Sweltering storms

“El Niño” is suddenly in the headlines as thermometers surge and we all swelter.  So, what is “El Nino”?  How does that differ from “La Niña”? Above all, how does that affect our daily lives?

The scientific explanation is dense: “Large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperatures, across the central and east-central Equatorial Pacific.”

Got that? No. Transposed into layman’s language that means: Warmer water, in the Pacific Ocean, that messes up normal weather patterns across the world.

El Niño of 1997 bore “more energy than a million Hiroshima bombs” writes National Geographic. “By the time it had run its course eight months later,” it had deranged weather patterns worldwide. The death toll rose to 2,100 and property damage bill crested at US$33 billion dollars.

In Peru, this caused massive rainfall which led to deadly flooding and mudslides. El Niño whipped Hurricane Linda off the coast of Mexico, which turned into the strongest Eastern Pacific tropical cyclone ever recorded. The extreme weather spurred cycles of mosquito-transmitted diseases in Africa. Meanwhile, other countries experienced severe drought.

It’s not uncommon for El Niño to be followed by a La Niña. Then, climate patterns and worldwide effects are, for the most part, opposite of each other. Where there was flooding, drought spread. Three La Niñas followed El Niños in a 15-year span. 

El Niño conditions here, for example, still prevailed in December 2013. There was “way above normal rainfall over from Cordillera Autonomous Region to Camarines, most of Visayas area and Western Mindanao. However, the rest of Luzon including Metro Manila, Southern Palawan and Eastern Mindanao were parched by below to way- below-normal rainfall.

Fast forward to today. Weather bureau Pagasa spotted early this month “a significant increase in the sea surface temperature.” This could usher in an El Niño come June. And it’d probably peter out by the first quarter of 2015.  That would reduce rainfall. Worse, it’d alter the track and intensity of the 18 to 20 typhoons that slam into the country annually, “causing them to become erratic.”

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization, earlier this year, predicted a warming of the tropical Pacific. A majority of models indicate that an "El Niño may develop around the middle of the year". And this week data, collected by US National Space Agency satellites showed “conditions in the eastern Pacific at the beginning of May 2014 were similar to those experienced in May 1997.”

BBC points out that the periodic warming “El Niño” and cooling “La Niña “ of sea surface temperature, in the eastern Pacific, “are phases in the naturally occurring phenomenon El Niño-Southern Oscillation—“ENSO” in shorthand.

These phases shift position of the jet stream. That, in turn, alters temperature and rainfall patterns in many regions and results in extreme weather conditions. Drought or abnormal rainfall “has a knock-on effect on crop yields, which are heavily influenced by temperature and precipitation levels.”

El Niño events can have a significant impact on yields of major food crops, like Filipino staples maize and rice, BBC environment reporter Mark Kinver writes. El Niño can whittle down maize yields by more than four percent.

Nature Communications states that latest research show El Niño likely improves the global-mean soybean yield by 2.15 percent. There is a big “But”. But it appears to change the yields of maize, rice and wheat by -4.3 to 0.8 percent. The global-mean yield of all four crops during La Nina years tend to be below normal.

These crops account for almost 60 percent of food calories produced on the world’s crop lands. Rice is one of the four staple foods that provides more than half of the global calories from crops.

“This new work tells us that we can predict when the bad years will be, ahead of the harvest," explain co-author Prof Andy Challinor from the University of Leeds, UK. The researchers found that the high reliability of ENSO forecasts presented an opportunity to link it with global crop yields data. This, in turn, would be beneficial for food monitoring and famine early warning systems.

The scientists suggested that the forecasts could help mitigate impacts by influencing planting dates, crop choices, as well as considering other inputs such as chemical treatments and irrigation.

"An improved response to ENSO could reduce the risk of malnutrition; allow for an increase in agricultural investment in positively impacted years; and improve the adaptation capability to climate variability and change."

“El Niño is a good example to illustrate that there is indeed predictability in the midst of chaos,” writes J. Shukla of Institute of Global Environment and Society. El Niño reminds   Henry Diaz of NASA of the story of Prometheus and the gift of fire: a tool of great promise to humanity, but one with a sharp double edge! It is vitally important that we learn how to use our improved knowledge wisely.

So, will “El Niño” also affect Senators Jinggoy Estrada, Juan Ponce Enrile and Bong Revilla?” emailed Dr. Carolina Camara of Butuan. The odds-on bets are they may be in prison by then for involvement in the Napolist pork barrel scam.”

Scriptures provide a reply: “Your Father who is in heaven makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”