2023-08-22 19:00:00
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El Niño is back, and the world is shaking. However, his name rather evokes an endearing cherub despite his nonsense. At the peak of its fury, this climatic phenomenon is in reality nothing like a good child. He is capable of the worst misdeeds, of all calamities: triggering violent floods in California, severe droughts and gigantic fires in Australia, cyclones in Polynesia, a collapse of fishing in Peru or a reduction in rice production in Asia. In the past, it has even been accused of having accelerated the fall of civilizations. A demon rather than an angel.
If El Niño is feared, it also fascinates the scientists who study it, as it is a master of the climate. A natural disturbance that causes the most significant variations in the climate system on a seasonal and annual scale. Together with its equally dangerous double, La Niña, they tell the story of the ocean and the atmosphere, how the two forces come together in a marriage that has lasted millions of years and whose crises regularly upset the world. Earth’s climate.
El Niño and La Niña follow one another in a cycle called ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation). The first, the ENSO warm phase, is associated with a warming of the equatorial Pacific that increases global temperature. The second, the cold phase, causes the opposite. These two sides of the same coin usually last between nine months and a year, and occur, irregularly, every two to seven years. The last episode of La Niña ended in 2022, after being maintained for three consecutive years (2020-2021-2022), an extremely rare event.
Sources : NOAA
Computer graphics: Le Monde, Audrey Lagadec, Floriane Picard and Victor Vallet
Since June, the sister has given way to the brother. El Niño must strengthen throughout the fall before reaching its maximum intensity between December and January, hence its name, which also designates the Child Jesus, in Spanish. “The arrival of El Niño will greatly increase the likelihood of breaking temperature records and triggering more extreme heat in many parts of the world and in the oceans”warned, in early July, the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Petteri Taalas, calling on States to prepare.
Explosive Cocktail
In fact, all over the world, governments and meteorological agencies watch like milk on the fire for the slightest movement of the “terrible child of the Pacific”. While Indonesia is stocking up on rice, humanitarian organizations are stockpiling food in the Horn of Africa. If the impact of El Niño is major and global, it is because the tropical Pacific represents a quarter of the surface of the planet.
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