West coast natives have started to bring out their hoodies and jackets in response to the quickly falling temperatures. The root of these dramatic changes? The ongoing El Niño weather conditions.
El Niño is the climate phenomenon along the Pacific that’s characterized by its higher-than-normal sea levels and warmer-than-average ocean temperatures. The last El Niño occurred during the winter five years ago. It was considered weak, without drastic temperature changes. This year’s El Niño, however, is projected to be much different.
A NASA analysis released earlier today found that the 2023-2024 El Niño winter season could cause five instances of 10-year flooding. That’s a flooding event defined by its one-in-10 chance of happening in any given year. This winter, cities across the West coast are being urged to prepare for an increase in high-tide flooding that can swamp roads and spill into low-lying buildings.
Todd Richards is a meteorology expert and formal Editorial Director for The Weather Channel.
Todd Richards: It’s what happens as a result of El Nino and as a result of that warming water being in a different location that prompts changes in the jet stream and where storms storm tracks go and where the storms actually flow. So last year was not El Nino that was causing the crazy weather we had during the winter. But we’ve already gotten a taste of what can happen when storms like that hitting here.
The World Meteorological Organization reports that El Niño is likely to peak sometime between late this month and early next year and the weather conditions could last until at least April 2024.
Todd Richards: We know in advance that we should expect this to happen. I mean, that’s rare for us to be able to say in the world of forecasting the weather that we can look ahead and say, you know, three months out, six months out, that we anticipate an increased likelihood of these types of flooding events. You would hope that that would get people talking about it, get them to prepare individually, individuals that live near the coast. Think about what you would do if there were flooding events. At least prepare that way on the individual level. And then for municipalities, it’s typically a longer term process. So it’s not about sandbags for this weekend. It’s more about, you know, walls and, you know, building codes and other restrictions as far as building on the coast for longer term planning. It probably is going to lead to a little bit longer than just the January, February, March timeframe, primarily because it takes a while for water to warm up. It takes a while for water to cool down.
California’s economy would be affected.
Todd Richards: The construction industry in Southern California relies on the fact that the weather is good or great just about every day. So when it rains, it’s such a rare event that, you know, it can be very costly to schedules and things like that. There’s only so much that they can build in to their schedules to accommodate things like rain because they don’t need to typically.
Rain???? In Southern California... They says it never.. no.. we won’t go there... This one is real... El Nino, could turn that song that was never true anyway.. on it’s head.. Our new song could be.. Stormy Weather.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Solana Espino.