Hindustan Times (Lucknow)

Australia’s Met: El Nino has ended, not sure about La Nina

- letters@hindustant­imes.com

CANBERRA: An El Nino weather event has ended, Australian weather authoritie­s said on Tuesday, adding that they were uncertain if a La Nina phenomenon would form later this year, as other forecaster­s have predicted. The cycle between the two is hugely important for farmers worldwide. El Nino generally brings hotter, drier weather to eastern Australia and Southeast Asia and wetter conditions to the Americas, while a La Nina has the opposite effect.

“El Nino has ended,” Australia’s Bureau of Meteorolog­y said, after the weather phenomenon had formed in the middle of last year following three years of La Nina.

Warmer sea surface temperatur­es in the central and eastern tropical Pacific cause El Nino and cooler temperatur­es lead to La Nina, which a US government weather forecaster this month gave a 60% chance of emerging in the second half of 2024.

The sea surface has been cooling since December and oceanic and atmospheri­c indicators now show the El Nino Southern Oscillatio­n has returned to neutral, the Australian weather bureau added.

“Climate models indicate ENSO will likely continue to be neutral until at least July 2024,” it said, using the formal name, the El Nino Southern Oscillatio­n, that describes the switch between the two phases.

While some climate models predict a flip to La Nina later this year, the bureau said it was uncertain whether this would happen and urged caution about such forecasts.

Global sea level jumped due to El Nino: Nasa

Global average sea level rose by about 0.76 centimetre­s from 2022 to 2023 — nearly four times the increase of the previous year — Nasa said in March, attributin­g the “significan­t jump” to a strong El Nino and a warming climate.

The Nasa-led analysis is based on more than 30 years of satellite observatio­ns, with the initial satellite launching in 1992 and the latest in 2020.

Overall, sea levels have risen by around four inches since 1993. The rate of increase has also accelerate­d, over doubling from 0.07 inches per year in 1993, to the current rate of 0.17 inches per year.

That would be double the amount of change in the next three decades compared to the previous century, she said, creating a future where flooding is far more frequent and catastroph­ic than today.

The immediate cause of the spike is the El Nino weather effect, which replaced the La Nina from 2021 to 2022, when the sea level rose around 0.08 inches.

El Nino involves warmerthan-average ocean temperatur­es in the equatorial Pacific.

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