Arthur Fender C. Bucker

The warm El Niño current appears in the tropical Pacific every few years and reshuffles weather across the planet: drying fields in some places, flooding streets in others. Meteorologists have long tried to catch it early, but the ocean is too cunning: the cause hides not in a single spot but in a call-and-response between regions separated by thousands of kilometers.

The ocean resembles a giant web, where each thread connects distant points of water. When one spot warms, winds and currents change thousands of kilometers away. The neural network in this study wove such a web for the first time on its own to predict El Niño.