‘A new peak’ in global temperatures in the forecast
Forecasters from the World Meteorological Organization report an increased chance that the global climate pattern known as El Niño will set in towards the end of summer. This increases the chances of warmer-than-normal temperatures in 2024.
While there is no clear picture yet of how strong the El Niño event will be or how long it will last, even a relatively mild event could affect precipitation and temperature patterns around the world.
“The development of an El Niño will most likely lead to another spike in global warming and increase the likelihood of temperature record breaking,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the meteorological organization, said in a press release.
El Niño is associated with warmer-than-normal ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. In the United States, it tends to lead to rainier, cooler conditions in much of the South and warmer conditions in parts of the North.
Elsewhere, El Niño could increase rainfall in southern South America and the Horn of Africa, and cause severe drought in Australia, Indonesia and parts of South Asia.
El Niño, along with its La Niña counterpart, is part of the intermittent cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, which is highly influential in shaping annual variations in weather conditions around the world.
ENSO is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and scientists are still investigating exactly how human-induced climate change over the past 150 years may affect the behavior and dynamics of El Niño and La Niña events. Some studies suggest that El Niño events can be more extreme in a warmer future.
Conditions in the tropical Pacific have been neutral since the last La Niña event ended this year. La Niña conditions were sustained for a rare three consecutive Northern Hemisphere winters, accelerating Atlantic hurricane seasons and continuing severe drought across much of the western United States.
But despite the cooling effect typical of La Niña, the past eight years have been the warmest on record, a worrying addition to the long-term pattern of temperatures steadily rising as the world continues to emit greenhouse gases from burning coal. oil and natural gas.
According to the World Meteorological Organization’s outlook, there is about a 60 percent chance El Niño will form between May and July, and an 80 percent chance it will form between July and September. The predictions are based on observations of wind patterns and ocean temperatures, as well as climate models, said Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, chief of the Climate Prediction Services Division at the organization, an agency of the United Nations.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a similar forecast last month. Both groups cautioned that while El Niño events are associated with certain typical conditions, they unfold differently each time. But in general, the warmest year of any decade will be an El Niño year and the coldest a La Niña year, according to data from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
Research on the effects of global warming on global precipitation and temperature is much more compelling: It has intensified wet and dry global extremes, prolonged heat waves, and warmed winters.
“There is little doubt that El Niño rolls the dice in favor of higher global average temperatures,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
But separately, climate change has led to global temperatures being warmer on average over time, she said, and the combination of the two could lead to more record-breaking temperatures.