Exactly What Are the Weather Patterns on this Planet Again?

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is trying as best it can to plot and predict oceanic twists, the impact of the vast global contraction of polar ice, the consequence of the humongous release of much-heavier-than-carbon-dioxide-greenhouse-gas methane as tundra melts in Siberia and Canada, the cyclical El Niño and La Niña eddies in the Pacific Ocean, the acceleration of severe tropical storms (hurricanes and cyclones) all over the world, downpours that produce unprecedented floods, storm surges while other regions face fires and droughts, etc., etc. that are changing so fast so as to defy the kind of reliable traditional meteorological prediction that once was routine. Satellites watch, scientists measure, professors create computer models, and nature seems to delight in surprising these experts with excess after excess.

The director of WMO’s World Climate Research Program summarizes the conundrum well: “We have had years of record Arctic sea ice minimum. We have lost a massive area of Northern Hemisphere snow cover, probably by more than 1 million square kilometers in the past 15 years. We are working on a different planet and we fully do not understand the new patterns emerging.”

So today, I just want to drill down on the current El Niño phenomenon, much stronger than normal, and its expected impact on our West Coast. First, take a look at how completely different the current El Niño cycle is from those of past years. The enhanced photographs above (from our government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) reflect the change in the concentration of rising surface temperature (marked in red) in two El Niño cycles, 18 years apart. It’s not subtle, and as time passes, the experts keep expanding the expected duration of this rather intense, current climatic event.

“El Niño is an anomalous, yet periodic, warming of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. For reasons still not well understood, every two to seven years, this patch of ocean warms for six to 18 months… The fact that El Niño is likely to last into spring is important for the United States since precipitation and temperature impacts from a moderate-to-strong El Niño are typically most noticeable during the colder months…

“We've likely already seen some impacts from El Niño this summer. For example, a record number of named storms have developed during the central Pacific hurricane season - a basin where we typically see an uptick in tropical activity during El Niño. We've also seen strong wind shear near the Caribbean which is also typical of El Niño, and contributed to the demise of Tropical Storm Erika and Hurricane Danny in August…

“The WMO report is similar to the El Niño forecast update released by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Aug. 13. NOAA's forecaster consensus unanimously favors a strong El Niño at its peak in the late fall and early winter.

“In that forecast update, NOAA said El Niño has an 85 percent chance of lasting into early spring 2016. This is an increase of 5 percent over NOAA's last El Niño update in July. NOAA also said that there is a greater than 90 percent chance of El Niño lasting through the upcoming winter…

“During an El Niño… trade winds weaken, and may at times reverse from west to east. Warmer western Pacific water then slowly sloshes back toward the central, even eastern Pacific Ocean in what's known as an equatorial-trapped Kelvin wave… Therefore, the most persistent thunderstorms will shift from the western to the eastern and central Pacific Ocean in an El Niño.

“This trade wind reversal and the resulting reorientation of thunderstorms changes the atmospheric circulation not just over this swath of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, but can also have far-reaching impacts on the atmospheric circulation.” AOL.com, September 4^th.  Good news (??) for California as this El Niño will drop some much-needed rain on that parched state (maybe too much at any given moment)… but for other states across the land, having faced flooding of late, they can expect more of the same.

But the subtext is the rising ocean temperatures, manifestly higher than ever recorded before. The amalgamation of climatic variables – from greenhouse patterns and natural cycles to the unpredictable and often self-accelerating impact of the combination of both – tells us that what we face is anything but predictable. It will be messy. Farmers may cheer and then wail, but the world seems to be long past the tipping point of restoring a planet to its more traditional cyclical patterns. Land use will change. Old crops will fail, but perhaps we can find new strains that may, someday prospect. And in all of this will be displacement. People, animals and crops. As we continue to debate mankind’s responsibility in all this, nature sneers at our ignorance, inaction and punishes us with her wrath.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as land values and usage change, exactly how will these massive variations impact your daily life?