Global Warming May Increase Droughts and Give Rise to Severe Hurricanes
El Niño, the periodic easterly Pacific Ocean phenomenon accredited with sheltering the United States of America and Caribbean from serious hurricane seasons, may be eclipsed by its brother in the central Pacific Ocean due to global warming, reported by an article in the September issue of the journal Nature. Read more about Global Warming Insurance
“There are two El Niños, or tones of El Niño,” said Ben Kirtman, co-author of the study and professor of weather forecasting and physical oceanography at the University of Miami’s Rosentstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. “Besides the easterly Pacific Ocean El Niño which we know and love, a second El Niño in the central Pacific Ocean is on the growth.”
El Niño is a repeating warm water stream along the equator in the Pacific Ocean that bears upon atmospheric conditions and circulation patterns in the tropics. The eastern El Niño increments wind sheer in the Atlantic that may strangle the evolution of major hurricanes there. The central Pacific El Niño, near the International Dateline, has been faulted for worsening drought conditions in Australia and India in addition to downplaying the consequences of its good brother to the east.
Chaired by Sang-Wook Yeh of the Korea Ocean Research & Development Institute, a team of scientists implemented Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature data from the past 150 years to 11 global warming frameworks built up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Eight of the models demonstrated that global warming considerations will increment the relative incidence of the central Pacific El Niño. Over the last 20 years, according to the data, the relative frequency of an El Niño event in the central Pacific has expanded from one out of every five to half of all El Niño happenings.
Although the cores of the central and eastern areas are roughly 4,100 miles apart, El Niños historically have not simultaneously happened in both places. A growth in central Pacific El Niño cases may bring down the hurricane-shielding consequences of the eastern Pacific event.
According to Kirtman, “presently, we are in the middle of a developing easterly Pacific Ocean El Niño event, which is part of why we are feeling such a mild hurricane season in the Atlantic. We also expect the southern United States to have a fairly wet winter, and the northeast may be dry and warm.” Kirtman expects the prevailing El Niño event to end next spring, maybe accompanied by a La Niña, which he expects may bode for a more intense Atlantic hurricane season in 2010.
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