Eric Holthaus continues his entertaining El Nino coverage in Slate:

El Niño means the tropical Pacific is warmer than normal, which improves the chances that typhoons will form. This week, a series of typhoons on both sides of the equator are helping to reinforce a big burst of westerly winds along the equator. These westerly wind bursts are a hallmark of El Niño, and help push subsurface warm water toward the coast of South America. If enough warm water butts up against Peru, the normal cold water ocean current there can get shut off, exacerbating the pattern.

Exactly how this all gets kicked off is an area of active research, but it’s clear that big El Niños need deviant trade winds to maintain the feedback loop. During especially strong El Niños, like this year’s promises to be, the trade winds can sometimes reverse direction—and this week’s off-the-charts wind surge is at record-strengthfor so early in an El Niño event. Since all this takes place in the tropical Pacific Ocean—the planet’s biggest bathtub—a fully mature El Niño has the power to shift rainfall odds worldwide and boost global temperatures. That’s exactly what’s happening this year.

More El Nino coverage from Slate. It’s going to be the strongest since 1998! or 2010! or ever!

First off, it’s rapidly intensifying. El Niño is about self-reinforcing feedbacks between the ocean and the atmosphere, and from all accounts, this one has its foot on the accelerator pedal.

If it continues, the impacts will be felt around the globe—here’s my detailed rundown of what to expect. Among them: drought in Australia, Southeast Asia, and perhaps India, with flooding in Peru and Southern California.

Slate manages to make oceanography and climate change interesting. I think they sensationalize a bit, which is unnecessary because the story is compelling on its own merits. But I don’t see this kind of coverage anywhere else and I enjoy it. You could spend a month drilling down to all the links they provide. An excerpt:

The news comes amid increasingly confident forecasts that there will be a strengthening El Niño for the remainder of 2015, which could spark a litany of impacts worldwide, not the least of which is the more efficient transport of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere. That liberated heat from the Pacific Ocean should boost global temperatures to never-before-recorded levels, making 2015 the warmest year ever measured…

Besides El Niño, a more worrying, longer-term trend is also taking shape. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a decades-long periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that tends to favor bursts of accelerated global warming. As I wrote last October, the Pacific appears to be in the midst of a shift into a new warm phase that could last 20 years or so.

The PDO—or, “the blob” as it’s been referred to recently—is starting to freak out some scientists. There are emerging signs of a major shift in the Pacific Ocean’s food chain, including a dearth of plankton, tropical fish sightings near Alaska, and thousands of starving sea lion pups stranded on the California coast. As Earth’s largest ocean, what happens in the Pacific affects the weather virtually planet-wide, and that means an “imminent” jump in global warming may have already begun—spurred on by the PDO.

El Nino has officially arrived, according to Slate, and might be a particularly long and strong one.

El Niño transfers huge amounts of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere, and there are hints that this El Niño, combined with the already very warm global oceans, could bring about a new phase in global warming. An associated slow-moving indicator of Pacific Ocean temperatures, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, reached record levels in December and January. A persistently strong PDO is associated with cold winters in the East and drought in California—we’ve had both in abundance this year. Should the PDO stay strong, it’ll essentially join forces with El Niño and increase the odds that 2015 will rank as the warmest year on record globally. Last fall I wrote that a PDO signal like we’re currently seeing could kick off a surge of global warming over the next five to 10 years.

I don’t have the expertise to say whether this article is sensationalized or not, but it is interesting reading.

By the way, Slate, “The Slatest” is okay, but some of us are still waiting for you to bring back “Today’s Papers”, which was the greatest news summary ever because it would compare and contrast how different media outlets were covering the same story, way back before the Internet was even a thing. I haven’t seen anything like it since. It was “fair and balanced” indeed, and the world got a bit dumber the day it went away. So bring it back, please!