While the 1998 North Atlantic hurricane season saw one of the deadliest and strongest hurricanes in the historical record, claiming more than 11,000 lives in Honduras and Nicaragua.” Bangladesh experienced one of the most destructive flooding events in modern history, with over 50 per cent of the country’s land area flooded. In China, river floods and storms led to the death of thousands, and displaced over 200 million people. Venezuela endured flash flooding and landslides that killed 25,000 to 50,000 people. “The southwestern United States experienced one of the most severe droughts in history. He tells Carbon Brief about some of the impacts of the extreme La Niña in 1998-99: ( 2015)Įxtreme La Niña events can cause havoc with global weather, says lead author Dr Wenju Cai from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation ( CSIRO) in Australia. The difference in sea surface temperatures (SST) between a weak (upper) and an extreme (lower) La Niña event. To be an ‘extreme’ event, sea surface temperatures have to drop over 1.75 degrees Celsius lower than normal, as the map below shows. Scientists judge how strong a La Niña event is by how cold central Pacific Ocean temperatures get. A new paper, published in Nature Climate Change, suggests that extreme La Niña events will occur almost twice as often in the twenty-first century than they did in the twentieth. Understanding how extreme La Niña will change as global temperatures rise has challenged scientists for the past three decades. Together, the warm and cold events form the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and cause most of the fluctuations in global weather we see from one year to the next. La Niñas are known to bring drought to the southwestern US, floods to Central America, and hurricanes to the Atlantic Ocean.
During La Niña events the trade winds strengthen, and the central and eastern Pacific Ocean becomes even colder than normal. La Niña, or ‘The Little Girl’, is El Niño’s cold water counterpart. Now a new study suggests that we could see La Niña events occurring twice as often as the climate warms.Įvery five years or so, weakening trade winds causes a shift to warmer than normal ocean temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, a phenomena known as El Niño. Scientists keep a close eye on its status as events can cause devastating extreme weather around the world.īut El Niño has a lesser-known sister, La Niña, which also has a dramatic impact on global weather. The Pacific weather phenomenon known as El Niño or ‘The Little Boy’ is regularly in the news.
0 kommentar(er)
