“When you get massive flooding, rats move to higher ground so they move into villages,” says Dr Thomson. She points to the example of plague and leptospirosis, two diseases carried by rats. “There’s lots of different ways that El Niño will drive the climate and change the average distribution of disease and make it more extreme,” says Dr Thomson. Notably, the event drove extreme rainfall in Kenya and led to a severe outbreak of Rift Valley fever, killing more than 400 people.Īlong with flooding and food insecurity linked to droughts, infectious disease outbreaks are another significant fallout of an intense El Niño. Before then, the 1997-98 El Niño episode caused up to £77 billion in global damages. In 2015/16, a strong El Niño year, Ethiopia suffered catastrophic drought, in which 10 million people were affected. Some of the worst climate-related crises in recent memory have been linked to the phenomenon. The cool phase of the ENSO is known as La Niña, which has been in place for the last three years and acted as a temporary brake – albeit not a very good one – on rising global temperatures indeed, the last eight years have been among the warmest on record.īut it is El Niño which is the more sinister sibling out of the two. The phenomenon is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which describes the periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the eastern Pacific Ocean. So, for example, the impact on the rain is going to happen during a country’s rainy season.”ĭespite the uniqueness of each El Niño, there are some constants: the most acute effects are felt within the tropics the global temperature will rise (by how much is dependent on the El Niño strength) and historically, the event is associated with droughts in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, while Peru and Kenya suffer from heavy rainfall.
“It doesn’t all happen the same way around the world,” says Dr Thomson. Conversely, it can drive unusually warm temperatures and dry conditions in regions of Africa that are normally very wet. In parts of the world, like the baked, semi-arid mid-west of the US, an El Niño can bring increased rainfall during the summer months.
#Define looming full
“It’s too early to say how the current El Niño storyline will unfold, but if it does unleash its full power in 2024 then it’s very likely that yet another record global temperature will be breached.”Ī country’s experience of El Niño varies from region to region and season to season, and is dependent on the intensity of the phenomenon when it comes to pass. “The distinct El Niño warming pattern, caused by slow, natural fluctuations in ocean currents and heat, is beginning to emerge in 2023,” says Professor Richard Allan, from the National Centre for Earth Observation at the University of Reading. Its impacts are unlikely to be felt until the end of the year, but there is concern it could be a strong one. This “shock to the system,” as described by Dr Madeleine Thomson, Head of Climate Impacts and Adaptation at Wellcome, is once again looming on the horizon, with an El Niño expected to come into effect over the coming months.Ĭlimate scientists have predicted there is a 90 per cent chance that the phenomenon will take hold in the latter half of the year. On the upside, an El Niño normally results in fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic and can help ease drought in dry parts of the world. The fallout includes: increased global temperatures heightened rainfall intense flooding and droughts surges in infectious diseases, including malaria and even plague forest fires mass fish die-offs.
The event is driven by slow, natural fluctuations in ocean currents and wind patterns, but the climatic impacts are felt over many months – and even years – across the planet. This subsequently drives surface air temperatures and pressure changes throughout the equator, which then go on to affect seasonal weather over both hemispheres. The phenomenon is declared when sea temperatures in the region rise 0.5 ☌ above the long-term average. Occuring every three to seven years, an El Niño describes the unusual warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, just off the coast from Peru. No, the answer is not Marty McFly or Doctor Who, but rather a global weather pattern that, for millennia, has subtly shaped and defined the long arc of human history. What links poor European crop yields in the late 1700s (the spark that helped light the French Revolution), a deadly famine in 1876 which killed 13 million people in north China, and the sudden disappearance of thousands of anchovies from Peruvian waters in 1972?
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