THE 1997-98 EL NIÑO ATLAS OF OCEANOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS ALONG THE WEST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA

Composite Horizontal Distributions

We present the horizontal distributions of temperature, salinity, and nitrate at 50 m for January, April and August 1998. The difference between these fields and the corresponding average conditions reported by the National Oceanographic Data Center (Antonov et al., 1998; Boyer et al., 1998; Conkright et al., 1998) are also included. Monthly averages for temperature and salinity were used but only a seasonal average is available for nitrate.  We have chosen 50 m depth as it corresponds to the level of maximum temperature anomaly difference.  We have also included the geopotential thickness distributions of the upper 500 dbar.