The El Niño weather phenomenon peaked in December and is one of the five strongest on record, the World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday, predicting above-normal temperatures between March and May on Earth. farm.
“Above-normal temperatures are forecast over almost all land areas between March and May,” she points out.
El Niño “is gradually weakening, but will continue to have an impact on the global climate in the months to come, fueling the heat trapped by greenhouse gases from human activities,” specifies the organization.
El Niño is a natural weather phenomenon, which corresponds to a warming of a large part of the tropical Pacific and occurs every two to seven years and lasts between nine and 12 months.
It modifies the circulation of the atmosphere on a planetary scale and warms distant areas and, underlines the WMO, it occurs in the context of a climate modified by human activities.
“There is about a 60% chance that El Niño will persist between March and May and an 80% chance that neutral conditions [ni El Niño ou La Niña] be observed from April to June,” WMO said.
“Every month since June 2023 has set a new monthly temperature record — and 2023 was by far the hottest year on record,” said Celeste Saulo, the new WMO Secretary-General.
Main responsible
“El Niño contributed to these record temperatures, but heat-trapping greenhouse gases are unequivocally the main culprit,” she said.
“Ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific clearly reflect El Niño. But sea surface temperatures in other parts of the globe have been persistent and unusually high over the past 10 months,” recalls the Argentine meteorologist, who has been head of the organization since January.
“The sea surface temperature in January 2024 was by far the highest on record for January. This is worrying and cannot be explained solely by El Niño,” she warns.
The current El Niño episode, which developed in June 2023, reached its peak between November and January.
It displayed a maximum value of about 2.0 °C above the mean sea surface temperature over the period 1991 to 2020 for the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean.
The WMO says there is a chance that La Niña – which has the opposite of El Niño lowering temperatures – will develop “later this year” after neutral conditions (neither ) between April and June.
But the WMO judges that the probabilities are too uncertain at the moment.