Warming climate will bring more extreme 'El Nino' events
Rising global temperatures are likely to double the frequency of the most severe El Niños - the periodic atmospheric disruptions which affect weather across the globe. Tim Radford reports. An El Niño is part of a natural cycle: a huge blister of heat in the equatorial Pacific, usually around Christmas-time. The phenomenon periodically triggers unseasonal floods in the western
US, and extreme heat and forest fires in the Indonesian rainforest and
the Australian bush. Except this: according to the latest study by climate scientists in Australia, the US, China and Britain, global warming is likely to make the most extreme El Niño events happen twice as frequently. Severely disrupted global weather patterns An El Niño episode is characterized by - the scientists say in Nature Climate Change -"severely disrupted global weather patterns, affecting ecosystems, agriculture, tropical cyclones, drought, bushfires, floods and other extreme weather events worldwide." So this is unlikely to be welcome news. Right now, and for the past year, conditions in the equatorial
Pacific have been neither unusually warm nor unusually cool. There is no
El Niño right now. Wenju Cai of Australia's CSIRO marine and atmosphere research and colleagues report in the journal that extreme El Niño events tend to happen when sea surface temperatures higher than 28°C develop in the normally cool and dry eastern Pacific. This can trigger big shifts in the atmospheric convection zones - areas of instability caused by temperature differences. These episodes have normally occurred every 20 years or so. Profound impact Now, as carbon dioxide levels rise and the global average
temperatures creep up, these extreme events are likely to be twice as
frequent: every decade or so. Read more from our affiliate, Ecologist. El Nino diagram via Shutterstock. 2014©. Copyright Environmental News Network |