Weather: El Nino returns surprisingly, now we tell you how it can upset the climate of 2023 in Italy too
El Nino is ready to return next SpringAfter a few years of absence, a surprise returns particular climatic phenomenon known as El Niño. This assumption scares also Italy as the effects of climate change underway will add up to this particular event, as early as next Spring.
But what is it and why is it so important? La Niña alternates cyclically with the opposite phenomenon, El Niño, sometimes interspersed with neutral conditions. It’s about large-scale phenomena, observed on the surface of the tropical, central and eastern Pacific Ocean and capable of influencing global weather and climate conditions.
Experts call this variation ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation). The cycles that characterize this phenomenon have a duration ranging from approximately 2 to 6/7 years.
There Niña he was born in Niño are respectively a cooling and warming of the ocean surface. During a Niña episode, the waters are 1/3 degree colder than normal, while in the Niño phases they are 1/3 degree warmer.
The most worrying anomaly concerns precisely this aspect: in the latter two years was La Niña to dominate the scene on a planetary level and, according to the classic scheme, global temperatures should have dropped. And instead the opposite happened, the 2022 was the hottest year ever since the weather data was recorded.
This fact leads to a reflection that is by no means trivial: the ongoing global warming, caused by human activities, now plays such an important role as to cancel out the effects of these immense climatic mechanisms.
But the question arises: what will happen when the effects of global warming (global warming) will add up to those of El Niño?
Meanwhile, what we do know is that NOAA, the US agency that deals with oceanic and atmospheric dynamics, has just announced that the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean are warming beyond expectations giving way to the phenomenon known as El Niño. The map below confirms this anomaly with values well above the climatic averages (colour red in the middle of the ocean, in front of the coasts of South America).
Pacific surface water warming (red color)
We are talking about a phenomenon that concerns a very vast surface, practically the entire Pacific Ocean, which can have some serious consequences on the earth’s climate.
Just think in the last intense episode of El Niño, that of 2015/16, the ocean waters even exceeded the norm by +3°C. This enormous quantity of heat was then transferred to the atmosphere, with an increase in the earth’s temperature and climatic anomalies in almost every part of the world: you will remember the very hot values ofSummer 2015which went down in history as the third hottest in Italy since temperatures were recorded.
TREND – After 2 years with a regimen of La Niña, we will meet as early as the next Spring to a strong warming of the waters of the Pacific. Statistically, the El Niño phenomenon is related to a greater activity of the anticyclone of African originwhich tends to expand over Italy and Europe in the spring-summer period.
The effects more immediate result in long-lasting heat waves with peaks of up to 40°Cdrought (especially in the Centre-South), and extreme weather events, due to a greater potential energy involved (hotter = more evaporation = more humidity in the air).