A big turnout at last night’s El Niño awareness meeting in Yucca Valley. In the first in his two-part report, reporter Mike Lipsitz explains just what El Nino is…
When temperatures in the upper 300 feet of waters in the eastern Pacific rise above average the condition is called an El Niño. About 200 people turned out for last night’s El Niño public awareness meeting at the Yucca Valley Community Center. A strong El Niño occurs when those temps are 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal. At present, eastern Pacific waters are at 2.8 Celsius above average (three-month average is about 1.9 degrees above average). And while the El Niño condition is cyclical, this year’s is possibly the strongest ever recorded. El Niño affects the location of the jet stream; it doesn’t mean that we’ll get stronger storms, but it does increase the likelihood of more frequent winter storms. Nothing is certain when forecasting weather; probabilities are high that Southern California will experience a warmer, wetter winter than normal. Tomorrow, we report on what you can do to prepare for the expected unusual weather.
ABOUT 200 ON HAND FOR EL NINO AWARENESS MEETING LAST NIGHT
