El Niño soon came to describe irregular and intense climate changes rather than just the warming of coastal surface waters. When capitalized, El Niño means the Christ Child, and was used because the phenomenon often arrived around Christmas. We have no real record of what indigenous Peruvians called the phenomenon, but Spanish immigrants called it El Niño, meaning “the little boy” in Spanish. However, El Niño is not a regular cycle, or predictable in the sense that ocean tides are.Įl Niño was recognized by fishers off the coast of Peru as the appearance of unusually warm water. El Niño events occur irregularly at two- to seven-year intervals. El Niño and La Niña are considered the ocean part of ENSO, while the Southern Oscillation is its atmospheric changes.Įl Niño has an impact on ocean temperatures, the speed and strength of ocean currents, the health of coastal fisheries, and local weather from Australia to South America and beyond. La Niña, the “cool phase” of ENSO, is a pattern that describes the unusual cooling of the region’s surface waters. El Niño is the “warm phase” of a larger phenomenon called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It is notable that we have experienced more frequent “extreme” ENSO events in the last few decades, but our records only go back 150 years, which isn’t enough to draw any conclusions.El Niño is a climate pattern that describes the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The ENSO is the result of a complicated interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean with many factors that are slowly being modified by climate change. It is difficult to say at this point in time. How Does Climate Change Affect the ENSO Cycle? The 2015-2016 El Niño event was one of the 3 strongest episodes on record, affecting 60 million people worldwide. Its greatest impact is on countries around the equator, including Central America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, Eastern and South-Eastern Africa especially. Impacts on Human Well-BeingĪs we saw earlier, the ENSO cycle can have far-reaching effects on our weather. Source: Australian Government BOM.Īustralia can experience much heavier downpours than usual, which enter further within the continent. Their frequency is quite irregular, and El Niño events happen more frequently than their counterpart. These phases usually occur once every few years and last 9 to 12 months, but can sometimes last years. They are opposite phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a temperature variation between the ocean and the atmosphere over the east-central Tropical Pacific. The Difference Between El Niño And La Niñaįirst, El Niño means “the little boy” in Spanish, and La Niña, “the little girl”. ![]() ![]() However, well-understood, medium-term variations like El Niño and La Niña could help us predict imminent changes with higher precision. Scientists have been crunching huge amounts of data with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to model the long-term fluctuations of the climate. ![]() We often hear the terms El Niño and La Niña thrown around in climate-related conversations, but what exactly do they refer to? This article will give a review of the cycle known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation.
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