"That's the first atmospheric domino to fall." "When El Nino moves that warm water, it moves where thunderstorms happen," said NOAA meteorologist Tom DiLiberto. This build-up of warm water in the eastern Pacific also transfers heat high into the atmosphere through convection, generating thunderstorms. In too-warm waters corals will expel living algae, causing them to calcify and turn white. And nearly a third of the corals on Australia's Great Barrier Reef died. It forms when the trade winds blowing east-to-west along the equatorial Pacific slow down or reverse as air pressure changes, although scientists are not entirely sure what kicks off the cycle.īecause the trade winds affect the sun-warmed surface waters, a weakening causes these warm western Pacific waters to slosh back into the colder central and eastern Pacific basins.ĭuring the 2015-16 El Nino - the strongest such event on record - anchovy stocks off the coast of Peru crashed amid this warm water incursion. Here is how El Nino will unfold and some of the weather we might expect:Įl Nino is a natural climate pattern borne out of unusually warm waters in the eastern Pacific. Peru has set aside $1.06 billion to deal with El Nino's impacts and climate change, while the Philippines - at risk from cyclones - has formed a special government team to handle the predicted fallout. Governments in vulnerable countries are taking note. This year's El Nino could lead to global economic losses of $3 trillion, according to a study published last month in the journal Science, shrinking GDP as extreme weather decimates agricultural production, manufacturing, and helps spread disease. "We're in unprecedented territory," said Michelle L'Heureux, a meteorologist with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.
But even before this El Nino began, in May, the average global sea surface temperature was about 0.1C (0.2F) higher than any other on record. An El Nino means that waters in the Eastern Pacific are warmer than usual. Experts are also concerned about what is going on in the ocean.
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