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Sep 01, 2023

Outside/In: What the heck is El Niño, anyway?

In case you hadn’t heard, El Niño is back in the news. And this time it’s pushing global temperatures to the 1.5-degree climate threshold, giving us a sneak preview of a world scorched by global

In case you hadn’t heard, El Niño is back in the news. And this time it’s pushing global temperatures to the 1.5-degree climate threshold, giving us a sneak preview of a world scorched by global warming.

But when it comes to El Niño, the first question on people’s minds is usually, "Wait…what the heck is El Niño again?"

Well, today on Outside/In we’ve got answers. Plus, we ask how to tell if extreme weather events are caused by climate change or by El Niño, and consider what this El Niño can tell us about our climate future.

Featuring Kim Cobb, Emily Becker and Ángel Muñoz.

Ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are off-the-charts hot this year. Normally that means more hurricanes. But on the other hand, El Niño suppresses hurricane formation in the Atlantic. The following is an explainer from Emily Becker, lead writer for NOAA’s El Niño blog, on why a phenomenon in the Pacific has impacts on storms in the Atlantic.

“The first thing to know is that the winds high over the Atlantic blow from the west to the east. The lower level winds blow in the opposite direction, from east to west. ‘Shear’ is the difference between these winds, and hurricanes can’t form as easily if the shear is strong," Becker writes.

Becker continues: "El Niño leads to more rising air in the central and eastern Pacific. When this rising air gets high up in the atmosphere, it spreads out—imagine the steam from your boiling pot of water hitting the ceiling. This outflow strengthens the upper level winds that cross over Central America into the Atlantic. The trade winds remain mostly the same, so the shear is increased, and storm formation is suppressed.”

Read Kim Cobb’s 2016 article, A bittersweet victory for an El Niño chaser. Cobb explains how her research on corals gives us a surprisingly accurate history of El Niño events going back as far as 7,000 years ago.

The National Weather Service for the UK has a great video explainer of El Niño, as well as over a hundred other short videos on their YouTube channel explaining various weather and climate phenomena like jet streams, global circulation, and the Coriolis effect.

For more science talk on El Niño, check out the ENSO Blog, where climate scientist Emily Becker is a lead writer.

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Hosted by Nate HegyiReported and produced by Felix PoonEdited by Taylor Quimby with help from Justine Paradis and Nate HegyiRebecca Lavoie is our Executive ProducerSpecial thanks to Jeongyoon Han for playing the violin, and Michael Prentky for the timpani recordingMusic for this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Walt Adams, and Brightarm OrchestraOutside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio