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La Niña begins to fade
April 22, 1999
The cold pool of water in the Pacific known as "La Niña"
is beginning to fade,
but ocean conditions have not returned to normal, according to scientists studying new
images from the U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon satellite.
New imagery of sea-surface heights taken this month by the ocean-observing
satellite show cooler temperatures and lower sea levels across the equatorial Pacific
Ocean (seen in blue and purple in the center of the image) are diminishing, which
indicates that the equatorial Pacific is slowly returning to normal.
However, in the north and south Pacific Ocean, temperatures and sea level remain
high (seen in red and white), a pattern that began many months ago. In a nutshell, this
means that although La Nina is fading, heat distribution in the Pacific Ocean remains
dramatically out of balance.
The TOPEX/Poseidon mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for
NASA's Office of Earth Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California
Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.
For more information, please visit the TOPEX/Poseidon project
web page at
http://topex-www.jpl.nasa.gov/
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