La Niña's exit leaves climate forecasts in limbo
Thursday, June 30, 2011 - 16:31
in Earth & Climate
It's what Bill Patzert, a climatologist and oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to call a "La Nada" -- that puzzling period between cycles of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean when sea surface heights in the equatorial Pacific are near average.