So for viewers and listeners who might not be familiar with them, can you describe exactly how we sort of encapsulate a marine heat wave and why they matter?

Yeah.

So marine heat waves at the most basic level are exactly what they sound like.

It's a heat wave that's happening in the ocean as opposed to on land.

And typically, the way that we define a marine heat wave is anytime the ocean is warmer than about 90% of the days before it.

So if it's over what we call the 90th percentile, for a certain amount of time, we declare a marine heat wave.

Um, and the difference, one major difference between a marine heat wave and a land heat wave is that they can last a lot longer than what you experience on land.

And so let's talk about why there is such a connection between what's happening in the Pacific, even if it's far, far away from land, but how it can ultimately influence the weather over the continent.

Okay.

An El Niño is essentially just an anomalous warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

So just to orient you where that is, we have South America, which is along the equatorial strip, and, um, western South America, you can see Peru, and, you know, just offshore you can see, um, the Galapagos Islands, and that is what we call the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

When that part of the world gets warmer than normal, and by normal I mean, you know, anything warmer than, you know, one or two degrees Celsius more than normal, um, that's what we call an El Niño.

And that may not sound like a lot.

That's anything like two to four, maybe five degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, that oceanic strip.

Um, but that impact, that, that heating happens over thousands of square kilometers.

Right