From
The Guardian
The global El Niño
weather phenomenon, whose impacts cause global famines, floods – and even
wars – now has a 90% chance of striking this year, according to the latest
forecast released to the Guardian.
El Niño begins as a giant pool of warm water swelling in the
eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, that sets off a chain reaction of weather
events around the world – some devastating and some beneficial.
India is expected to be the first to suffer, with weaker
monsoon rains undermining the nation’s fragile food supply, followed by further
scorching droughts in Australia
and collapsing fisheries off South America. But some regions could benefit, in
particular the US, where El Niño is seen as the “great wet hope” whose rains
could break the searing drought in the west.
What is El Niño
The knock-on effects can have impacts even more widely, from
cutting global gold prices to making England’s World Cup footballers sweat a
little more.
The latest El Niño prediction comes from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts
(ECMWF), which is considered one the most reliable of the 15 or so prediction
centres around the world. “It is very much odds-on for an event,” said Tim
Stockdale, principal scientist at ECMWF, who said 90% of their scenarios now
deliver an El Niño. "The amount of warm water in the Pacific is now
significant, perhaps the biggest since the 1997-98 event.” That El Niño was the
biggest in a century, producing the hottest year on record at the time and
major global impacts, including a mass
die-off of corals.
“But what is very much unknowable at this stage is whether
this year’s El Niño will be a small event, a moderate event – that’s most
likely – or a really major event,” said Stockdale, adding the picture will
become clearer in the next month or two. “It is which way the winds blow that
determines what happens next and there is always a random element to the
winds.”
The movement of hot, rain-bringing water to the eastern
Pacific ramps up the risk of downpours in the nations flanking that side of the
great ocean, while the normally damp western flank dries out. Governments,
commodity traders, insurers and aid groups like the Red Cross and World Food
Programme all monitor developments closely and water
conservation and food stockpiling is already underway in some countries.
Professor Axel Timmermann, an oceanographer at the
University of Hawaii, argues that a major El Niño is more likely than not,
because of the specific pattern of winds and warm water being seen in the
Pacific. “In the past, such alignments have always triggered strong El Niño
events,” he said.
El Niño events occur every five years or so and peak in
December, but the first, and potentially greatest, human impacts are felt in
India. The reliance of its 1 billion-strong population on the monsoon, which
usually sweeps up over the southern tip of the sub-continent around 1 June, has
led its monitoring to be dubbed “the most important weather forecast in the
world”. This year, it is has already got off to a delayed
start, with the first week’s rains 40% below average.
26Jun2014 update
a. Rainfall deficit for whole of India - 40%
b. Rainfall deficit for Central India only - 57%
(Source -
NDTV)
Italics in the above article are mine.
Praful Rao,
Kalimpong,
Dist Darjeeling
