It would be pretty remarkable if you weren’t somehow affected by the Queensland floods in 2011, the Great Ocean Road Christmas bushfires in 2015, or even the heatwaves leading up to Black Saturday in 2009 that killed 173 people in Victoria.
 |
| When floods occur, is it always La Nina to blame? Nope. The tricky part is that no two El Niño or La Niña events are exactly the same. |
But have you ever taken a step back to think about what’s really going on with the weather in times like this? We don’t have bushfires and floods all the time, so something was obviously happening to cause such a drastic change in weather.
You’d be correct in saying that something more was at play here. In fact, it’s called ENSO – the El Niño- Southern Oscillation – the changing surface ocean temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean. When the central and eastern equatorial Pacific is warmer than normal, it is called El Niño, “the little boy” in Spanish; conversely, when it is cooler than normal, it is called La Niña, or “the little girl.”
These two children are responsible for changes in our weather patterns every two to seven years. They make tweaks in the Pacific Ocean temperatures, wind and clouds that have enormous effects on the rest of us.
Read CSIROscope by Rachel Vorwerk - “El Niño and La Niña – por que no los dos?! (Actually, that would be very bad).”
No comments:
Post a Comment