What is meant by El Nino phenomena?
The real-time prediction skill for El Niño-Southern Oscillation has not improved steadily during the twenty-first century. One important reason is the season-dependent predictability barrier (PB), and another is due to the diversity of El Niño. In this paper, an approach to data analysis for predictability is developed to investigate the season-dependent PB phenomena of two types of El Niño ...
What is caused by El Nino?
Weaker winds means the ocean gets warmer and this process happens interchangeably and consecutively thus making the El Niño bigger and bigger. In other words, El Niño is caused by the weakening of the trade winds which results in pushing of warm surface water to the west and less cold water to the east.
What is El Nino and what does it do?
The term El Niño (Spanish for 'the Christ Child') refers to a warming of the ocean surface (or above-average sea surface temperatures) in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The low-level surface winds, which normally blow from east to west along the equator (“easterly winds”), instead weaken or, in some cases, start blowing the other direction (from west to east or “westerly winds”).
Why is it important to know about El Nino phenomenon?
What is El Niño?
- Recognizing El Niño. El Niño can be seen in measurements of the sea surface temperature, such as those shown in the column to the right, which were made from the ...
- The Origins of the Name El Niño. ...
- Animations of Important and Recent El Niño Events. ...
- Historical El Niños. ...
- Historical References. ...
What happens during El Niño phenomenon?
An El Niño condition occurs when surface water in the equatorial Pacific becomes warmer than average and east winds blow weaker than normal. The opposite condition is called La Niña. During this phase of ENSO, the water is cooler than normal and the east winds are stronger. El Niños typically occur every 3 to 5 years.
What causes the phenomenon of El Niño?
El Niño occurs when warm water builds up along the equator in the eastern Pacific. The warm ocean surface warms the atmosphere, which allows moisture-rich air to rise and develop into rainstorms. The clearest example of El Niño in this series of images is 1997.
What is an El Niño and what effect does it have on weather?
El Niño is a weather pattern that occurs in the Pacific Ocean. During this time, unusual winds cause warm surface water from the equator to move east, toward Central and South America. El Niño can cause more rain than usual in South and Central America and in the United States.
Is El Niño wet or dry?
Weather typically differs markedly from north to south during an El Niño event (wet in south, dry in north) but also usually varies greatly within one region from event to event.
What are 3 effects of El Niño?
Severe drought and associated food insecurity, flooding, rains, and temperature rises due to El Niño are causing a wide range of health problems, including disease outbreaks, malnutrition, heat stress and respiratory diseases.
How does El Niño affect the atmosphere?
By changing the distribution of heat and wind across the Pacific, El Niño alters rainfall patterns for months to seasons. As the warm ocean surface warms the atmosphere above it, moisture-rich air rises and develops into rain clouds.
Why El Niño causes drought?
During El Niño episodes the normal patterns of tropical precipitation and atmospheric circulation are disrupted, hence triggering extreme climate events around the globe: droughts, floods and affecting the intensity and frequency of hurricanes.
How does ENSO affect humans?
How ENSO impacts humans. El Niño, La Niña, and the neutral condition all produce important consequences for people and ecosystems across the globe. The interactions between the ocean and atmosphere alters weather around the world and can result in severe storms or mild weather, drought or flooding. Beyond “just” influencing ...
How does ENSO help students?
ENSO provides teachers with the opportunity to have students discover ways that the oceanic and atmospheric systems interact and how those interactions can impact ecosystems and human society. The resources in this collection can be used to help learn about the basics of ENSO, the inter-relationship of Earth systems, the consequences of these interactions, and how to use and analyze data. These resources can be used to teach students how scientists study the complexity of the Earth’s systems and why better El Niño/La Niña forecasts can benefit agriculture, natural resource managers and human communities.
How does ENSO affect agriculture?
Agriculture is of course very dependent on climate and weather, as a result ENSO’s influence on rainfall and temperature have important consequences for food production and availability.
What is El Niño anyway?
El Niño is a condition that sometimes occurs in the Pacific Ocean, but it is so big that it affects weather all over the world.
How do you take the ocean's temperature from space?
Where the ocean is warmer, sea level is slightly higher. In 2008, the Jason-2 satellite (also called the Ocean Surface Topography Mission) was launched into orbit around Earth. It continued the measurements being made by Jason-1, launched in 2001. Both satellites have a sensitive altimeter onboard.
Watch El Niño in action!
Here's a movie that shows the El Niño and La Niña conditions as they occur from December 1996 through January 2000. Watch the white bulge of warm water travel across the Pacific ocean.
What Is ENSO
El Niño and La Niña are the warm and cool phases of a recurring climate pattern across the tropical Pacific—the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or “ENSO” for short. The pattern shifts back and forth irregularly every two to seven years, and each phase triggers predictable disruptions of temperature, precipitation.
U.S. Impacts
El Niño is anchored in the tropical Pacific, but it affects climate "downstream" in the United States. In the summer, El Niño's primary influence on U.S. climate is on the hurricane season in both the eastern Pacific and the Atlantic. In winter, it influences the jet stream and the path of storms that move from the Pacific over the United States.
Global Impacts
El Niño and La Niña have their strongest influence on global climate during the Northern Hemisphere winter. During La Niña winters, the southern tier of the United States is often drier than normal. Northern Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are often wetter than normal.
Understanding the ENSO Alert System
On the second Thursday of each month, scientists with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center in collaboration with forecasters at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) release an official update on the status of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Here is a description of the categories and criteria they use.
El Niño and La Niña are climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean that can affect weather worldwide
Warmer or colder than average ocean temperatures in one part of the world can influence weather around the globe. Watch this Ocean Today video to see how this works.
El Niño
During El Niño, trade winds weaken. Warm water is pushed back east, toward the west coast of the Americas.
La Niña
La Niña means Little Girl in Spanish. La Niña is also sometimes called El Viejo, anti-El Niño, or simply "a cold event." La Niña has the opposite effect of El Niño. During La Niña events, trade winds are even stronger than usual, pushing more warm water toward Asia.
Overview
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific (approximately between the International Date Line and 120°W), including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. The ENSO is the cycle of warm and cold sea surface temperature (SST) of the tropical cen…
Concept
Originally, the term El Niño applied to an annual weak warm ocean current that ran southwards along the coast of Peru and Ecuador at about Christmas time. However, over time the term has evolved and now refers to the warm and negative phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is the warming of the ocean surface or above-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. This warming causes a shift in the atmospheric circulation with r…
Occurrences
El Niño events are thought to have been occurring for thousands of years. For example, it is thought that El Niño affected the Moche in modern-day Peru, who sacrificed humans in order to try to prevent the rains.
It is thought that there have been at least 30 El Niño events since 1900, with the 1982–83, 1997–98 and 2014–16 events among the strongest on record. Since 2000, El Niño events have …
Cultural history and prehistoric information
ENSO conditions have occurred at two- to seven-year intervals for at least the past 300 years, but most of them have been weak. Evidence is also strong for El Niño events during the early Holocene epoch 10,000 years ago.
El Niño may have led to the demise of the Moche and other pre-Columbian Peruvian cultures. A recent study suggests a strong El Niño effect between 1789 and 1793 caused poor crop yields i…
Diversity
It is thought that there are several different types of El Niño events, with the canonical eastern Pacific and the Modoki central Pacific types being the two that receive the most attention. These different types of El Niño events are classified by where the tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies are the largest. For example, the strongest sea surface temperature …
Effects on the global climate
El Niño affects the global climate and disrupts normal weather patterns, which as a result can lead to intense storms in some places and droughts in others.
Most tropical cyclones form on the side of the subtropical ridge closer to the equator, then move poleward past the ridge axis before recurving into the main belt of the Westerlies. Areas west of Japan and Korea tend to experience many f…
Regional impacts
Observations of El Niño events since 1950 show that impacts associated with El Niño events depend on the time of year. However, while certain events and impacts are expected to occur during events, it is not certain or guaranteed that they will occur. The impacts that generally do occur during most El Niño events include below-average rainfall over Indonesia and northern South America, whi…
Socio-ecological effects for humanity and nature
When El Niño conditions last for many months, extensive ocean warming and the reduction in easterly trade winds limits upwelling of cold nutrient-rich deep water, and its economic effect on local fishing for an international market can be serious.
More generally, El Niño can affect commodity prices and the macroeconomy of different countries. It can constrain the supply of rain-driven agricultural commodities; reduce agricultura…