily temperature changes, the ocean absorbs and stores heat over long periods, releasing it slowly, explained Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and a senior author of the study. The ocean has a kind of “memory” that allows conditions such as El Niño and La Niña, natural cycles of ocean warming and cooling in the Pacific, to influence atmospheric circulation and, in turn, shape rainfall patterns across many regions, she added.

“Historical relationships we have relied on for seasonal forecasting may no longer hold as consistently,” she said.

In some regions, forecasts may improve as climate signals become clearer.

“Forecasting systems will need to be continually updated to account for these evolving dynamics,” she added.

Researchers have begun mapping how predictable seasonal rainfall may become in different parts of the world.

“One notable result is a decrease in predictability over northern Amazonia during Northern Hemisphere winter, where seasonal rainfall becomes harder to anticipate,” said Phong Le, a scientist in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, who led the study. In contrast, predictability is projected to increase across many tropical regions in several seasons.

Climate change is also altering the timing of seasonal events. A study published in Science shows that these timings can shift unevenly across species, throwing ecological interactions out of sync and often creating unpredictable outcomes.

“Even small shifts in seasonal events, like floods arriving a week earlier, can have cascading ecological impacts,” said Jonathan Tonkin, a professor at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a senior author of the study. Because species are closely linked to one another, a change in timing can ripple through entire systems: “Ecosystems are highly interconnected systems, and changes to any one member can ripple out through the whole system.”

When nothing works anymore

Patil said seasonal signs he once relied upon have stopped making sense.

“Sometimes it feels like it will rain,” he said. “The next moment, it is blazing hot. It’s just unpredictable.”

As we spoke in March, with temperatures already crossing 38°C (100.4°F), the television showed a rain forecast for the evening. Leaning on his walking stick, he made his way toward the sorghum field about 100 meters away.

“If it rains even for 10 minutes, I will lose everything,” he said, inspecting the harvest-ready crop that could be damaged by even a brief shower. Luckily, the forecast was wrong. It didn’t rain.

Farmer Yallappa Naik, 68, from western India’s Nandani village, did what farmers are told to do when one crop fails: Try again.

In June 2023, he planted sugarcane, following the calendar he had used for decades. Then, heavy rainfall began.

“The water was at least seven feet deep in the field for over 10 days,” he said.

Nothing survived.

He tried again with sorghum, wheat, and vegetables. Those crops withered in extreme heat, rotted in untimely rain, or were eaten by pests he had rarely seen before.

In October 2024, he sowed sorghum. By March, much of that crop had failed. Weeds spread quickly, returning even after he cleared them three times.

“In the past five decades, I had never seen so many weeds,” he said.

He lost $316 that season.

Naik isn’t alone. Studies show that climate change is making the Indian monsoon more erratic, with greater swings between long periods of dry spells and intense rainfall.

“In recent decades, the Indian summer monsoon has become far less predictable than it once was,” said Hamza Varikoden, a senior scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, who led the monsoon study.

Instead of bringing steady rainfall across the season, the monsoon in South Asia is increasingly marked by short bursts of intense rain followed by longer dry spells, he said. Even when total rainfall remains similar, each season can bring wild, unpredictable swings between floods and drought.

“The seasonal cues that farmers traditionally rely on are becoming less predictable, making agricultural planning more challenging,” said Catherine George, a doctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany.

Climate change is a major factor behind precipitation shifts. The atmosphere can hold 6-10% more moisture for every 1°C of warming, leading to heavier downpours. Climate models suggest that although overall rainfall may increase in the future, it is likely to come with greater variability and more extreme events, Varikoden said.

Read: Why is it raining so hard? Global warming is delivering heavier downpours

Adaptation under constraints

Naik has now narrowed his farming to a three-month window.

For much of the year, he says, extreme weather makes it too risky to grow crops.

So instead of cultivating crops that take six months or longer to mature, he now focuses on crops that grow in a short duration, such as beets.

“It brings down my risk of loss to some extent,” he said.

Experts said the solution to increasingly erratic weather lies not just in better forecasts, but in rethinking how to prepare for extremes.

This can mean adjusting sowing dates based on updated forecasts, choosing crop varieties that can withstand heat or short dry spells, and diversifying crops to reduce risk, said Ancy Pushpaleela, a researcher at Cochin University of Science and Technology in India.

In addition, farmers can better cope with uneven rainfall by storing water, conserving soil moisture, and using irrigation more efficiently during dry periods, Pushpaleela added. Managing groundwater more effectively can also help buffer against both droughts and sudden downpours.

“The goal is to shift from relying on precise predictions to managing risk, so that communities are better prepared for a wider range of possible outcomes,” Foufoula-Georgiou said.

But for Patil, the 80-year-old farmer in Jambhali, the loss is not only financial. It is the erosion of a system he spent his whole life learning. There was a time, he recalled, when harvests were so abundant that there wasn’t enough space in the house to store grain.

Now, he says, even getting enough to eat twice a day feels sufficient.

The many benefits of carpooling

Autor não encontrado — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Transcript:

During rush hour, highways and city streets fill with cars that emit tailpipe pollution.

This pollution harms people’s health and warms the climate. In the U.S., cars and light trucks produce about 16% of the country’s climate-warming emissions.

But there’s a simple way to reduce that pollution – carpooling.

When people share a ride instead of driving alone, fewer cars hit the road. That means less traffic, less pollution, and cleaner air.

Plus, you can save money on gas by splitting expenses. And in some areas, you can use carpool lanes that move faster and offer reduced tolls.

Carpooling can be as easy as riding with friends to dinner or events, or driving to work with a neighbor or coworker.

You can also use a carpool app or website to organize commutes or out-of-town trips with others in your community.

To help things go smoothly, set expectations early – who drives when, what to play on the radio, and how to split gas and parking costs.

And if plans change, like if a car breaks down, communicate quickly and have a backup plan ready.

When organized well, carpooling can save money, and even spark new friendships – all while helping fight climate change.

Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media

What’s a ‘super El Niño’? And other El Niño questions, answered

Autor não encontrado — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:36:07 +0000

The odds are in El Niño’s favor right now.

This natural weather phenomenon, part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, occurs when warmer-than-average water extends throughout most of the equatorial Pacific Ocean just below the surface. That’s happening now. And powerful bursts of westerly wind have pushed immense amounts of warm water eastward, toward the Niño3.4 region where sea surface temperature, along with other atmospheric conditions, is used to assess the state of ENSO.

On May 14, in its monthly ENSO outlook, the NOAA/National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center gave an 82% chance that El Niño will be in place for the period May through July, which implies that it’ll be here within weeks.

How do experts know when El Niño has arrived?

El Niño conditions are declared when the atmosphere and ocean are in sync and the Niño3.4 sea surface temperature is at least 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9°F) warmer than the seasonal average.

But just as hurricanes can and do stray from the “cone of uncertainty” at times, it’s vital to remember that El Niño can do much the same. Preparing for the prototypical outcomes is a smart move, as long as you keep in mind that forecasting the El Niño-Southern Oscillation is more a matter of probabilities than certainties.

NOAA now uses a Relative Oceanic Niño Index, or RONI, in which the Niño3.4 value is adjusted relative to the world’s tropical oceans as a whole; the goal is to keep global warming from smudging the signal of El Niño and La Niña events themselves.

Read: A new and better way to keep tabs on El Niño and La Niña

Nearly all seasonal forecast ensembles used to predict ENSO at agencies around the world now concur that the imminent event is likely to bring Niño3.4 warming of at least 1.5°C, which would push it into the “strong” category. And some of the ensemble averages are now going well above 2°C, even for the adjusted RONI index. That would put it in the ballpark of the biggest El Niño events in the NOAA database going back to 1950.

Individual ensemble members still cover a fairly broad range, with outcomes varying from a weak event to a record-stomping one, but as shown below, they’re about as close to being unanimous on a significant El Niño as you’re likely to see. (This output is mainly using the traditional pre-RONI index, which tends to run slightly hotter on recent El Niño events.)

13 models, 643 ensemble members, weighted median +2.73°C.

The forecast is for a strong El Niño peaking this fall — the kind that resets which places get the rain, the snow, the drought all winter.

Single climate index, planet-wide consequences. https://t.co/DIQIrjEFwt
— Weatherdle (@weatherdle_org) May 11, 2026

What’s a ‘super El Niño’ – and will we get one?

Back in 2003, a group of researchers from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, invoked the term “super El Niño” in a Monthly Weather Review paper. They used it to describe events where the Niño3.4 departure from average was at least 3°C. The phrase has since been used more loosely around the world, especially in news articles and social media, but it’s not part of the toolbox of most professional ENSO forecasters.

“While ‘Super El Niño’ is sometimes used informally, it is not a scientific term,” said senior climatologist Felicity Gamble in a statement from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, which avoids the “super” moniker in its products.

The same is true of NOAA, which is going with “weak,” “moderate,” “strong,” and “very strong.” NOAA’s monthly ENSO outlooks now include month-by-month odds that a predicted El Niño event will fall into each of these four brackets. The odds of a “very strong” event peak at 37% in the November-to-January period.

Summing these categories, the odds that we will have El Niño at any strength are now greater than 90% from this summer through winter 2026-27, according to NOAA.

Figure 1. Probabilities from NOAA’s May 14 outlook that the expected El Niño event of 2026-27 will fall into various strength categories during each overlapping three-month period through December-February. El Niño events typically build in northern summer and fall, peak in the winter, and fade by spring. Unlike La Niña, El Niño rarely persists or recurs for two or more years in a row, though that occasionally happens. (Image credit: NOAA/NWS/CPC)

Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services, a California-based forensic meteorologist and former National Weather Service forecaster, began using “very strong” when the 2015-16 event arrived, so he’s happy to see NOAA doing the same. As Null puts it, “Everyone sees a forecast plume that looks like the liftoff of Artemis and goes crazy, and somehow early on attached the ‘super’ superlative to it.”

Does a stronger El Niño event lead to more extreme impacts?

Whether it’s super, very strong, mega, whiz-bang, or something else, the approaching El Niño could certainly land in the uppermost tier of what we’ve seen in recent decades. So does that mean the impacts would be correspondingly intense?

Alas, it’s not that simple.

“A strong El Niño event doesn’t always mean stronger impacts on our weather,” the Australian climatologist Felicia Gamble said in a statement released by that nation’s Bureau of Meteorology. “Sometimes a weak El Niño can lead to significant impacts on Australia’s rainfall and temperature, while a stronger event may have less noticeable impacts.”

ENSO expert Nathaniel Johnson, a meteorologist at NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, noted in an email that a stronger El Niño event does raise the odds of the most prototypical outcomes. However, it’s not the only thing involved.

“In any given season and region, there are many large-scale patterns that help to shape our local weather,” said Johnson. “El Niño is just one of those factors, but it happens to be the most predictable on timescales of months to seasons. If the El Niño event is very strong, then it is more likely that the El Niño influence will dominate over those other, less seasonally predictable factors.”

That said, there are places where a strong El Niño event can lead to distinctly different outcomes than a weak or moderate one. In the eastern tropical Pacific, for example, surface waters – normally chilled by upwelling – are often too cool to support showers and thunderstorms even in moderately strong El Niño conditions. Beyond a certain threshold of strength, though, the normally dry eastern tropical Pacific will warm up enough to support heavy rainfall, Johnson said: “This would essentially indicate a shift of the entire tropical Pacific warm pool to the eastern Pacific, which would immediately impact regions like coastal Ecuador and Peru.”

The very name El Niño, which means the Christ child in Spanish, came from Peruvian fishers who noticed that their anchovy catches – typically some of the world’s largest – took severe hits from unusually warm water during certain years around Christmas. (Earlier this year, Peru’s anchovy fisheries called for a proactive early start to get ahead of the possible El Niño.)

The Galápagos archipelago and its distinctive food chain are also highly vulnerable to the heavy rains and warm waters of a strong El Niño event.

What might we expect with this El Niño event, and where?

El Niño’s impacts occur as the global atmospheric circulation is rearranged by the massive zone of rising, warm air (often as large as the United States) that develops over the eastern tropical Pacific. These impacts can be remarkably far-flung, but they’re typically strongest across the tropics – from the Indian and Pacific Oceans to the Atlantic and into Africa – and over the midlatitudes of North and South America, the land masses closest to the Niño3.4 region.

Read: Five things you need to know about El Niño’s likely comeback

In a nutshell, El Niño tends to bring dry (and often hot) conditions in and around Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, and the Amazon and Central America, while relatively cool and wet conditions often prevail over East Africa and the southern tier of the United States. The timing of these common repercussions (called teleconnections) varies a bit. For example, North American impacts are triggered largely by interactions with the midlatitude jet stream, so they’re normally strongest toward winter, when the jet stream is more active. On a global scale, the heat transferred from ocean to atmosphere during El Niño tends to cause record-warm years in our human-warmed climate.

Figure 2. Typical El Niño influences, or teleconnections, on precipitation. (Image credit: NOAA)

In some parts of the world, the El Niño playbook is higher-confidence than elsewhere. One of those is the northern tier of the United States and much of adjacent Canada, where El Niño reliably delivers warmer-than-average winter weather. Emily Becker and Michael Tippett analyzed this connection as part of their deep dive into North American temperature responses to ENSO in a 2024 paper published in the Journal of Climate. This region sits hundreds of miles poleward from the broader-scale warming and drying that afflicts much of the tropics, but it’s part of the same web of El Niño teleconnections.

El Niño’s blunting of the usual big swings in winter temperatures across this region is noteworthy. “Not only does this warm zone experience many mild days during El Niño, but it also gets fewer cold snaps,” said Tippett (Columbia University). And while La Niña winters in the northern U.S. and Canada can be either warmer or colder than average, El Niño is more consistently on the warm side, Becker and Tippett found.

Sometimes, even a fairly dependable seasonal-scale tendency driven by El Niño can hide important smaller-scale details. The Indian monsoon tends to be drier than average during El Niño, but a 2025 analysis in Science found that amid these drier-than-usual monsoons, the occasional rainfalls that do occur seem to be turbocharged, dropping more extreme short-term rains than usual.

Likewise, hurricane activity tends to decrease in the Atlantic and ramp up in the Pacific during El Niño events. This may well pan out in 2026, based on sea surface temperatures and other ocean and atmosphere signals already showing up in seasonal models. But even in an otherwise quiet year, there could be periods of atmospheric alignment when dangerous Atlantic hurricanes still emerge.

One bright spot with El Niño is that it tends to suppress U.S. tornado activity during the winter and subsequent spring (see Figure 3 below). La Niña events sometimes but not always lead to major spring tornado outbreaks, whereas the suppressive effect of El Niño appears to be a bit more reliable. The big exception is in and around Florida: Some of the state’s worst tornado outbreaks on record outside of tropical cyclones occurred near the tail end of the powerful El Niño events of 1982-83 (on March 16-17), 1997-98 (on February 22-23), and 2015-16 (on February 23-24).

Figure 3. Seasonal tornado activity (height on the vertical axis) for each February-April from 1979 through 2023 versus the state of ENSO (La Niña on the left, El Niño on the right) based on the Relative Oceanic Niño Index. (Image credit: NOAA Climate.gov graphic, adapted from original by Kelsey Malloy, now at the University of Delaware.)

And what about climate change?

Very strong El Niño events are rare enough birds on their own, so it’s tough to assess how these events, and their impacts, will evolve as human-caused warming continues to grow.

Not that long ago, the 2023-24 El Niño event was expected to cause major global repercussions. And indeed, on the “traditional” Oceanic Niño Index, or ONI, it ended up in the “very strong” range, peaking at 2.1. However, the impacts didn’t play out as expected, especially in midlatitudes, where the connections to El Niño were unusually weak. As it happens, record heat was swaddling much of the world at the time, including tropical oceans, and that appears to have blunted the effects of El Niño.

In a 2025 Journal of Climate paper, a team led by Clara Deser, a senior scientist at the National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research, carried out a set of model experiments showing that long-term warming in the Indian and Atlantic tropical oceans, together with long-term cooling in the eastern tropical Pacific, can lead to a counteracting large-scale circulation that almost completely negates the effects of an El Niño event.

As Deser and colleagues wrote, “historical precedent may no longer be a reliable guide to ENSO teleconnections as anthropogenic warming patterns intensify.”

In a recent New York Times roundup of potential El Niño impacts, Deser said: “We are now in a different baseline climate.”

In a similar vein, Australia’s Felicity Gamble said: “The increasing warmth in our oceans, both globally and in the Australian region, mean that history is now a poorer guide for seasonal prediction.”

The 2023-24 event helped turn attention toward using the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, with the idea that RONI might work better than ONI in factoring out periods of intense tropics-wide heat (such as 2023-24) from the assessment of El Niño. Sure enough, the 2023-24 event reached the strong range in RONI, topping out at 1.5 (borderline strong) rather than landing in the more rarefied very-strong range on the traditional scale.

“The weakened impacts of the 2023-24 El Niño compared to expectations can be reconciled, at least in large part, by its substantially weaker amplitude based on RONI instead of the traditional ONI,” said NOAA’s Johnson.

If there’s a poster child for counterintuitive El Niño behavior, it’s the bizarre dryness that plagued Southern California during the winter of 2015-16, one of the strongest El Niño events on record. El Niño is often wet across much of California, but there’s ample variability, as documented by Jan Null. In a website post, Null described the 2015-16 case as the “poster child for ‘All El Niños are not the same!’ ”

Michelle L’Heureux, a physical scientist who leads the ENSO team at the NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Center, encourages thinking of El Niño as shifting the odds of various seasonal outcomes (e.g., wetter, drier, hotter, cooler). If those odds are expressed as a bell curve, then the stronger the event, the further El Niño pushes that curve to one side.

L’Heureux points to the 2015-16 California case as a cautionary tale on how El Niño forecasts should be treated as guidance rather than a guarantee.

“This doesn’t mean a major El Niño didn’t happen or it did not have a considerable influence on the global circulation (it did). It means that, in southern California, even a very strong El Niño was not able to nudge the distribution over enough to the point where drier outcomes were impossible.”

Looking ahead, L’Heureux added: “In 2026-27, I am confident we will see at least some locations in the U.S. that will not align with the expected El Niño impact.”

Jeff Masters contributed to this post.

Pennsylvania greenhouse stays warm by storing heat underground

Autor não encontrado — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Transcript:

Heated greenhouses let farmers grow some crops year-round – even in cold climates. But oftentimes, the heat comes from burning propane, which is expensive and warms the climate.

Tim Clymer, co-owner of Threefold Farm in Pennsylvania, says he’ll sometimes drive by a commercial greenhouse.

Clymer: “And see the exhaust coming out of there, and I know how much fuel they’re burning through.”

So he built what he calls a climate battery greenhouse instead.

On warm, sunny days when the greenhouse naturally heats up, fans blow warm air into a network of underground tubes that heat the soil around them.

Then, when it’s cold, the system works in reverse. Fans draw the heat out of the earth and back into the greenhouse.

Clymer: “We’re using the soil as a big thermal battery. So regular batteries store electrical energy, we’re storing heat energy in the soil.”

Clymer built his greenhouse nine years ago and uses it to grow figs, Meyer lemons, satsuma mandarins, and other citrus fruits.

He also started a company that sells greenhouse design plans and consults with other farmers to share what he’s learned.

So more farmers can invest in this approach for heating greenhouses without heating the climate.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media / Thanks to PASA Sustainable Agriculture for logistical support.

¡Presentamos a una nueva meteoróloga!

Autor não encontrado — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:23:29 +0000

Con la temporada de huracanes a la vuelta de la esquina, nos complace presentar a una escritora nueva en nuestra cobertura de Eye on the Storm para la temporada 2026. Irene Sans, la nueva meteoróloga de Eye on the Storm, llega desde Florida, donde cuenta con más de una década de experiencia. Irene cubrirá los fenómenos meteorológicos extremos tanto en inglés como en español.

Irene es una de las pocas meteorólogas hispanohablantes en los EE. UU. con doble certificación (televisión y medios digitales) otorgada por la Sociedad Meteorológica Americana. Ha trabajado como meteoróloga estatal adjunta para la gestión de emergencias en Florida y ha sido meteoróloga en estaciones de televisión y radio en español e inglés en todo Estados Unidos y América Latina.

Las audiencias hispanohablantes se encuentran entre las más preocupadas por el cambio climático, y también entre las más vulnerables a las olas de calor, los días de mala calidad del aire, las inundaciones y los huracanes. Sin embargo, pocos medios de comunicación en los EE. UU. atienden a estas audiencias.

Durante las últimas temporadas de huracanes, la editora de YCC en español, Perla Marvell, ha traducido muchas de nuestras publicaciones al español. La respuesta ha sido extraordinaria: en ocasiones, las publicaciones traducidas reciben más tráfico que las versiones originales en inglés. Por eso, nos sentimos honrados de que Irene se una a nosotros para ayudarnos a brindar información que puede salvar vidas a los hispanohablantes.

Con Irene en el equipo, también podremos ampliar nuestra cobertura de otros tipos de fenómenos meteorológicos extremos, más allá de los huracanes. Esto promete ser especialmente importante ante la llegada de un poderoso patrón de El Niño que podría provocar inundaciones en el cinturón solar de los EE. UU., una activa temporada de huracanes en el Pacífico desde Hawái hasta México, y un aumento del calor y la sequía en gran parte de los trópicos del mundo, incluyendo América Central.

A lo largo del verano les iremos dando a conocer mejor a Irene, así que estén atentos a una entrevista de preguntas y respuestas con ella. Es un recurso invaluable para nuestro equipo y estamos impacientes por ver cómo enfrenta esta temporada de huracanes. ¡Esperamos que le den una calurosa bienvenida!

Gracias, Jeff y Bob

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Introducing a new meteorologist!

Autor não encontrado — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

[Haz clic aquí para leerlo en español]

With hurricane season right around the corner, we’re thrilled to introduce a brand-new writer to our Eye on the Storm coverage for the 2026 season. Irene Sans, Eye on the Storm’s new meteorologist, comes to us from Florida, where she has over a decade of experience. Irene will be covering extreme weather in both English and Spanish.

Irene is one of the few Spanish-speaking meteorologists in the U.S. who is double-certified (broadcast and digital) by the American Meteorological Society. She has worked as a deputy state meteorologist for emergency management in Florida and has been a meteorologist for broadcast television and radio stations in Spanish and English across the United States and Latin America.

Spanish-speaking audiences are among the most alarmed about climate change – and also the most vulnerable to heat waves, poor air quality days, floods, and hurricanes. But few U.S. media outlets serve these audiences.

During the past few hurricane seasons, YCC en español editor Pearl Marvell has translated many of our posts into Spanish. The response has been remarkable: Sometimes we see more traffic to the translated posts than to the original versions in English. So we’re honored that Irene will be joining us to help us provide more life-saving news to Spanish speakers.

With Irene on the team, we’ll also be able to deepen our coverage of other types of extreme weather in addition to hurricanes. That’s looking to be especially important with the approach of a powerhouse El Niño pattern that could bring floods to the U.S. Sunbelt, an active Pacific hurricane season from Hawaii to Mexico, and intensified heat and drought across much of the world’s tropics, including Central America.

We’ll be helping you get to know Irene throughout the summer, so stay tuned for a Q&A with her. She is a huge asset to our team, and we can’t wait to see how she tackles this hurricane season. We hope you’ll give her a warm welcome in the comments!

Thanks,

Jeff & Bob

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Kids race boats powered by sunshine alone

Autor não encontrado — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Transcript:

This weekend, spectators will gather on the shore of Lake Riley in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, for the 34th annual Solar Boat Regatta.

In this competition, middle and high school students race solar-powered vessels they designed and built themselves.

Weber: “We’ll have a speed race, and then a slalom race, and then an endurance race, which is the students going around a set of buoys for an hour, and whoever gets the most laps, you know, wins that part of the race.”

Mark Weber is with the Minnesota Renewable Energy Society, which runs the event.

He says some teams convert kayaks or canoes. Others build their boats from scratch out of fiberglass or even plywood kept afloat by milk cartons.

He says the teams often get creative. One past entry was built from a Jet Ski, and another looked like a fire boat.

Weber: “And so they would go and squirt water out of it and had a little hose and sirens on it.”

All the vessels are powered by electric motors, with energy generated by solar panels on board.

So he says the event gives students hands-on experience with renewable energy, electrical wiring, and boat design – and in the process, they get to have a lot of fun.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media

The long shadow of Maui’s wildfires

Autor não encontrado — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Transcript:

Three years ago, devastating wildfires on Maui killed more than 100 people and destroyed much of the town of Lahaina.

The flames have long been extinguished, but for many, the crisis is ongoing.

Knightsbridge: “Almost 100% of my caseload is wildfire survivors. … A lot of them have lost family members. … Some of them had to relocate. … Some of them have just lost everything.”

Christopher Knightsbridge is a therapist at a behavioral health clinic in Lahaina.

He co-authored a recent study that found that people affected by the Maui fires have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.

And the mental health impacts are often greatest for people who lack permanent housing or stable employment.

Knightsbridge says for many of his patients, addressing their mental health struggles often takes a back seat to their other urgent recovery needs.

Knightsbridge: “What’s more important, right? At the moment, it’s food and making sure your kids are OK, making sure your kids are going to school. … They haven’t even begun to be able to really process the traumas that happened because they’re too busy trying to just basically survive.”

So he says the people of Lahaina still need support and resources to help them rebuild their lives and get the mental healthcare they need.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media

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