[ad_1]
Forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization report the possibility of a global climate pattern known as El Niño arriving by the end of summer. With the possibility of warmer than normal temperatures in 2024.
Although there is not yet a clear picture of how strong El Niño events are or how long they last, even mild ones can affect rainfall and temperature patterns around the world.
“The development of El Niño will lead to a new surge in global warming and increase the possibility of breaking temperature records,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the meteorological organization, in a press release.
El Niño is associated with warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. In the United States, it tends to bring rain, cooler conditions in the south, and warmer conditions in the north.
Elsewhere, El Niño could increase rainfall to southern South America and the Horn of Africa, and drought to Australia, Indonesia and parts of southern Asia.
El Niño, along with its counterpart La Niña, is part of an intermittent cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, which is highly influential in shaping year-to-year variations in weather conditions around the globe.
ENSO is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and scientists are still investigating exactly how human-caused climate change over the past 150 years may have influenced the behavior and dynamics of El Niño and La Niña events, with some studies suggesting that El Niño events may also occur. . more extreme in summer.
Conditions in the tropical Pacific have been neutral since the last La Niña event ended this year. La Niña conditions persisted through a rare three consecutive winters in the Northern Hemisphere, extending the Atlantic hurricane season and prolonging severe drought in parts of the Western United States.
However, despite the usual cooling effects of La Niña, the last eight years have been the warmest on record, an alarming addition to a long-term pattern of steadily rising temperatures as the world continues to emit greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
According to the forecasts of the World Meteorological Organization, there is about a 60 percent chance that El Niño will form between May and July, and an 80 percent chance that it will form between July and September. The forecast is based on observations of wind and sea temperature patterns as well as climate modelling, said Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, head of the Climate Prediction Service Division at the organization, which is a UN agency.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a similar outlook last month. Both groups cautioned that while El Niño events are associated with certain typical conditions, they vary from time to time. But in general, the warmest year of any given decade will be an El Niño year, and the coldest will be a La Niña, according to data from NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.
Research on the effects of global warming on rainfall and temperatures around the world is even clearer: It has intensified global wet and dry extremes, prolonged heat waves and warm winters.
“There is little doubt that El Niño tends to favor a higher global average temperature,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
Separately, however, climate change has caused global temperatures, on average, to be warmer over time, he said, and the combination of the two could lead to even more warming.
[ad_2]
Source link