DURHAM, N.C. — Everyone’s heard about El Niño. But few people outside scientific circles understand how it works. Or why the naturally occurring event – which raises ocean surface temperatures a few degrees Celsius for sustained periods every two to eight years in a remote stretch of the tropical Central Pacific – can cause such big changes in weather patterns across the globe.

Nicholas School of the Environment PhD candidate Taichiro Sakagami aims to change this.

Sakagami has created a series of four animated videos, each between four and nine minutes long, that use outputs from scientific ocean models to illustrate – in thorough but easy-to-understand terms – how El Niño works, and why its effects are so far-reaching.

He’s posted his videos on the online video-sharing site, YouTube, at .

Sakagami created the videos because he feels that, at a time of increased concern about climate change and other environmental issues, scientists have a responsibility to share their expertise broadly.

“Scientists have to learn to distribute their outputs and findings to the general public, not just to scientific journals,” he says.

He chose to make videos about El Niño, because he says it’s a topic with widespread appeal and relevance. El Niño events cause changes in weather patterns across the globe and are usually heavily reported in the mainstream press, however most people still really don’t know a lot about the phenomena.

For the last 18 months, Sakagami has worked with his advisor, Richard Barber, Harvey W. Smith Professor Emeritus of Biological Oceanography at the 51 Marine Lab, and with Rachel Brady, adjunct associate professor of computer science, to develop and produce the four educational animations, using outputs from ocean models.

In March, he posted the videos to YouTube, and has since had more than 120 hits – a respectable number for videos on such a seemingly “scientific” topic.

Sakagami says the target audience for his videos is anyone from students interested in ocean sciences to veteran researchers at organizations like NOAA and NASA. He hopes animations like his will help people better understand what is happening in the world’s oceans, and encourage other scientists to make their data more accessible to the general public, too.

“Right now it’s easy to create animations (like these) because we can easily get the software, and we have the infrastructure to distribute the animations online through websites like YouTube,” he says.

Ocean models are computer programs that scientists use to simulate real-world conditions of the ocean and investigate the effects that different factors might have on them. Scientists use the models to study many different things, including temperature change, ocean circulation and coastal erosion.

While model outputs may be beautiful to look at in some cases, they’re usually hard to explain to anybody who hasn’t studied ocean dynamics, Sakagami says. But by tweaking them here and there, and adding explanatory graphics and text, they can become highly effective and eye-catching educational tools – the perfect vehicles for sharing, and explaining, complex scientific data or concepts with mainstream audiences.

“We think ocean models are good enough to use and show beyond the modeler’s world, and we want to use these modeling outputs for educational purposes,” he says. “We want to do something better than the animation created by the models themselves.”