Last winter the center of the United States and the Western Europe witnessed one of the coldest winters of the last twenty years with extremely low temperatures and heavy snowfall. According to some scientists (1) this anomaly was caused by the combination of these two factors: the phenomenon of "El Nino" and a negative phase of the North Atlantic circulation (-NAO, an acronym in English). know that El Niño is characterized by the displacement of warm surface waters to the eastern tropical Pacific, disrupting the ocean-atmosphere system, causing climate changes in many parts of the world (see previous articles on this phenomenon in this section).
The North Atlantic Oscillation, unlike the previous one (El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)), is a phenomenon only atmospheric produced by a fluctuation in the pressure difference between the area of \u200b\u200bthe Azores anticyclone and the low pressures of Iceland, which mainly affects the climate of Western Europe. The dominant pattern of recent years has been the a positive phase (+ NAO) characterized by the predominance of westerly winds, warm and humid, resulting in mild winters and wet summers in central Europe and the ocean shore, and at the same time, a decrease snowfall in the Scandinavian countries. An example of this are the fronts that regularly affect the Cantabrian coast and the British Isles.
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