Good Business eMails: El Niño is already affecting the weather

Heads up to our Northeast friends: A month’s worth of rain could fall over the course of mere hours this evening, roughly from northern New Jersey to southwest Connecticut, and more than 35 million people are under flood watches. Isolated totals could reach 7 inches.

For some perspective: New York City typically gets about 4.6 inches of rain during the entire month of July.

If you’re in the flood zone, download the app and keep track of the rain with our experts. —Angela

El Niño and climate change are both driving extreme weather events — soon it may be hard to tell which is which

From Andrew Freedman

A couple crosses a flooded street on a tricycle during heavy rains in Santiago, Chile on July 17. (Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images)

The developing Super El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean continues to rapidly intensify, and its influence is already being felt in the form of changes to weather patterns near and far.

El Niño events feature hotter-than-average sea surface temperatures near the equator in the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean. The hotter water has ripple effects throughout the atmosphere, shifting the location of towering tropical thunderstorms and further altering the movement of air across the tropics and beyond.

This El Niño’s impacts are emerging relatively early in its life cycle — after all, the event itself was only officially declared on June 11 — and its extremes are likely to become more pronounced with time as the climate cycle intensifies.

But El Niño’s impacts are coming on top of climate change-driven trends in extreme weather, and it could become difficult to tease apart the influences on particular extreme events for this reason.

What we know for sure is that the next year or more is likely to feature an unusually fast tempo of damaging and costly extreme weather events, influenced by both one of the most powerful El Niño’s on record and worsening human-driven climate change. In some instances, the two may team up together, yielding a more powerful, rapidly-intensifying Pacific typhoon, for example.

In others, they may act in opposing directions, but it’s unlikely that an event will be the result of only one or the other given how pervasive the influence of climate change already is.

There have already been some events that fit the patterns seen in a more typical El Niño year. For example, this incipient Super El Niño is being blamed for a below average monsoon season so far in India. This could have repercussions throughout commodity markets, given India’s status as a major rice producer.

Recent deadly flooding in Chile has also been tied in part to the unusually hot ocean water in the eastern Tropical Pacific associated with El Niño.

In addition, this summer’s gathering Super El Niño is creating ideal conditions for powerful hurricanes and typhoons in the Eastern, Central and Western Pacific Ocean basins. Hurricane Genevieve, for example, rapidly intensified into a powerful Category 5 storm while over the open ocean southwest of Mexico on Monday. Typhoon Dolphin, in the Western Pacific, is also rapidly intensifying. It is forecast to become a massive super typhoon during the next few days, feasting on unusually warm ocean waters.

In recent years, more hurricanes and typhoons have undergone periods of extremely rapid intensification in a trend that studies have tied to global warming. Particularly, the link is to warmer ocean waters that tropical cyclones feed off of.

By warming the waters even further, El Niño is stacking the deck even further in favor of more rapidly intensifying storms.

Typically, El Niño years feature particularly active Pacific hurricane and typhoon seasons, and quieter than average Atlantic hurricane seasons. Aside from two named but relatively weak storms, the tropical Atlantic has been uncharacteristically quiet so far this hurricane season, in line with El Niño-related expectations.

In addition, El Niño is part of the reason, though not the entire explanation, for something remarkable going on in the global climate right now. Global sea surface temperatures are breaking all-time heat records and have been doing so for about two months straight, according to data from the University of Maine’s excellent Climate Reanalyzer website.

The warm ocean water is also influencing weather on a global scale. For example, they are helping to worsen heat waves in the US and Europe, among other impacts. The record ocean heat is also a factor that is helping to supercharge tropical cyclones outside of the Atlantic Ocean, at least so far.

Firefighters battle a wildfire near Avila, Spain on July 24. (Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images)

Fires rage on two continents as scientists reach for superlatives

On the topic of Europe and extreme heat, Western Europe continues to experience a deadly and devastating wildfire outbreak as the region enters its fourth major heat wave in the past three months.

A wet winter encouraged vegetation growth, but a flash drought from the repetitive heat waves then dried out the vegetation and made them more apt to ignite from lightning or various human causes. These fires, which have been especially fierce in Spain and France, are tied in part to those sharp swings between wet and dry conditions — a hallmark of human-caused global warming.

Similar dynamics are also playing out in the Western US and British Columbia, where extreme heat and dry conditions have led to an outbreak of wildfires, many of them ignited by lightning from thunderstorms that delivered little rainfall but plenty of sparks. Oregon, Washington and parts of Idaho have been particularly hard-hit.

“The conspicuous overlap between record-breaking warmth, dryness, and/or low snowpack and these fires is simply not a coincidence.”

— Daniel Swain, climate scientist for the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources

A common feature between the US and European blazes is the simultaneous extreme heat and dryness, a combination becoming increasingly common as part of a trend that climate studies have tied directly to climate change.

“The conspicuous overlap between record-breaking warmth, dryness, and/or low snowpack and these fires is simply not a coincidence,” wrote University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain on X. “The scientific evidence linking increasingly extreme fire weather, as well as increasingly extreme wildfires themselves, to climate warming is clear.”

Unfortunately, the forecast features more extreme heat and dry weather for much of the Western US, with not just one but multiple heat domes setting up over the region from this week into early August.

This is likely to increase wildfire risks and continue to lead to extreme fire behavior that makes such blazes so difficult to fight.