‘It’s too big to fail’: Powerful El Niño expected to bring record wet winter to the West Coast
There’s an over 60% possibility that Southern California will have a wet winter, and an over 40% possibility that San Francisco will have one
Winds changing direction along the equator and rising sea-level ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are causing El Niño to be more powerful
El Niño is a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific that occurs every few years
By REUTERS and ZOE SZATHMARY
DAILYMAIL.COM
11 October 2015
Californians may need to stock up on umbrellas this winter, due to this year’s El Niño.
Bill Patzert, climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the Los Angeles Times: ‘There’s no longer a possibility that El Niño wimps out at this point.
‘It’s too big to fail.’
The newspaper wrote that ‘rising sea-level ocean temperatures in the Pacific’ along with ‘a change of directions of the wind along the equator’ are causing El Niño to be more powerful.
Winter storms typically dropping rainfall in Central America might instead change course and affect California and the southern US because of this, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The newspaper reported there’s an over 60% possibility that Southern California will have a wet winter, and an over 40% possibility that San Francisco will have a wet winter.
The Climate Prediction Center’s deputy director Mike Halpert told the newspaper that ‘this could be one of the types of winters like in 1997-98.’
KFOR wrote that ‘the winter of 1997 was the second warmest and seventh wettest on record.’
A U.S. government weather forecaster on Thursday maintained its outlook for strong El Niño conditions as likely to continue through the Northern Hemisphere into 2016, potentially roiling global crops and commodities prices.
The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) again pegged the likelihood of El Niño conditions persisting through the winter at about 95 percent, peaking in late fall/early winter.
It said its El Nino conditions would likely start gradually weakening next spring.
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