Should we be worried about El Niño?

The name El Niño was on everyone’s lips in 1997 as the warming of tropical Pacific waters wreaked havoc on global weather patterns. That year’s El Niño resulted in global disasters ranging from widespread drought and flooding to an increase in insect-borne diseases such as malaria.

Eighteen years later El Niño is back on the radar. A recent report by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration forecasts a return of the weather system in the late autumn and early winter of 2015, and satellite images of tropical Pacific ocean temperatures indicate that this event may match or surpass the power of the one in 1997.

Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

These images show the oceanic temperatures patterns that create El Niño, but how exactly does this phenomenon affect the weather?

Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the New York Times that many of the factors were in place for an El Niño “that rivals what we saw with the great Godzilla El Niño of 1997 and 1998”. However, Patzert also warns that the impact of El Niño will depend on the relaxing of trade winds in the central and western Pacific. “I’m a little cautious: this could happen, it could not happen,” he said.

Have you read?
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Author: Murray Nicol is Digital Manager at the World Economic Forum.

Image: A farmer works on a drought-hit paddy field in the outskirts of Chongqing municipality REUTERS/Stringer