> One important player is the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), a disturbance of clouds and rain in the tropics that circles the globe in roughly 30 to 60 days.

> One important player is the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO), a disturbance of clouds and rain in the tropics that circles the globe in roughly 30 to 60 days. This puts a name to something I was observing in Apple Weather these past few months (I’ve been spending some time in there just observing weather, partly due to Dark Sky shutting down and partly due to the onslaught of storms that hit us). If you spend enough time observing a radar map of weather around the globe, what becomes apparent is the source of a lot of water. A lot of the “atmospheric rivers” that hit California appeared to have their origins southeast of the Philippines. Actually there’s a lot of crazy weather going on between Northern Australia and Southern China. You’ll also see this nearly contiguous belt of rain just circumnavigating along the Equator from West to East. Notable stops along this route if you don’t know your Equatorial geography include Tanzania where Mt. Kilimanjaro is, Lake Victoria which is the source of the Nile, most of the World’s Rainforests, the Andes which are functionally this enormous moisture trap that turns most of eastern South America into this giant drainage basin, and interesting enough that little spot southeast of the Philippines that seemed to be continuously feeding the storms that hit the West Coast in North America. This is apparently Madden-Julian oscillation and taking a quick glance at the Wikipedia page, that appears to be exactly what I was looking at. If I were looking in the Summer, I might have seen a connection to the monsoon season in India because it is apparently linked to those too via its oscillations. This is neat. This is the best article to hit Hacker News today since it taught me something new.