“Godzilla” El Nino forming in Pacific — NASA expert

El Nino (ehl NEEN’-yoh) is a heating of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather worldwide, mostly affecting the United States in winter.

As Southern California bakes under a heat wave meteorologists are betting on a wet and wild winter driven by an El Nino of biblical proportions. Late last month, Goldman Sachs analysts Damien Courvalin and Raquel Ohana said they expect New York Mercantile Exchange gas prices to average $2.75/MMBtu in the second half of this year (see Shale Daily, July 27).

“This El Nino will be a nice down payment on drought relief, but will not be a drought buster”, Patzert predicts. El Ninos are generally thought to have the most influence on winter weather, but this one may be associated with an extremely wet May and an unusually consistent stretch of thunderstorms experienced over the summer, Redmond said.

We only have records going back to 1950.

El Nino, meaning the “Christ child” in Spanish, refers to a term used by Peruvian and Ecuadorian fisherman long ago in referring to a warm ocean current that usually appeared around Christmas time, and could last for months.

The Climate Prediction Center on Thursday put the chance of an El Nino event at greater than 90 percent with odds that it will carry into early spring at 85 percent.

Just how it will affect Chicago depends on a few other things. It shifts the North Pacific jet stream farther southward and eastward. It could continue to play a role this year, Castro said.

“This is a slow emergency that’s not visible but we can already notice chronic child malnutrition is increasing”, he said said.

He said the El Nino could be unfavourable for those who rely on a balanced water supply.

Authorities in California warn that a wet winter will not solve the state’s drought, which has prevailed for the past 15 years and could easily resume once the potential rainfall ends. In those cycles, California had devastating floods and costly landslides from repeated heavy rains. Downtown Los Angeles got nearly a year’s worth of rain in February alone.

Halpert stressed that those forecasts aren’t a sure bet. This storm was also a record breaker for California. Normally, the trade winds blowing out of the East drive colder water from the depths of the Eastern Pacific Ocean to the surface. That can mean more storms moving into the United States and a change in the seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns.

Such a situation would not be good news “for long-term water storage in the snowpack”, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at Stanford University.