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Is El Niño coming?
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Posted on Apr 22 2002
Sea warming in the Pacific equatorial region may be the early stages of El Niño, a phenomenon that may eventually cause drought in the Northern Marianas that is expected to aggravate the water problem on Saipan.
Robert Carruth, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) office on-island, said the sea warming reported by the Division of Environmental Quality that resulted in coral deaths may be an indication of the developing phenomenon, citing information obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The NOAA is projecting that mature El Niño would develop within the coming months.
“Those meteorologists who work for NOAA—and oceanographers—believe that the conditions may be going into El Niño,” Carruth said. “They say that probability is getting higher that we might have an El Niño next year.”
“If 2003 is an El Niño, we might expect higher rainfall than normal because of tropical storms and typhoons. However, it’s the El Niño plus one year—they call it ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation]-plus one—that’s when we might get a drought,” he said.
This weather pattern was experienced by the CNMI during the 1997 El Niño, which brought frequent rainfall, followed by drought the following year, according to Carruth.
The effect of El Niño in the Marianas tends to be marked by usually higher than average rainfall. That’s mainly because there tends to be a higher occurrence of tropical storms and typhoons in the actual El Niño year,” he said.
El Niño is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperature at the Equatorial Pacific. It is the opposite of La Niña, which pertains to unusually cold temperature.
