El Niño could bring danger for California
LOS ANGELES — It’s Earth’s original disrupter — a recurring climate pattern so powerful that it can drive global average temperature to record highs, and generate both cliff-crumbling storms and crop-destroying droughts across the planet.
Now, after a long hiatus, El Niño is showing signs of a strong return in 2023.
This week, federal forecasters said there was a 55% chance that a strong El Niño would occur, effectively flooding the surface of the Equatorial Pacific with water so unusually warm that it can alter weather patterns and devastate some ocean fisheries.
El Niño is “the most important global form of climate variability, just given how much of the Earth it affects,” said Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College. “The sloshing of sea surface temperatures totally reorganizes weather and climate around the world, and its tendency is to kind of amplify a lot of the kinds of impacts that we expect with something like global warming.”
For California — a state already bracing for potentially devastating floods due to epic snowmelt — a strong El Niño could bring a second consecutive winter of above-average precipitation, accompanied by landslides, floods and coastal erosion. For the rest of the world, El Niño threatens to inflict trillions of dollars in global income losses.
“This looks like a really big El Niño event,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said during a briefing this week. “This looks like it has a high potential of being the real deal, and it’s going to have large global effects.”
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-la Niña Southern Oscillation pattern, sometimes referred to as ENSO, and officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that a transition into El Niño is very likely in the next two months.
While a weak El Niño is possible, there is currently an 80% chance it will be moderately strong and a 55% chance it will be strong, the agency said. There is also a 90% chance that the system will linger through the winter and into 2024.
The report came only days after the
World Meteorological Organization released its own outlook, which found that in the next five years, worldwide temperatures are likely to surpass record levels due to heat-trapping greenhouse gasses and the incoming El Niño.
There is a 66% likelihood that the annual average near-surface global temperature will surge beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels at least once between 2023 and 2027, the agency said. (The Paris Agreement of 2015 established 1.5 degrees Celsius as the global goal for avoiding the worst effects of greenhouse gas emissions and humancaused climate change.)
The WMO predicts that there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.