Not to be selfish, but a Super El Niño sounds bad and I kind of want to know how it will impact me. I assume next summer (2015) will be as hot as this winter was cold, but I have no idea what else to expect. Drought? Floods? Locusts?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Anybody who says they know what will happen is not telling the truth, or at least is woefully uninformed.
Usually it means more rain (sometimes a LOT more) to Southern California), but not always. Sometimes when Southern California gets that rain, Washington and Oregon don’t, but not always. Sometimes when Southern California gets all that rain, it stays further south than normal, and our northern states in the east get a drought, but not always.
My understanding (having lived through many of them, I’m in San Diego) is that the determining factor (like always on the west coast) is the jet stream. If the jet stream stays north, no rain in San Diego (like this year). If the jet stream comes south, rain whether we have an el nino or not)
The only thing that REALLY matters about an el nino is usually the tuna come within reach of ‘day’ boats out of Fisherman’s Landing in San Diego. But not always. And when it brings albacore? Watch the f#$k out! You have NEVER seen anything like a sportfishing boat landing when the albacore are running.
And that is pretty much all that matters in San Diego when it comes to an el nino. It may or may not rain, but the tuna will most likely run.
.
Oh! And jelly fish. We get a lot of tropical jelly fish during an el nino. I guess they could be considered the locust of the sea.
I don’t really care about the jelly fish, because I don’t swim in the ocean. My mother taught me not to swim in a toilet.
.
What to expect? Having had the opportunity to sit in on some graduate-school level lectures on climate change last year, what we should expect, generally speaking, is “more extreme weather, more frequently”.
If there’s a dry season where you live, expect longer dry seasons. If there’s a rainy season, expect bigger downpours (though total seasonal accumulation may go up or down). If your region gets snow in the winter, expect more intense blizzards. If where you live is in the path of Atlantic hurricanes, there may not be more hurricanes but they’ll likely be more powerful.
I know it’s not funny, but you made me laugh anyway. I tried to read that article and just shook my head. Huh? So yeah, drought, flood, locusts? is about where I am with my response, too.
Don’t sweat it, man. It’s all good. Dontcha know Jesus is going to come back before the shit hits the fan?
…and the Prince of Peace is bringing the floods and locusts with him, because gay marriage. Or abortions. Or something.
Well of course. Because we all know Jesus’ greatest public display of anger was when he went into the temple courts of Jerusalem and overturned the tables and chased out all the vendors who were selling in the gay bazaar.
You mean it wasn’t when he chastised his disciples for disrespecting Jesus’ wealthy patrons and the Magi?
The last major hurricane in my area was in 1996 (Fran). That was in an el Nino period. But…it is hard to tell because no one knows at this point how Arctic melt will affect the Gulf Stream or the upper atmosphere behavior. My amateur bet is “more like monsoon” weather–but are we in the wet season or the dry season?
Don’t worry, Rand Paul has a plan: Repeal the federal government and let the Market solve everything.
it’s deeply satisfying to need only one plan that applies to all situations. That’s what holds the republican party together. Half of them believe the Market will solve everything and the other half believe Jesus will, but it’s the same belief system.
Both halves believe that tax cuts are a universal panacea.
Just for comparison, James Burke’s 1989 scenario of how the response to global warming would unfold says that there will be political panic in 2015 that fundamentally transforms the response toward tighter regulation of greenhouse gases internationally and more international power over sovereign states. Burke, however, is a popular historian. But a wake-up year now or next year would fit his scenario. Not that a Lionsgate produced documentary could ever predict anything.
I asked our local NWS guys and got a pretty non-commital answer as expected. (see above comment about knowing..). they said that during a moderate El Niño, we should see less hurricane activity, but remember it only takes one. Andrew was during El Niño.
Yes, we in Key West are extremely interested in the possible looming super El Niño. We shall see.
El Nino doesn’t have particularly striking effects on the Northeastern US. The southern US, in general, gets more rain. The big weather changes are in the tropics. This past crazy winter is something more common in the year before an El Nino, but was still mostly driven by Northern Hemisphere events.
La Nina is more of an event for the US, actually, because it’s associated with droughts in the southern US.
Yeah, Booman is in the Philly area.
Guess what? Philly doesn’t really have climate. But it does have a buttload of WEATHER. Which is why the ONE type of winter that you’ll almost never experience is an “average” winter.
So, expect el Nino to dial it up to 11.
Blistering heat with scattered snowstorms.
Prior Super El Ninos 1983 and 1998. Don’t recall the use of the term El Nino in 1983 – but for something near sixty days there was rain and no sun. The coming of the 1998 El Nino was well broadcast, but didn’t observe anything particularly notable at the time and therefore, have zero memory of it.
Expect to hear plenty of, “never seen anything like this before” and much complaining and grumbling, but unless the weather events are global, sustained at a Richter scale 10 level for more than a few days, or even weeks, we humans aren’t going to view it as a warning. We’ll continue increasing our fossil fuel consumption to make more junk and travel more places until ocean and land based food stocks collapse and half or more of us die from hunger (and possibly thirst as well).
here in NorCal it’s being presented as the hopeful ending of the current drought. so we’ll go from damn little rain to way above average, with mudslides in hilly areas and flooding near rivers.
It looks like pretty smooth sailing for the Northeast for the coming year. Here’s the running three month climate forecasts for the year ahead in handy graph form:
Climate Prediction Center Color Outlook Maps
It indicates an above average temperature for next winter and otherwise normal conditions for the period for much of the country. The one caveat is that these specific projections have not caught the winter weirding from destabilizing conditions in the Arctic very well the last few years.
The BIG danger potential lies along the West Coast, particularly in California. They are subject to devastating floods, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great California Flood of 1861-1862. The Central Valley became a lake 300 miles by 20 miles wide. Here’s an account from along the Trinity River…
From the NYTimes…
So the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) did a major ‘what if’ study of the potential impacts today of these not so infrequent events, frequency comparable to a Big One earthquake, called ARkStorm. (WARNING pdf) They had previously done such a study on a Big One type earthquake that forms the basis for a lot of their current earthquake preparedness and response planning. They examined multiple impacts and came up with a potential cost impact of $750 Billion, three times more than the Big One earthquake.
So when the weather forecasts start talking about that ‘Pineapple Express’ watch out West Coast!