Breaking: “Godzilla” El Nino May be Forming August 13, 2015

Scientists following the developing El Nino event in the Pacific see signs that this year may bring the biggest event since the record-breaker of 1997-98.

Los Angeles Times:

The strengthening El Niño in the Pacific Ocean has the potential to become one of the most powerful on record, as warming ocean waters surge toward the Americas, setting up a pattern that could bring once-in-a-generation storms this winter to drought-parched California. The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center said Thursday that all computer models are now predicting a strong El Niño to peak in the late fall or early winter. A host of observations have led scientists to conclude that “collectively, these atmospheric and oceanic features reflect a significant and strengthening El Niño.” “This definitely has the potential of being the Godzilla El Niño,” said Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

This has implications for global temperatures, as El Nino years bring a warm Pacific, and the huge expanse of warm surface water brings higher global surface temperatures generally. Surface temperature records are generally broken in El Nino years, as this graph shows.

One exception being 2014, which set a new warm temperature record without being an El Nino year. Scientists warn that 2015 so far has been warmer than 2014, and a developing El Nino may bring record temperatures stretching well into 2016.

The Times again:

Patzert said El Niño’s signal in the ocean “right now is stronger than it was in 1997,” the summer in which the most powerful El Niño on record developed. “Everything now is going to the right way for El Niño,” Patzert said. “If this lives up to its potential, this thing can bring a lot of floods, mudslides and mayhem.” After the strongest El Niño on record muscled up through the summer of 1997, the following winter gave Southern California double its annual rainfall and dumped double the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, an essential source of precipitation for the state’s water supply, Patzert said.