Last week, the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization issued a confident prediction that El Niño will form at some point this summer. They pegged the odds at 80 percent — a striking forecast that nonetheless lacked a firm starting time.
Now, however, the first major weather organization has officially called it. According to a statement translated by Gizmodo, the Japanese Meteorological Agency has declared that El Niño is actively upon us.
A day after the JMA issued its statement, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its own El Niño advisory, declaring that “El Niño has developed in the tropical Pacific.”
There have been many predictions that El Niño conditions — a naturally occurring climate pattern characterized by unusually warm ocean surface temperatures — will soon be upon us, but agrowing number of weather agencies are now affirming El Niño is here. And as a consensus emerges around the development of El Niño, warnings about its potential strength are growing ever more stark.
The NOAA, for example, issued a prediction that El Niño will intensify “to a moderate or strong level this fall,” with a 63 percent chance of sea surface temperatures exceeding 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in certain parts of the Pacific. If this occurs, it would break records, beating the worst El Niño season ever observed in 1877.
Essentially, this El Niño is expected to supercharge the Pacific jet stream, delivering much drier conditions for the American Midwest, and tons of rain across the US South, the NOAA advisory explains. Canada and the Northern US states would likely experience much warmer temperatures as well, which may supercharge summer wildfires.
Ultimately, though, it’ll be difficult to say exactly what this El Niño cycle will look like until it’s right on top of us.
“Every El Niño is not the same; each one is unique with its own imprint on our weather,” Ken Graham, director of the NOAA’s National Weather Service said in a statement. “Advanced monitoring and an improved understanding of El Niño patterns allow the NWS to better predict and better prepare the public and our core partners for what is to come.”
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