As temperatures around the globe continue to rise, we could begin to experience more severe forms of weather much more often, according to a new study. Researchers taking part in the study now believe that the climate phenomena known as El Niño and La Niña are likely to increase in both frequency and violence thanks to global warming.
The study published in the journal Nature Climate Change states that droughts will increase in the United States, and flooding could ravage the western Pacific, as the world warms and the El Niño and La Niña events become more aggressive.
Currently extreme La Niña events occur once every 23 years, but thanks to global warming, experts believe they will increase in frequency to one every 13 years, and they will follow extreme El Niño events.
El Niño is a band of warm ocean water that develops in the Pacific Ocean near South America on a cyclical basis, as part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, with La Niña being the cool part of the cycle. Both of these parts of the cycle are the root cause for many extreme weather events across the globe, and with global warming they will begin happening more frequently and with much great intensity.
The research was conducted by teams across the globe in Australia, China, Peru, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While the teams cautioned that extreme weather events cannot specifically be tied to climate change, the findings suggest that there will be more heat waves and aggressive storms as temperatures continue to rise across the globe.
The last time the Earth experienced a strong El Niño event was in 1997-98. This event resulted in a very strong hurricane season in the Pacific Ocean, with 24 recorded tropical depressions and nine hurricanes. Of these nine hurricanes, seven of them reached category three in strength, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and killing hundreds.
Once El Niño dissipated in 1998, it was followed by a La Niña event that resulted in above-average activity in what became the deadliest Atlantic hurricane season in the last 200 years. The most notable storm of that season was perhaps Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America with force, killing 11,000 people and leaving another 11,000 missing in what would be the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in recorded history.
If the study's findings prove correct, these types of weather events promise to become more frequent and even more intense and could spawn some of the most dangerous storms ever to be recorded.
