Visualizations by
Cheng Zhang
Released on April 18, 2016
Atmospheric river is one of good indicators of El Niño. This animation shows the activities of atmospheric river in January 2016, mainly through three datasets - precipitation, water vapor, and cloud. Precipitation is showed in green-to-red for liquid precipitation and blue-to-purple for frozen precipitation (please see the color bars below), which is from IMERG. Water vapor (from MERRA 2) is illustrated in light blue color. Cloud (from GOES 15) is pictured in white.