"State of the Climate System"
Ben Cook and Jimmy Booth


        With much of the research at GISS focused on understanding future and past climate change, 
the current state of affairs in the climate system often falls off our radar.  Then someone at a cocktail party 
finds out what we study, or a former colleague who went into energy policy calls, and wants to know how 
all of these weather events relate to climate change. While we can't definitively answer this yet, we can 
attempt to contextualize the current state of the climate in terms of the predominant teleconnection 
patterns. That is what we will try to do in this seminar, with a focus on teleconnections that affect NYC 
weather.

        Teleconnections are long distance temporal relationships in the earth system, some of which can 
be helpful in producing seasonal forecasts.  We will summarize the teleconnections associated with the El 
Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), and the North Atlantic 
Oscillation (NAO).  Then, we discuss the weather and climate anomalies of the past six months in the 
context of these teleconnection patterns. We also look to the future, discussing which teleconnections have 
been useful for seasonal prediction and why.  Finally we will tell you exactly how much snow will fall on 
New Year's Eve, in each of the 5 boroughs, separately.