UK forecasts ‘biggest’ El Nino

AFP | London

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This year's El Nino weather pattern will be the biggest in over a century and could make 2027 the hottest year globally, Britain's national weather agency predicted yesterday.

This year's El Nino weather pattern will be the biggest in over a century and could make 2027 the hottest year globally, Britain's national weather agency predicted yesterday.

An El Nino weather event happens when warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific trigger worldwide changes in winds, atmospheric pressure and rainfall, as well as higher global temperatures overall.

Adam Scaife, head of long-range forecasting at the weather agency, told the BBC: "We are expecting the biggest El Nino for over a century, peaking at something over three degrees -- that is unheard of in modern climate records."

This means Pacific water would heat up more than 3C above the norm in the coming months.

El Nino occurs when water temperatures rise at least 0.5C above the baseline. While it is part of a natural cycle, scientists agree climate change increases its impacts.

A record El Nino would be "adding to the stresses of climate change" following a summer of heatwaves across Europe, the Met Office said in a blog.

Temperatures in the Pacific region are currently running about 2.6C above a rolling 30-year average, according to the Climate Brink dashboard based on data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The dashboard also aggregates forecasts that put El Nino on course to peak at a 3.9C anomaly this November -- well above a 3C anomaly detected in 2015.

"We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event," British scientist Scaife said in a Met Office blog.

If the forecast is accurate, then 2026 "will far exceed our recent experience of El Nino and its worldwide climate influences", said the physicist who specialises in climate modelling.

"I have never seen an El Nino signal this intense in our forecasts," he added, with even a 2C rise considered a "really big event".

El Nino typically results in drier conditions across southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, and northern Brazil, and wetter conditions in the Horn of Africa, the southern United States, Peru and Ecuador.