Extreme El Niño Events to Double as Climate Change Warms the Globe

It turns out that as our planet warms, extreme weather events are likely to increase. Scientists have discovered that El Niños may double in number as our planet warms, causing scenarios such as the 1983 heatwave that led to the Ash Wednesday bushfires in Australia.

"We currently experience an unusually strong El Niño evnt every 20 years," said Agus Santoso, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our research shows this will double to one event every 10 years."

Extreme El Niño events develop differently from standard ones. The more regular ones first appear in the western Pacific, but more extreme events occur when sea surface temperatures exceed 28 degrees Celsius and develop in the normally cold and dry eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. This means that global warming could greatly impact how often these events occur.

"El Niño events are a multi-dimensional problem, and only now are we starting to understand better how they respond to global warming," said Santoso in a news release.

In order to investigate a bit further, the researchers examined 20 climate models that consistently simulate major rainfall reorganization during extreme El Niño events. In the end, they found a substantial increase in events from the present day through the next 100 years as the eastern Pacific Ocean warmed in response to global warming. This could be serious since El Niños can cause damage and cost countries billions.

"During an extreme El Niño event countries in the western Pacific, such as Australia and Indonesia, experienced devastating droughts and wild fires, while catastrophic floods occurred in the eastern equatorial region of Ecuador and northern Peru," said Wenju Cai, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In fact, the latest research suggests that El Niño events are likely to double in frequency as the world warms. For Australia, this could mean summer heat waves that could get an additional boost from these extreme events.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Climate Change.