El Nino brings warmer-than-normal waters in certain parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean, whereas La Nina brings colder-than-normal waters.<\/p>\n
But, while La\u202fNina has only just ended, why are we seeing such a rapid flip from one extreme to another?<\/p>\n
Earth Sciences New Zealand and MetService meteorologist Jon Tunster told the Front Page<\/a> that there aren\u2019t too many historical comparisons for the speed of moving from one to the other in the same year.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you go back and look around, there aren\u2019t a huge number of what we would call historical analogues for a switch that occurs in the same year, and certainly not for one that occurs as quickly as this.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, we\u2019re running quite light on analogues, to be honest. When we searched through the record, we were able to find 1976 possibly as one, and 2023 to 2024 was another one.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the trouble is, when you look at these historical analogues, there\u2019s a whole bunch of other variables that change within them. It can\u2019t necessarily be the case that we just follow history and we know what\u2019s coming in the future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The big picture from the models is a dramatic increase in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.<\/p>\n For New Zealand, El Nino generally brings more westerlies, often stronger or more persistent, with rainfall tending to be concentrated in western areas and reduced in northern and some eastern areas.<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps one easy comparison is that probably this winter will be different from last winter. Last winter was quite wet for a lot of places.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were a decent number of northerly sourced northeasterly rain events. One good example was the Nelson-Tasman flooding that happened in late June or early July last year.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was sort of characteristic of that type of winter, and I think that what people might start seeing on the ground is that if you\u2019ve become accustomed to seeing a lot of these kind of humid rain-bearing events coming down from the north, maybe we just start to see far fewer of those than what we\u2019ve become accustomed to in the last year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Listen to the full episode<\/a> to hear more about:<\/p>\n What El Nino could mean for New ZealandIts global impactsWhat models are showing How forecasters judge strength. <\/p>\n The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime\/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.<\/p>\n You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio<\/a>, Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"El Nino brings warmer-than-normal waters in certain parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean, whereas La Nina brings colder-than-normal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[83585,60796,1668,12814,117,111,43,139,207696,192804,69,28630,37961,54547,1551,223,1961,61,4998,23644,80],"class_list":["post-402771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-el","tag-formidable","tag-front","tag-looms","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nino","tag-nio","tag-nz","tag-page","tag-patterns","tag-reshape","tag-set","tag-the","tag-this","tag-to","tag-weather","tag-winter","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}