This new understanding of El Niño and La Niña events will help researchers determine whether to expect shifts of El Niño characteristics as the global climate changes.
The Kīlauea eruption has generated extensive news coverage and UH Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology experts have been sought by local, national and international media to provide background and information.
The study concluded that with warmer sea surface temperatures, tropical cyclones become not only stronger, with higher maximum wind speeds, but also larger, with gale-force winds covering a greater area.
A study published last week in Science presents a mechanism to explain the unexpected and unprecedented disruption of the atmospheric winds in February 2016.
New research determined that the relationship between La Niña and rainfall in Hawaiʻi has changed and recent La Niña years have brought less-than-normal rainfall.