El Niño / La Niña

El Niño and La Niña are the oceanic components while the Southern Oscillation is the atmospheric counterpart, thus giving rise to the term El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Though ENSO is a single climate phenomenon, it has three phases – El Niño, La Niña and Neutral. 

El Niño, meaning “boy child” in Spanish, was first used some centuries ago by fishermen in Peru and Ecuador to refer to the unusually warm waters that reduced their catch just before Christmas. The opposite of El Niño is La Niña, which means “little girl” and refers to the large-scale cooling of the ocean surface temperatures in the same region, coupled with a reversal of the atmospheric conditions. 

Read more at https://wmo.int/topics/el-nino-la-nina

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