If you don’t know El Niño now, you will soon.
The waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean are heating up, scientists say, building towards a strong El Niño event that could rival the intensity of the record 1997 event that wreaked weather-related havoc across the globe, from mudslides in California to fires in Australia.
According to the latest forecast released Thursday by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, this year’s El Niño is “significant and strengthening.”
“There is a greater than 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16, and around an 85% chance it will last into early spring 2016,” the NOAA said in a statement.
Bill Patzert, a climatologist for the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, told the Los Angeles Times that it had the potential to be the “Godzilla El Niño.”
The weather phenomenon largely became a part of the public vernacular during the 1997 El Niño. It caused devastating flooding in the western U.S. and drought in Indonesia. It was blamed for deadly virus outbreaks in Africa and rising coffee prices around the world.
But what is El Niño, and what impact will it have this time around? Let us explain.
What is El Niño and what causes one?
El Niño is a warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, mainly along the Equator — see the thick red belt in the satellite photo, which indicates waters that are warmer than normal.
These warmer waters are normally confined to the western Pacific by winds that blow from east to west, pushing the warmer water toward Indonesia and Australia.
But during an El Niño, the winds slow down and can even reverse direction, allowing the warmer water to spread eastward all the way to South America.
El Niños occur every two to seven years in varying intensity, and the waters of the eastern Pacific can be up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than usual.
What happens when there’s an El Niño?
A strong El Niño heats up the atmosphere and changes circulation patterns around the globe, especially the jet stream over the Pacific, which becomes stronger and dumps more frequent and intense storms over the western U.S., especially California. It also means more rain for the west coast of South America.
But the atmosphere is somewhat of a zero-sum game. More rain in North and South America comes at the expense of normally rainy Southern Asia and Australia, which become abnormally dry and experience droughts.
A strong El Niño also influences cyclone seasons around the planet. The warmer the East Pacific is, the more hurricanes it gets. The Atlantic Ocean sees fewer hurricanes, however, a result of increased upper level winds that prevent hurricanes from developing, which is why officials are predicting a calm 2015 hurricane season in the U.S.
The Western Pacific, on the other hand, tends to see more and stronger typhoons, which may explain why there have already been 5 super typhoons there in 2015. Normally there’s only one by this point in the year.
The weather isn’t the only thing that’s affected. Warmer surface waters in the eastern Pacific drive away the coldwater fish that are the backbone of the fishing industry in much of Latin America. It was here that the phenomenon was first noticed by fishermen, who named it “El Niño” — meaning “little boy” or “Christ child” in Spanish — since it would often appear around Christmas.
Will this El Niño be worse than 1997?
Credit: CNN
Credit to Kfor.com
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