Investigations suggest climate change is affecting El Niño’s activity

Jul 1, 2013 11:21 GMT  ·  By

An international team of researchers writing in the journal Nature Climate Change maintain that, in the late 20th century, the El Niño was unusually active. They suspect that this was because of environmental changes brought about by global warming.

The El Niño, otherwise known as ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) is basically a band of abnormally warm oceanic water temperatures that forms every once in a while off South America's western coast.

Whenever the El Niño forms, both hurricane activity in the Atlantic and rainfall in Hawaii decrease, EurekAlert explains.

On the other hand, winter storms in the Pacific start heading south, meaning that California has higher risks of being hit by floods.

The specialists saying that global warming is probably altering the El Niño have reached this conclusion analyzing data related to how vegetation responded to this phenomenon over the past 7 centuries.

The scientists mainly focused on tree-rings, which apparently can serve as an indicator of how much rainfall a regions received within a given time frame.

Tree-rings can also shed light on local temperatures recorded over the years, the same source details.

In all fairness, the scientists' investigations only led them to the conclusion that, towards the end of the 20th century, the El Niño's activity picked up.

Still, since this period coincides with the emergence of new weather patterns as a result of climate change, the researchers decided that the two phenomena were probably interconnected.

“Many climate models do not reflect the strong ENSO response to global warming that we found. This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases,” researcher Shang-Ping Xie said.

“Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future ENSO activity. If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts,” Shang-Ping Xie further argued.