A team of scientists reported it can now forecast disruptive El Niño events a year in advance have announced that an El Niño has a 3-in-4 chance of happening later this year, Live Science reported.
El Niño (and La Niña) is a phenomenon that occurs when equatorial Pacific waters are abnormally warm or cold, Live Science reported. An El Niño event can disrupt ocean and wind currents across the globe, wreaking havoc on the climate and triggering disasters worldwide.
The name comes from the spanish word for little boy, or baby jesus, and was created by a South American fisherman who realized the ocean became warmer during the holiday season, according to Yahoo News. La Niña, Spanish for little girl, happens when waters are colder influencing weather events around the world.
The forecast by researchers in Germany and Israel said the predictions "may allow society to better adapt and mitigate the sometimes devastating effects of an El Niño event," study co-author Armin Bunde, a theoretical physicist at the University of Giessen in Germany, told Live Science.
Scientists have usually predicted ENSO (both El Nino and La Nina effects) by checking water temperatures in the eastern Pacific, along the equator, limiting predictions to six months or less, since ENSO forecasts depend in part on the direction the trade winds blow, according to Live Science.
"Our approach uses another route," Bunde told Live Science. "We do not consider the water temperature in a specific area of the Pacific Ocean, but the atmospheric temperatures in all areas of the Pacific. Then, we study how the temperatures in the El Niño basin are linked to the temperatures in the rest of the Pacific area."
The researchers said their method correctly predicted the absence of El Niño events in 2012 and 2013, and forecast about a 75 percent chance of an El Niño in late 2014, Live Science reported.
Climatologist Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who did not take part in this research, said the methods the researchers employed were outdated, and could not be used to correctly predict when an El Nino will occur, according to Live Science.
"The techniques the researchers used made me feel like I was back in the 1980s and 1990s," Barnett said, according to Live Science.
Climatologist Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society in the Palisades, said using statistics is not a dependable way to predict the events, Live Science reported.
"A common problem with statistical methods is that you can always find a statistical relationship if you look hard enough," Barnston said, according to Live Science. "Also, while they looked at data from 1950 to 2013, there is relatively lower quality temperature data from that area in the '50s and '60s. We wish it were better, but it isn't, and when you're using a statistical method and define the (statistical) relationships from not-so-great data, you lose a considerable degree of success."
"The simplistic calculations they use basically ignore all the physics we've discovered about the ocean and the atmosphere of the equatorial Pacific," Barnett added.
