El Niño Is Back, and Is Poised to Turbocharge Extreme Weather Scott Dance - The Washington Post
go to original June 9, 2023

Here’s How El Niño Could Make For More Wild Weather This Year (TIME)

The infamous climate pattern El Niño has returned for the first time in four years, according to scientists, a declaration of extreme weather risks and a probable acceleration in global warming over the coming year.

Climate scientists say El Niño will probably push average global temperatures beyond a record set in 2016. That year, an intense El Niño triggered deadly heat and precipitation and was linked to rainforest losses, coral bleaching and a rise in diseases such as cholera and dengue.

What impacts develop around the world in the coming months are difficult to predict — especially because scientists don’t yet know whether or how the backdrop of human-caused global warming might affect how El Niño behaves. Earth’s oceans have already shown dramatic warming this year, even before El Niño’s arrival.

El Niño is known for triggering wet weather in Southern California and drought in Southeast Asia, for example, but scientists say no two El Niño episodes are identical.

NOAA announced El Niño’s arrival Thursday morning in a monthly forecast update that in April had declared that El Niño was rapidly brewing. That assessment came on the heels of three years in which La Niña — El Niño’s counterpart known for a cooling influence on global temperatures — dominated. A weak El Niño came before that, in 2018 and 2019.

The latest outlook says that El Niño’s influence on global weather patterns is forecast to build into this fall and winter. (Its name ties back to the fact that it often reaches peak intensity at the end of the year, around Christmas — it translates to “the Christ child” in Spanish.)

NOAA predicts 84 percent chances of at least a moderate-strength El Niño, and 56 percent chances of a strong El Niño.

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