More evidence supports a strong El Nino ahead

All signs are pointing wet winter. On Monday, the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, announced that this El Nio is expected to be the strongest we’ve seen in over a decade.

According to the National Weather Service, Pacific Ocean temperatures are the warmest they’ve been since the 1950s and the magnitude of this El Nio is on the rise.

“What we’re seeing now is really a phenomenal warm anomaly in the ocean surface temperatures across a broad swath of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean,” said Warren Blier, a Science and Operations Officer with the National Weather Service here in Monterey.

These warm waters are not all due to El Nio. The WMO says that our planet has altered drastically because of climate change, resulting in warmer ocean waters. So human induced climate change influencing this El Nio cannot be ruled out.

But, forecasting the magnitude of a strong El Nio is no easy task.

“Part of the problem here is that we don’t have that many equivalently strong cases to look back on. So when we look back on things that were similar, we see wet winters, but at this point we only have so many similar cases to compare with,” said Warren Blier.

Now, an El Nio is a natural event that happens every 3-7 years, but when human influenced climate change is added into the mix, these two factors may combine in ways never seen before.