El Niño

The images and animations shown here are visualizations of the El Niño phenomenon that occurred in 1982 and 1997, two of the strongest El Niño events on record.


Sea Surface Temperature	Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies	Anomalies Composited with Outgoing Longwave Radiation

1982-84 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG 1995-97 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG Red regions represent warmer sea surface temperatures and blue regions cooler. Notice how the bands of color in the animations move with the changing seasons.	1982-84 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG 1995-97 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG Temperature anomalies represent the departure from normal sea surface temperatures. Red shows regions where the water is warmer than normal and blue shows regions where the water is cooler. El Niño shows up as the large red area off the West coast of South America.	1982-84 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG 1995-97 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG



Anomalies Composited with Outgoing Longwave Radiation & Raytraced	Anomalies Compared Across Two Periods	VRML

1982-84 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG 1995-97 QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG These images were created using raytracing to compute shadows and reflections and produce an artistic view of El Niño events.	QuickTime \| Real \| MPEG These images show a comparison between two large El Niño events. The first begins in Oct '81 and the second in Oct '96. As the El Niño event in the second animation begins to fade, a La Niña event begins to emerge in the early part of '98.	Also included here is a VRML representation of a subset of the imagery that provides interactive navigation through a VRML world.

Research Project
Science:	Atmospheric Science
Scientists:	Phil Arkin John Janowiak Richard W. Reynolds Diane C. Stokes
Animators:	Tim Scheitlin Don Middleton
Date Catalogued:	2002-08-05
Rights:	© 2002, UCAR, All rights reserved.