> El Niño is a climate pattern that naturally occurs every two to seven years when ocean surface temperatures warm in the eastern Pacific.
From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)[2]:
> El Niño can affect our weather significantly. The warmer waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south of its neutral position. With this shift, areas in the northern U.S. and Canada are dryer and warmer than usual. But in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast, these periods are wetter than usual and have increased flooding.
> El Niño also has a strong effect on marine life off the Pacific coast. During normal conditions, upwelling brings water from the depths to the surface; this water is cold and nutrient rich. During El Niño, upwelling weakens or stops altogether. Without the nutrients from the deep, there are fewer phytoplankton off the coast. This affects fish that eat phytoplankton and, in turn, affects everything that eats fish. The warmer waters can also bring tropical species, like yellowtail and albacore tuna, into areas that are normally too cold.
As far as the Continental United States is concerned, this means the Northern half of the country will be warmer than usual, the Southern half of the country will be wetter than usual, and the Northeast in particular will be drier than usual.
You failed to add the two most important things on the subject about its impact worldwide
1) Certain regions, particularly those riding the equatorial line that also have wet seasons will experience (rather, are experiencing right now) extreme wet seasons with heavy flooding , for example in south america, such as Peru, Brazil and COlombia. The wet season causes an extreme cascading effect in those societies by the spike in cases of water-related (mosquito larvae) disease like dengue, cholera and malaria.
2) The same countries will experience drought in the normally quieter, "winter" season. That wrecks agricultural yield. Watch the price of bananas and similar water-intensive perennials , at your local supermarket early next year. For countries near major river flows (amazon in particular) that are not diversified in power sources and heavily dependant in hydro for power , they can get really in trouble and experience brownouts further damaging their GDP. This is rarer since most countries learn their lesson after the 1-brownout in a decade..but you never know.
The baseline is going up, and people are already dying due to weather extremes. A cyclic pattern that increases extremes is a legitimate cause for concern in each year it occurs.
While I am not saying to ignore climate change, I do believe that the recent public narrative of a looming „climate catastrophe“ is certainly just to scare people into accepting all kinds of policy changes (and some of them with questionable usefulness).
What causes El Niño to happen every few years? What mechanism drives the phenomenon? I was thinking maybe sun spots, but sun spots have 11 year cycles on average, so I don't think it's the cause. Why doesn't El Niño happen every year, like hurricanes?
"El Niño and La Niña reflect the two end points of an oscillation in the Pacific Ocean. The cycle is not fully understood, but the times series illustrates that the cycle swings back and forth every 3-7 years. Often, El Niño is followed immediately by La Niña, as if the warm water is sloshing back and forth across the Pacific. The development of El Niño events is linked to the trade winds. El Niño occurs when the trade winds are weaker than normal, and La Niña occurs when they are stronger than normal. Both cycles typically peak in December.
El Niño and La Niña aren’t the only cycles evident in this image series. The Pacific Ocean is moody: It turns slightly hot or slightly cold every couple of years. This bi-annual pattern isn’t the distinctive, well-defined stripe of warm ocean waters near the equator typical of El Niño, but rather, a general warming of the ocean.
On top of the two-year warm/cold cycle and the El Niño/La Niña pattern is a broader decadal cycle in which the Pacific has a warm and a cool phase. In the 1990s, the Pacific was in a warm phase. The strong El Niño of 1997 marked the end of the warm phase."
Coriolis. There are timescales set up by two big mechanisms: one is westward-propagating oceanic Rossby [0] waves just to the north and south of the equator and the other is eastward-propagating Kelvin [1] waves along the equator which hit the Peruvian coast, split in two and flow north and south bouncing along the coast. Sloshing back and forth.
There’s nothing we could do to this planet (including climate change, ocean acidification , or even “launch all the nukes”) that would make it less hospitable to humanity than the moon/mars.
What El Niño means depends wildly on where you live.
In California, particularly Southern California, an El Niño winter is more likely wetter than usual. The 1997-1998 winter comes to mind.
These are all statistical predictions based on previous years, and any individual year can vary wildly from average. In addition, climate change makes historical data increasingly irrelevant. So, take any forecast of the weather six months into the future with a grain of salt!
I first moved to San Francisco in early 1997. I was absolutely flabbergasted at the amount of rain we got that winter. It just never stopped raining. For months. My distant memory of it was that it started raining just before Thanksgiving (when I had a cousin visit, which is why I remember) and then just didn't stop until like May of 1998. I just looked it up: 18 days of rain in November, 10 in December, 22 in January, 20 in February, 14 in March, 10 in April and 14 in May. Nice to know my 25 year old memory wasn't that bad.
I went to Tahoe for the first time that winter and the snowpack was absolutely absurd. Like 20 feet. The ski area parking lot I went to had a wall of snow carved out next to the cars. I have a sideways panoramic photo taken of myself next to it to remember it by.
My dumb brain read it first as "10~14 is a small number, not that bad". But it's really not small, I can't imagine having rain almost every two days, or basically all month in January when it's already darker and colder.
I am of the "there's no bad weather only bad clothing" camp, but that much quasi-continuous rain in the winter is a seriously depressing thought. Even the monsoon in SEA only lasts a month or so and it's kinda warm.
I was in SF for that winter. I remember one time running a half block from a cab to a bar and it was like we jumped into a pool. Even our jeans were soaked through.
Here in Northern California it means we've had a lot more rain, and it's been much cooler than usual as well as getting snow to a much lower level than usual (around 800 feet). Normally it would have already been 100 or so for a month already. however, today is first day to really hit 90 and we just had some rain last week. Honestly, I'm hoping it means we have a more mild & wet summer but that I'm not sure of. Anything other than the fires would be nice though.
The unfortunate side effect of El Niño is to further destabilize the marine environment off shore.
This isn’t all El Niño, we lost the sunflower starfish which preyed on urchins and kept them in check to a disease, but the warm surface waters are another bad situation on top of low kelp cover, urchins out of control, no predators for the urchins, etc. if we don’t have kelp forests off shore, the environment will be totally different and many species that depend on the kelp will disappear.
El Niño has been occurring for thousands of years. I think any contribution it has in destabilizing marine environments must be leveled with the fact that it's been doing so for a very long time, and yet those marine environments are still there. This tells me that it's not a primary cause.
The kelp forests that provide safe harbor for young fish, and much of the riches California’s fishing industry enjoys, can easily disappear. They already have in large swaths of the coast.
The sardine stocks collapsed. Salmon season is cancelled. Abalone will probably never be legally taken again in my lifetime in California.
El Nino is a natural phenomenon, but when the ecosystem is already on the edge because of climate change, ocean acidification, and overfishing it is enough that it might permanently change the ecosystem. I’m explaining that it’s already way out of whack because we killed most of the otters, decimated the sardine run, and then the starfish wasting disease took the last main urchin predator.
"El Niño usually brings a quieter Atlantic hurricane season and more hurricane activity in the Pacific, while La Niña does the opposite — a dynamic that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has compared to a seesaw.
El Niño's warmer waters can also push the Pacific jet stream south. When that happens, the NOAA says, "areas in the northern U.S. and Canada are dryer and warmer than usual. But in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast, these periods are wetter than usual and have increased flooding.""
* Winter-Spring (June-November): Dryer than usual in eastern Australia, warmer than usual in southern Australia
* Summer-Autumn (December-May): Warmer than usual with average rainfall in eastern Australia, dryer conditions in Cape York and Tasmania, and wetter conditions in the southern part of Western Australia
Inevitable, but disappointing of course - I had hoped we'd have something closer to a 5y cycle, as the previous couple of dry cycles were much longer than this most recent wet(ish) one.
I'm 150km inland, just north of Sydney AU latitude (150E, 33S).
The very averaged annual rainfall in our area is 600mm (about the same as London, about half of Sydney).
In 2021 we had 910mm, and 2022 we had 966mm. So far this year we've had 192mm - and given January is our wettest period, that's way under both long-term average and recent trend.
It's worth noting that the Americans here will likely experience wetter than normal conditions (region dependent). I'm just happy Australia might have a year without so much rain. Might be a bad fire season in the end of the year though.
> National forecasters said on Thursday that the climate pattern system, known for bringing record rainfall in South America, more winter storms in the U.S West and South, and droughts in southern Asia, Indonesia and Australia, is expected to make its official return within a few months and has a strong chance of lasting the rest of the year.
>
> El Niño is a climate pattern that naturally occurs every two to seven years when ocean surface temperatures warm in the eastern Pacific.
In Los Angeles, anyway, where as you may know, it "never rains", there's been what residents can only describe comparatively as "non-stop rain" since the new year.
Where it should be regularly mid-70s by this time of year, it's stayed around high-50s since January.
Preparing for my trip to London, I was planning for a wetter and colder climate than I'm accustomed to. It turns out it's actually nicer weather in London than in LA right now.
>The most recent IRI plume also indicates El Niño is likely to form during the May-July season and persist into the winter.
I was confused by the post's title but it appears El Nino is 90% likely to increase temperatures this year from May - Winter. I don't know how different this is from a normal El Nino, nor do I know if 90% is higher or lower than average.
> El Niño is a climate pattern that naturally occurs every two to seven years when ocean surface temperatures warm in the eastern Pacific.
From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)[2]:
> El Niño can affect our weather significantly. The warmer waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south of its neutral position. With this shift, areas in the northern U.S. and Canada are dryer and warmer than usual. But in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast, these periods are wetter than usual and have increased flooding.
> El Niño also has a strong effect on marine life off the Pacific coast. During normal conditions, upwelling brings water from the depths to the surface; this water is cold and nutrient rich. During El Niño, upwelling weakens or stops altogether. Without the nutrients from the deep, there are fewer phytoplankton off the coast. This affects fish that eat phytoplankton and, in turn, affects everything that eats fish. The warmer waters can also bring tropical species, like yellowtail and albacore tuna, into areas that are normally too cold.
As far as the Continental United States is concerned, this means the Northern half of the country will be warmer than usual, the Southern half of the country will be wetter than usual, and the Northeast in particular will be drier than usual.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/el-nino-returns-2023/
[2]https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html