One of the strongest ever La Niña events has been blamed for the catastrophic flooding affecting the southern hemisphere, according to the latest NASA data.
Satellite data recorded by the US space agency indicates the current La Niña event in the eastern Pacific has remained the strongest on record for the past two months.
A new Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite image of the Pacific Ocean that averaged 10 days of data has just been released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.
"The solid record of La Niña strength only goes back about 50 years and this latest event appears to be one of the strongest ones over this time period," said Climatologist Bill Patzert of JPL. "It is already impacting weather and climate all around the planet."
"Although exacerbated by precipitation from a tropical cyclone, rainfalls of historic proportion in eastern Queensland, Australia, have led to levels of flooding usually only seen once in a century," said David Adamec, Oceanographer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
"The copious rainfall is a direct result of La Niña’s effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical Australia particularly rainy this year."
The new image depicts places where the Pacific sea surface height is near-normal, higher (warmer) than normal and lower (cooler) than normal. The cooler-than normal pool of water that stretches from the eastern to the central Pacific Ocean is a hallmark of a La Niña event.
Earth's ocean is the greatest influence on global climate. Only from space can researchers observe the vast ocean on a global scale and monitor critical changes in ocean currents and heat storage.
Continuous data from satellites like OSTM/Jason-2 help agencies like NASA understand and foresee the effects of ocean changes on our climate and on climate events such as La Niña and El Niño.
The latest report from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) noted that "A moderate-to-strong La Niña continued during December 2010 as reflected by well below-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across the equatorial Pacific Ocean."
The CPC report said that La Niña is expected to continue well into the Northern Hemisphere through spring 2011.
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