NOAA

This is the place to find a wonderfully thorough description of El Niño and all that comes with it. Coupled with the " What is an El Niño?" site, both produced by the same group, a user gets a complete description of El Niño and a wide array of coordinated illustrations.

NOAA

A bit more technical for the average Joe. The site gives a background description for what El Niño is plus a wide variety of links to the real time data to support the concepts described. Many of the real time links are to technical sites, not educational based sites, offering little background on how to read and/or interpret the information. With a little bit of time and research, the data proves very useful and beneficial to the understanding of the El Niño event.

NASA: Goddard Space Flight Center

Goddard has complied brilliant graphics to show the progress of El Niño from January 1997 through March 1998. The areas covered are temperature beneath the sea, temperature anomalies beneath the sea, sea surface temperature comparisons, sea-surface height anomalies, and sea surface temperature anomalies. The graphics come from NASA's TOPEX/Poseidon satellite. Also, quick time movies can be downloaded to illustrate the phenomena.

NASA: Goddard Space Flight Center

The primer was based on a very good idea. The site opens with a welcome, and then moves page-by-page under the users control through the use of a " next " button. Each page covers a concept related to El Niño and has a very clear, helpful picture/diagram illustrating the concept. By allowing the user to go at their own pace, they are able to reach comprehension of one area before being bombarded with another area.

NASA: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

This site has a list of amazing animations a user can preview. Depending on how much time a user has, there are several movies listed that range from 150k to 2MB of memory. The animations are of sea-surface height data collected from the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite over a year and a half time period, December of 1996 to June of 1998.