Fig. 5: Hydrodynamic and morphological responses to ENSO phases and El Niño flavors during winter (1997–2022) along the NAWC.
From: Waterline responses to climate forcing along the North American West Coast
Composites of hydrodynamic and morphological responses to (a–c) ENSO phases and (d–f) the strongest El Niño events during winter (DJF) over 1997–2022. The figure shows spatial distributions of winter waterline position anomalies changes relatively to the summer (JJA) and wave power anomalies (scaled by their standard deviation), along with 200 hPa eddy kinetic energy (EKE) contours, proxy for storminess and storm tracks position. Waterline position anomalies are scaled by their seasonal cycle amplitude to highlight the magnitude of the anomalies relative to the seasonal cycle. The definition of ENSO phases and flavors, based on values of MEI, EP, and CP indexes100, is detailed in the Methods section. The background map was generated using Python’s mpl_toolkits.basemap library.
