El Nino-La Nina|Climate changes|hurricane|weather fluctuations|Volcanoes|climate variations|Drought
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Basically what is El Nino? Before knowing this we should know what is Southern Oscillation? The Southern Oscillation is changing pattern of reversing the surface air pressure in between eastern and western tropical Pacific Ocean. El Nino is an unusual warming of the ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific, i.e. the warm current which flows in a southern direction through the coasts of Ecuador and Peru during the months of January, February and March. Normally, this is called El Nino/Southern Oscilliation or in short it is called ENSO. Main destruction effect of El Nino is Coral reefs. The rise in the sea temperature created by El Nino destroys the algae which mainly protects the coral. The coral bleaches white in this process of El Nino and dies. This is very much evidential during the time of El Nino the shores of the beaches will be in white instead of blue.
Not only the damage to the corals, El Nino contributed to the lack of severe storms such as hurricanes. El Nino normally differs from one another from time to time depending on the atmospheric conditions. To exactly understand the effects of an El Nino event, we can compare from the diagrams below, which shows the normal condition and El Nino condition of Pacific region. In total, El Nino is a disruption in the ocean-atmospheric system in Tropical Pacific areawhich is the main key factor for weather and climate around the globe.
Climate Changes and variations in the weather conditions like heavy rainfall, flood, valcano eruption, drought, intense solar radiation, etc. mainly depends on El Nino and La Nina. Now what is La Nina? La Nina is an unusual cold temperature in the ocean in the Equatorial Pacific. La Nina mostly causes opposite effects of El Nino, i.e. While La Nina cause a dry period in the Midwestern U.S., El Nino would cause a wet period in that area. El Nino is caused by earth quake and volcanic activities in the mid-ocean ridges. A heavy El Nino is always associated with flood, heavy rains and warm weather in Peru, drought in Indonesia, Africa and Australia. A strong El Nino also creates a very heavy downpours and landslides in southern California, a mild winter in the northeast, very few hurricanes in the southeast. All these effects are not confirmed but more likely to happen.
El Nino mainly affects the sea life and birds. The fish in the ocean area where El Nino is happening either die or migrate to the other area where they will find more for eating. This will create chain reaction among the sea birds which is depending in the fish as their food. They may also die or go elsewhere. Forests in the coastal areas are often destroyed by storms and ocean swells. Marine mammals also get affected by this. Due to temperature changes by El Nino, ocean fishing is also affected.
Finally, to say, these events of El Nino and La Nina disproportionately trigger socioeconomic disasters on the global scale. These two factors mainly associated with climate impacts through out the world. During the ENSO extremes, greater climate related socio-economic losses, widespread climate anomalies and disasters should be expected.
El Niño is associated with long dry spells in areas west of the Pacific Ocean.
El Nino years are no better or worse. Among other things, there are distributional issues and natural ecosystem impacts to consider. For that matter simple aggregation of costs and benefits does not always make sense as a measure of social welfare. Social impact of climate change is a really tough problem.
- El Nio: Research, Forecasts and Observations
NOAA and El Nino: NOAA's role in studying, predicting and mitigating the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon
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