Scientists say that as the planet’s climate continues to warm into the future, we can expect many changes in the weather.
Even the powerful weather pattern known as El Niño and La Niña may change, and that change is not for the better.
El Niño’s and La Niña’s may get a lot of attention because they are known for creating intense and destructive weather events.
A new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, focused on what happens to El Niño and La Niña events in the warmer climate of the future.
“The intensity of those year-to-year swings increased under climate change. A warmer climate gave you stronger heat waves, stronger wildfires, with El Niño /La Niña, and stronger floods also,” said NCAR climate scientist John Fasullo.
Fasullo used specially designed computer model simulations to tune out the impact of climate change and then compare it to output run under the anticipated level of climate warming.
“The events, in general, in the future, intensified by about 30 percent,” Fasullo said.
So multiply this year’s La Niña-influenced drought and wildfire outbreak in the western U.S., and the flooding in the east, by 30 percent in the future.
“If you’re managing wildfires in California, you care very much about what the worst case scenario is going to be,” Fasullo said. “And that worst-case scenario in the future is about the averages becoming worse and also about the extremes becoming worse.”
Fasullo said that El Niño’s and La Niña’s are the two strongest factors influencing climate variability, right behind the change of the seasons themselves. It’s really the gateway research to the weather of the future.
“So understanding the changes to El Niño and La Niña in a warmer climate is fundamental to understanding the impacts of climate change,” said Fasullo.
The planet is in an El Niño Watch right now for this fall and winter. Although it is expected to just be a weak event at this point, it still increases the likelihood of colder and wetter weather across the southern half of the country, and Fasullo says that does include southern Colorado.