The Child it’s already here and official data points to a potentially very strong event. NOAA, which a month ago saw no reason to worry, now gives a 63% probability to what meteorologists call SuperNiño.
Meanwhile, NASA has already detected that Peru’s sea level is 15 cm above average. It’s just the beginning: more than 25 degrees are expected in the coming months.
And what does all this mean? Nobody knows very well. On the one hand, NOAA itself explains that “even very strong El Niño events do not produce the expected impact everywhere; stronger events only tip the odds further.” As Severine Fournier saysdeputy scientific director of Sentinel-6, “each El Niño is different, but they almost always bring a warm year and large changes in rainfall in parts of the planet.”
And it is logical: “El Niño” only means that the absence of strong trade winds that cool the surface of the equatorial Pacific causes the temperature of that area of the ocean to skyrocket. And it is this, through different atmospheric teleconnectionswhich disrupts all the weather systems in the world. But, for that to happen, the effects of the heat of the equatorial Pacific have to interact with a lot of systems and the result is unpredictable.
On the other hand, at least on paper, we are on the verge of what may be the largest event ever recorded. Nobody knows if from a certain moment onwards the rules we knew are broken.
So… Can we say that we are heading towards a SuperChild? As is evident, the climatic situation that is causing climate change increases the degree of uncertainty of everything. However, the data are very clear: in the last 76 years we have only seen eight cases like the current one (which, starting from a winter in a cold phase – La Niña – have reached summer in a warm phase).
None of those cases ended with a decaffeinated El Niño. In each and every one of them, rapid warming was followed by climate ‘curves’. The ground was the 1951 event that remained ‘moderate’ (although there is debate as to whether it was stronger, but we were unable to measure it well for technical reasons).
It is true that eight cases is not too many. But, for now, we know that the probability of him being a SuperChild is very high and that the probability of him becoming weak is almost negligible.
Image | BenBaso
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