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El Nino weather staging a Pacific comeback
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Posted on Jan 10 2001
Honolulu (PINA Nius) – The Pacific is moving out of a two-year La Niña cold spell and may be entering a new El Niño period, the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper reported. This could mean a more active hurricane season and a dry winter, according to the National Weather Service, the newspaper said.
“Sometime in the March-to-June time frame we’ll start to have a warming situation in the ocean temperatures near the equator,” which is one of the features of an El Niño, said Jim Weyman, meteorologist in charge of the weather service’s Honolulu office.
Long-range forecasting models disagree on how strong the warm cycle will be, or how quickly it will develop, the Honolulu Advertiser said.
Weyman told the Advertiser: “When we went from the last El Niño to La Niña, it was very rapid. We’ll have to see what will happen this time. We’ll have more definite knowledge as we progress into the season.”
During an El Niño, a massive pool of warmer-than-normal water moves west to east across the equatorial Pacific, changing rainfall and wind patterns as it goes. A La Niña event occurs when those waters are cooler than normal.
Within the last few months, two-year cooler temperature trends headed back to normal, according to the weather service’s Climate Diagnostics Center.
