The Effects of Warm Water on the Weather

During an El Nino, a big blob of warm water moves across the Pacific Ocean. This affects how strong the winds across the equator are and can reverse the temperature gradient. So there's this shift of this blob of heat that happens on quite long timescales. And basically if the winds get too strong, they'll eventually kind of counter themselves and flip back to the other phase. It's a self-correcting loop up to a point. But we're still doing a lot of research on this topic and we don't have a perfect answer yet...