NASA maps El Nino’s shift on US precipitation

This winter, areas across the globe experienced a shift in rain patterns due to the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño. A new NASA visualization of rainfall data shows the various changes in the United States with wetter, wintery conditions in parts of California and across the East Coast.

“During an El Niño, the precipitation averaged out over the entire globe doesn’t change that much, but there can be big changes to where it happens. You end up with this interesting observation where you get both floods and droughts just by taking the usual precipitation pattern and doing a shift,” said George Huffman, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.