METEO 241 Portfolio #2: The 1982-83 El Nino and how it's increased precipitation amounts over California and the Gulf Coast States affected the amounts of Outgoing Long-wave Radiation (OLR) between December 1, 1982 and February 28, 1983

George R. Kasica
METEO 241 Portfolio #2: The 1982-83 El Nino and how it's increased precipitation amounts over California and the Gulf Coast States affected the amounts of Outgoing Long-wave Radiation (OLR) between December 1, 1982 and February 28, 1983

(Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) anomaly plot for the period December 1, 1982 through February 28, 1983 courtesy of ERSL's Monthly/Seasonal Composite Web page click small image for full size image)

(Annotated outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) anomaly plot for the period December 1, 1982 through February 28, 1983 courtesy of ERSL's Monthly/Seasonal Composite Web page click small image for full size image)

In the above pair of images you can see that the effect of the increased precipitation we saw in section five on the amounts of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) levels. As you can see from looking at the annotated image on the right, the levels were lower than normally seen for the period December through February as a result of the higher amount of clouds and higher amounts of precipitation. Both of these tend to lead to lower amounts of outgoing longwave radiation as the image shows.