ClimateBrink: “The strongest El Niño in a thousand years?” By Zeke Hausfather.
“This year’s El Niño event is already the strongest in the instrumental record based on Niño 3.4 region sea surface temperature anomalies.” Hausfather had previously written about this year’s forecast here, and breaking the prior record over at Carbon Brief. Daily Niño 3.4 anomalies passed the prior record (set in November 2015) on September 20th, and reached 3.4C as of this week… September as a whole had the highest Niño 3.4 temperature anomalies on record.
“And this year’s El Niño still has a few more months to grow; the latest runs in (from 14 seasonal forecast models) show this year’s El Niño peaking around 4C (with 80% of model runs ending up somewhere between 3.3C and 4.6C).”
“The figure [above] looks at three different lines of evidence for historical El Niño strength.” The top panel shows the thermometer record, where this event has already set a record for events since 1877 and is forecast to smash it. “The two lower panels show different lines of evidence from tree rings and corals as to what happened during the millennium before.”
“Cook and Cane (2024) (middle panel of the figure above) used 544 tree-ring chronologies from places whose rainfall responds to El Niño to reconstruct winter (December to February) sea surface temperatures across the equatorial Pacific.”
“The second long record came out in August of this year, when Julia Cole and colleagues published a study in Science using 28 coral records from five islands in the Galápagos.” The Galápagos sit in the eastern Pacific, where El Niño events (including this year’s) are centered.
“Corals lay down annual bands whose chemistry tracks the temperature of the water they grew in, so a fossil coral can be used as a rough thermometer for whatever decades it was alive.”
Hausfather is growing in confidence that this year’s El Niño event is likely to be the strongest in 1,000 years if the latest models of its peak prove accurate. Don’t buy any green bananas. And stop buying gas or diesel.
