Seasonal climate models are predicting an El Niño event that could be the strongest on record, bringing with it more extreme weather. An El Niño event is expected to develop from the middle of this year, impacting global temperature and rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
"I think we're going to see weather events that we've never seen in modern history before," said Jeff Berardelli, Chief Meteorologist and Climate Specialist at WFLA-TV in Tampa, Florida. El Niño is a cyclical and natural warming of patches of the equatorial Pacific that then alters the world's weather patterns. Its counterpart, La Niña, is marked by waters that are cooler than average.
Berardelli explained that an El Niño event essentially redistributes heat on Earth. Currently, the subsurface heat in the Pacific is moving east across the ocean and ascending to the surface from the deep waters, marking the initial stages of El Niño. The WMO's Global Seasonal Climate Update showed that sea-surface temperatures are rising rapidly, with high confidence in the onset of El Niño followed by further intensification in the months to follow, according to Wilfran Moufouma Okia, chief of climate prediction at WMO.
El Niño typically occurs every two to seven years and lasts around nine to 12 months. While the models indicate that this may be a strong event, the WMO cautioned that the models also have a harder time making accurate forecasts in the spring.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources, said the predictive models appear reliable because the volume and intensity of subsurface warm water anomalies—pulses of unusually warm water that are key to El Niño physics—are about as large as seen in the historical record. The very strongest events are called "super El Niños".
