El Niño expected to strengthen further: High Impacts, unprecedented preparation

The El Niño of 2015-2016 

WMO has produced an animation to explain this year’s El Niño event. 

From WMO (U.N. system’s authoritative voice on weather, climate and water)

A mature and strong El Niño event, which is contributing to extreme weather patterns, is expected to strengthen further by the end of the year, according to the latest Update from the World Meteorological Organization.

Peak three-month average surface water temperatures in the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean will exceed 2 degrees Celsius above normal, placing this El Niño event among the three strongest since 1950. (Strong previous El Niños were in 1972-73, 1982-83 and 1997-98).

1997 vs. 2015: Animation Compares El Niños Side-by-Side

see Climate Central

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a naturally occurring phenomenon which is the result of the interaction between the ocean and atmosphere in the east-central Equatorial Pacific.

Typically, El Niño events peak late in the calendar year, with maximum strength between October and January of the following year.

They often persist through much of the first quarter of that year before decaying.

“Severe droughts and devastating flooding being experienced throughout the tropics and sub-tropical zones bear the hallmarks of this El Niño, which is the strongest for more than 15 years,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.

“We are better prepared for this event than we have ever been in the past.

On the basis of advice from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, the worst affected countries are planning for El Niño and its impacts on sectors like agriculture, fisheries, water and health, and implementing disaster management campaigns to save lives and minimize economic damage and disruption,” he said.

“The level of international, national and local mobilization is truly unprecedented, exemplifying the value of actionable climate information to the society”, said Mr Jarraud. “The preparedness for this El Niño will benefit from the systems WMO has been working to strengthen since the last major event in 1997-1998”, he added.

 What a difference a year makes. Strong El Niño settling in, comparing a year ago with today, as shown by this visualization of sea surface temp anomalies.

WMO released its Update on the eve of an international El Niño Conference in New York, of which WMO is a major co-sponsor, to increase scientific understanding of this event as well as its impacts, and help boost resilience to anticipated global socio-economic shocks.

“Our scientific understanding of El Niño has increased greatly in recent years.

However, this event is playing out in uncharted territory. Our planet has altered dramatically because of climate change, the general trend towards a warmer global ocean, the loss of Arctic sea ice and of over a million square km of summer snow cover in the northern hemisphere,” said Mr Jarraud.

“So this naturally occurring El Niño event and human induced climate change may interact and modify each other in ways which we have never before experienced,” he said.

“Even before the onset of El Niño, global average surface temperatures had reached new records. El Niño is turning up the heat even further,” said Mr Jarraud.

Comparison of the existing El Niño to past strong events.

In short, we're in the middle of one of the strongest El Niño's in recorded history.

It is important to note that El Niño and La Niña are not the only factors that drive global climate patterns.

For example, the state of the Indian Ocean (the so-called Indian Ocean Dipole), or the Tropical Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature, are also capable of affecting the climate in the adjacent land areas.

Most Recent 2 Months Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Animation (Western Hemisphere)
NOAA SST anomalies

Regionally and locally applicable information is available via regional/national seasonal climate outlooks, such as those produced by WMO Regional Climate Centres (RCCs), Regional Climate Outlook Forums (RCOFs) and National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs).

WMO released its Update on the eve of an international El Niño Conference to increase scientific understanding of this event and help boost resilience to anticipated global socio-economic shocks. The conference takes place on 17-18 November at Colombia University in New York and is co-sponsored and jointly organized by the World Meteorological Organization, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The conference will:

• Provide an overview of the 2015 El Niño and its potential impacts
• Explore the connection between the current El Niño and global change
• Foster dialogue between climate scientists and development practitioners to strengthen action for climate resilience and sustainable development
• Examine the progress, and lessons learned, over last 20 years in international, national and regional climate services, with a focus on El Niño

The full agenda is available here.

The conference will be livestreamed.

Background Information

The ongoing El Niño has already been associated with a number of major impacts.

These include:

Coral bleaching: Record ocean temperatures, caused in part by El Niño, have contributed to a major coral bleaching event.

It began in the north Pacific in summer 2014 and expanded to the south Pacific and Indian oceans in 2015. It is hitting U.S. coral reefs disproportionately hard.

NOAA estimates that by the end of 2015, almost 95 percent of U.S. coral reefs will have been exposed to ocean conditions that can cause corals to bleach.

Tropical cyclones: El Niño has contributed to a very active tropical cyclone season in the Western North Pacific and Eastern North Pacific basins.

Hurricane Patricia, which made landfall in Mexico on 24 October, was reportedly the most intense tropical cyclone in the western hemisphere.

El Niño tends to reduce hurricane activity in the Atlantic and around Australia.

Regional Impacts:

South East Asia: El Niño is typically associated with drought in South East Asia.

This has helped fuel wildfires in Indonesia, among the worst on record, which has caused dense haze to cover many parts of Indonesia and other neighbouring countries, with significant repercussions for health.

Pacific Islands: Historically, El Niño has caused reduced rainfall in the southwest Pacific (from southern Papua New Guinea southeast to the southern Cook Islands) and enhanced rainfall in the central and eastern Pacific (e.g. Tuvalu, Kiribati, Tokelau and Nauru).

But it also affects the number of tropical cyclones and their preferred tracks, so that there is a risk of extreme rainfall events even where drier than normal conditions are forecast.

More information here.

South Asia: Southwest monsoon.

The India Meteorological Department reported that the June-September rainfall over India as a whole was 86% of its long period average.

El Niño situation is believed to have played a key role in the rainfall deficit, which was successfully forecast by the India Meteorological Department as early as in June 2015.

Eastern Africa: The October to December rainfall season is expected to be highly influenced by the El-Nino phenomenon which is usually associated with enhanced rainfall within the equatorial sector of the Greater Horn of Africa during the October – December period.

However, local systems and the sea surface temperature patterns of the Indian Ocean impart highly on the influence of El-Nino to the region’s seasonal rainfall performance.

More information here.

Southern Africa; A number of countries in southern Africa are reporting below average rainfall leading to drought conditions and fears of food insecurity.

El Niño is a contributory, but not the only, factor. Further reading here.

South America: El Niño has a major impact on a number of countries in South America.

For instance, in the 1997-98 El Niño, central Ecuador and Peru suffered rainfall more than 10 times normal, which caused flooding, extensive erosion and mudslides with loss of lives, destruction of homes and infrastructure, damage to food supplies.

In Peru about 10% of the health facilities were damaged.

National meteorological services throughout the region have been very active in advising governments on preparedness measures to try to limit damages from this year’s El Niño.

The International Center for the Investigation of the El Niño Phenomenon, is WMO’s Regional Climate Centre for Western South America and is based in Ecuador.

It has organized briefings for policy makers and representatives from disaster risk management, agriculture and food production, health, tourism and other industries in South America.

In Central America, the Caribbean Climate Outlook Forum is issuing outlooks for El Niño-related conditions.

North America: the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration is regularly issuing El Niño Updates and advisories, along with regular blogs.

Links : 

• ECMWF : El Niño approaches peak warming
• MetOffice : Is an El Niño on the way and what might its impacts be? 
• Hawaii Univ : Extreme Pacific sea level events to double in future 
• NOAA : El Niño: One of Nature’s Biggest Weather Makers 
• LA Times : Massive El Niño is now 'too big to fail,' scientist says 
• NASA : El Niño Strengthening 
• Climate Central : El Niño Keeps Antarctic Sea Ice From Another Record Max
• NYTimes : The Pacific Ocean Becomes a Caldron
• EarthSky : El Niño strengthening / El Niño already disrupting ocean food web
• Nature : Hunting the Godzilla El Niño

Canada CHS update in the GeoGarage platform

45 nautical raster charts updates + 1 chart added

see : GeoGarage News

New report and maps: Rising seas threaten land home to half a billion

Redesign of the sea level rise maps for every coastline around the globe

by ClimateCentral

Carbon emissions causing 4°C of warming — what business-as-usual points toward today —- could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people, with unstoppable rise unfolding over centuries.
At the same time, aggressive carbon cuts limiting warming to 2°C could bring the number as low as 130 million people.

How to avoid the next Atlantis

These are the stakes for global climate talks December in Paris.
Our analysis details the implications of different warming scenarios for every coastal nation and megacity on the planet, and our globally searchable Mapping Choices tool maps them.
We are also publishing Google Earth fly-over videos and KML contrasting these different futures for important cities around the world, and printable high-resolution photorealistic images of select global landmarks. We have made these visualizations embeddable and downloadable.
These are the stakes for global climate talks, in pictures.

Some of our major findings include: China, the world’s leading carbon emitter, leads the world, too, in coastal risk, with 145 million people living on land ultimately threatened by rising seas if emission levels are not reduced.
China has the most to gain from limiting warming to ​2°C, which would cut the total to 64 million.
Twelve other nations each have more than 10 million people living on land at risk, led by India, Bangladesh, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and Japan.
The U.S. is the most threatened nation outside of Asia, with roughly 25 million people on implicated land.
Meeting the 2°C​ goal would cut exposure by more than half in the U.S., China, and India, the world’s top three carbon emitters, as well as in many other nations.
Global megacities with the top-10 largest threatened populations include Shanghai, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Mumbai, Dhaka, Jakarta, and Hanoi.

Explore the full interactive map >>

Links : 

• NOAA : Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts

Safe at sea with satellites

At sea, space technology is used to help save lives every day: managing traffic between ships, picking up migrants and refugees in distress or spotting oil spills.
The European Space Agency is once again at the forefront developing new technologies and satellites: to keep us safe at sea and to monitor the environment.
Space makes a difference here on Earth and certainly at sea where there is no infrastructure.

Book : Pacific: The Ocean of the Future by Simon Winchester review – does salvation lie in the world’s ‘dominant entity’?

Travelling the circumference of the truly gigantic Pacific, Simon Winchester tells the story of the world's largest body of water, and - in matters economic, political and military - the ocean of the future.

The Pacific is a world of tsunamis and Magellan, of the Bounty mutiny and the Boeing Company.

It is the stuff of the towering Captain Cook and his wide-ranging network of exploring voyages, Robert Louis Stevenson and Admiral Halsey.

It is the place of Paul Gauguin and the explosion of the largest-ever American atomic bomb, on Bikini atoll, in 1951.

It has an astonishing recent past, an uncertain present and a hugely important future.

The ocean and its peoples are the new lifeblood, fizz and thrill of America - which draws so many of its minds and so much of its manners from the sea - while the inexorable rise of the ancient center of the world, China, is a fixating fascination.

The presence of rogue states - North Korea most notoriously today - suggest that the focus of the responsible world is shifting away from the conventional post-war obsessions with Europe and the Middle East, and towards a new set of urgencies.

Navigating the newly evolving patterns of commerce and trade, the world's most violent weather and the fascinating histories, problems and potentials of the many Pacific states, Simon Winchester's thrilling journey is a grand depiction of the future ocean.

From The Guardian by Philip Doare

Simon Winchester argues that our destiny will be dictated by the Pacific’s vast expanses  

Will the Pacific save us?
In his biography of an ocean, Simon Winchester finds an optimistic note among all the doom we humans trail in our wake.
This enormous body of water, which covers roughly a third of the planet’s surface, has become a cistern for our western sins.
We have raided its indigenous peoples and animals; our world wars and nuclear tests have contaminated its islands and seas.
How does it repay us?
By absorbing the heat caused by our excessive burning of fossil fuels, acting as a “gigantic safety valve” to global warming.
Archipelagos may be overwhelmed and coral reefs die, but in the end, Winchester intimates, the Earth will survive because of “the dominant entity on the planet” – all 64 million square miles of it.

As a companion to his magisterial Atlantic, Winchester’s Pacific is an equally digressive book, worthy of Herman Melville, and full of wondrous anecdotes that would fuel an entire series of QI.
Sikh guards were employed by the British to guard their colonial armouries because their religion forbade smoking.
Newly discovered deep-sea vents, where life itself may have begun, recycle all of the planet’s oceanic water every 10 years.
All of the continents could fit into this one ocean.
To encompass this vastness in one book, Winchester selects a series of key moments in the Pacific’s recent history.
He starts in 1950 with a bravura chapter, The Great Thermonuclear Sea.
It is not a pretty story.
Places recently ravaged by bloody war faced a new outrage: the multiple detonation of atomic bombs.
Far from the Berlin Wall, the cold war was rehearsed in blood-warm seas. Islands, and islanders’ bodies, became test sites for the apocalypse.
One explosion was witnessed by a reporter from the New York Times.
“It was like watching the birth and death of a star, born and disintegrated in the instant of its birth... it lighted up the sky and ocean with the light of many suns, a light not of the earth”.

Not all of Pacific’s scenes are so dark.
A scintillating chapter on the transition of surfing from Hawaii to California in 1907, courtesy of a half-Hawaiian, half-Irish surfer named George Freeth, hymns the “erotic, arching elegance” of this democratic use of the sea.
We follow the birth of the Sony Corporation in Japan and the sacking of Gough Whitlam in Australia, both tectonic shifts in the cultural rise of the Pacific Rim.
Western interests fall, with the symbolic sinking (probably due to sabotage) of the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong’s harbour; Prince Charles sails over its wreck in 1997 as he and the British leave the colony to new rulers described by the prince as “appalling old waxworks”.

But the greatest power of the Pacific is elemental.
It is where our weather is born, and in a brilliant chapter on El Niño and climate change, Winchester shows that the placid ocean is becoming steadily more stormy, wreaking indiscriminate havoc from the Philippines to Australia.
At the same time, those waters have become witness to “a sudden and wholesale redistribution of world power”, from America to China.
Far from running scared at the notion, Winchester wonders if it might not actually be a good thing if we were to allow the east its turn, rather than falling back on our old notions of racial superiority.
The Pacific is our future ocean.
And in this provocative, elegant book, it has found a new and lucid storyteller.