Brainstorm: El Niño - A Regulator in the Global Control Center

El Niño—ever heard of it, but never quite understood what it’s all about?

This episode is about one of the Earth’s most important climate phenomena: the El Niño–Southern Oscillation—ENSO for short. This system controls how the tropical Pacific changes and, as a result, affects the weather worldwide.

We explain El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña, using a simple analogy: an invisible “regulator” in the climate system. When this regulator shifts, the distribution of warm and cold water in the Pacific changes, affecting precipitation, storms, and temperatures—all over the world.

El Niño vividly demonstrates how closely the ocean and atmosphere are interconnected—and how a relatively small regulator in the Pacific can help shape the weather across the entire globe.