Topic
A recurring Pacific Ocean warming (El Niño) and cooling (La Niña) cycle driven by shifting trade winds, shaping global weather and rainfall patterns.
University of Hawai'i researchers project a shift toward stronger tropical cyclones near the islands in a warmer climate. The study could not say whether storm counts will rise, and El Niño and La Niña years differ less in its late-century runs.
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Hurricane Isaias killed four people and cut power to at least 600,000 after reaching Florida with 105 mph winds. Its downgrade to a post-tropical cyclone leaves the flood threat in place, with NOAA warning of up to 10 inches of rain in Georgia and the Carolinas.
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FAO's September food price index rose to 136.0, its highest since November 2022, while its cereal index climbed 17.2% from a year earlier. With Gulf urea supply cut and El Nino's harvest boost due to fade, the larger cost risk sits with next year's planting.
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Filmmaker Quinn Barabash found a nearly two-metre swordfish on Haida Gwaii, a fish thought to have been documented in B.C. only twice before. The fisheries researchers who wrote up the find use it to urge B.C. managers to prepare for heat-driven catch failures.
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Sea surface temperatures in the Pacific's Niño 3.4 region passed 30 degrees Celsius for the first time, preliminary data released Oct. 5 show. On the anomaly measures that remove global ocean warming, the event is already close to the strongest El Niño on record, Timothy Osborn of the University of East Anglia told Live Science.
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World Meteorological Organization forecasts put El Niño's peak around December and give it a near-100% chance of lasting through February 2027. Its maps tilt regional odds toward heat, drought or flood, and WMO says they do not replace local forecasts.
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El Niño now building in the Pacific is on track to be the strongest recorded, with central Pacific seas forecast up to 3.6C above normal this summer. Past strong events point to cooler New Zealand seas, though the same record includes a long, damaging marine heatwave.
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This El Niño is already the strongest on record, running 3.4C above average in an equatorial Pacific region and still climbing, New Scientist reports. The larger worry is climate regime shifts that could persist for decades after the Pacific cools.
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Growth lines and isotopes in one giant clam shell from Jiigurru put northern Great Barrier Reef summers around 1800 at 0.9 to 1.2C cooler than in 1995-2015. Winters were nearly unchanged, so this site's warming has come mostly in the hot season, on the evidence of one animal.
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Forecasters expect this year's record-breaking El Nino to strengthen further before it peaks around December. The physics shows which way rainfall moves in Indonesia and coastal Peru, but it does not say how severe the drought or flooding will be.
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El Niño kept the Atlantic free of hurricanes through September for the first time in reliable records by holding wind shear high over warm water. The mark could still fall if the National Hurricane Center upgrades Tropical Storm Fay in its post-season review.
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Science News reports the El Nino region's daily sea surface anomaly hit 3.08 C on September 21, past the 3.02 C mark set in November 2015. NOAA's preferred index still ranks the 1997-98 event stronger, leaving two analogues in play for the coming seasons.
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A study in PNAS puts the biggest constraint on cocoa yields on heavy rain while trees are flowering, and the researcher who led it says that makes the risk forecastable. The response it calls for is drainage work on smallholder farms.
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Coral chemistry from the eastern tropical Pacific has finally put a number on how much warming has strengthened El Niño. The natural-forcing alternative fails the test the same authors ran.
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For the first time, a WMO update on El Nino carries almost no hedge about the tropical Pacific over the next two seasons. The harder question, what any given basin actually gets, sits in a second document.
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The Met Office will commit to the sign of the disruption, not its address. The rice loss is already booked to a marketing year that begins after the event ends.
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The Met Office expects the tropical Pacific above 3C in November, and one aggregated forecast says 3.9C. The global temperature consequence lands in 2027, which is still a planning cycle away.
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Forecasters see this El Nino peaking well above the 2015 event and pushing 2027 to roughly 1.76C above preindustrial. That is a decade of trend warming delivered in one year.
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