S. George Philander

Yeah, I mean, El Nino is kind of remarkable in that it is a global phenomenon.

George Philander, the famous climate scientist at Princeton University, who was a major scholar of El Nino, called it the trunk of the variability tree, right? And then scientists, what we do to the extent that we can identify characteristic elements oscillations in weather and climate around the world and identify its spatiotemporal extent right el nino is a phenomenon that manifests in the tropical pacific and we can measure it as a phenomena over these particular regions and then we know it has these physical connections to generating rainfall here or drought over there and these are kind of canonical teleconnections as we call all of them.

But to the extent where we can identify this thing as a coherent pattern, an oscillation that reemerges uniquely in time and identify the impacts associated with it, it goes from being kind of a source of uncertainty to being a source of predictability.

You had mentioned, you know, the importance of El Nino in kind of determining fisheries catches for, you know, anchovies and sardines off of, you know, Peru's coast.

And El Niño is akin to a wave phenomena, right? It is kind of a, a pattern, uh, what we call a mode of variability.

George Philander, who's this Princeton geophysicist and, and major scholar of El Niño, called El Niño the trunk of the variability tree when it comes to climate variation in terms of kind of regulating these pulses of energy redistribution around our planet.

And so, you know, a phenomena like El Niño being modal, meaning it has a canonical pattern temporally and spatially, and then induces physical responses that we can characterize and use as a means of prediction, right? Like, we know what we should expect for Peru.

We know what we should expect for Australia.