El Niño: 1997 vs. 2015

Interest in the present developing 2015 El Niño is high. Here we provide side by side comparisons of Pacific Ocean sea surface height (SSH) anomalies of what is presently happening in 2015 with the Pacific Ocean signal during the famous 1997 El Niño. These 1997 and 2015 El Niño animations were made from data collected by the TOPEX/Poseidon (1997) and the OSTM/Jason-2 (2015) satellites. Jason-2 continues to provide an uninterrupted time-series that originated in 1992 with TOPEX/Poseidon. TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2 is use space-based radar altimetry to collect sea surface height data of all the world's oceans. Here, these images are processed to highlight the interannual signal of SSH. The mean signal, seasonal signal, and the trend have been removed.