Never miss an update – get breaking news delivered straight to your desktop or mobile phone.
It might sound like an obscure football play, but the Madden-Julian Oscillation (or MJO for short) is actually a type of atmospheric variability that influences the location and strength of tropical precipitation. And it’s part of the reason we’ve suddenly had so many systems to track in the Atlantic this week.
In short, a MJO is a disturbance at the top of the atmosphere that can cause upward motion in the atmosphere. When this upward motion is enhanced over a given spot in the tropics, thunderstorm activity there gets an assist and makes the possibility of tropical storms forming more likely. Such bursts of activity are most common in August and September when lower-atmospheric conditions such as wind shear and humidity are usually more favorable for development.
Ready To Learn More? Here Are Some Recent Weather Words You May Have Missed:
You can find our entire archive of Weather Words here.
The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.
