While El Ni\u00f1o forms across the tropical Pacific, forecasters look at one region in particular called the Ni\u00f1o3.4, monitoring a three-monthly average of the sea surface temperature compared to the long-term average.<\/p>\n
A strong or ‘super El Ni\u0144o’ is when that goes above 1.5C.<\/p>\n
Forecasts from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), NOAA and BoM are all pretty much aligned in their outcomes.<\/p>\n
In the latest prediction from the ECMWF, more than half of their forecast models suggest a temperature increase of over 2.5C by the autumn.<\/p>\n
Anything over this would be a “historically strong event,” said Johnson.<\/p>\n
BoM forecasts are also confidently showing the possibility of a very strong El Ni\u00f1o to develop later this year.<\/p>\n
Some forecast data is even suggesting the temperature rise could exceed 3C, surpassing the current known peak of 2.7C recorded in 1877.<\/p>\n
It should be noted this was a very different era with limited observations and so there remains a lot of uncertainty in the reported temperature.<\/p>\n
That El Ni\u00f1o lasted around 18 months which triggered a catastrophic global climate event, causing extreme drought and widespread famine across Asia, Brazil, and Africa which killed millions, while producing severe flooding in other regions like Peru.<\/p>\n
The last ‘very strong’ El Ni\u00f1o occured in 2015-2016 when the average three-monthly (November, December, January) Ni\u00f1o3.4 temperature increase reached 2.4C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While El Ni\u00f1o forms across the tropical Pacific, forecasters look at one region in particular called the Ni\u00f1o3.4,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-584039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}