Long-term weather forecasts suggest that 2014 might be the hottest year since records began, as climate bad-boy El Nino is getting ready to spew heat into the atmosphere.
An El Nino occurs when warm water buried below the surface of the Pacific rises up and spreads along the equator towards America. For nine months or more it brings rain and flooding to areas around Peru and Ecuador, and drought and fires to Indonesia and Australia.
It is part of a cycle called the El Nino-Southern Oscillation. It is notoriously hard to make a prediction before the “spring barrier” as to whether there will be an El Nino in a given year. Scott Power from the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, Australia said that the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle more or less reboots around April-May-June each calendar year, New Scientist reported. Wenju Cai from the CSIRO, Australia’s national research agency in Melbourne said that the problem is that there is so much background variability in the atmosphere and ocean that it is hard to see any signal amidst the noise.
Cai said that even if there is a developing El Nino, it is hard to predict. But now a model aimed specifically at predicting El Nino seems to be able to sift through the noise by examining a previously-unexplored feature of Pacific weather. The probability is 0.76 that El Nino will occur in 2014, which in other words mean that there is a 76 per cent chance of an El Nino this year. As a result of climate change 2014 is likely to be one of the hottest years on record. If El Nino does develop this year, it will make 2014 even hotter – maybe the hottest ever, Cai said. But since El Nino normally straddles two calendar years, it might give 2015 that title. (ANI)