Though not a certainty, the “smart” money is on the building El Ni\u00f1o in the Pacific Ocean leading to a wetter-than-normal winter this year. It now seems more a question of how much \u2014 and how long \u2014 the precipitation will last, not whether it will happen.
\n“It\u2019s like it (El Ni\u00f1o) is almost too big to fail,” said San Diego Lifeguard Lt. John Sandmeyer following a recent briefing he and other city officials had from the National Weather Service about the El Ni\u00f1o\/La Ni\u00f1a cycle. “The atmosphere is loaded with moisture, and it will come, though it\u2019s uncertain whether the ocean track will go over Central California, Southern California or Mexico,” said Sandmeyer. He described the building El Ni\u00f1o, explained by weather forecasters, as a “significant bank of water 2.23 degrees (much) warmer than usual and hundreds of feet deep out in the South Pacific.”
\n“El Ni\u00f1o,” “The Christ Child” in Spanish, referring to its impact during Christmas in South America, is the “warm” phase of the El Ni\u00f1o Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific. El Ni\u00f1o is accompanied by high air pressure in the western Pacific and low air pressure in the eastern Pacific. The “cool” phase of ENSO is called La Ni\u00f1a, translating as “The Girl.”
\nThe ENSO cycle, both El Ni\u00f1o and La Ni\u00f1a, causes global changes of both temperatures and rainfall. Because El Ni\u00f1o’s warm pool feeds thunderstorms above, it creates increased rainfall across the east-central and eastern Pacific Ocean. This anomaly happens at irregular intervals of two to seven years lasting nine months to two years, with the average period lasting five years. On the West Coast of the United States, El Ni\u00f1os typically cause significantly wetter winters.
\nDavid Pierce, climate researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, verified that an El Ni\u00f1o is in fact highly likely this winter. And, Pierce noted, this current El Ni\u00f1o could be enhanced by a concurrent ocean anomaly known as “The Blob.”
\n“The Blob is a patch of unusually warm water off the Gulf Coast of Alaska,” Pierce said, adding, “The Blob has moved down and has been hanging out over the West Coast, including California, for more than a year.
\n“It\u2019s hard to tell how much effect El Ni\u00f1o and The Blob will have,” said Pierce, pointing out that “every indication is both will continue through this winter.”
\nPierce offered a gambling analogy to describe the likely impact of an El Ni\u00f1o\/The Blob on California\u2019s winter climate.
\n“It\u2019s like having dice that are loaded,” he said. “You don\u2019t know what (precipitation) number is going to come up until you roll the dice. But the odds are we\u2019re more likely to have a wet winter, though it\u2019s not actually guaranteed.”
\nPierce said other factors, like tides, can have a huge impact when coupled with El Ni\u00f1os in the amount of disruption such an event can cause.
\n“In the 1982-83 El Ni\u00f1o,” he said, “a lot of the storms happened during high tides, which caused a lot of coastal damage. There was less coastal damage during the 1997-98 El Ni\u00f1o because storms weren\u2019t associated with high tides.”
\nPierce described El Ni\u00f1os\/La Ni\u00f1a as “a very natural phenomenon known from paleoclimatological records to have been going on for thousands of years.” He added El Ni\u00f1os\/La Ni\u00f1as have been happening intermittently for the past century with varying results.
\n“In 1997-98, California got 180 percent of normal precipitation,” Pierce said, pointing out that that\u2019s extreme and noting El Ni\u00f1os typically average about 30 percent higher precipitation than usual. “You can\u2019t really make a prediction for how much it will depart from normal,” he said.
\nNoting that El Ni\u00f1os “cause more moisture to go up into the atmosphere in the form of clouds and precipitation,” Sandmeyer pointed out this temperature-moisture oscillation serves as an “engine” driving weather.
\n“It\u2019s the unequal warmth of the Earth\u2019s surface that causes weather,” the lifeguard said, adding that El Ni\u00f1os create a “bigger engine” that translates into greater-than-normal rainfall.
\nAbove-average rainfall is going to be more impactive throughout San Diego County, including along the coast. Nearly 54,600 San Diego County residents, about 1.75 percent of the total, live in 100-year flood zones, mostly known flood plains that could be subject to flooding during El Ni\u00f1o-fueled rainstorms over the next several months, according to a report released by the National University System Institute for Policy Research.
\nSandmeyer, team leader for the San Diego River Rescue Team, which is charged with safeguarding people along waterways during heavy rains and flooding, said El Ni\u00f1o\u2019s impact along the coast could be pronounced.
\n“It would create pollution and add to the erosion of the beach in some areas,” he said.
\n“like Dog Beach and Ocean Beach and along river mouths.” He added that first responders are gearing up for the possibility of an especially wet winter.
\n“The River Rescue Team responds to anybody trapped in or around moving water,” Sandmeyer said. “Preparations are being made throughout the city and county,” he added, “coordinating between lifeguards, fire and police departments and the city\u2019s Traffic Division. We\u2019re planning for flooding. So there\u2019s a lot of discussion going on. It\u2019s a big deal.”
\nSandmeyer said it\u2019s not the amount but the duration of rain that falls during an El Ni\u00f1o event that could prove to be the most problematic.
\n“The biggest threat we\u2019ll see in San Diego is if we get three or four days of rain with significant downpours,” said Sandmeyer. “Then we\u2019re going to see areas, including roads, flooded because they won\u2019t have time to drain. We\u2019re gearing up for evacuations and closures of blocked areas and (residential) complexes. It\u2019s a wide swath of the county that\u2019s under the hazard level when there are significant rainstorms.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though not a certainty, the “smart” money is on the building El Ni\u00f1o in the Pacific Ocean leading to a wetter-than-normal winter this year. It now seems more a question of how much \u2014 and how long \u2014 the precipitation will last, not whether it will happen. “It\u2019s like it (El Ni\u00f1o) is almost too […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":258838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11559","_seopress_titles_title":"How much severe weather will El Ni\u00f1o bring?","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11559,11551],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beach-bay-press","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}