El Niño explained
By Carly Green
El Niño is back and impacting weather forecasts this year in a big way. You’ve probably heard of El Niño, possibly from that “Saturday Night Live” sketch with Chris Farley.
But here’s the real deal with this climate phenomenon.
Every two to seven years, trade winds shift and sea surface temperatures warm in the Pacific, creating the meteorological event. As conditions change, they trigger a domino effect of disruptive weather patterns worldwide.
Normally, trade winds blow east to west across the Pacific Ocean. This pushes warmer water towards the western edge and allows cooler water to rise up toward the surface on the eastern edge.
During El Niño events, trade winds weaken or change course, pushing that warm ocean water on the west further east across the ocean, bringing rainfall and rising surface temperatures along with it.
While unpredictable, these episodes tend to last nine to 12 months, peaking in the depths of winter and fizzling out by late spring.
El Niño, which is Spanish for “little boy” or “the Christ Child,” got its name a few centuries ago when some Peruvian fishermen noticed an occasional warming trend in their waters around Christmastime. But evidence suggests that locals have been privy to it for thousands of years. For example, Incas built their cities on hills — far from rivers — likely to avoid El Niño’s impact.
No two El Niño events are alike, but in the U.S., they typically produce wetter, cooler winters in the south and warmer, drier winters across much of the north. On a global scale, they can cause heat waves and devastating droughts in the western Pacific region or heavy rains and flooding in the eastern Pacific region. El Niño conditions can also boost hurricane activity in the Pacific, but reduce it in the Atlantic.
The two most active El Niño years on record (since 1950) were 1982-83 and 1997-98. During ’97, El Niño-related weather killed approximately 23,000 people and cost as much as 45 billion dollars in damages.
This year’s El Niño is shaping up to be one of the most extreme — if not the most extreme — to date, even being called a “Godzilla” by some scientists.
So if you’re checking the weather, curious about what the forecast is, when it comes to El Niño, at least after watching this video, you can say, “Now I get it.”
