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Adverse El Niño events expected to double in frequency

1,159 views · Published 19 February 2014 · 0:36 · Indexed 1 October 2026

Channel: News Direct · 2014 · News & Politics

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Originally published on January 20, 2014

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Changes in the climate are expected to double the occurrence of adverse weather events caused by the El Niño, an Australian study has found.

The study conducted by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, incorporated 20 climate models to study the historic trends of El Niño. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, predict that extreme weather events caused by the El Niño — droughts in Australia, floods in South America — are expected to occur once every ten years over the rest of this century. Such powerful El Niño, however, occurred only once every 20 years over  the past 100 years.  

"We are due for a big El Niño year," the study's lead author Wenju Cai, an atmospheric scientist at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, said in an NBC News report. "But nobody can predict when it is going to come."

Under normal circumstances, trade winds blowing from east to west across the equatorial Pacific send warm surface waters to the eastern Pacific, generating a low-pressure area over which storms form.

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