Climatologists are calling this year’s El Nino “massive,” “incredibly strong,” and “record breaking,” and all the descriptions are apt because this El Nino has turned out to be a real hum-dinger.
The current El Nino easily smashed the previous record set in 1997-1998 and is already wrecking havoc around the globe. The new figures indicate the effects will only get worse. It is possibly climate change making the unusually strong impacts of El Nino all the more likely. The 1997-1998 El Niño killed 20,000 people and caused almost $97 billion in damage worldwide.
The El Nino climate pattern, characterized by abnormal warming in the equatorial Pacific Ocean has already impacted a large number of weather events around the planet, from an abnormally quiet Atlantic hurricane season to an abnormally busy Pacific hurricane season.
From Australia and New Zealand, to North America and the Mid-East, and all points in between, droughts replaced the rainy seasons or torrential rains have caused massive flooding and landslides. Weather patterns have been turned upside-down.
A key factor in this year’s El Nino makes it a record breaker
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), along with other climatology agencies, uses a number of measurements to gauge the strength of an El Nino. One of the more important measurement’s is looking for sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies between 90 degrees west and 160 degrees east longitude, and 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south of the equator, known as the Niño 3.4 region.
An El Nino occurs when warm water piles up around Australia and Indonesia and spills out toward the East, taking any rains along for the trip across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas. (That’s why we are seeing drought in these countries now.) On November 16, this year, NOAA reported a weekly SST reading 3.0 degrees Celsius above normal, a record high.
This SST reading was above the 2.8 degrees Celsius anomaly recorded during the week of November 26, 1997. The 1997 reading was from the last really strong El Nino. This year’s El Nino went on to hit a record 3.1 °C on November 18, the highest SST ever recorded in this region of the Pacific.
Axel Timmerman, at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, was quoted by New Scientist: “The El Niño community is closely watching the evolution [of this El Niño] and whether the current event will surpass the 1997-8 event. Monthly and weekly central Pacific temperature anomalies clearly show that this current event has surpassed it.”
You can be sure there are many effects from El Nino yet to come. And the impacts will be record-breaking, too. And once it is over, it won’t be a time of celebration, because then we will have to face La Nina, and it will more than likely be strong, but with just the opposite effects on the world’s weather.
