Zhibo Zhang, professor of physics, has been named director of the Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute (GPHI), UMBC’s arm of the Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER). PHaSER, a multi-institution consortium led by Catholic University of America, contributes to NASA’s Heliophysics Science Division at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) through research on the Sun, its processes, and space weather, which can affect planet Earth and human technologies. 

NASA allocated $10 million to UMBC in 2021 under its $64.1 million PHaSER award, underscoring the university’s contributions to heliophysics research and building on more than thirty years of successful collaboration between UMBC and GSFC, located in Greenbelt, Maryland. 

“My first priority is to support GPHI faculty and help enable the outstanding science and engineering they carry out at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,” Zhang says. “At the same time, I hope GPHI can serve as a stronger bridge between NASA and UMBC by connecting GPHI faculty with UMBC research resources, collaboration and funding opportunities, and with students and faculty who can expand our collective capacity and open doors to bigger, cross-cutting ideas.”

Zhang follows Jan Merka, who has served as the inaugural GPHI director since 2011. As director, Zhang will continue in his faculty role at UMBC, advancing his team’s research on atmospheric dust’s influence on climate and remaining deeply committed to teaching and mentoring. His guidance of undergraduate and graduate students has helped multiple students secure the prestigious NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) Fellowship and other awards, including the 2025 Elsevier/JQSRT Richard M. Goody Award, fostering the next generation of scientists.

“We are very proud of the fact that UMBC is currently ranked as the #11 institution in the nation in NASA expenditures,” say Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research and creative achievement. “Zhibo Zhang is an outstanding colleague with a broad set of relevant expertise and experiences who will provide important leadership to GPHI and to our partnership with Catholic University under PHaSER. I know that he is the right leader to strengthen our relationship with NASA, building on over three decades of successful cooperative partnership between UMBC and NASA Goddard.”

Written by Bob Leamon, research scientist, Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER), UMBC

El Niño is officially here, and while it’s still weak right now, federal forecasters expect this global disrupter of worldwide weather patterns to gradually strengthen.

That may sound ominous, but El Niño – Spanish for “the little boy” – is not malevolent, or even automatically bad.

Here’s what forecasters expect, and what it means for the U.S.

What is El Niño?

El Niño is a climate pattern that starts with warm water building up in the tropical Pacific west of South America. This happens every three to seven years or so. It might last a few months or a couple of years.

Normally, the trade winds push warm water away from the coast there, allowing cooler water to surface. But when the trade winds weaken, water near the equator can heat up, and that can have all kinds of effects through what are known as teleconnections. The ocean is so vast – covering approximately one-third of the planet, or about 15 times the size of the U.S. – that those sloshings of warm water have knock-on effects around the globe.

That warming at the equator during El Niño leads to the warming of the stratosphere, starting about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) above the surface. Scientists are still studying how exactly this teleconnection occurs.

At the same time, the lower tropical stratosphere cools.

That combination can shift the upper-level winds known as the jet stream, which blow from west to east. Altering the jet stream can affect all kinds of weather variables, from temperatures to storms and winds that can tear hurricanes apart.

Basically, what happens in the Pacific doesn’t stay in the Pacific.

So, what does all that mean for you and me?

With apologies to Charles Dickens, El Niño tends to create a tale of two regions: the best of times for some, and the worst of times for others.

On average, El Niño years are warmer globally than La Niña years – El Niño’s opposite. Globally, a strong El Niño can boost temperatures by about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit (0.4 Celsius). But in North America, there is a lot of local variation.

El Niño years tend to be warmer across the northern part of the U.S. and in Canada, and the Pacific Northwest and Ohio Valley are often drier than usual in the winter and fall. The Southwest, on the other hand, tends to be cooler and wetter than average.

El Niño typically shifts the jet stream farther south, so it blows pretty much due west to east over the southern U.S. That shift tends to block moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, reducing the fuel for thunderstorms in the Southeast. La Niña, conversely, is associated with a more wavy and northward-shifted jet stream, which can enhance severe weather activity in the South and Southeast.

El Niño also affects hurricanes, but in different ways in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Over the Atlantic, El Niño tends to increase wind shear – the change in wind speed with height in the atmosphere – which can tear apart hurricanes. But El Niño has the opposite effect in the eastern Pacific, where it can mean more storms. The ocean heat can also raise the risk of marine heat waves that can devastate corals and ecosystems fish rely on.

In the middle of the U.S., El Niño is generally associated with warmer and drier conditions that can mildly increase the chances of a bountiful corn crop.

In contrast, El Niño can wreak havoc on crops in Southern Africa and Australia and increase Australia’s fire risk with dangerously dry conditions. Brazil and northern South America also tend to be drier, while parts of Argentina and Chile tend to be wetter.

Of course, just because this is normally what happens doesn’t mean it happens every time. Witness California’s record rainfalls from multiple atmospheric rivers at the end of the last La Niña, which normally would mean dry conditions.

Every weather event is somewhat different, so the influence of El Niño is a matter of probability, not certainty. How El Niño and La Niña will be influenced over time by climate change isn’t yet clear.

The forecasts don’t all agree

Is 2023 going to be a record-breaking year? That’s the multibillion-dollar question.

The National Weather Service declares the onset of El Niño when water temperatures are at least 0.9 F (0.5 C) above normal for a three-month period in what’s known as the Niño3.4 region. That’s a large imaginary rectangle south of Hawaii along the equator.

For a strong El Niño, the Niño3.4 region needs to warm by 2.7 F (1.5 C) for three months. It’s not clear as of right now whether this El Niño will meet that threshold this year.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s first El Niño advisory of the year, released on June 8, sees an 84% chance of El Niño being greater than moderate by winter and a 56% chance that it will be strong.

Those forecasts can change, though, and different forecasting methods offer different forecasts of the magnitude.

“Dynamical” models, similar to the models used for typical weather forecasts, have projected a very strong El Niño, whereas “static” or statistical models are far less optimistic. Personally, I’m a statistical modeler, and my own model doesn’t suggest a strong El Niño in 2023. Rather, my model – like other static models – predicts that 2023 will fizzle out, and after a couple of quiet, or neutral, years, we will see a strong El Niño in 2026. I did get the recent unusual “triple dip” La Niña right, but I’m willing to be proved wrong by observations, as any good scientist should be.

But no computer model of any flavor has had experience with the globally super-high ocean temperatures that are occurring right now. The Atlantic is unusually warm, and that could offset some of the usual forces that come with El Niño.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Ever since humans could first observe sunspots about 400 years ago, we’ve been using them to try to define the solar cycle. Approximately every 11 years, solar activity such as sunspots and solar flares ebbs and flows, causing changes to weather patterns on Earth and occasionally threatening telecommunications. Predicting these changes reliably could help everyone from farmers to the military.  

Traditionally, scientists have used the concept of a “solar minimum,” when solar activity is reduced, to mark the beginning of each cycle. But the “solar minimum” framework is somewhat arbitrary and imprecise, explains Robert Leamon, research scientist at the Partnership for Heliophysics and Space Environment Research (PHaSER), a UMBC partnership with NASA.

Leamon led new research showing that a “solar clock” based on the sun’s magnetic field, rather than the presence or absence of sunspots, can precisely describe and predict many key changes throughout the solar cycle. The new framework offers a significant improvement over the traditional sunspot method, because it can predict surges in dangerous solar flares or changing weather trends years in advance.

Specifically, the new research, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, shows that the solar cycle operates as a distinct sequence of events. Notable, and sometimes abrupt, changes occur at each one-fifth of a cycle. That’s true regardless of the exact length of a given cycle, which can vary by several months to a year. In a nod to music enthusiasts, Leamon and colleagues call it a “circle of fifths.”

Finding the landmarks

The new paper by Leamon, Scott McIntosh, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Alan Title, at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, builds on work by Leamon, McIntosh, and Daniel Marsh, also at NCAR, published in 2020. That paper demonstrated the existence of a solar cycle phenomenon the research team dubbed “the terminator.” 

The sun’s magnetic field changes direction each solar cycle, but there is overlap between consecutive cycles. The sun’s magnetic field is sometimes called the polar field, because it either points to one of the sun’s poles or the other. A terminator marks when the previous cycle’s polar field has completely disappeared from the sun’s surface, and is quickly followed by a dramatic rise in solar activity.

The new paper points to additional landmarks along the journey through a full solar cycle from terminator to terminator. These landmarks are clearer and more consistent than using sunspots as a guide to cycle length. For example, “The max number of sunspots doesn’t quite align with when the polar field reverses, but the polar field reversal happens at exactly one-fifth of the cycle going from terminator to terminator,” Leamon says.

At two-fifths of a cycle, dark areas called “polar coronal holes” re-form at the sun’s poles. At three-fifths of a cycle, the last X-flare, a class of very large and potentially dangerous solar flares, occurs. At four-fifths, sunspots are at a minimum—but this landmark is less consistent. And then the sun passes through another terminator, after which solar activity rapidly picks up again. Other phenomena, such as UV emissions, also line up nicely on the fifths.

Symptoms and causes

The team picked out patterns in data collected daily by two ground-based observatories. The Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, Canada has measured solar radio flux, which serves as a useful proxy for solar activity, daily since 1947. The Wilcox Solar Observatory at Stanford University has collected daily measurements of magnetic fields on the sun’s surface since 1975. 

Once the team noticed the changes that occur at exactly one-fifth of a cycle, they asked, “How many different solar things can we look at? And then we realized they all overlap on this same set of fifths,” Leamon says. Different parameters shift at different points on the cycle, but “everything is tied to these five landmarks.”

This new theory of a solar clock changes the focus from sunspots to shifts in magnetic field. “It’s almost like symptoms and causes,” Leamon says. While sunspots are an important symptom, the magnetic field is the underlying cause driving the solar cycle.

The longest threads

This shift in framework improves researchers’ ability to predict events in the solar cycle more precisely and further in advance, which gives people like satellite operators time to make preparations as needed based on predicted solar activity. Once observatories detect an initial polar field reversal, the precise length of the first fifth of the cycle is set. That means the timing of the other fifths (and their associated events) is a simple matter of multiplication.

The new framework also puts tighter bounds on the period within the cycle when severe flares are expected, which is useful information for people on Earth. Rather than a gradual shift from minimum to maximum activity, the period from terminator to about three-fifths of a cycle seems to be the peak period for flares, with a rapid drop-off after that point until the next terminator. The current cycle began after a terminator in December 2021, and the new framework predicts the last major flares should occur in mid-2027. 

Leamon points to a quote by physicist Richard Feynman to explain the value of a theory like this one, that accounts for many variables within a system. “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry,” Feynman said. Leamon and colleagues’ new theory is an example of one of these long threads—precisely predicting many aspects of the solar cycle with a single, simple parameter, and making it easier for humans to be ready for changes driven by the sun.