We’ve all heard about El Nino over the years and how it can affect weather patterns, but it can be a bit tricky to understand the relationship between all of the elements involved in it. According to Fabius Maximus, a monster El Nino may be coming this year.
George at MyReadingMapped has put together some great maps to try to explain it.
In George’s words:
This documentary,in the form of a Google Map, accounts for everything you want to know about the El Niño Zone in a Google Map. Like weather changes, the Galapagos volcanic hotspot, changes in Thermohaline Circulation from Deep Current to Surface Current, the Westerly Winds, the submarine topography, disease outbreaks, food shortages, famine and cultural uprisings. I created this map because I discovered that no map to date put all the factors listed above together in one image. You can even compare today’s weather in the zone by turning on the weather feature in Google Map as shown below.
You can check out the map for yourself on his site or you can grab this KML file
to see it inside of Google Earth.
Great work, George!
About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
Thanks for the link. However, to clarify — I link to a wide range of amateurs making bold claims about the near-certainty of a “monster” or “super” El Nino. I also link to wide range of climate scientists making far smaller predictions, with emphasis on the difficulty of making reliable forecasts this side of the “Spring barrier”.
It’s a lesson about the importance of relying on good sources, and avoiding the increasingly popular “climate porn”.