 Thank you. I'd like to thank Auburn University and Auburn Extension and our host Brenda Ortiz for inviting me here today. Again, my name is David Zierden. I'm with Florida State University and even though I'm with FSU, I've been a lifelong Gator fan so you can thank us for sending you Will Mustchamp and a defense for next year. But at Florida State we've been involved in a partnership called the Southeast Climate Consortium for over a dozen years now and this consortium includes partners from Auburn University, University of Alabama, Huntsville, Georgia, Clemson University, North Carolina State, and University of Florida. So we've been working closely with Extension and with agriculture for over a dozen years now so I'm feeling more and more at home with this kind of crowd and this topic. Before I get too much into my talk I want to go over some basic concepts and the first one is, there we go, I want to talk first about what we mean and the difference between weather and climate and I think everyone's got a good intuition of what that means but real simply weather is the current conditions outside of the atmosphere usually measured by with temperature, rainfall, barometric pressure, winds, humidity, and when we talk about weather we talk about the minute-to-minute hour-by-hour day-to- day changes especially as modulated by the comings and goings of individual weather systems, air masses, cold fronts, low pressure systems, that kind of thing and usually when we're talking about weather the time horizon goes out from the current conditions to as far as 10 days in the future but when we talk about climate kind of the old view of climate was just the average weather over time usually a 30-year period but that really doesn't do climate justice climate is more than just a long-term average it includes knowledge about the variability of the weather patterns and climate patterns a better definition is climate is the slowly varying aspects of our earth, ocean, and atmosphere system together and going into that weather is fairly predictable out one to even five days in advance with these sophisticated weather prediction models and these predictions are very dependent on the initial conditions that's why we have such a robust observation system in this country and around the world and send up weather balloons twice a day to sample the atmosphere at all different levels and it's dominated by the initial conditions climate is more kind of the average of the weather and it's modulated by things by external for scenes like sea surface temperatures snow and ice cover the solar intensity or radiance hitting the earth and concentration of greenhouse gases all these help modulate climate so it's kind of a different mechanism when we're looking at changes in weather and changes in climate and there's some other nice little anecdotes and sayings on comparing weather and climate popular one whether is your mood climate is your personality I've also heard to say whether is what you wore today where climate is the wardrobe in your closet more recently Neil deGrasse Tyson the host of Cosmos now he had a whole episode on climate and climate change and what and he used this illustration that he was walking his dog down the beach and he had the dog on the leash and the dog was wondering to and fro like they tend to do but he was keeping a straight line and he said whether is the dog changing from day to day and week to week where climate is more slow and steady so keep your eye on the person not the dog one more term I want to kind of introduce is climate variability and to illustrate this I have a couple different graphs on the top left is the average annual temperature for the state of Alabama from 1895 to the present and on the bottom right it's annual rainfall averaged over the state for the same time period 1895 to present and if we look at temperature we can see some interesting things going on first of all there's no real trend the southeast United States is one area of the globe that really hasn't seen an increase in temperature due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases it's really unusual the western United States especially the higher latitudes are all warming significantly but the southeast u.s. is one area that hasn't also you'll notice the 1930s were actually the warmest decade on record here in Alabama some a lot of the high temperature records were set in the in the 1930s and even 50s then about 1958 there was kind of an abrupt shift where we had several cold decades in a row now in recent decades we've returned more towards normal but you'll also notice there's tremendous year to year variability in this climate record and that's what I want to focus on today and if we look at rainfall it's even more pronounced there's there's really no trend there's none of this decadal variations that we see in temperature but it's just this tremendous year to year variations where the risk lies you can have a record setting low years of less than 35 inches of for the year or over 75 for a given year so it's that year to year variability is where the real risk and challenges and opportunity lie and what I'm going to talk to you about today is a tool that gives us a little bit of predictability of this year of these year to year variations especially in the colder weather months November through March and that mechanism is the El Nino La Nina cycle. This show of hands how many have heard these terms are kind of familiar with how they affect our weather and climate. That's good everybody has so a lot of this will be review but real simply El Nino is a phenomenon that returns every two to seven years. It's this area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator from the coast of South America all the way out to the international date line where every two to seven years this area will will will really warm like gangbusters it'll it'll it'll warm several degrees Celsius warmer than it normally is which is a huge change when you're talking about the tropical Pacific Ocean and this is the satellite image of the great El Nino of 1997 98 here the ocean temperatures were were five degrees Celsius or more warmer than normal during that winter caused enormous impacts around the globe this presence of warm water in the Pacific. The opposite phase and again it occurs every two to seven years is called La Nina and that's where that same area of the Pacific Ocean or a similar area along the equator cools down several degrees colder than normal and it has its own set of impacts on the the climate of the Northern Hemisphere North America and other parts of the world. So real quickly a little background on what causes this warming and cooling in this part of the of the ocean this is just a diagram of the normal state of the Pacific Ocean. It's dominated at the surface by these easterly trade winds if you've ever been in the tropics the trade winds blow east to west almost all the time continuously unless there's a hurricane or a real big weather system in place you're going to get these easterly trade winds and because of these persistent easterly trade winds it leads to cold water and nutrient rich water upwelling off South America and even to a lesser degree off California but also the warm water piles up over in the Western Pacific and this is known as the Pacific warm pool some of the warmest ocean temperatures in the world right here and these warm ocean temperatures support a lot of cloudiness and rainfall and thunderstorm activity that we call convection. So this is the normal state of the Pacific Ocean. Now what happens to when an El Nino is forming is over here in the Western Pacific these trade winds are disrupted. They fall close to nothing or even reverse and become westerly and that'll set in place a chain reaction of events that helps build an El Nino. A little closer look at some of these things I was talking about this is just a 30 year climatology of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. Here in the Reds you see sea surface temperatures approaching 30 degrees Celsius or 85 degrees Fahrenheit over in the Western Pacific much cooler over here in the Eastern Pacific and along the equator and that's the normal state. Now this next slide is going to show the departures from normal over a two year period from 1997 through 1999 where a lot was going on in the Pacific. We had this big El Nino form in 1997-98 and it was followed immediately by a fairly strong La Nino or cooler ocean temperatures and this is going to show anomalies which are the departures from normal the warmer will be in red the coolers will be in blue. So here we go as we start 1997 you see this explosion of warm water in this El Nino region and it really had tetsified during the winter and then you saw this abrupt change to colder than normal in 1998-99 and we'll let it run one more time that's so that really illustrates this cycle in the Pacific Ocean. Now historically we don't have this kind of action every year we we usually have an El Nino one out of four years a La Nino one out of four years and the other two years are close to normal or neutral so it's usually only one out of four years that we have either this El Nino or La Nino affecting our weather. Well the first big El Nino was in 1982 and 83 and because the Pacific Ocean is so vast there's very few observations of ocean temperatures and weather conditions and in 1982 and 83 was the first great El Nino of this century that really caused catastrophic impacts flooding and coastal erosion in California terrible droughts in Australia and parts of South America very rainy winters here in the in the southeast and in Florida so that really opened the eyes of the scientific community that this Pacific Ocean is something we need to pay attention to so through an international effort a series of weather buoys that monitor that both the atmospheric conditions and the oceanic temperatures and currents down several hundred meters were deployed across the whole Pacific Ocean everywhere there's one of these little blue dots is one of these weather buoys and they telemetry their telemetry their data back via satellite real time so now that we can we really have a great monitoring system and can pay attention to the Pacific Ocean day to day one editorial comment due to budget constraints in the last few years and basically mismanagement a lot of these buoys in the eastern Pacific have gone offline and I think that's one of the reasons we've had such a hard time getting a handle on this current El Nino and predicting whether it would go ahead and develop or or not so I think that's been part of the problem but we can we can show the historical changes in the Pacific Oceans the comings and goings of the El Ninos and La Ninos by just taking the sea surface temperatures in this area of the Pacific Ocean along the equator is called the Nino 3.4 area and just the departures from normal month by month and plot them on a timeline here we're starting in 1950 on the top left and going through 1970 all the way to the current 2012 and even 2014 on the bottom right and some things that will jump that I want to point out about this graph we have these dotted lines that plus or minus half degree Celsius that's the commonly accepted threshold for being an El Nino or La Ninos strength and then you see when the temperatures are warm we have these orange spikes or humps these are the El Ninos the blue valleys are when it's colder than normal these are the La Ninos and here you see the big El El Nino of 1982 83 again in 1997 and 98 our most recent El Nino was in 2009 2010 but another thing to notice is that El Ninos are typically one-year events where the La Ninos are often two or three years in a row more most recently in 2011 through 2012 that has big implications for us because La Ninos I'll show you in just a few slides tends to bring the southeast much warmer and drier winter and that can often be the trigger for drought and when you have two or three of these La Ninos in a row it sets the stage for multi-year droughts here in the southeast like back in the 2000s you know 1999 through 2001 we had terrible drought down here the 1950s 54 through 56 the 1970s all of these multi-year droughts were influenced in some way by this multi-year La Nina so real quick how does these how do these ocean temperatures feed back into the atmosphere and and affect our weather patterns well these diagrams show it pretty clearly when you have an El Nino this warm water that's usually confined to the western Pacific spreads across the whole basin and with that warm water is this thunderstorm activity and convection and this is a very efficient mechanism for transferring heat and and heat and moisture and heat energy from the ocean surface into the upper atmosphere now when a La Ninos in place it pushes this convection very far to the west and confines it to the far western Pacific and we get a different type of circulation and by just the presence or absence of this heat and humidity source pumping into the upper atmosphere it changes our jet stream patterns the top is the preferred or the predominant jet stream pattern we see in during an El Nino year and it's dominated by this strong subtropical jet stream that taps this Pacific moisture it brings storminess and winter storms to California and the and the western United States and these storms frequently redevelop along the northern Gulf Coast tapping the Gulf moisture and bring us very frequent rainfall and storminess during these El Nino episodes and little foreshadowing we've seen California getting hit two or three weeks in a row by what they call the pineapple express kind of a good indication that something's going on in the Pacific Ocean when we have a La Nina in place that now the polar jet stream is the more dominant jet stream it tends to follow a path that steers the storms up the Mississippi and Ohio Valley but down here in along the northern Gulf Coast in Florida we frequently get get left out the most of the storm energy is far to our north leaving us warmer and drier in the winter months and when I'm talking about the winter months it usually feel these impacts from basically November through March and this this is a better way of quantifying those impacts if you group all the El Nino events together and just look at how it affects our rainfall patterns this shows for January when you group all the El Ninos together leads to rainfall that's 40 to 60 percent above normal for the Peninsula of Florida but that above normal even extends well up into Georgia and to central Alabama also not so much in northern Alabama not near as much of an impact it can also affect summer weather when we have an onset of El Nino the late summer is often drier than normal as this graph shows a 10 to 20 percent drier than normal on the onset of an El Nino conversely when we have La Nina or the cold water in place we see much the opposite impact starting in fall we see the whole southeast is 10 to 30 percent drier than normal as we get into the winter that pattern really intensifies over the Peninsula of Florida now you can only expect half the normal rainfall when you have a La Nina in place some other impacts from the Pacific Ocean this cycle has a big impact on the act on the tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic and Pacific Basin and real quickly we just took a hundred years of the strongest hurricanes the category three hurricanes that made landfall in the United States and plotted them in the two different phases El Nino and La Nina you see when there's an El Nino in place we have relatively fewer hurricane strikes over twice as many when a La Nina La Nina is in place and kind of the generally accepted model there is that when you have an El Nino and all this excess moisture and heat energy going into the upper atmosphere it leads to unfavorable winds over the hurricane formation region or shear that tend to blow apart the storms before they form and this year we have had another relatively inactive season as predicted because we anticipated an El Nino forming in the Pacific so what we've seen this year is right in line with with what we'd expect from El Nino now this doesn't necessarily have to do with this El Nino La Nina cycle but it's an interesting fact we're in a hurricane drought right now believe it or not it has been nine years since a major hurricane category three or higher has hit anywhere in the United States Wilma was the last one that hit South Florida back in 2005 and this shows that's by far the longest streak without a major hurricane in the historical record very similar thing for the state of Florida the state of Florida has not been hit by any hurricane of any strength since Wilma in 2005 again over nine years twice as long as any his other historical streak so it's just kind of an anomaly but we are in this hurricane drought I don't think we can read anything into it it's likely not to continue we're going to get hit sooner or later and we need to be prepared but let's get to the good stuff why is this El Nino La Nina cycle important to us in these changes in climate patterns because it has a direct impact on agricultural production here's one example this just taking the National Agricultural Statistics Service their historic County yield statistics for corn over a 50 or so year period and doing the same thing we do with the weather data we break it into the into the different categories whether you have El Nino or La Nina and we looked at the departures from normal for these corn yields county by county and we call them residuals that's a fancy term because there's also a trend to do to technology and and advancements in cultivars and things like that so these residuals are just a departure from that trend line but anyway when you have an El Nino in place corn yields are generally down from 10 to 35 percent over the entire southeast on the other hand when you have a La Nina or the warmer drier winters seem to increase corn yields across this whole southeast region and what we think is going on there is one these these agricultural statistics do not separate between irrigated and rain fed so for the La Nina case a lot of this corn is irrigated you have a warmer spring a lot more sunshine more solar radiation so you get a head on the growth curve and the yields just respond due to the increase in sunshine and earlier warm temperatures now that I don't know that this this measure is this important to corn and wheat production but it also has a big impact on the number of chill hours or chill accumulation during the winter time and that's very important for flowering fruits blueberries peaches strawberries things like that and as you'd expect when an El Nino is in place and we generally get these cooler wetter winters there's a there's a great 70 to 90 percent chance that you'll get less than the normal amount of chill hours for your region on the other hand a La Nina with the warmer drier winters there's only a 10 to 20 10 to 30 percent chance that you'll get less than normal so there's a really good chance that you'll get wait I'm saying that all backwards back up back up El Nino with the cooler wetter winters a great chance that you're going to get more than your normal chill accumulation that makes sense La Nina with the warmer drier there's a good chance that you will not reach your normal your or anticipated chill accumulation let's talk about some fun stuff let's talk about some recent events we had quite the chill here in November this shows morning low temperatures across the region on the morning of I believe it was November 20th 15 up here in Auburn 21 down in southeast Alabama 23 in Tallahassee this came close there was even some teens in north Florida and this came close to setting a record for the earliest occurrence of temperatures in the teens for the state of Florida missed it by two days but it was close to the record and it was certainly said a lot of daily records during this morning here's a really interesting graph from Monticello in north Florida right to the east of Tallahassee this shows the temperature at the agricultural fond station it dropped very quickly right after sunset reached 32 degrees about 6 30 that evening and did not rise above freezing until 9 o'clock the following morning over 14 and a half hours below freezing so good thing we don't have a lot of citrus production in north Florida I think it might have affected some satsuma growers around southern Alabama and north Florida but we also had very high dew points during this freeze it led to a heavy accumulation of frost or I call this north Florida snow because of that cold snap and some others it was actually one of the coldest November's on record for the southeast here's the historical rankings that the pinks are in the top five second coldest in Auburn southeast Alabama a lot of ones here in north Florida so very cold November and because of that and kind of are also kind of backs up our conceptual model of Al Nino this shows chill our accumulation this that Russell County Alabama just to our south I believe the orange line is the normal or average chill accumulation beginning at October 1st this line is what we've witnessed and you see we're well ahead of the normal curve almost twice as many chill hours as we normally would have at this time of the year so all that's good background but we really want to know what's happening this year so let's let's take a look and I'm I apologize some of these slides are going to get kind of complicated and technical but bear with me they tell a good story I told you it was the changes in winds over the western Pacific Ocean that kind of initiate in El Nino well this this graph shows near surface winds from back in February and March kind of a 30 day time period and you see a very strong and persistent westerly winds over here in the Pacific Ocean and this is a time longitude plot called a hovmular plot but the way to look at it is everywhere you have one of these orange blobs that's an occurrence of westerly winds over in that area of the Pacific Ocean and we can see one distinct episode and in January and early February another one in late February and March and yet another one in April so we had these three big episodes of westerly winds over the Pacific Ocean and that set in place a chain reaction of what we call a Kelvin wave where where the water below the surface actually the third the depth of the thermocline actually deep deepens as this Kelvin wave moves from Indonesia and Australia over to South America it takes about one and a half months for one of these waves to traverse the Pacific Ocean but here you see where it's finishing this journey and so now the water below the surface several hundred meters below the surface is much much warmer than it normally is and even at the surface you can see some warming initiating so that happened back in April and May it was such a strong Kelvin wave that a lot of scientists thought this might even be one of the big El Nino events but then during the summer the westerly winds stopped and the sea surface temperatures almost returned to normal well since then in the last couple months we've had a couple more weaker westerly wind events another weaker Kelvin wave but now the sea surface temperatures are really starting to respond this shows a sea surface temperature anomalies as of a week or so ago of one to two to even two and a half degrees Celsius starting to look like the classic El Nino signature there and if we look at this second from the top graph this is that same Nino 3.4 index that I showed you earlier and here you you can see how it was kind of cooler than normal in the Pacific back in the winter time then in April and May with that first Kelvin wave it warmed almost to that point five degree threshold then it kind of fell apart in July and August returned to normal but now it's kicking back in in full gear now the the Nino 3.4 index is up to one degree Celsius above normal well above the El Nino thresholds and it looks like it's going to persist for the next several months so with that said and with a week to moderate El Nino showing itself and being in place this is Noah's official climate outlook for the winter time December January and February and this shows their temperature outlook an increased chance of colder than normal temperatures across the southern U.S. again very consistent with what we know about El Nino our precipitation outlook an increased chance of above normal precipitation for the southwest Texas Florida in the southeast that same pattern I showed you on those maps earlier that showed the typical El Nino impacts there's you'll notice that same pattern so Noah is banking on this El Nino being in place all winter and influencing our winter climate patterns some other designs that El Nino's whether the sea surface temperatures said so or not that at least the atmosphere was responding like El Nino we did have a dry summer in the southeast actually Tallahassee had its record driest summer when you talk about June July and August the inactive Atlantic hurricane season the very active eastern Pacific hurricane season with the with the hurricanes hitting Baja Mexico and stuff that that's very consistent with El Nino this pineapple express that's kicking in in California again it shows that strong subtropical jet stream and tapping that moisture from the tropical Pacific I'm kind of saying El Nino's here we need to plan accordingly some of the other forecast centers are not fully on board yet Noah is still holding at a 65% chance that it'll be in place during the winter time the Australians who monitor this very closely they're a little more bullish at 70% Klaus Walter who's I respect greatly noted El Nino expert he's more confident than that he says 80 to 90% that it's here and will remain in place so I'll finish up here all this information on El Nino and climate variability can be found at aggroclimate.org shameless plug Brenda Ortiz has done a great job putting together several flyers on the impacts of El Nino on La Nina on our climate and even on corn and wheat in particular and some management options so I believe those are available in the other room on the I had to encourage you to pick them up and read through them and please visit aggroclimate.org contact your extension professional they can help you navigate the tools and get used to them but there is a whole host of information down to the county level on this climate variability and how this El Nino La Nina cycle affects our climate so that I'll wrap up and be glad to take any questions yes yeah I was on the fence or the whole science was for the last several months because it was it was like on again off again it was right there on the threshold but now now it looks like it's it's got some momentum it'll yeah it's a pretty sure bet that at least a week El Nino will be in place through the winter months