That trend is still expected to continue, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, on a conference call with reporters to discuss the US agency’s latest forecast, released Thursday.
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It’s also likely to make the northern winters warmer and southeastern U.S. winters a bit cooler, but not much, Halpert said.
El Nino, the warming of Pacific sea-surface temperatures, can have devastating consequences for agriculture, triggering heavy rains and floods in South America and scorching weather in Asia and as far away as East Africa. Since 1958, there have been seven El Nino systems – three wet, three dry and one average.
Every few years, the winds shift and the water in the Pacific Ocean gets warmer than usual.
John Allen, postdoctoral research scientist at the global Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University in Palisades, N.Y., told CBC News earlier this month that El Nino may give tornado activity a boost in Canada this year.
El Nino usually brings heavy winter rain in California, and much of the southern and eastern U.S. Halpert said that’s no guarantee and even past super El Ninos haven’t delivered the rain that California now needs.
What is unknown is how it will play out for the state beset by four years of drought that fallowed farm fields, turned lawns brown and dried up streams and wells. It’s been unofficially named Bruce Lee after the action hero.
If you were around for one of these previous strong El Ninos’, you probably remember the flooding of freeways and the damage to piers and waterfront homes. Droughts and Atlantic hurricanes are reduced.
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Satellite measurement show that this El Nino is now more powerful than a king-sized one in 1997-98, which started weaker and finished stronger, said NASA oceanographer Bill Patzert, who compared it to Godzilla for the mudslides and destruction it can cause. These El Nino events trigger changing weather patterns globally. And while El Nino often puts a big damper on the Atlantic hurricane season, that means more storms in the Pacific, such as Hawaii, Halpert said.
