The El NiƱo of 2023ā24 is weakening. Forecasters estimate an 85% chance that El NiƱo will end and the tropical Pacific will transition to neutral conditions by the AprilāJune period. Thereās a 60% chance that La NiƱa will develop by JuneāAugust. Overall, the forecast this month is very similar to last month, and we continue to expect La NiƱa for the Northern Hemisphere fall and early winter (around 85% chance).
La NiƱa and El NiƱo are opposite phases of the El NiƱo-Southern Oscillation climate pattern. āENSOā for short. Just like El NiƱo, La NiƱa changes the ocean and atmospheric circulation in the tropics. Those changes start in the Pacific Ocean and then ripple around the world in predictable ways. So, the arrival of La NiƱa gives us an early picture of potential upcoming climate conditions.
Why are our probabilities relatively high, even though weāre still solidly in the grip of the āspring predictability barrier,ā a time of year when forecasts are often trickier? What could La NiƱa mean for summer and fall climate? And what might we expect for the global average surface temperature, after a record-setting year? So many questions! The hooks are baited, letās cast our lines.
Tropical fishes
First things first: current ENSO conditions. The sea surface temperature anomaly in the NiƱo-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific is our primary metric for ENSO (anomaly = departure from the long-term average, long-term in this case is 1991ā2020). Since El NiƱoās peak in NovemberāDecember 2023 at about 2.0 Ā°C (3.6 Ā°F), this anomaly has been dropping steadily, but, at 1.2 Ā°C, it is still well above the El NiƱo threshold of 0.5 Ā°C (0.9 Ā°F).
Looking at the atmosphere over the tropical Pacific, however, we find that the expected El NiƱo patternāweaker-than-average trade winds, more rain and clouds in the central tropical Pacific, drier conditions over Indonesia, reflecting a weaker Walker Circulationāhas largely disappeared. This is not unexpected; as ENSO events decay, sometimes the atmosphere and the ocean are on somewhat different schedules. (This is also the case when they begin.) What it tells us is that the ocean-atmosphere coupling, an essential component of ENSO, has likely ended. That provides confidence that the warm sea surface temperature anomaly will continue to diminish, likely crossing into neutral (between 0.5 and -0.5 Ā°C) by AprilāJune.
Creatures of the deep
More evidence that El NiƱo is likely to give way to neutral soon, with La NiƱa right on its tail, can be found under the surface of the tropical Pacific. We keep a close eye on the temperature of the water in the upper 300 meters (~1000 feet) of the equatorial Pacific because this water provides a source to the surface. Since January, two upwelling Kelvin wavesāblobs of cooler water that travel from the west to the east under the surfaceāhave been moving through.
The more recent upwelling Kelvin wave will continue to shift eastward and rise up, providing a source of cooler-than-average water to the surface.
Sailfish
As I mentioned above, La NiƱa causes changes in global atmospheric circulation, making certain temperature and rainfall patterns more likely. Weāll dig into this a bit more after El NiƱo ends, but one potential La NiƱa impact has been getting some notice recently: La NiƱa tends to encourage a more active Atlantic hurricane season. It does this by reducing vertical wind shearāthe change in wind from near the surface to high up in the atmosphereāover the Atlantic Ocean, making it easier for hurricanes to grow. Considering that the tropical Atlantic Ocean is already very warm, you can bet that NOAAās hurricane outlook team is paying close attention to the likelihood of La NiƱa. NOAAās early seasonal hurricane outlook will come out next month, and weāll have a post about hurricanes on the ENSO Blog in June.
Shark tank
Speaking of the bathwater Atlantic, letās revisit the topic of the global average surface temperature. This metric isnāt particularly relevant to anyoneās day-to-day operationāwhenās the last time you woke up in the morning and thought āIāll just check the global mean surface temperature forecast for today!āābut itās a critical monitoring tool for climate change.
El NiƱoās warmer-than-average tropical Pacific tends to contribute to higher global average surface temperature, while La NiƱaās cooler tropical Pacific usually contributes to relatively cooler years. However, emphasis is on the relative since more recent La NiƱa events have been among the top ten warmest years ever.Ā One can see that much of the global oceans are warmer than average, going beyond El NiƱo.
Like with ENSO, we track the global surface temperature anomaly as the departure from the long-term average. Unlike ENSO, a few different ālong-termā base periods are used by different researchers and in different situations, including 1991ā2020 (recent normal), 1901ā2000 (the 20th century), and 1850ā1900 (the pre-industrial era). However, so long as you pay attention to which base period is being used, the message is still the sameāthe global average temperature anomaly is breaking records.
According to NOAAās National Center for Environmental Information, āthe February global surface temperature was 2.52 Ā°F (1.40 Ā°C) above the 20th-century average of 53.8 Ā°F (12.1 Ā°C), making it the warmest February on record [dating back to 1850] and the ninth consecutive month of record-high global temperatures.ā
Could a developing La NiƱa return the global average surface temperature closer to normal? Not very likely. We are just a few months in, and NCEIās Global Annual Temperature Outlook already predicts āa 45% chance that 2024 will rank as the warmest year on record and a 99% chance that it will rank in the top five.ā For more info on how NCEI makes this prediction, check out this post.
The forecast from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME), a collection of state-of-the-art climate models from U.S. and Canadian centers, predicts only a slight reduction in the global surface temperature anomaly over the next several months. Note that the NMME prediction uses a base period of 1850ā1900 to provide an estimate of the increase in global temperature over āpre-industrialā times.
It could be another very interesting year, climate-wise. Stay tuna-ed for more from us on ENSO and global climate!