Hurricane Patricia and El Nino

uperjim

Member
Is a massive Hurricane (like the one we are seeing now in the Pacific) capable of altering the strength/intensity of an El Nino?
 

xsledder

Active member
My question is if the storm tracks through Chicago could it be strong enough to pull cold air down from Canada?
 
G

G

Guest
A massive hurricane is going to wreck a dock or two in Mexico but it will not change the temp of the ocean water. It is the increased temps of the water that create an El Nino.
 

hockeylover86

New member
Interesting that the models have the storm track coming up over MI.

More amazing is the records it has been setting, pressure is 25.98" at the center.... crazy.
 

Admin

Administrator
Staff member
It is a pretty big storm and incredibly powerful. Hurricanes can cool the water that they pass over, but not to the extent that it would impact the El Nino. The storm pales in size comparison to the area of the ocean impacted by El Nino. Also, there are mechanisms in place that generate the El Nino, some known and some not, but the bottom line is, even cooling an area with an El Nino going on would be temporary, with the warmer water being regenerated. I guess the best comparison I could give as to the temporary cooling effect would be dropping a snowflake into a shallow dish of water. There would be measurable cooling, If you had the right instruments to measure at that scale, but overall, would be very small.

Post tropical systems do not pull down cold air. Sometimes they can join forces with a mid-latitude storm, such was the case with Sandy out east a few years ago, but they only add moisture and energy to such a system, not pull down cold air.

-John
 

frnash

Active member
And the line of storms currently moving across east TX into southwest AR looks like the residue from the deep low pressure center (a.k.a. "tropical storm wannabe") that traveled from offshore San Diego across southern California (where it caused a huge downpour and mudslides along the "grapevine" on I-5 near Tejon Pass & Gorman, and ditto along SR58 near Mojave, CA — even delivering ~ 0.20" of rain on two successive days in Death Valley(!) — then into AZ, where it did a "sit and spin", dumping 3 days of rain over SW/south central AZ (in October??? :eek:) before moving on into NM and TX.

Hey, if I wanted weather like this I'd have died and moved to "Loozy Anna"! :mad:
 
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