The climate phenomenon called El Niño has arrived for the first time in five years, and with it could come a decrease in the upcoming season’s risk of hurricanes.
El Niño is a rise in the temperature of the central Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon with global impact, influencing rainfall, snow, seasonal temperatures and storms. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that El Niño had arrived, although it was “weak” and “widespread or significant global weather pattern impacts are not anticipated.”
An El Niño typically leads to more tropical storms in the Pacif
ic and fewer in the Atlantic, which would mean a less active hurricane season for South Florida.
Dennis Feltgen, meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, cautioned against excessive optimism about Florida’s risk.
“El Niño is known to act to suppress tropical activity in the Atlantic, but it’s only one factor that influences the overall hurricane season activity,” he said. “Even if the 2015 season does see below-average tropical cyclone activity, it only takes one storm hitting you to make it a bad year.”
He said the last hurricane to strike Florida was Wilma in October of 2005.
“That’s also the last major hurricane to strike the U.S.,” he said. “This remarkable streak will come to an end, and we need to be ready.”
The NOAA Climate Prediction Center will issue its hurricane outlook in late May, he said.
El Niño suppresses hurricanes by increasing atmospheric stability in the Atlantic and increasing vertical wind shear, which prevents powerful storms from organizing.
El Niño, which in Spanish means the Christ child, was so named by the fishermen of South America’s Pacific coast because the phenomenon often arrived around Christmas, when it suppressed the upwelling of cold oceanic water, reducing the availability of nutrients and leading to poor fishing.
