How much sea surface temperatures departed from the 1981-2010 average during the week of Aug. 10, 2015.
“We’re predicting that this El Niño could be among the strongest El Niños in the historical record dating back to 1950,” Mike Halpert, the deputy director of the , part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said during a press teleconference.
Whether this is good news or bad news depends on where you are: For Californians, the prospect of a top-tier El Niño boosts the hopes for a winter, which is desperately needed after four years of record-setting drought. For the Pacific Northwest, also mired in drought, El Niño usually means drier weather, though it could still be an improvement on last year.
El Niño is a cyclical climate phenomenon rooted in the tropical Pacific that features a buildup of warmer-than-normal waters in the central and eastern portions of the basin. Over the last few months, those waters have been steadily heating up. In July, temperatures in a key region were more than 2°F above average, a departure that comes in second only to the blockbuster El Niño of 1997-1998, the event by which are judged.
It’s possible this El Niño, which in was called “significant and strengthening,” could reach more than 3.5°F above normal in this ocean region, “a value that we’ve only recorded three times in the last 65 years,” Halpert said. That threshold was reached during the 1997-1998 event, as well as those from 1982-1983 and 1972-1973.
“None of the typical impacts are ever guaranteed,” Halpert said.
Still, the boosted odds are potentially welcome news to a state that is four years into a record-setting drought, as it could begin the slow climb out of the . But they can also come with serious downsides, such as major flooding and landslides, as happened with the 1998 event.
Some of that will depend on winter temperatures, which were unusually high across the West last winter, causing precipitation to fall as rain, not snow, and leaving states with .
Those elevated temperatures — which made winter feel — were the result of a persistent high-pressure pattern that also helped form a large pool of warm water off the West Coast, which some scientists dubbed “.”
El Niño could actually knock out the high-pressure pattern and with it the unusually hot weather, , an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, said. This already seems to be happening, he added.
“I’m actually looking forward to next year” being better than this year, Mass said.
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